Don’t be delusional. Nothing has ever grown because it had a mindset about it.
Someone as usual took the phrase, packaged it nicely and sold it back to you: another instant miracle remedy, right next to the other things you’re supposed to apply to live a better, happier life.
Beneath different products, always the same promise.
It’s not a coincidence that corporate language borrowed the word “growth” from biology and kept none of the biology. What’s left is a quarterly target you dream about completing.
Grow 20% year over year.
Grow your network.
Grow your personal brand.
Grow your Substack.
The word survived. The thing it used to describe didn't make it to the digital era, certainly not in its original sense. It became a caricature of itself.
It’s two years now that I have been participating in an actual restoration project, on actual land, run on actual seasons. It’s the least profitable and slowest thing I have ever been involved in, and I didn’t fully understand it until I saw it with my own eyes. Trees planted in one year don’t show canopy for 5 or 10.
There is literally not a single technique that can drastically speed up degraded soil recovery. For a person with a strong sense of urgency, this is a humbling experience. There is no dashboard, no KPIs. The only feedback loop is: did it rain enough, did you choose the right species for this exact spot, and will you still be here in two decades to find out if you were right. Not every plant survives, and that’s expected.
You pour water, your heart, and unlimited hope into growing life and creating a better tomorrow. But the purpose here isn’t to romanticize land restoration.
It’s to name the actual difference between growth mindset and growth.
Growth mindset is a belief you can perform today, on command — just flip the right switch in your attitude, and the universe is supposed to believe you're finally ready and worthy to absorb all the knowledge, wisdom, or [insert whichever word you've bought into].
Actual growth is a fact you can only confirm in hindsight — and only if you were still there to check. One gives you something to say at the meeting tomorrow. The other doesn’t even give you the courtesy of knowing, in the moment, whether it’s working.
There is nothing motivational about actual growth. Nobody is going to put “wait four years and then maybe see results” on a keynote slide. But it is the only version of growth that has ever actually occurred in nature, and nature is, technically, where we stole the word from.
Like many things, AI didn't invent this distortion, but it gave it a countdown clock. Growth used to be a slow lie; now it's a race, and everyone can see everyone else's lap time. The FOMO isn't "am I improving" anymore — it's "who already lapped me while I was planting a tree that won't show canopy for a decade." Nobody panic-adopts a growth mindset over a forest. They panic-adopt it watching a feed that never stops proving someone, somewhere, is already ahead. And someone, somewhere, always will be.
Fredrich Nietzsche had a phrase for the discipline that isn’t self-improvement content and has been deeply rooted in the ancient stoicism:
amor fati
meaning “love of one’s fate”
Not “growth mindset” — the cheerful, cheap cousin that assumes every setback is secretly a gift with a lesson attached, packaged for your next LinkedIn caption.
Amor fati is (thank goodness) far more clinical than that. It’s the willingness to want the thing that happened, including the years it cost, without converting it into a takeaway — without the cry-porn of parading every obstacle to prove how real your journey was.
There’s no slide for it. It doesn’t scale. It was never supposed to.
Here are a few expensive questions. No plushie, no dopamine hit — just an answer you’ll have to sit with in silence.
What would it cost you to let one thing take longer than a quarter?
If nobody claps when it finally works — was it still growth, or was the applause the point?
Don't be delusional.
Everyone is looking at the beautiful forest that took decades or centuries to grow. No one drops a tear for the drought years or the natural disasters that forced the roots to regrow. Nobody optimizes wild nature surrounding us. Yet it's still standing.
Fin
While you’re here:
"Not “growth mindset” — the cheerful, cheap cousin that assumes every setback is secretly a gift with a lesson attached, packaged for your next LinkedIn caption."
Growth mindset has become a motivational slogan. Believing we can improve is useful, but growth is not just about mindset.
I’m skeptical of companies that embrace the term while using it to put the pressure for improvement entirely on individuals instead of addressing the systems and leadership choices that enable real growth.
Belief and Experience has correlation.