Stop Delaying Growth - a deep dive on what it really means to possess a growth mindset in your day-to-day life: https://ramimaalouf.substack.com/p/stop-delaying-growth
We live in a time where it’s easier to consume ten hours of “useful” content than to spend ten minutes applying a single lesson from it. We tell ourselves we’re learning, but without action, nothing changes. The fix is simple, but it isn’t easy: stop delaying growth
What is and what isn’t growth mindset?
A growth mindset isn’t about endlessly seeking more information, it’s about looking into your own life for lessons and putting them to work immediately. Every day gives you raw material: mistakes, small wins, moments of clarity. If you pause long enough to reflect, you can turn those moments into concrete actions for tomorrow. That’s self-improvement in a nutshell
But most of us delay it. We jot down ideas, insights, and realizations… then leave them to collect digital dust in a notes app. I do it too. I’ve built a database of wisdom I barely touch. If I actually lived by it, I’d be unstoppable. We would all be unstoppable. But that’s the hardest part for me, and I’m pretty sure it’s the same for the world as well. We don’t lack knowledge, we lack the discipline to turn what we know into how we live. Knowledge is potential energy; discipline is what converts it into motion. Without a system to apply insights the moment they appear, they fade into background noise.
I’ve realized that to have any chance of succeeding at this, and to maintain a growth mindset, you first need a solid foundation. Cal Newport’s Deep Life Stack 2.0 calls this Stage One: Discipline, Control, Craft, and Simplification. Without these, the deeper layers of the stack like living by your values, transforming your life, and leaving a legacy are hard to achieve. He goes in depth on this topic in this podcast e.p. which I’d recommend if you’re serious about living with a growth mindset and deep work. For me, this foundation means having my life under control: being generally in control of my actions and doing the things that I want to do, not the things that I default to out of impulse or distraction.
It means choosing deliberately, rather than letting my environment or mood dictate my next move. In Newport’s terms, this is the Control layer: designing your schedule, systems, and surroundings so that the important things happen by default. When Control is in place, Discipline becomes easier to maintain, because your energy isn’t constantly drained by chaos.
It’s essential to be organized; for example, your task manager should not be chaotic with overdue tasks everywhere. You need to manage these aspects effectively; otherwise, it will be very hard to be intentional with your actions, which is crucial for developing a growth mindset
Newport’s framework also makes it clear that intention is non-negotiable. If you don’t decide in advance how your time and energy will be used, you’ll revert to default behaviors which is usually the old habits you’ve been trying to escape. Time management and task management skills are vital. They align closely with your ability to cultivate a growth mindset because once you can be intentional with your time, you’ll also be intentional with your actions and decisions.
In an ideal world, every mistake you make today would become tomorrow’s improvement. You’d spot the flaw, turn it into a small, repeatable habit, and watch that habit quietly reshape your life. Over time, your days/habits would stack. Each habit building on the lessons of the last. Until your life becomes a network of strong, positive routines.
The beauty of habits is their resilience. Once you’ve done it for months or years, they hold even when life gets chaotic. Simplest proof of that is the habit of brushing your teeth. No matter how bad your life gets, you still do it, because it’s part of you. the cool thing is you can do that for absolutely anything you want to do more or less of. Habits are like trees: plant them now, or keep holding seeds that never take root. Every day you wait, you delay the person you could already be.
Putting It into Practice
Now, this may seem like a lot, but in reality, they don’t take much effort. The hardest part is doing it day in and day out for the first few days. Start with step 1 and slowly move to step 2 once you’ve got a good grip on step 1, and so on…
Step 1. Build your foundation (Control & Discipline)
- Time-block your day so every hour has a purpose.
- Be very honest with yourself and what you spend your day on. Commuting, toilet breaks, prayers, cooking, responding to DMs… All these take time. Be intentional with them and put them on the timeblock
- Keep a single, organized task list. If it’s currently messy, clean it up. Get all these microtasks like paying bills, sending an email at a set time so they don’t clutter your day.
- Drop or delegate anything that doesn’t align with your priorities.
- Don’t be afraid to let go of certain tasks that no longer serve you. If you don’t think it’s worth doing it now, it probably never will (unless it’s time-sensitive)
Step 2. Turn lessons into action immediately
- As part of your time blocking, make sure you dedicate 5–10 minutes at the end of each day reflecting on what you learned.
- create or take questions that can get you in the right headspace to reflect deeply and honestly. A.k.a “journaling prompts”. Check out my most viewed video on YouTube, where I go into detail about the questions I ask myself before i sleep
- type them out, write them out or just talk to yourself. Do whatever it takes to come up with the most eye-opening realizations.
- Apply one lesson within 24 hours, even if it’s a small thing.
- If there are other things that you wanna implement at a certain time in the future, schedule them so you get reminded of them at a later date when you need it most
- Focus on one improvement at a time until it sticks.
Step 3. Make habits your armor
- Attach new habits to existing routines so they stick.
- This is a technique taught by James Clear, author of Atomic Habits. He calls it “habit stacking”
- Track them visually. Seeing progress fuels consistency. there are already a lot of resources and softwares on this, so just check them out.
- Remove triggers for bad habits; make good habits effortless to start. I talk all about this in my video on how to overcome pxrnography or any addiction in general. On a high level, Pornography is just a bad habit that you can undo with time
Step 4. Keep your habits alive
- Every week, review your habits. Ask: What slipped? Why? Then adjust. Use reminders, recurring tasks, or even physical cues in your environment so your habits survive low-energy days. I talk more about maintaining habits in this article
- Never let a small miss become a big one. Don’t lose all the momentum once you miss once. Carry the momentum you previously had and move on from that day
If you do these things, growth stops being a thing you “get to later.” It becomes your default mode. And remember, growth compounds😉