Dictionary meanings:
The ability to cope with difficult situations, or unusual problems.
The ability to find quick and clever ways to overcome difficulties.
Able to deal skillfully and promptly with new situations, difficulties, etc.
The ability to make decisions and act on your own.
The Concept
The first mindset that you need to develop is "Resourceful Mindset" which means that you are able to find most effective & efficient solution by yourself, in real time, with available resources, which will make you progress on your path or overcome a problem.
Being resourceful is the quality of being able to procure, modify and apply resources in the best possible way that is innovative, creative and generates best preferable results, fast.
Resources include anything that you will use to achieve a certain objective. Example: information, tools, infrastructure, people, strategies, technology, etc.
Think of resourceful people as “full of resources,” or tools for coming up with solutions. They adapt well to new or difficult situations and they are able to think creatively. For example, if a snake gets loose in the pet store, a resourceful person will be able to figure out how to lure it back into its cage again.
Resourcefulness can make you better at everything you do, and separate the truly extraordinary people from the general herd.
Why to develop resourceful mindset?
Resourcefulness is required to accomplish anything and is a prerequisite for grit.
For example, you wish to start an import export business. Before you start your company you have to get an import-export license, communicate with lot of people, and understand your product, after that build relationships with suppliers, approach potential customers, generate leads, execute order, proceed for shipment and collect money from your client. Now, do you see how much work there is to be done? And the fact is that you do not know anything about the functioning of this world. So how will you understand the procedures, arrange required documents and negotiate with people? If you give up before taking any action by saying that you are completely unaware, incapable and illiterate of getting all the pieces together than how can your business survive?
You see, resourcefulness is your ability to gain knowledge when you are ignorant, manage & produce things when you have nothing, build things that doesn't exist and do what is required to do when you have zero skills, understanding & experience.
So, if you are not resourceful you cannot achieve anything in practical world.
Traveling to unknown foreign places without local knowledge and reaching your destination successfully somehow using multiple public transport and physical gestures to talk to people (because you don't know their language either) is resourcefulness.
Being able to write a letter, search a post office near you and finally drop the letter in an unknown city full of people who don't even speak the same language as you is resourcefulness.
If I tell you to book a flight ticket for yourself to china (without involving a travel agent) book hotel tickets and then once you reach there, travel from one city to another by hiring a personal car & not a taxi, without a GPS, only by talking to people, will you be able to do that?
Here is another example; I typed this entire book in my mobile phone! If I wasn't resourceful, I would have given excuses such as "I did not have a PC how I can write a book?" or why I could not get the work done. But being resourceful is powerful, it gets the work done.
Do you see how important being a resourceful person is? This is a mindset worth cultivating. THIS IS WHAT IS CALLED COMMON SENSE.
Researchers at Trent University in Canada concluded that resourceful students are more likely to use self- control in order to overcome stress in their life, and as a result are “more likely to be better adjusted, to receive higher grades, and to remain in university than their less resourceful counterparts.”
Of the 481 undergraduate students surveyed those with high levels of self-reported resourcefulness turned out to be far more likely to stay in school and succeed academically.
Interestingly, the results also showed that students attending university for more internal reasons and less so to please others or delay responsibilities showed higher levels of academic resourcefulness.
In another study, the Faculty of Education of Kocaeli University in Turkey found that highly resourceful students had better coping skills, used more positive reappraisal techniques, were more likely to seek social support, and were less likely to use escape-avoidance strategies during exams.
In 2003, psychologists at the University of Wollongong found further evidence to support the fact that highly resourceful students are less prone to low academic performance stemming from academic stress. The study, which involved 141 first-year undergraduates, found that resourceful students don’t necessarily experience lower levels of stress than non-resourceful students; they just know how to handle it better.
How to develop a resourceful mindset?
I could have given you a fancy structured model to develop this mindset but I am not doing so as you already know the reason behind it. Keeping it precise and up to the point.
To develop this mindset the only thing you need to do is go out, keep your eyes wide open, get things done, use common sense, don't give up and take 100℅ responsibility of the outcome. Don't stop unless you have successfully accomplished that task.
Simple, right? That's all you need but because I always over deliver, I have some supplements for you that can help your mind broaden the spectrum of your resourceful mindset.
Application of this mindset
"It's no resources but resourcefulness that ultimately makes a difference" - Tonny Robins