How to Adopt a Can-Do Mindset

The need to overcome difficult tasks is an inherent feature of everyday life. Your boss gives you a deadline that you can’t even imagine meeting. Later that day, a close relative asks you to prepare a meal for other family members that will break your budget. Either you say “no” and risk losing either (a) your job or (b) the regard of this relative, or you buckle down and figure out a way to get the thing done.

You can undoubtedly think of many other cases in your life in which you stood at the bottom of a mountain and could not see a way up and over it. When you eventually do succeed, how do you look back at the experience? Are you glad you faced and overcame the difficulty, or do you think the whole thing was a waste of time and energy? Maybe you met that deadline after all, but was it worth the effort? Perhaps you got that meal prepared and everybody loved it, but wouldn’t you have been better off saving the money and using it toward something you actually needed?

A Theory of Overcoming Impossibility

According to University of Texas psychologist Veronica X. Yan and colleagues (2024), “Identity-Based Motivation (IBM)” leads people to draw conclusions about their own resilience and coping ability from a “difficulty mindset.” There are three types of difficulty mindsets: regarding difficulty as important, regarding it as impossible, or regarding it as a path toward self-improvement. The identity you derive from this mindset is based on whether you see yourself as optimistic, ethical, finding purpose, and persevering.

Putting all of this into more personal terms, think about one of those challenges that you faced and eventually overcame. How did you interpret this success as reflecting on yourself as a person? Even if things didn’t work out as you hoped, do you still feel that you are better now than you were before you started?

IBM proposes that the way people view and interpret life difficulties is, in part, a function of cultural values. In the words of the authors, “Each society provides people with a set of implicit blueprints for how to make sense of their experiences; this set of blueprints together form its culture” (p. 1007). Several of these blueprints include whether people feel they deserve to be rewarded for their efforts, whether a higher authority exists for which people should suffer, and conservatism, or the belief that there is a reason for things being the way that they are. Which of these blueprints guides your own approach to overcoming life’s obstacles?

Testing the Three Difficulty Mindsets

Across a series of 15 studies drawing from 2,380 participants in the groupings of WEIRD-er (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) vs. less-WEIRD countries, Yan and her collaborators sought to compare difficulty mindsets along with their relationship to identity. They also measured the extent to which their online samples of adult participants believed in the social blueprints of deservingness, higher authority, and conservatism.

To give you an idea of your own difficulty mindset, here are the items on the three scale.

Ratings are from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (6):

Difficulty-as-improvement

1. In a way, the difficulties I have today are strengthening my character to meet tomorrow’s challenges.
2. Experiencing difficulty makes me grow stronger.
3. Experiencing difficulty is the strongest of teachers; I may temporarily feel broken, but in the long run, I will be better.
4. Life is not complete without difficulty, hardship, and suffering.

Difficulty-as-importance

1. Sometimes if a task feels difficult to me my gut says that it really matters for me.
2. If a goal feels difficult to work on, I often think it might be a critical one for me.
3. When a task feels difficult, the experience of difficulty sometimes informs me that succeeding in the task is important for me.
4. Often when a goal feels difficult to attain it turns out to be worth my effort.

Difficulty-as-impossibility

1. Sometimes if a task feels difficult, my gut says it is impossible for me.
2. If a goal feels difficult to work on, I often think it might not be for me.
3. When a task feels difficult, the experience of difficulty sometimes informs me that succeeding in the task is just not possible for me.
4. Often when a goal feels difficult to attain it turns out to be out of my reach.

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To assess the identities associated with each mindset, the authors used standard measures of sense of optimism, presence of meaning and purpose in life, conscientiousness, and “character virtues” such as forgiveness and gratitude.

The findings showed that, across societies, people could relate to the ideas of difficulty-as-improvement. People in less-WEIRD countries were more likely to endorse this mindset which, in turn, was rooted in culture-bound beliefs such as karma and spirituality. Across cultures, though, the difficulty-as-improvement mindset was associated with resilient identities. Those who endorse this mindset see themselves as “conscientious, virtuous, and optimistic people who lead lives of purpose and meaning” (p. 1017).

Finding Hope in Difficulty

Life’s difficulties, as the results of from this U.Texas-led research team’s study shows, can help shape your identity as you think back on both your accomplishments and your failures. The question is not whether you overcome the challenge, but whether you let it penetrate into your sense of self-worth. The difficulty mindset scales provide clear messages about ways to think about those seemingly insurmountable challenges that pop up all the time in daily life.

The 4 items on the difficulty-as-improvement mindset can become phrases you say to yourself the next time things seem hopeless. These phrases can also help you re-interpret the past experiences in which you were forced to stretch yourself beyond what you thought was your limit.

Indeed, in the first of their 15 studies, the authors literally “crawled” the 630 billion English words on the Internet to develop vectors of common ways that people spoke about difficulties. The language of difficulty, then, is as common a feature of everyday life as are difficulties themselves. You can’t avoid them. The question is how you will interpret those you will face and think about those that are now behind you.

To sum up, you may not live in a culture whose blueprint regards difficulty as providing a path to fulfillment, but you can pave your own way by readjusting your mindset.