The Gray Area
A learning vs. achievement mindset
Recently I have adopted a learning mindset, versus one based solely on achievement. Instead of approaching each task, goal or milestone with anticipation - gritted teeth, white knuckles and a racing heart - I have started approaching them with curiosity, adaptability and a newly coined slogan “no matter what happens - whether I would classify this as going well or going poorly - I will learn something out of it.”
Is this a novel idea? No, probably not. There’s a reason cliche wisdom and phrases have been around forever - they’re universal, they’re deep, they’re true. But in my experience - I can never comprehend their weight until it’s a lesson I’ve learned on my own. A fact that my friends and family have been frustrated by many times throughout my life thus far :) I succeed. I fail. I learn.
After living in an achievement mindset for much of my life, I found a couple of things that I didn’t like about it. First, it created this false sense of urgency, like I needed to hurry up and get everything done. One of the biggest problems with this is that it never stops - there’s always more to do and everything can always be done better. Unless you’re spending too much time making something perfect—which is a waste of time—anything less than perfect feels like a failure. Do you see the conundrum? No wonder this leads to such frequent feelings of burnout and defeat.
Because of the black and white nature of it, either you achieve what you set out to achieve, or you fail. This leaves very little margin for error and the chances of feeling a sense of failure from your efforts are high because of the high bar we set for ourselves. When I was in an achievement mindset, measuring myself with a pass or fail metric every single day, I always felt defeated. I felt stuck and unfulfilled. I didn’t like what I was doing day in and day out, but I stuck through it anyway, waiting for the next achievement to fill the hole inside long enough to make it to the next one. This mindset bred perfectionism—it lead to developing an inner voice of my biggest critic, making nothing feel good enough or worth it.
A learning mindset, however, lends itself much more to operating in the gray area. It’s trying on different hats and seeing what fits. It’s introducing creativity to my life and coloring outside the lines. It’s having the courage to explore a completely different field of work because you’re curious about it, instead of riding the wave of something you hate all the way to the top. It’s saying yes to things you don’t know if you’ll be good at or things that might scare you.
Sure, learning can be embarrassing sometimes. You may have to pretend to have confidence. You may have to speak up even when your voice shakes. But wouldn’t you take this over playing small every day? Because there’s a particular kind of freedom that comes from not having all the answers. When you stop pretending to be perfect, you get to be present. When you stop trying to look like you belong, you actually start belonging to yourself.
Learning isn’t always fun, but in the end, it’s always worth it because of the experience and knowledge that you walk away with. It’s the difference between collecting achievements like trophies on a shelf and collecting experiences like stories you can’t wait to tell.
It erases the shame and failure that an achievement mindset can build, because nothing can really be a failure when you’re not operating in black and white. Operating in the gray is learning, but it’s also taking back your authenticity. It’s preferring an imperfect presence over a perfect vacancy. It’s showing up as the messy, curious, still-figuring-it-out version of myself instead of the carefully curated picture I thought people wanted to see.
Life is a gray area: messy, confusing, beautiful, fun, exciting and most of all - a learning experience. Here’s to operating in the gray :)
