Growth Mindset
I came across this article by Sal Khan, some time ago introducing me to this concept of a growth mindset. Following the words of my fifth-grade teacher who taught us about meta-learning, I'm constantly trying to learn about learning as a student and a teacher. It's a liberating idea to believe that you can learn anything, and I wholeheartedly believe that in the struggle to learn something you get better not only at a skill but at learning itself.
I really think a really successful application of the growth is the pursuit of "anxiety-driven growth" over "boredom-driven growth":
As Jim Stone explains in his answer to Accelerating Personal Growth:
The vertical axis represents the size of the challenges we are facing.
The horizontal axis represents the power of our skills in relation to those challenges.
When our challenges exceed our skills (in the upper left part of the diagram), we feel anxiety.
When our skills exceed our challenge (in the lower right part of the diagram), we feel boredom.
To truly accelerate growth in an anxiety-driven way, we should strive to push ourselves out of our comfort zones. This involves jumping into situations where we still don't have complete mastery over the skills required to succeed in a task. This makes for a much more effective excercise of the brain and leads us to accelerate not only learning but any sort of growth we wish to achieve. Learning inside the context of the growth mindset requires this sort of exercise and I think we're all capable of it.
Somewhat related: