Are you gritty?
I sure hope you are. Especially if there is anything in life that you truly want to accomplish.
What is that one thing you’d love to be great at – heck, you’d practically sell your soul to be great at it – but just seems like an impossible feat?
Maybe you want to have great charisma – where people see you as funny, witty, interesting and intriguing.
Maybe you want to be a successful entrepreneur – where you run your own business, make your own decisions, and your actions have a direct impact on your bottom line.
Or maybe you just really want to be great at connecting with people – where you create deep, lasting relationships, and each one of your friends feels like a lifelong best friend.
Whatever your goal, improving your grittiness just might be the key to unlocking your hidden potential.
So, what is grit?
According to Angela Duckworth, a leading expert on grit, it is “passion and perseverance for long-term goals”. She also says what grit is not: “Grit isn’t talent. Grit isn’t luck. Grit isn’t how intensely, for the moment, you want something.”
Basically, grit is working hard day-in and day-out towards a singular goal, no matter what barriers get in your way.
So even if your singular goal is to live a happy life, that may mean you need rich, meaningful relationships to fulfill that dream.
Unfortunately, our culture (and our brains) are constantly touting the talents and luck of successful people while downplaying their hard work and the obstacles they overcame.
America’s Got Talent, or America’s Got Grit?
Just read the titles of many competition TV shows today. America’s Got Talent. The X Factor. The Voice. It makes it sound as though these people were born to win.
“These people are so talented.”
“He has that X factor.”
“Listen to the beautiful voice she was born with.”
But it makes sense why we do this. It is something Nassim Taleb calls the narrative fallacy. In his book The Black Swan, he says:
“The fallacy is associated with our vulnerability to overinterpretation and our predilection for compact stories over raw truths. It severely distorts our mental representation of the world.”
In other words, we like to take a few facts and create our own causes or effects to make them tell a story so that it all makes sense in our head, even if it isn’t the truth.
For example, if you’ve seen certain gangster/mobster movies, you may see Italians as very loud, confident, social people. They have big family gatherings, lots of friends, and they tell great stories while using emphatic gesticulation.
If I have that stereotype in my head and I know a successful Italian in the sales department of my company, I might tell myself, “He’s great with people because he’s Italian, which is why he was able to get a good sales job.”
In reality, it’s much more likely that he’s socially calibrated because he grew up around social people or because of other social dynamics during his upbringing, not because he’s Italian. There are many Italians out there who aren’t loud, charismatic people.
What I’ve done here is this: I took a few facts – he’s Italian and he’s good with people – and I used one fact as a cause for the other (he’s good with people because he’s Italian). Unconsciously I created a narrative because a story is easier to remember than facts. This allows my brain to file it as “solved” so that it doesn’t have to waste as much effort to recall it later, even though I have zero basis for believing this story and in fact I actually don’t believe it at all.
So when Kenichi Ebina won the eighth season of America’s Got Talent, it would have been much easier to say that he’s a good dancer because he’s talented, or because he’s Japanese, rather than looking into all of the work he put in before that day.
Sadly, this type of thinking prevents many people from achieving greatness.
What Will Smith’s Success Looks Like
Talent and luck can certainly help a person on their path to success, but they alone cannot create success. There is one key factor that is absolutely necessary: grit.
In her book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, Duckworth quoted Will Smith saying, “I’ve never really viewed myself as particularly talented…Where I excel is ridiculous, sickening work ethic.”
To me, it’s easy to look at Will Smith and think that he’s a naturally charismatic person. It would make sense why he’s successful and famous. Who wouldn’t like him?
Duckworth quotes him further though, and Will Smith goes on to say:
“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 outworked, 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. It’s really that simple.”
This is such a great example of grit. He has an intense passion to persevere regardless of the circumstances.
Duckworth has a generalized formula for how you get from talent to achievement, and it looks like this:
What this is saying is that although talent may help you acquire a certain level of skill, in order to make meaningful achievement, you need to put in the effort, regardless of the talent you were born with.
As Duckworth says it:
“Talent – how fast we improve in skill – absolutely matters. But effort factors into the calculations twice, not once. Effort builds skill. At the very same time, effort makes skill productive.”
Having this knowledge may seem trivial, but it can have a profound impact on your ability to succeed.
Get Your Mindset Right and the Pieces Will Start Falling Into Place
A lot of people truly believe that they can’t become the person they wish they could be. I understand why they feel this way, which I touched on above (by overvaluing talent and undervaluing effort).
It’s unfortunate because many people don’t realize that the words they use and the beliefs in their head are often times the biggest obstacles blocking them from their dreams and goals.
Here are a couple things that people have told me:
“It feels as though I will always feel lonely because I just don’t have that people pizazz.”
“I can’t make, let alone keep good friends because I’m not witty and interesting like other people I know.”
It pains me too because I was in the same boat. I wasn’t outgoing. I didn’t attract the attention of the group. I definitely wouldn’t have been able to sell anything. I probably couldn’t have even sold water to a guy stranded in the middle of the desert.
But once I changed my mindset from “I’m not social” to “How can I learn to be social?”, my journey began.
Understand that it’s not your talents that make you. Sure, some people are born to be more social than others. Their brains are likely wired differently than ours. But if you put in the effort, if you have enough grit, you can surpass those people and become highly successful in whatever domain you choose.
If you could only walk away with the two main ideas, it’d be these:
- Get your mindset right. You need to believe that you can accomplish your goals. Anything that improves with practice and time (public speaking, social skills, math, art, etc.), is something you can successfully master.
- Think long term and don’t give up. Come back every day and keep working at it. Expect there to be setbacks, obstacles and frustrating times. Expect it to take time. It will be worth it if you are truly passionate about this goal.
I will leave you with one last quote from Angela Duckworth’s Grit:
“Many of us, it seems, quit what we start far too early and far too often. Even more than the effort a gritty person puts in on a single day, what matters is that they wake up the next day, and the next, ready to get on that treadmill and keep going.”