Getting Grit

“[Duckworth] found that the people who had distinguished themselves in overcoming multiple challenges over many years to sustain the pursuit of something that was important to them had several critical qualities in common, namely:

• Passion

  . They were lit up from within by a cause or an activity that electrified and energized them, sometimes from a young age. They weren’t guided by what others wanted; instead, they were single-mindedly focused on something that crowded out other interests, gave their lives meaning, and filled them with a sense of purpose.

• Perseverance

  . They weren’t just resilient in the short run. they had a bounce-back quality that existed throughout years of emotional droughts, physical and financial setbacks, and discouragements that would cause many people to give up.

• Long-term goals

  . They attached a goal to their passion that might have seemed unreali

  stic to some, but that became their immovable North Star. In some cases, this led to world-renown or Olympic fame, but for others, the results were quieter, from regaining the ability to walk after a crippling injury, to maintaining the hope of being exonerated after wrongful incarceration, to remaining clean and sober in the hardest of circumstances.”

“In 2014, at the University of Texas at Austin commencement, Admiral William McRaven brought the house down with his inspirational eighteen-minute talk, ‘Ten Ways to Change the World.’ In it, he described the ordeals of SEAL trainees, including punishing runs in freezing cold weather, navigating underwater in pitch-black conditions, and being forced to do extra calisthenics after multi-hour endurance sessions. Admiral McRaven said if you want to change the world, you have to ‘sing when you are up to your neck in mud,’ ‘go down obstacles head first,’ and ‘punch the shark in the snout’ when you are underwater, alone, and scared. He finished his speech with the last of his ten change-the-world points, noting that everyone in the SEAL training wants to quit at some point because they don’t believe they have what it takes to persevere:

Finally, in SEAL training there is a bell, a brass bell that hangs in the center of the compound for all the students to see. All you have to do to quit is ring the bell. Ring the bell and you no longer have to wake up at five o’clock. Ring the bell and you no longer have to do the runs, the obstacle course, the PT—and you no longer have to endure the hardships of training. Just ring the bell. If you want to change the world, don’t ever, ever ring the bell.’”

“To qualify for the label of authentic grit, it’s not enough to be resilient, persistent, and passionate. I believe that gritty behavior is a positive force only when it awes and inspires others to want to become better people and imagine greater possibilities for themselves. People who display it make us wonder: ‘What if I went after hard things, too? What if I devoted my energy and time to cultivating my passions? What if?”

“It all starts with a dream. People who come to me for help have a dream to go beyond their normal boundaries to do something that is significant and fulfilling, something they will regret not pursuing if they never make the attempt. These are sometimes people whom others would describe as successful, who don’t necessarily have to change anything to have a comfortable existence for the rest of their lives, but who have a hunger to dig deeper and go further with a cherished goal—sometimes a hidden one.

My first question is simple and to the point: ‘What is the best possible outcome of our working together?’ Just using the words ‘best’ and ‘possible’ awakens someone’s senses to the idea that anything can happen, and that whatever that thing is, it can be magnificent. This is when people usually get right to the point and express some large, difficult goal: ‘I want to become an inspirational leader who helps other people find their purpose and bring it to work in a new way,’ ‘I want to stop waiting to be happy and start doing things that will make life more fulfilling,’ ‘I want to change my approach to work so that I can spend more time with my family and friends,’ or ‘I want to become an entrepreneur and control my own future.’”

“I felt like I’d entered an alternate universe when I read a lengthy research paper by three of positive psychology’s top luminaries—Ed Diener, Laura King, and Sonja Lyubomirksy—called ‘The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect.’ It was the fall of 2005 when I was in the MAPP program at Penn, and I was reading more and more research that helped me to understand exactly what it takes to flourish and succeed in life. This paper, though, was a doozy, and it upended all of my previous thinking.

In one of the most profound, slam-dunk findings I’ve ever read, these three researchers had parsed and reviewed hundreds of studies on success in life to discover the exact opposite of what I and many others had mistakenly believed was true: we don’t become happy after we succeed at something, but rather we succeed at something because we are happy first. Their comprehensive overview of longitudinal, qualitative, correlational, and causal studies on success in friendship, health, finance, work, and all other aspects of life helped me understand why achieving certain external goals when I was younger never made me happy for long, and had instead left me emptier than before. The grades, the awards, the schools, the scores, and the right weight never brought me the lasting satisfaction I had thought they would, and now I could see why. If I’d had access to these findings during the worst of my bulimic behavior, maybe I would have taken a different approach to my diet and health, and wouldn’t have done so much damage to myself.”

“People with authentic grit are not wildly unrealistic about their competencies, but they do take risks because they have self-efficacy—they believe they will figure out whatever they need to know or do to accomplish their goals. One of their most distinguishing characteristics, however, is that they do not fear failure, and they don’t necessarily allow themselves to visualize or accept the idea that they will fail. …

The reason grit requires skillful risk-taking is that gritty people often break new ground, doing things that haven’t been done by them or, often, by anyone else. They have to go outside their comfort zone over and over to get where they want, all the while with no guarantee of success. That doesn’t stop them, though; they’d rather bet on themselves than accept a life in which they’ll never know what might nave been.”

“Positive psychology’s Chris Peterson was fond of saying that thriving people are good at ‘struggling well.’ As we all know, life is full of challenges, particularly if we choose to set grand goals, but what separates people who don’t have grit from people who do is often this issue of working hard and overcoming difficulties without losing focus, equanimity, or passion—that is, struggling well. So, if you want to cultivate grit but you don’t have a constructive relationship with discomfort, failure, and delayed gratification, it’s imperative to find ways to make your peace with these conditions.

One of the most intriguing findings in Angela Duckworth’s research on grit is that high-grit people hate hard work as much as those who don’t have grit. High-grit people simply accept hard work as the price they must pay to get where they want to go, and so they find ways to do it. As the late boxer and humanitarian Muhammad Ali put it, ‘I hated every minute of training but I said, ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.’”