![]() With the wind now at my back, I charged on, and a week later, I was done:Īside from seeing the power of a growth mindset in action, this puzzle forced me to confront my resistance to using tools. Eventually, I hit on a few strategies that, when applied diligently, allowed me to make significant progress.Īfter a few weeks of applying my new puzzling skills, I was surprised to see that I was well more than half done. ![]() Some techniques worked and some didn’t, but each little experiment taught me something. I tried a variety of novel puzzle strategies that had never occurred to me before. I convinced myself that the puzzle could be completed and that I was capable of figuring it out. I would put the growth mindset into action and use it to overcome the challenge that this puzzle presented. I decided that this puzzle would be my growth-mindset training. On the other hand, people with a fixed mindset see the same difficulty as a sign that they’re simply not smart enough or talented enough to handle the challenge. 1 They see a challenge as an opportunity for growth. When people with a growth mindset encounter something difficult, they see it as a sign that they need to work harder and find new strategies. When we run into challenges, like my puzzle, we really need a growth mindset. 1 She contrasts this against having a “fixed mindset,” which means believing that your level of success depends on your innate, unchangeable capabilities. Dweck, a research professor at Stanford University, says that success comes from having a “ growth mindset,” which means believing that your intelligence and all of your other abilities can be grown through hard work, persistence, and the use of effective strategies. Luckily, as I entered the third week of my struggle, I started listening to an audiobook of Carol Dweck’s Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. ![]() ![]() For the first time in my puzzling career, I felt like giving up. None of my usual strategies worked for this puzzle, and I was at a loss about what to do. In a one-hour puzzling session I might only connect five pieces. I was recovering from foot surgery, so I had plenty of time on my hands, but I couldn’t seem to make progress. However, after two weeks of dedicated effort, I had completed less than 10% of the Starry Night photomosaic. Normally, I finish a 500 piece puzzle in less than a week, just by casually working on it in my spare time. Furthermore, many of the space-exploration pictures were very similar to each other.Īt first glance, I knew the puzzle would be harder than most I had done in the past, but I really had no idea what I was getting into. For the most part, these colors are evenly distributed throughout the puzzle. Starry Night–at least in the version they reproduced–has only three colors: blue, yellowish-white, and black. While photomosaic puzzles do tend to be more challenging than standard jigsaw puzzles, this one was several orders of magnitude more difficult than those I’d done previously. As is typical with a photomosaic, some of the images appeared 2 or 3 times in different places. For the Starry Night puzzle, all of the images were of space exploration. A photomosaic, in case you don’t know, is made of hundreds of tiny photographs that are arranged to form a pixelated version of the original image. The painting had been transformed into a photomosaic puzzle. The picture for this puzzle was Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night: This particular puzzle, however, almost defeated me. I love puzzles, and I’ve done enough puzzles to become pretty good at them. Last summer I received a jigsaw puzzle as a gift.
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