The air conditioning vent over the table hummed at a perfect F sharp, a low, persistent thrum that vibrated right through the cheap veneer of the conference table and into my bones. My manager, David, smiled. It was the same smile he used for quarterly projections and mandatory team-building events-a carefully constructed expression that didn’t involve his eyes. His gaze was fixed on the performance review document, its crisp whiteness a stark contrast to my own exhaustion. I’d just come off a 63-hour week. The project was delivered, the client was happy, and my sleep deficit was a geological feature.

I nodded, the motion feeling disconnected from my brain. Growth opportunity. The phrase hung in the chilled air. It wasn’t presented as a thank you for salvaging a poorly planned project. It wasn’t accompanied by a bonus or talk of a promotion. It was framed as a gift. The gift was the experience of the ordeal itself. The prize for running the marathon was… the running. And the expectation was that I should be grateful for the chance to have developed such impressive shin splints.

The Weaponization of a Mindset

It’s a beautiful, powerful concept in its original context-the idea that our abilities aren’t fixed, that we can learn and improve through effort and dedication. Dr. Carol Dweck’s research was about education, about helping children overcome the fear of failure and embrace challenges. But in the corporate world, it has been warped into something insidious. It’s become a tool to individualize systemic failures. The workload is impossible? You need a growth mindset to handle it. The deadlines are unreasonable? This is a chance to grow your time-management skills. The system is broken? No, your resilience just needs developing.

It reframes corporate dysfunction as a personal development challenge. The burden of fixing the problem shifts from the organization, which created the unsustainable conditions, to the individual, who is now responsible for developing the mental fortitude to endure them. If you burn out, it’s not because you were given the work of three people. It’s because your mindset wasn’t strong enough. You failed the ‘growth opportunity.’

I used to be a proponent of this. I’ll admit it. A few years ago, I wrote an internal memo praising our team’s ‘growth mindset’ after a brutal product launch. I thought I was being a good leader, celebrating our grit. Looking back, I see what I was really doing: I was putting a positive spin on exploitation. I was justifying the burnout of my colleagues because it was easier than confronting the leadership that had set us up for that 13-week death march. I didn’t see it then, but I was handing the company the exact language it needed to keep doing it. I was sharpening the knife that would later be stuck in my own back.

Aiden’s Illusion Shattered

I met a man named Aiden J.P. a while back. He was a wind turbine technician, a job that sounds romantic until you realize it involves climbing 233-foot towers in gale-force winds to fix complex machinery. He was the poster child for a growth mindset. He’d volunteer for the toughest assignments, work through holidays, and study schematics in his sliver of downtime. He told me he believed that if he just pushed hard enough, he’d learn everything, become indispensable, and secure his future. He saw every emergency call-out in a blizzard as a learning experience.

For three years, it worked. Management loved him. They gave him certificates of achievement-laminated paper that cost about $3. He was their hero. Then, the company went through a restructuring. They laid off 43 technicians across the region. Aiden, with his perfect record and his legendary work ethic, was kept on. But his territory tripled. His workload became physically impossible. He was now responsible for a fleet of turbines that three people used to maintain. When he finally went to his manager, utterly shattered, and said he couldn’t keep up, his manager looked at him with disappointment.

The growth wasn’t for him. He wasn’t growing his skills in any meaningful way anymore; he was just running faster on a treadmill cranked up to a lethal speed. The company was the one growing-growing its profit margins by replacing three salaries with his one. He was simply the component being stress-tested to its breaking point.

True Growth vs. Forced Endurance

We don’t expect this kind of ‘growth’ in any other area of life. It’s an unnatural, violent way to develop. You watch a child learn to walk. They pull themselves up, they fall, they try again. They rest. They aren’t expected to go from crawling to sprinting in a single, grueling 73-hour push. Their growth is cyclical, interspersed with naps and nourishment. It’s supported by an environment that allows for failure without judgment. We give them clothes that fit but have a little room to move, to stumble, to get back up. Forcing a child into shoes that are three sizes too small isn’t a ‘growth opportunity’ to strengthen their toes; it’s just cruel. You have to create the right conditions for development, not just demand resilience in the face of terrible ones. My sister is always looking for the right things for my nephew, making sure he’s comfortable and has what he needs, from the food he eats to the Kids Clothing NZ he wears. The whole point is to foster his potential, not to test his breaking point. The corporate world has forgotten this distinction. They demand the growth without providing the nourishment, the space, or the safety.

This tangent about children isn’t as disconnected as it seems. It’s about the fundamental misunderstanding of what growth is. True growth is sustainable. It integrates lessons, builds real capacity, and leads to a stronger, more capable state. Forced endurance, on the other hand, is a debt. You are borrowing energy, health, and mental well-being from your future self, and the bill always comes due. For Aiden, it came in the form of a debilitating back injury and an anxiety disorder. For me, it was a slow erosion of passion, turning a job I once loved into a source of constant, low-grade dread.

The Alternative: Bounded Mindset & Boundaries

So what’s the alternative? A ‘fixed mindset’? Giving up at the first sign of a challenge? Of course not. The opposite of a weaponized growth mindset isn’t no mindset. It’s a realistic, bounded one. It’s the wisdom to distinguish between a productive challenge and an exploitative demand. It’s having the courage to say, ‘I am dedicated to growing and learning, but the current expectation is unsustainable and unhealthy. The problem is not my mindset; the problem is the workload.’

This requires boundaries, which is a word that corporate culture often treats as a synonym for ‘lack of commitment.’ It also requires a conscious rejection of the corporate narrative. When a manager praises you for surviving a crisis they created, see it for what it is: an attempt to make you complicit in your own exploitation. Thank them for the feedback, but privately recognize that your ‘growth’ was a byproduct of their failure to plan.

A New Path: Sustainable Growth

Aiden eventually quit. He took a job with a smaller company for less pay. His new boss told him, ‘I need you for the next ten years, not the next ten months. Don’t you dare burn yourself out.’ He works a steady 43 hours a week now. He’s learning new diagnostic systems, mentoring a junior technician, and for the first time in years, he doesn’t feel a knot of dread in his stomach on Sunday night. He is growing, but this time, it’s for him.