Growth Mindset as the New Chain
They tell you the sky is the limit, but only if you believe it. Growth mindset—what a radiant idea. Yet, beneath its glittering promise lies a subtle command: grow, or you’re the problem.
Corporations love to champion the 'growth mindset,' urging employees to embrace challenges, persist through failures, and believe that abilities can be developed. At first glance, it seems altruistic—a benevolent push to help workers achieve their potential. But dig deeper, and you uncover a darker truth: the corporate obsession with growth mindset is not about your growth but theirs.
In a system where the bottom line trumps human well-being, the growth mindset is weaponized as a psychological tool. It turns self-improvement into a moral obligation, a condition of worth. If you're struggling, the fault isn't the task, the toxic environment, or the lack of support. The fault is you. You didn't try hard enough. You didn't believe enough. You didn't grow.
This ideology aligns perfectly with the corporate machine. It shifts the burden of systemic failures—unrealistic targets, overwork, inadequate resources—onto the individual. The employee becomes a self-policing entity, questioning their own resilience rather than the system's design. It’s a masterstroke of modern capitalism: control without overt coercion, oppression disguised as empowerment.
What’s more, the growth mindset mythologizes endless improvement. It turns stagnation into sin, complacency into heresy. Yet, can we truly grow without limit? Even nature knows when to rest, when to conserve, when to let go. Corporations, however, do not. Growth is their lifeblood, their unyielding commandment, and now it must be yours too.
Consider the irony: those at the top rarely embody the growth mindset they preach. Their wealth insulates them from failure. Their power protects them from scrutiny. It’s the rank and file who must stretch beyond their limits, who must grind and strive, who must live with the ever-present fear of not being 'enough.'
The allure of the growth mindset also serves another purpose: it makes dissent unspeakable. If you complain, you're resisting growth. If you push back, you're shirking responsibility. Silence is easier, safer. And so, the wheels of the machine turn unchallenged.
Perhaps the true question isn’t how to grow but why we’re forced to. In a world so obsessed with progress, could the ultimate rebellion be stillness? To step off the big business treadmill and reject its endless demands?
Because growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of cancer, not humanity. And perhaps the real limit worth setting is the one we impose on the system, not ourselves.