USA: When the light bulb comes on

Fixed vs. growth mindsets, Easy button backfires, grown-up meltdowns, short-circuiting over basic circuitry, the peculiar freedom of old underdogs, and my role as Assistant to the General Manager

When I walk into a dark room and flip the switch on the wall, I expect the light to come on. When I plug my phone charger into the outlet, I expect my phone to charge. It’s not like I think it's magic; I know there are some wires somewhere that do something if the electrical bill has been paid. If it doesn’t work as expected, either the power is out, or something is broken. That’s really all there is to it for me. I’ve never been curious about the how or why of any of it. I don’t know how it works and that’s fine with me.

My husband, on the other hand, is just the opposite. If he encounters something he doesn’t understand (which is rare, but it happens), he is immediately intrigued and wants to figure out how it works. 

One of his first adult jobs was in the maintenance department of a university. There he learned to do at least the basics of all the building and repair trades. Even before that, though, he had built and repaired things around the house and in the yard at home. Over our thirty-plus years of marriage, Andy has remodeled or added onto nearly every house we have ever lived in (and there have been so many), has owned several different businesses centered around building, has taught building and furniture making, and is currently finishing up his final and most complex build to date—the overland expedition vehicle that will take us around the world for the foreseeable future. The moniker Handy Andy fits my husband to a tee. 

Andy learned early-on that putting things together to make other things that work is a skill that can be learned. He tried making and fixing things as a kid, and when he saw some success—even in small things—he was progressively challenged to try increasingly more complex things. His efforts were rewarded by praise and admiration and a growing sense of satisfaction, instilling in him a basic mindset of confidence in his ability to take things apart, put things back together, and create for himself. When he looks at things, he sees beyond what is visible on the surface.

I did not have the same upbringing—not at all. I’ve never been a person who works with my hands, unless you count holding a pen or tapping a keyboard and making my thoughts come out the ends of my fingers. I did play some sports in years past—at least until I destroyed my shoulder in the baseball speed pitch booth at the carnival—but even that doesn’t really count as working with my hands. I was rewarded for and subsequently found satisfaction in getting good grades, being funny, and speaking and writing with clarity and eloquence. Anything dealing with words has always been in my wheelhouse.

In the education world where we recently worked, they spoke of two different kinds of mindsets. A fixed mindset is one in which a person believes there are certain aptitudes assigned to each person. You are either good at math or you’re not. No amount of practice is going to make a non-math person into someone who could be successful at complex calculations. The other option, the one we were supposed to train our students to adopt, is the growth mindset, wherein a person believes that any and all skills can be learned with enough dedication, study, and practice. 

Andy grew up with a wide-open growth mindset. If he didn’t know something, he was confident he could, and should, learn it. To this day, there are no limits in his mind, nothing out of his reach. He might not be the best there is at a particular skill, but he has learned to be very good at a great number of things, and he can function at an adequate level at just about anything he sets his mind to. 

I grew up with and continue to have what might be termed a limited growth mindset. I hate to call it an entirely fixed mindset; for an educator, that feels like admitting defeat. I do enjoy doing difficult tasks and learning new things, after all. But I have definitely bought into the mentality of specific aptitudes for categorical skills. I know how to create things with words—spoken, written, and read—and I know how to learn from words and even utilize the technologies built around words. I was a teacher, for goodness’ sake. We had to learn new things all the livelong day. I do have a growth mindset: I absolutely believe I can learn and improve on an endless assortment of skills through study and practice—so long as they are based around words.  

But once my problems move from language, where I’m comfortable, to manual skills, where I’m not, my first instinct is to hire the work out. If I have to work with my hands, my confidence flies out the back of the pick-up truck and my anxiety ratchets up like those straps that were supposed to hold the load securely in place—the straps I can never seem to fasten and unfasten properly. 

So, for one half of the partnership tasked with building an expedition vehicle to travel the world, we have Handy Andy, a would-be serious contender in the Mr. Figure-it-Out pageant. For the other half we have me, a person who loses all confidence if there are no books or computers involved—and whose arthritic hands sometimes don’t cooperate at all, even when I can get my brain onboard. As you might imagine, I have not been the most capable or cooperative Assistant Expedition Vehicle Builder. 

I have avoided helping whenever I can get around it, and when I do help, I am often so tense that I am not exactly cheerful and fun to be around. Even when Andy assures me a particular task will be easy, I get nervous, then clumsy, then frustrated. I’m just not good at working with my hands. The more I say it, the more I believe it. And the more I believe it, the truer it becomes. Ugh. If I am being honest, I will have to admit my own insecurity has caused a fair amount of tension between us over the past year. I have helped with the rig here and there, but not anywhere near as much as I should have as a partner on a project of this magnitude. 

But we are coming down to the final stages of the project and we don’t want to stay in Montana through yet another winter. We want to get on the road. That means this old dog needs to get busy learning some new tricks.

Last weekend we painted the cab of the truck, inside and out. That wasn’t too bad. I was only responsible for a few days of prep work—tape and plastic and more tape and plastic so our amateur painting job wouldn’t look quite so amateurish.

Once it was ready to go, Andy did all the painting with the spray gun. I just moved ladders and hoses and documented the process with photos and video.

The painting project was a huge success—it doesn’t look at all like it was painted by two total beginners. And—wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles—I had fun being part of the process. Andy and I grinned and high-fived through the whole thing. We felt like a real team for a change.

This past week, though, we moved into electrical work. Yikes. No part of any building project terrifies me more than electrical work. From my understanding, faulty electrical work means things smolder, then catch fire, then explode—and we all die. I should NOT be on Team Electrical Work.

Andy disagreed. He gave me a tour of the tools and components, then tried to explain to me some basic terminology and techniques.

I froze. 

He tried again, patiently, using more simplistic language and having me practice various techniques step-by-step under his supervision.

I panicked.

He assured me no power is hooked up to anything yet and emphasized just how easy my assigned tasks were.

It didn’t help. My brain sounded every alarm it knew how to ring and raised all the red flags, as well as a few flags in dayglow yellow and safety orange I didn’t even know I had. My circuits overloaded and I went into shutdown mode. I am embarrassed to say it, but I was reduced to tears and found myself nearly hyperventilating. That’s how strong a trained mindset is, friends.

But after a bit of pacing around the barn and some intentional breathing, I forced myself to pull it together and try. 

Oh. 

The simple tasks he wanted me to do weren’t actually that bad after all. 

As I finished those jobs, Andy began to prepare me for the next stage of the electrical project. This time, instead of telling me how easy the job would be, he scrunched up his shoulders, cringed, and said, “This next part will be more difficult. It’s going to require you to be up on the ladder, crammed awkwardly into the small space between the top of the camper and the ceiling of the barn. Then, it’s a multistep process that takes some concentration. It’s not too hard for you to learn, but it is more complicated, and you have to do the job while in an awkward position. I’ll check over all your work, so you don’t have to worry about doing anything wrong. I think you can do it, but it won’t be easy. If it proves to be too much, you can stop, and I’ll take over.”

I suddenly felt something in me shift. A switch in my brain had clicked into the on position. “Ok,” I said, nodding grimly, “show me what I need to do.”

He showed me. 

I did it. All of it. I wired up a set of six puck lights for the kitchen and entryway, then climbed down the ladder to test them out. I touched the negative and positive wires from the first light to the little battery in the cupboard like Andy had shown me. All six lights came on.

Although outwardly I played it cool, inwardly I had to admit—that was kind of amazing. I had never done anything like that before in my half-century-plus.

Regardless of the awkward positioning and my generalized fear of electrical work, I immediately grabbed the supplies I would need for the next step, moved the ladder down a bit, and climbed right back up. I angled my body into the cramped space and stretched my arms as far as they could reach, then wired up the next set of four little lights that would shine down over the dinette. 

Thinking back on my experience over dinner that night, a light came on for me. I told Andy something clicked when he told me the job he had set aside for me to do would be difficult instead of easy. It actually got me excited instead of fearful. Together, we followed the wires in my brain until we found a connection that made sense.

All the times Andy has told me a particular job is easy enough that even I can do it, I have gone into the task with trepidation—a tangled bundle of nerves. What if I can’t do the job that is supposed to be so easy? I will be humiliated at my absolute ineptitude if I can’t do the tasks clearly labeled easy—no skills required. My fear of feeling stupid holds me back and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Afraid it might be too hard for me, I seize up at the first sign that it might indeed be difficult—better to withdraw from the competition before making an utter fool of myself. 

However, this time, under Andy’s gentle tutelage, I pushed past my initial fears of electrical work and practiced some of the basic building blocks. In doing so, I gained a little tiny bit of confidence, really nothing more than a spark of hope. The sirens in my head were still there, but I found the volume switch and turned them down a bit somehow, and I returned some of the red flags to their reset position. This helped me shift my mindset just enough. Then, when Andy told me the next step would be difficult, I was ready. After all, it’s perfectly understandable to struggle and even fail when something is predicted to be difficult. The underdog team in a football game is actually at an advantage—if they can keep their heads on straight—because nothing is expected of them. There is no pressure when everyone knows you are in over your head. All the pressure is on the team facing the high expectations. Nobody wants to lose to the underdog. 

When Andy said the job would be difficult and he would finish it if I couldn’t, I was off the hook. I was the underdog. There was no pressure to succeed, and failure was a perfectly viable option. For me, that meant I was free to try—so I did. Just as Andy had predicted, it was difficult. However, the adversity I felt, both physically and mentally, was anticipated. It wasn’t a sign of imminent failure; it was just a natural part of the task, exactly what I expected. 

Apparently, this is what a true growth mindset feels like—setting expectations low, anticipating struggle, expecting frustration, embracing the possibility of failure—but being willing to regroup and try again.

So here I am, an old dog, learning new tricks. Not only do I know how to prep a vehicle for painting, not only do I finally understand the basics of an electrical circuit and how to strip and connect wires properly, but I am also learning more about how my own brain’s circuitry works. Sometimes you have to rewire it a bit to get the light bulb to come on.