Latest Blog Post

Growth or fixed

My life is busy, much of my time is accounted for and scheduled for doing things that I have chosen I want to do, even if, when it gets to those thing there seems to be other things that might be more important.

I met with Yujay a couple of weeks ago, he is an E.N.T. surgeon and a service lead for E.N.T. for Queens Medical Centre in Nottingham.

We were scheming and chatting about possible opportunities and options to work together and he was commenting on how busy it seemed that I was when I was looking at him and thinking god, he seems to be 100x busier than me.

Despite that though, he has a growth mindset of wanting to look for opportunities to improve things and make them better, even if that is catastrophically difficult in the environment in which he works.

It is so frustrating to be involved in an organisation so big, who is happy to spend money out of their revenue budget but not out of the capital budget.

They’re spending £120,000 a year on disposable endoscopes when new non-disposable endoscopes would cost them £150,000. They have a 5-year plan to spend £600,000 and they will still not have the product that would cost a quarter of that.

That is frustrating.

It doesn’t stop someone like Yujay having a growth mindset though and it shouldn’t stop your or I.

As everybody ran out of the speed awareness course that I did last week (see blog here) it didn’t look like they had learned anything at all.

People literally ran out of the hotel to their cars as I was walking to the toilets to get changed into my cycling gear.

I found it hard to believe that they weren’t going to be speeding in about 10 minutes of leaving the course.

I tried at least to apply the growth mindset to this.

I wrote the action plan at the back of the book they gave me and I understand that I speed when I am distracted.

The only time that I electively speed is when I am on a motorway when everything is traveling in the same direction and there is space around.

I am comfortable sat at 80MPH and I regularly do and I will take the punishment for that.

I don’t electively speed in open areas because I am acutely aware of the significant risks to other people, but I do speed when I lose concentration because I think of something else.

So our result is every time I sit in my car, I am going to tell myself out loud that I am driving now, it probably won’t make any difference but what is the point in listening to anything if you aren’t at least going to try.

By Colin Campbell on 30/10/19 18:00