You Can't Use What You Can't Define

Could you define your mindset in 100 words if someone asked you right now?

For me, this is one of the most misunderstood words on the internet today.

It gets bastardized in the internet age. Generic positivity advice. Gurus telling you to "work on your mindset" like it's a setting you flip. The word gets a mountain of attention. But does that attention lead to any meaningful results?

People are confused when they hear it.

We throw words around in this society all the time, and there's real power in knowing the true definition. You can't use a thing you can't define.

If you asked 100 people on the street to define their mindset, you'd get 95 different answers. So let's lock onto one.

Fun fact: "mindset" was searched on Google somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 times a month in 2025. People are looking for help. Trying to understand why they're stuck in a certain pattern. And a select few are hunting for the tools to actually change it.

Merriam-Webster defines mindset as "a mental attitude or inclination" or "a fixed state of mind."

That second definition is where the trap is.

If you read it and stop at the word fixed, you can save yourself some time, money, and energy, and just accept that you are the way you are, and that's that.

I call bullshit.

In my world, there's nothing fixed about a mindset, and this is the whole game if you plan to build an extraordinary life. I lean into the first definition. A mental attitude or inclination. A point in time. Something that can be evaluated, understood, and changed.

That reframe changes everything.

But I didn't always see it that way.

I’ve been obsessed with personal development for decades, but I will never forget the most impactful moment I’ve had in my life that completely changed my perspective on mindset.

I’m 20 years old. I’m sitting in my car talking to my mom on the phone, literally crying my eyes out because of the challenges that I faced with my college journey.

My first semester of college earned me a 0.4 GPA, and this catastrophic failure caused me to spiral into a couple more years of mediocrity, partying too much, and feeling lost.

I wasn’t hanging around the right people. I wasn’t being a leader. I wasn’t in tune with why I was behaving in this way, and it was such a stark contrast to my successful teen years that I was lost.

I’m on the phone looking for sympathy or a shoulder to unload on, and I caught the biggest wave of embarrassment and a huge slap in the face as I was talking.

I’m so fortunate to have a mom who is supportive, but she also had the wisdom to know that I needed to figure this out on my own. She was there to support, but not fix.

I hang up the phone. I continue crying in my car as I sit there feeling sorry for myself.

It hits me like a ton of bricks, and I feel a huge wave of inspiration sweep over me.

I was done living this way. I’d struggled long enough that my external world forced me to confront the very reality I was ignoring in plain sight.

I made a decision in the car that day that it was time to get my shit together. I knew what I was capable of, and I made the conscious decision to stop believing that I was a failure, a college dropout, a loser.

That singular moment was so powerful that I immediately visited the counselor at the college I was attending the next day. We made a plan to “get me out of this damn school as quickly as possible”.

I never looked back. I stacked the workload heavily, and I finished school in record time with a 4.0 GPA from that point forward.

This singular, defining moment found me by accident. I didn’t know how to be intentional at the time, but this was the first “big boy” decision that I made to purposefully put me on a better path.

All I knew from that moment was that I was powerful beyond measure when I truly decided to do something.

I didn’t know it at the time, but that moment cascaded into an obsession with personal development and accountability that has served me well in my life.

There are moments all around us in our lives, and, sometimes, it is only in retrospect that we can truly appreciate the gravity of one, singular decision.

Here's what that experience taught me.

If your mindset is a collection of past experiences that built the lens you see the world through, then there's only one logical conclusion. You can influence the version you'll have a year from now. You just have to be intentional about the experiences and beliefs you stack over the next 365 days.

There are three things to get straight.

Your baseline. Your mental capacity, your upbringing, your socioeconomic starting line, your life experiences, your beliefs. They're all in the equation. You're the current version of your collective experiences, filtered through what you've chosen to believe. Add your natural behavioral tendencies on top, and you've got a default operating system you run every day, whether you're conscious of it or not. Get curious about it. Not just WHAT you think on a consistent basis. HOW you think. The magic is in the how.

Your future. The future doesn't exist yet. Your brain loves to trick you into thinking some event out there will fundamentally change how you operate. I refuse to hand that decision to external forces. You have to define where you're headed. How you want to operate. What that future mental attitude actually looks like. Skip this, and you stay at the mercy of your circumstances forever.

Your power. Here's the good news. The power to shift this is sitting on your shoulders. There are infinite things in this world you can't control, and for most people, ignorance and avoidance are the coping mechanisms, because staring at all of it gets depressing fast. Fine. But for the things you CAN control, you have to plant a flag. Most people forget that their mindset is one of them. It's a choice. A decision. A movable target that flexes based on your inputs and your daily deposits.

So how does this look tactically?

1. Decide that your mindset is moldable and you can influence it. Nothing happens until you believe this.
2. Define your current beliefs. How you arrived at them. Then pressure-test how deeply they're actually ingrained into your concept of self.
3. Go into full "future you" mode. Define the mindset that gets you the outcomes in your future vision. Simple, not easy.
4. Document the gaps between your current framework and that future version. This is the sauce.
5. Build a system to reinforce the new beliefs daily, weekly, and monthly. Give the new mindset something to anchor against.

It looks simple when written out. Don't fool yourself into thinking it's easy. This is some of the hardest work there is.

But it gets easier once a few things sink in. If you haven't been building your mindset on purpose, the one you've got right now was handed to you by external forces. You're the author once you're an adult, which means you're solely accountable. Time is an asset here, not a liability. New mental models take a while, and you get rewarded with every step in the new direction, even when it doesn't feel like it yet.

You are powerful. You hold all the power to shape whether your mind supports your day or sabotages it.

We don't get to control much in this world. This is one of the rare places where we do.

Choose wisely.

Remember, most people lose the fight in their own head before the market, the boss, or the economy ever gets a vote. The enemy isn't out there. It's the story you told yourself this morning.

So write a good one. Reinforce it often. And go meet the version of you that's been locked away too long.