People With a Strategic Mindset Use These Three Steps to Achieve Goals
Today I came across a thought provoking article on the BBC news site breaking down some new research on the strategic mindset. The research is from Patricia Chen, Ph.D., an assistant professor of social psychology at the National University of Singapore.
Chen’s research suggests that those with a strategic mindset use a technique experts call metacognition. In short, metacognition is when someone thinks about how they think. What’s more, those who apply metacognition to their goal pursuit process tend to be more successful than those who don’t.
Unquestionably, there is an awful lot to explore in Chen’s mindset research. However, the bite size takeaway I have thus far comes down to learning how those with a strategic mindset achieve their goals. In general, this comes down to these three steps of using metacognition I paraphrased from the BBC article:
1. Monitoring your progress in reaching your goal
2. Recognizing your flaws and the areas that need improvement
3. Taking steps to overcome those flaws and improve on the areas that need improvement
While this is definitely an oversimplification, it’s still easier said than done. Furthermore, these three steps are fairly obvious at first glance. But the insight is not in these three steps. The insight is really that strategic thinkers are not as smart as they appear. Instead, what makes them appear smart is that they’re far better at learning from their mistakes and flaws than everyone else.
This is what makes Chen’s research so interesting to me. It destroys the idea that successful people are successful because of a natural gift to do things better and know more than everyone else. In fact, most successful people don’t do things better or know more than anyone else. Rather, they just learn from and apply the learning from their mistakes better than everyone else.