The Power of Mindset

Mindset is a mental attitude that determines how we interpret and respond to situations. In our qualitative research with Robert B. Dilts, we have found three distinctly different levels of mindset, which we will introduce in this post. To illustrate the power of mindset, I would like to share the story of Katalin Karikó, a researcher who this week won the Nobel prize for medicine for her work on modifying the RNA molecule to avoid triggering a harmful immune response. Yet, her life was full of rejection and doubt. Her achievement had much to do with her mindset.

At the first level, the meta mindset has to do with clarity and a person's sense of life journey. It serves as a dashboard, indicating direction and providing a compelling vision and purpose. It also provides the clarity to set longer-term goals and roles.

The key starting point is finding joy and flow in an activity, which often ignites our future trajectory both professionally and personally. Karikó was born on January 17, 1955, in a small village in Hungary. She had a vision from early on to become a scientist. Her father was a butcher, which exposed her to a version of biology from an early age.

As a young adult she became fascinated with messenger RNA, the genetic script that carries DNA instructions to the protein-making engine of cells. Her vision was that somehow mRNA could play a pivotal role in the therapy of various diseases. It became her mission to make her vision a reality to help cure patients. However, despite the clarity of vision and mission, obstacles may appear, originating both inside our mind and in the external world.

This is where the second level of mindset, the macro mindset, comes into play. We sometimes like to refer to it as your “starlight,” which relates to the focus applied to long-term goals. We find that the starlight comes from a combination of several activities and qualities. These activities include establishing focus, which we refer to as meta goals. They enable you to prioritize the multiple courses of action available. Karikó made “making a meaningful contribution” as her life focus.

To keep going you need to be internally grounded and resourceful and have ways of recharging and balancing and to practice them daily. This aspect of mindset is about the quality of self-care. Karikó’s balancing and recharging came from her family. Female professionals frequently face balance being both a mother and a professional. Karikó has always believed that a woman should not have to choose between her mission as a scientist and her passion as a mother and wife.

Another important habit is to constantly scan for opportunities and invest time to create them. This is about the mindset quality of curiosity. Karikó faced a shortage of funding for her research in her native country. She then faced the choice of stopping and doing something not connected to her mission or continuing her research at the price of having to leave her native country. In 1985, already married and the mother of a young daughter, she left Hungary to pursue her dream.

After scanning for posts and scholarships all over the world—embodying the mindset quality of being a seeker, Karikó accepted an offer from Temple University in Philadelphia for a postdoctoral fellowship. It was time to be innovative and resilient. Karikó and her husband gave up everything and bought a one-way ticket to the U.S., where they knew no one.

It was crucial for her to be aware of risks but not to get discouraged by adversity and negative feedback. The display of determination and resilience reflected both her meta goal and strong sense of vision, and the quality of openness. As she put it in an award acceptance speech, “Follow your dreams and don’t hesitate to learn anything from anyone.”

A third level of mindset, the micro mindset, serves as a daily priority-setting spotlight. A key element of this mindset level is to focus every day on what you are passionate about and your purpose as if wearing the hat of a self-motivator. In Karikó's words, “With my colleagues, we worked for years to find this technology. Sometimes, it seemed like science fiction. But we knew that if the result of our work saved the life of even one person, then we had done it.” By focusing on what mattered to her every day, she “accidentally” met her work partner and teammate Drew Weissman in the copy room, where they got to chatting about mRNA.

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They continued to work and publish about their groundbreaking discovery for over a decade and, after some crushing defeats, they managed to catch the attention of some big biotech players. Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit the world.

Karikó's life is a testament to finding one’s passion and then pursuing it every single day. Many of us know what we are passionate about, but we are not good self-motivators on a daily basis.

In the end, when the vaccine worked, it felt like redemption, Karikó told the Daily Telegraph.

We strongly believe the difference that made the difference for her was her mindset. As Karikó claims, “I tried to imagine: Everything is here, and I just have to do better experiments.” And that is exactly what she did.