Cultivating a Growth Mindset: Lessons from the Tibetan Himalayas

Perched on the edge of a mountain in Dharamshala, the morning mist wrapped around the cedar trees, and the distant sound of monks chanting was the soundtrack to my every morning. This Himalayan town in India, home to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan diaspora community, isn’t just a place of refuge but a living classroom on the essence of growth mindset and resilience.

This trip—a month-long immersion in India to study Tibetan—was as enlightening as it was challenging. Yet, through the challenges of tone, script, and aspiration, the meaning of a growth mindset started revealing itself to me, offering me lessons for the language and for navigating the complexities of today’s globally interconnected techno-environment.

The Journey Begins: Stepping Out of Comfort Zones

My decision to learn Tibetan wasn’t born out of necessity – I don’t need to speak Tibetan – but out of a desire to embrace the unfamiliar. Since moving to Asia at 20, I’ve understood that leaps into the unknown lead to innovation and progress. This leap started on another trip – to Nepal – where I trekked for the first time in the Himalayas. Inspired by the color-soaked stones cut deep with Tibetan prayers, I set off on a journey of growth to learn what these stones said. I didn’t know where it would take me, and I didn’t even know the direction to start, but I knew that somehow I’d be different.

Companies like Airbnb and Uber ventured into uncharted territories and embraced the uncertainties that came with them. Stepping out of your comfort zone is a cliche, but it’s also the first step toward growth. Accept that you don’t know yet but are willing to find out.

The winding paths and deep steps leading down to the Esukhia School, where I’d spend the next month, reflect a humble and profound commitment to knowledge.

The path to knowledge and discovery is confusing, and you will get lost, but even in losing yourself, you gain a new perspective, which helps you catch a glimpse of your path again.

My journey to Dharamshala wasn’t just about learning a new language; it was about immersing myself in a culture that embodies the principles of a growth mindset. I was in my 30s and looking for a change in my life.

The Power of Curiosity and Continuous Learning

If you want to grow, you must push yourself. There’s no other way. In Carol Dweck’s book The Growth Mindset, she explains how some can keep pushing and progressing while others cannot even try. It’s not about motivation, desire, or drive. It’s mindset.

Dweck details two mindsets:

1. Fixed Mindset: The belief that abilities, intelligence, and talents are innate and unchangeable. “I’m not musically talented,” or “He was just born that way.”
2. Growth Mindset: This mindset reflects the belief that skills and intelligence can be developed through persistent hard work and continued learning. “If I practice I’ll get there,” or “He must have trained hard for that!”

Put simply, if you believe you can improve, you’ll be willing to put in the effort. If you don’t, you won’t.

Of course, the fixed mindset is provably false—your ability to read this came about by some hard work you put in a long time ago, not God’s gift to discern written language.

As the days in Esukhia unfold, each lesson in Tibetan script and pronunciation becomes a reminder of the vastness of knowledge yet to be explored. This sense of continuous learning is a cornerstone of the growth mindset—The truly happy ferryman isn’t the one who reaches the island with the golden temple but the one who finds joy in being out on the open ocean—enjoy the journey.

“The truly happy ferryman isn’t the one who reaches the island with the golden temple but the one who finds joy in being out on the open ocean.”

You get to choose what continuous learning means to you. It can mean a constant drive to learn new things, try new activities, and pick up books on diverse topics. And it can mean going deep and genuinely exploring the unending complexities of one subject. You can always be more flexible, a better speaker, write better code, or make better sushi.

I’m sure you know people at work who haven’t learned a new piece of software since Word and Excel. Trying to show them why they should use a PKM app like Obsidian or change their workflow to make use of Vim will be hard sells until they shed their fixed mindsets.

Embracing Failure as a Learning Opportunity

Attempting to converse with locals in a newly acquired language inevitably leads to misunderstandings and mistakes. I visited a small factory in McLeod Ganj where Tibetan refugees were making leather goods. The wooden floors creaked as the manager took me around and explained how they started the company, and after about 15 minutes of hearing him say the word, I regretfully asked him what ཚགས་པགས་ meant. He picked up a piece of leather and repeated, “ཚགས་པགས་!” “Oh, leather!” He put his hand on my shoulder as we both laughed about the situation.

That rainy afternoon in the monsoon season, I came out of the factory with two things—a leather washbag and a new vocabulary that I’d never forget.

Each mispronunciation, fall, error message, or reprimand isn’t a setback but a valuable lesson that brings you closer to fluency. This perspective on failure is essential for developing a growth mindset.

The Role of Diverse Perspectives

Diversity has become such an overly politicized buzzword that it’s lost all meaning. Before the governments of the world created diversity quotas and forced people together, whether they liked it or not, there was some real value to it.

Walking through the narrow passageways of McLeod Ganj, past billowing clouds of steam from restaurant windows and pro-independence graffiti, my teacher took me out of town to a mountainside park that overlooked what seemed like the rest of the world.

The prayer wheels spun, and prayer flags fluttered in the strong breeze, scattering the subtle scent of incense long since burned away. As we walked back up toward town, a monk at a tea stop with a gentle smile started up a conversation. We sat down and asked the old lady there for a cup of “ཇ་མར་” (butter tea.)

With the help of my teacher, I understood that he was a hermit monk who had just come back from a long stint alone in a cave in the mountains. As we talked, he gave me a whole new perspective on the place we were at and life in general. But mostly, what remained with me was a slow sense of contentment with watching things unfold despite being beyond my control—something I’d never have learned or experienced back home.

I don’t believe in diversity for its own sake, but if you haven’t experienced true diversity in people, opinions, ideas, and cultures, you haven’t experienced the growth you could have.

When working with a tightly knit team on short, focused sprints, diversity is the last thing you want. It will slow you down and bring everything into question. But for strategy, creative planning, and personal growth, there is something to be gained that you won’t get anywhere else.

Practical Steps to Cultivate a Growth Mindset

Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned both at Esukhia and throughout the last two decades in Asia:

1. Make a List of “One Days”: During a conversation with a friend at lunch, you hear yourself say, “One day I’d like to do an Iron Man,” and a call with a colleague produces this sentence, “One day I’d like to turn this into a new product.” Without somewhere to park those ideas, they’ll disappear like the fog on the mountains. There was a time when “Tibetan” was just a goal on my list. A decade later, I speak it fluently.
2. Seek Feedback and Act on It: You can’t learn a foreign language (or anything) without a native speaker correcting you, but you must take the criticism and change.
3. Stay Adaptable: Pivot when faced with new information, adapt when circumstances change. Schedule a quarterly executive session with yourself where you get honest about every aspect of your life.
4. Cultivate Resilience: Challenges and setbacks are inevitable. Building resilience will turn hurdles into stepping stones, helping you reach higher. You don’t need to become a Tibetan monk and move to a mountain cave. Simple techniques for building grit are all you need.
5. Remember You Can Improve: If you spent an hour a day on one item from your list, think where you’d be in six months – you can improve, but first leave your fixed mindset at the door.
6. Encourage Collaborative Learning: Sharing knowledge and collective learning accelerates growth, especially with a diverse group. It’s why I license all my code under a GPL for anyone to use. But note that I don’t write code with anyone else in the room. Learn together, practice alone.

Personal Growth and Professional Success: It’s not Either-Or

Everyone talks about work-life balance, keeping their personal and professional lives separate, but personal growth is inseparable from professional development. I use personal growth techniques to help me grow as an omnivert at work.

The principles that guide you to learn a new language or skill apply to professional development as much as personal development. Embracing challenges, fostering curiosity, and valuing diverse perspectives are all critical components of building a growth mindset to fuel progress across the life-work divide.

In the quiet moments, as I waited for my teacher to arrive and stared out the window at the hazy valley below, it became clear that the journey toward a growth mindset is punctuated with silent times of reflection. Each new experience, whether in the serene setting of a monastery or a nonstop neon-paced Chinese mega city, is food for growth, but only if you reflect on it every once in a while.

Moving Forward with Intentionality

The monsoon rains were true to their season, and as I drove back to the airport after a month in Dharamshala, the orange setting sun—blurred through the rain on my window—had a message for me. I wasn’t living a default life, and I wasn’t going back to a life already decided. I was going to create a life built with intentional determination and a belief that I could make it better.

You can’t cultivate a growth mindset passively; it requires effort and a staunch willingness to embrace the unknown. But you don’t need to travel to the roof of the world and seek out Tibetan monks. The world is rich with lessons. All it takes is being willing to immerse yourself in the journey of growth, not only keeping pace with the changing world but shaping it.