Will you follow through on your next goal or will you drop out prematurely? Are you the kind of person who has multiple interests and does not know what to do?
In her best-selling book (Grit — The Power of Passion and Perseverance), researcher and author Angela Duckworth coins the term Grit as the intersection between perseverance and passion to achieve long-term and meaningful goals.
Grit and resilience are abilities to pursue activities and goals you are passionate about and persevere even when you face obstacles.
Duckworth’s research suggests that grit is among the strongest predictors of long-term success in life or career.
Findings from grit research
Among her most interesting findings are that …
- Grit scores among college applicants predict very accurately how successful a person will be in their studies
- People with more grit are showing larger signs of identity and commitment with what kind of person they want to be
- Grittier people recover faster from hardships and setbacks
- People with more grit focus on improvement rather than their current performance levels
- When exposed to the right environment (e.g. mentors, teachers, opportunities), people can become grittier, i.e. it is a skill that can be learned and honed
In this TED talk, Angela Duckworth explains the concept of grit and how it can help you master your mental toughness in day-to-day life:
What is important to remember is that talent does not make you gritty. There is no relationship between grit and talent.
Since you can do something about the former, but not about the latter, I will take a closer look at why grit is important, how you can build it up, and when to quit on your commitments.
“Grit is having stamina. It is living life like it is a marathon, not a sprint. […] Being gritty is falling in love and staying in love. “- Angela Duckworth
Why is grit important?
When it comes to achievement and success in life, effort counts twice, in comparison to talent.
The Grit Formula can be broken down as follows:
Talent x effort = skill
Skill x effort = achievement
Grit is important since it is a driver of achievement and success, independent of talent and intelligence.
If you are less talented than your peers, you might start at a lower level, but with larger grit, you make plenty up for it.
Ultimately achievement never comes linearly but exponentially that means you need to see through setbacks and persevere in order to break through performance plateaus.
Of course, being naturally talented is great, but to be able to do well and thrive, it is crucial to show perseverance.
Without that, talent is most of the time unmet potential. Only with effort, talent becomes a skill that eventually leads to success.
“Without grit, talent may be nothing more than unmet potential.” — Angela Duckworth
Moreover, grit facilitates personal growth then coping with failures in life. Trial and error are important steps to becoming more successful in life.
Approaching failure with a gritty attitude helps to recover faster from setbacks. If you have never really failed at something, developing grit in such situations might be more difficult.
Therefore, it is important to treat yourself with kindness and start shifting your mindset from outcome to execution.
Why talent matters less and less in 2021 and onwards
Nowadays, talent is grossly overestimated. You can observe this yourself when you take a look at the job market.
Luckily, some startups and companies adopt a more growth-oriented mindset towards recruiting people.
Talent used to play a bigger role in the past, but with the growing emergence of Internet access and rapid growth of online educational material, the talent gap among individuals can be closed faster than ever before.
However, this benefit comes with some side effects. We need to be aware of when it comes to achieving our long-term goals.
Why grit and perseverance matter more and more in 2021 and onwards
One major side effect is the massive amount of options we can choose from. Educational platforms such as Skillshare, Youtube, or Udemy offer so much educational video content that we could run into a state of analysis paralysis.
The Internet, especially social media platforms, makes us more susceptible to comparing our situation with others.
Instagram posts by friends that show one highlight reel after another might sway our commitments we made earlier.
New educational content or the number of books that are being created every day distract us from what we actually want to achieve.
Hence, it is important to practice grit and resilience daily to clear our minds from these distractions that do not serve us in the long run.
Don’t focus on mastering multiple things at once. Choose your pursuits wisely, stick to them, and be rewarded generously going forward.
How to build grit and resilience?
There are many ways to build more grit and resilience into our everyday lives.
First of all, you always have to start answering the questions why you want to be more gritty, what does grit mean to you, and who are you doing it for?
1. Why do you want to develop more grit?
For you, it could be that more grit leads to…
- higher levels of freedom
- fulfillment and meaning in your pursuits
- more joy in life
Whatever it might be, you have to be crystal clear on why you are focusing on being more gritty.
2. What does grit mean to you?
This is very individual and could be …
- focusing on your passion project for a couple of hours a day
- building a side hustle besides your normal job
- saving money for your dream vacation
3. Who are you doing this for?
Ultimately, when it comes to achievement, we all do this for …
- ourselves or
- our loved ones
There is no right answer here. If you are gritty because you believe you can provide your family with a better life or you just do it for yourself, is completely up to you.
What are strategies to develop more grit?
Three strategies to develop more grit are fostering a growth mindset, focusing on deliberate practice, or seeking out a like-minded environment.
Strategy 1: Foster a Growth Mindset.
The ability to learn and to grow is not fixed. Fostering a growth mindset starts at the deepest level: Your beliefs.
If you believe that you can improve or that all skills are learnable, anything and everything becomes possible.
To get started, you need to be honest with yourself first. Take a good look in the mirror and tell yourself where you stand at the moment.
Secondly, visualize what it is that you want to achieve.
Lastly, find one person (yes, just one) who achieved what you want to achieve and figure out their journey.
You need to drill that fact into your mind:
Whatever you want to achieve in life, if somebody has done it, there is no reason why you can not pull that off, too.
To close the loop, go back again to the questions: Do you only want the benefit of your goals, or do you also want to pay the price to achieve that goal.
Can you imagine taking this journey yourself? Will you enjoy it?
Answering these questions will give you clarity when you face obstacles along the way.
Read more on how to develop a growth mindset here.
Strategy 2: Focus on deliberate practice.
Deliberate practice in essence is doing the work that does not come easy.
For example, if you want to learn to code, it might be easier to just code along with YouTube tutorials, but you might get more out of your invested time when you solve challenging coding problems on HackerRank or Leetcode.
Or even better, work on your own projects and google approaches as soon as you encounter problems.
Actively do the things that put you out of your comfort zone. The concept of deliberate practice was researched and summarized by Anders Ericsson (Author of the book Peak).
According to Ericsson, improvements in skill do not come from practicing over and over the same concepts but practicing purposefully by integrating four key components:
- a specific goal,
- intense focus,
- immediate feedback, and
- frequent discomfort.
Integrating these four components into your practice forces you to mentally exhaust yourself, which in turn will spark your creativity.
To kick it even up a notch, you might want to hire a coach for your goal, who not only holds you accountable but pushes you to your limits.
Insight to Action Challenge practice deliberate practice
Improve your typing speed over the next thirty days by practicing 15 minutes a day. Check out 10fastfingers.com for a benchmark and go through the exercises on typing.academy to improve your typing.
Test yourself after 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30 days. Share your improvement in the comments below. I love to see your growth.
Practice makes progress.
Strategy 3: Spend time in the right environment.
If you find it hard to implement change from the inside out (i.e. hustling through), seeking out the right environment to spark lasting positive change can be a great alternative.
The reason is that we human beings are amazing at adapting to our environments. Just think about the impact Covid had on work regulations.
From one day to the next, you found yourself in-home office, regular video meetings, etc.
Jim Rohn famously said, “we are the average of the five people, we spend the most time with”.
“We are the average of the five people, we spend the most time with.”
— Jim Rohn
Of course, this saying is not scientifically proven, but there is practical evidence on how much the environment affects and shapes your mindset, behavior, and identity.
Do you spend too much time with people, who always complain about work and life in general (i.e. might impact you negatively)?
Observe how mentally well you feel after averaging out the people you spend the most time with. Can you observe some patterns?
Now figure out, what it is that you want out of life.
Do you want more money? Spend time with wealthier people.
Do you want to have more spirituality? Seek out friends and podcasts who are into personal growth.
Or do you want to integrate more fitness and health into your life? Start watching youtube videos of fitness instructors or give a call to that friend who always posts pictures on Instagram in their bikinis.
Whatever it is, try to immerse yourself in the universe you want to create for yourself.
At the end of the day, the reality is just a reflection of how you feel inside. And how you feel inside is heavily influenced by your surroundings.
COMMITMENT = FREEDOM?
Let’s face it: It is a miracle, how many lives we can live during one lifetime.
We could study medicine today and become full-time coders the next year.
Or we could work in finance by day and blog about traveling the world in the evenings.
The list goes on. Internet and technology offer us a myriad of possibilities and options to choose from.
We are literally bombarded with options of what we could do next.
The next shiny thing is just around the corner.
You have to realize that your most important asset in today’s world is your attention.
Hence, the most important decision for you is to commit to something that you are passionate about in the first place.
Choose a grit path for a certain skill or project, when you can answer these questions with a clear “Hell, yeah“.
- Would I enjoy learning this?
- Can I imagine myself doing this consistently for the next two years?
- [in case it is business relevant] Can I enjoy this even if it does not bring me any monetary benefits?
As Mark Manson (Author of The Subtle Art of not Giving a F***) puts it
“Commitment gives you freedom because you’re no longer distracted by the unimportant and frivolous. It gives you freedom because it hones your attention and focus, directing them toward what is most efficient at making you healthy and happy.
It makes decision-making easier and removes any fear of missing out; knowing that what you already have is good enough, why would you ever stress about chasing more, more, more again? Commitment allows you to focus intently on a few highly important goals and achieve a greater degree of success than you otherwise would.”
It is natural to have multiple passions. It is fine to want to do a lot of things.
However, be aware that your time is limited. It might sound paradox, but a commitment to a purpose can be very freeing.
While the commitment itself binds you to a certain set of pursuits, how you do and manifest these things are completely up to you.
And this is when the joy of freedom kicks in.
The freedom to solve problems in a creative way.
The freedom to do the hard work and feel some kind of fulfillment after putting in the effort.
Examples of Grit Paragons
Grit, perseverance, and resilience are traits that will be rewarded handsomely in our society because they are so rare.
“The only thing that I see that is distinctly different about me is I’m not afraid to die on a treadmill. I will not be out-worked, period. You might have more talent than me, you might be smarter than me, you might be sexier than me, you might be all of those things you got it on me in nine categories. But if we get on the treadmill together, there’s two things: You’re getting off first, or I’m going to die. […]
You’re not going to out-work me. It’s such a simple, basic concept. The guy who is willing to hustle the most is going to be the guy that just gets that loose ball. The majority of people who aren’t getting the places they want or aren’t achieving the things that they want in this business is strictly based on hustle. It’s strictly based on being out-worked; it’s strictly based on missing crucial opportunities. I say all the time if you stay ready, you ain’t gotta get ready.” — Will Smith
When you see a consistently successful person, rest assured that this person deserves all the credit because he or she put in enormous amounts of work into their craft.
When the time comes to end a commitment
Sometimes, it is best to end a commitment, whether it is a bad relationship or a dream.
Everybody has a bad day now and then, but before you end a commitment, you should follow through until it reaches a natural ending.
This natural ending can come at the end of the year (i.e. time) or when you completed a milestone (i.e. achievement).
It is crucial that you never give up on something just because you had a bad day.
This rule is important because it provides you with mental closure, otherwise, you will always think what if.
Conclusion and how to follow through on your next endeavor
Remember, grit is a skill that needs to be practiced by exposing ourselves to situations when it matters most.
It does not teach us how to be perfect, but how to rise again after we fell down.
Therefore, always be kind to yourself. For instance, if you want to read more, focus on reading one page per day rather than wanting to read a whole book in a week.
Grit, like any other skill, comes with daily practice. Consistency comes before intensity.
Developing grit can help you to narrow down and to focus more on what you really want to learn.
For instance, if you want to learn computer programming, figure out what you want to build and choose an appropriate language to start.
From experience, I can tell you that you should only focus on one language at a time. Do not run into the trap of learning multiple languages at the same time.
The same goes for learning an instrument or any other form of creative arts.
Use a measurement stick of at least 500–1,000 hours of committed effort and deliberate practice before starting your next project.
If you commit to your practice two to three hours per day that means half to one year of commitment, which is enough time to achieve a meaningful milestone.
Insight to Action Challenge for developing more grit
Take pen and paper and write down for ten minutes all kinds of projects and skills you want to achieve.
Next circle the top five based on urgency, satisfaction, and joy. This helps you to prioritize.
Finally, answer for each of these the question on a scale from 1 to 10, how much does it improve my quality of life if I learn this. Be honest and kind to yourself.
There is no right or wrong. If you love knitting then make knitting a priority in your life.
Share your next grit project in the comments. I love to hear from you.
