What the Trees Aren't Trying to Prove

Nobody's grading you anymore

There's a stretch of a few weeks every autumn here in Vancouver, usually right after the rain finally lets up, when the light goes amber and the trees start doing their thing. Not all at once. Some are barely turning while their neighbour two doors down has already dropped every leaf. None of it happens on a schedule, and none of it looks rushed. This is the beauty of fall.

I notice it more than I used to. And most years it makes me think about something I wish weren't true: that I still, somewhere in me, want a shortcut for becoming a better version of myself. An update I could download. A course I could finish. A book that would finally be the one. I've chased a few of those over the years, looking for the thing that would just fix it, whatever "it" was that week. It's never worked that way. Not once.

Turns out that wanting isn't just a personality quirk. Carol Dweck, a researcher at Stanford, spent decades studying why some people treat a setback as information and others treat it as a verdict. She calls it the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. If you believe your abilities are basically fixed, carved in stone, every task becomes a referendum on whether you're one of the good ones or not. Success proves it. Failure exposes it. There's no room to just be learning.

If you believe abilities can grow, the same task means something else entirely. A setback is just new information about where you are right now, not a verdict on who you are.

Dweck found traces of this in kids as young as four. Give a four year old an easy puzzle and the option to redo it or try a harder one, and some of them will redo the easy one every time. Not because they're lazy. Because by four, some kids have already learned that success means not failing, and the safest way to not fail is to stay where you know you'll win.

I grew up in a house where the fixed version was just how things worked, and I don't think anyone chose that on purpose. I remember being eight or nine, bringing home a spelling test, nine out of ten, genuinely pleased with myself. My dad asked what I got wrong. I told him, and I still remember the word after all these years. Pineapple. He said that one was easy, I should have had it.

That kind of moment doesn't feel dramatic when it happens. It's just a sentence. But it teaches you something fast, and it doesn't need to be repeated many times before it sticks: tests are gauges. Every one of them is either proof you're fine or evidence you're not. I got good at avoiding the second option, including, more than once, by cheating when I thought I could get away with it. Not because I didn't know the material. Because I couldn't stand the mark being the verdict.

More than it looks like from the outside, that costs you something. If every task is pass or fail, you stop being able to try things you might be bad at, which means you stop growing in exactly the places you'd benefit most. And you start managing how you look far more carefully than you manage how you actually are.

I've worn that mask long enough that some days it feels like my actual face.

So what's the alternative?

Not "try harder to have a growth mindset," which is a bit like telling someone to try harder to relax. The alternative I've found more useful sits underneath the mindset question: what would it be like to not need the result to tell you whether you're allowed to belong?

That's a strange question to sit with if you've spent your life earning your place at every table you've ever sat at. A few years ago, after a long stretch of feeling like I had to keep proving something, I wrote myself a note. It said, roughly: you don't have to fight for this. You don't have to perform to deserve to be here. You're not being graded on whether you show up put together. You're allowed to be here as you actually are, not as the edited version.

I can't tell you that landed instantly or stayed landed. It didn't. It's not a download either. But it's the kind of thing that, once you've felt it, changes what you're listening for.

Back to the trees

That's what gets me about the trees every year. None of them are trying to impress anyone. None of them are worried about turning at the wrong pace, or being judged for still being green while the tree next door has already gone gold. They're just doing what they do, on their own timeline, and somehow that's the thing that makes the whole street worth walking down on my neighbourhood walk.

I don't think you get to skip the process and just arrive at the place where you don't need to prove yourself. I've tried. But I do think it helps to notice that the tree isn't earning it. And maybe you don't have to either. There can be beauty in change.