As I’ve documented on this blog many times, I like to learn by doing. I’m not as technical at work as I used to be, but have found I can stay sharp in my hobby time. This has sparked a number of side projects (A Football App I Play With Friends and Jonabot being the biggest of them). With Agentic AI becoming ever more prevalent and a quiet Thanksgiving planned, it was time to explore. I set out to create a “Growth Mindset Coach” and plan to detail it in three posts:
- This post which will give the general idea and structure.
- The second post will detail the first version of the agent which I created over the summer using n8n.io. This showed me how even non-technical folks can create basic agents in a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) design platform. I think that this will drive mass adoption for agentic AI across all white collar workers.
- Creating the agent in Python with Google’s Agent Developer Kit (ADK). This is a more extensible model that allows me to use code to make the solution more robust. While this particular use case does not require a more robust solution, I’m intending to expand on this concept and make other agents that can help me monitor and improve my habits.
The Idea behind the Coach
One of the things that’s become really important to me over the last couple years is having a “growth mindset” based on Carol Dweck’s book (my review here). I’m naturally more of a fixed mindset person who enjoys comfortable successes instead of learning and rising to new challenges, so, for me, this requires constant diligence. In Mindset, Dweck makes several recommendations on how you can keep yourself in a Growth Mindset:
- Constantly remind yourself of the importance of the growth mindset.
- Acknowledge and even give a name and personality to your fixed mindset persona (I call mine “Slobby”). Once you have named it, you can learn its tendencies and where it might attack you in a day. For example, “there are a number of projects that Slobby is trying to get me to put off starting because he’s afraid that if I start on them I might fail on them.” When you name it like that you can think about how to deal with it.
- Try to do one hard thing per day. Name what it is going to be and then set out to accomplish it.
The idea behind my “Growth Mindset Coach” is to leverage Generative AI to create a chatbot that can guide me through these three tasks each day. The coach (in both the n8n.io and the ADK version) has a long prompt guiding it to take me through each of the three things above. I also have the coach take notes on how Slobby might effect me and what hard task I commit to so that it can ask me about them the next day. The notes are kept in a Google Sheets spreadsheet (allowing me to explore the concept of “tools” for my agent).