Growth Mindset Lessons for the Office (Thanks, Science!)

It’s a Monday night, and my family and I are glued to the TV, waiting for a geyser of red foam called “elephant toothpaste” to erupt from a massive 20-foot-tall flask and into the sky.

Elephant toothpaste is a foamy concoction that you can easily make at home. But it’s one thing to make it in a water bottle as a science experiment and another to do what Mark Rober, a former NASA engineer and current YouTuber, is attempting to do on the TV in front of us: make the tallest elephant toothpaste explosion in the world.

Science experiment flasks bubbling over

My family and I hold our breath as the foam shoots out of the top of the flask. Then, we gasp! The force of the blast lifts the flask in the air, and foam explodes from the bottom as well as the top.

A Big Mess, a Bigger Lesson

It’s been more than a week since my wife and I watched that video with our boys, but I’m still thinking about it. It was cool because I not-so-secretly love sciency things. But the best part was the way Mark’s team reacted to the toothpaste-gone-wrong. Even as foam spilled out of the bottom of the flask, they went wild. They were ecstatic!

The experiment didn’t go as planned—there was a flaw in the design. But in spite of that, the team saw it as a success.

Rethinking Failure: Growth Mindset Lessons from Science

We often say at The FruitGuys that there are no failures, only learnings. And although I believe that to be true, it doesn’t always feel true. For all of us Fruit People, it’s really important that we get every office fruit and snack delivery right. It’s deflating when something doesn’t go to plan because we never want to disappoint a client. But Mark’s video reminded me of an important growth mindset lesson: We have to think like engineers, because when we approach every problem not as a failure but as an opportunity, it inspires us to do better. 

The video we watched wasn’t the end of Mark’s elephant toothpaste experiment. A year later, he and his team went back to the same spot and built an even stronger flask (as seen in the video above). That time it worked perfectly! It shot elephant toothpaste up in a geyser as high as a 25-story building.

Takeaways for Work and Life

The lesson behind all of Mark’s videos is similar: Come up with an idea, build something, try it, modify it, and try again. In other words, have a growth mindset, not a fixed mindset. Approaching business problems like this—from an engineer’s perspective—helps me remember to take action fearlessly and learn from each iteration. This growth mindset helps our FruitGuys team grow stronger, too—especially when we face challenges with orders or delivery. After all, problems are just opportunities for learning and improvement.

For more mindset tips from TV, check out this one inspired by Hulu’s The Bear.

Welcome to the Chief Banana newsletter—weekly letters from the desk of The FruitGuys’ CEO. Find more Chief Banana newsletters here. To get Chief Banana in your inbox every week, fill out the “Subscribe to our Newsletter” form on this page. 

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