Grit

Please note this post is based on the book, the summary on Powermoves and another summary here on Medium. None of this is written by me, I composed these notes to sum up my experience.

Grit is the combination of passion (a deep, enduring knowledge of what you want) and perseverance (hard work and resilience). It’s about moving in a direction with consistency and endurance, like having a clear inner compass that guides all your decisions and actions.

Gritty people are able to maintain their determination and motivation over long periods despite experiences with failure and adversity.

Our potential is one thing. What we do with it is quite another.
Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare.

From the very beginning to the very end, it is inestimably important to learn to keep going even when things are difficult, even when we have doubts.

Passion for your work is a little bit of discovery, followed by a lot of development, and then a lifetime of deepening.

The grittier an individual is, the fewer career changes they’re likely to make.

At the start of an endeavor, we need the encouragement and freedom to figure out what we enjoy. We need small wins. We need applause. Yes, we can handle a tincture of criticism and corrective feedback. Yes, we need to practice. But not too much and not too soon. Rush a beginner and you’ll bludgeon their budding interest. It’s very, very hard to get that back once you do.

If you’d like to follow your passion but haven’t yet fostered one, you must begin at the beginning: discovery.

1. First, they set a stretch goal, zeroing in on just one narrow aspect of their overall performance. Rather than focus on what they already do well, experts strive to improve specific weaknesses. They intentionally seek out challenges they can’t yet meet.
2. Then, with undivided attention and great effort, experts strive to reach their stretch goal. Interestingly, many choose to do so while nobody’s watching.
3. As soon as possible, experts hungrily seek feedback on how they did. Necessarily, much of that feedback is negative. This means that experts are more interested in what they did wrong — so they can fix it — than what they did right. The active processing of this feedback is as essential as its immediacy. And after feedback, then what?
4. Then experts do it all over again, and again, and again. Until they have finally mastered what they set out to do. Until what was a struggle before is now fluent and flawless. Until conscious incompetence becomes unconscious competence.
5. Finally, experts start all over again with a new stretch goal. One by one, these subtle refinements add up to dazzling mastery.

Nobody wants to show you the hours and hours of becoming.
They’d rather show the highlight of what they’ve become.

Growth Mindset > Optimistic Self-Talk > Perseverance Over Adversity

• Have huge perseverance
• Never feel like they’re good enough, but are satisfied being unsatisfied
• Love the chase as much as the capture
• Have an enduring passion carrying them through boring and painful times
• They know what they want: they have both determination and direction

Talent x Effort = Skill →

Skill x Effort = Achievement

Talent is how quickly your skill improves when you invest effort.

Achievement is when you take the required skills and use them.

Will You Quit at the First Obstacle?

Many people often start things full of excitement, only to give up too soon when they encounter the real first obstacle.

We quit what we start way too early way too often.

But what really builds skills and leads to achievement is waking up day after day and staying at it.

Grit is about working on something you love so much that you simply want to keep at it.

Grit is falling in love and staying in love.
Grit is working on something you love so much that you simply want to keep at it

Angela Duckworth says most people quit because they:

• Get bored
• Don’t think it’s worthy
• Can’t see themselves ever making it.

1. Interest: Passion starts with enjoying what we do. You don’t have to enjoy every single part, but you enjoy it overall
2. Practice: You must devote yourself to improving in your focus area zeroing in on your weaknesses. “Whatever it takes I want to improve” is a common trait among gritty people
3. Purpose: The conviction that your work matters, that it’s connected to the well being of others. Interest without purpose is hard to sustain
4. Hope: Hope encompasses all three stages and is what will keep you going when things are difficult and doubts arise. You don’t usually find your passion as if a bolt hit you from the sky.

From her interviews most people found their passion by exploring many different interests they had.

Finding Your Passion Step by Step

1. Try different things which seem interesting to you;
2. Pick one which is particularly interesting for you;
3. Proactively develop that interest;
4. Further deepen it over a lifetime.

So, to be clear and for your complete understanding, it’s more about “developing” your passion than it is about “finding” your passion.

You don’t find your passion. You CHOOSE it and DEVELOP it

Deep practice means zeroing in on your weaknesses, focusing more on what you did wrong than on what you did well. And then fixing it.

Fear of failure and of looking bad are the worst enemies of deliberate practice.

It’s because since the core idea behind deliberate practice is to train based on mistakes outside of your comfort zone you simply can’t allow shame to hold you back.
Deliberate practice is a behavior and it’s more effortful and rarely as enjoyable as flow.
Make deliberate practice a regular habit. Get into a routine. Practice in the same time and place, so it becomes automatic. All types of skills can be improved in this way.
It is planned and happens when you’re beyond your skill level. Your goal is to increase your skill and you are looking for problems to fix.

FLOW ->
You’ll hear some people talk about flow, about how the best performance happens while in the zone. It is fun to be in the zone, but it doesn’t just happen. You have to do hard work as preparation. Practice sucks, but the results rock.

Flow is a state instead and it can be more challenging to accurately plan. In flow you’re not analyzing what you’re doing but simply doing it and you’re effortless.

All the feedback you get is often great and not based on mistakes because your skill level is enough for the challenge.

The experience of working hard changes when the effort is rewarded. If we don’t associate hard work to rewards, we won’t work hard

Purpose ->
Often gritty people have difficulty in putting into words what they feel about their purpose.

But the key is that purpose is always connected to other people.

Gritty people appear to be far more into helping others than those with perhaps less grit. In other words, they’re connected to the world and to others. The purpose is a huge motivator. Nevertheless, people who both enjoy the work and want to help others are the ones who do best.

The hope of gritty people has nothing to do with luck, but has to with getting up again and again after we fall down.

You can grow Grit in two ways:

• From the inside out, by developing your interests into passion
• From outside in by immersing yourself in the kind of culture that promotes and foster grit.

You have to believe that results will come via hard work applied over a long period of time. This is a kind of mindset you have to develop and make yours.

Greatness happens when people strive in one direction, when they use everything available to them, when they are awesome observers who look at everything as potential models and never stop trying.

After doing something repeatedly, no matter how hard it is, it becomes easy. But people give up. They knit incomplete sweaters, write incomplete novels, don’t stick with diets. They give up. Strivers, on the other hand, improve their skill so that they are better than the talented who are complacent. It takes people a long time to develop expertise. This is one reason why perseverance is important. You have to stick with one thing for a long time to get really, really good at it.


Most people describe their work as a “job” or “career” — few would refer to it a “calling.” But these are the fortunate ones. People who consider their work a calling do better work, are more productive and have fewer sick days. And they tend to be happy with their lives. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with looking at your work as a job or career, but any job can be a calling if you look at it right. It’s how you see your work that’s important.

Gritty people have hope. They think they can improve the future through their own efforts. Getting up each time they’re knocked down requires having faith that ultimately, they’ll succeed.

Because grit, optimism and happiness are all correlated, there are many reasons to strive for this. When you keep looking for ways to improve your situation you’re more likely to find it. Many of us are unaware of how much in life is defined by thoughts. If you think you can change your level of intelligence, then you can. If you think it’s hopeless, then it probably is.

Optimists are said to have a growth mindset as opposed to an attitude of failure. With a growth mindset, if you have a setback, it makes you work hard. People with this mindset are grittier than those with an attitude of failure.

Culture can shape our identity. An awful lot of what we do can be traced back to our identity. This is especially true of grit. If you think you aren’t a quitter, you’re more likely to persevere. If you think you’re able to overcome great adversity, your behavior will usually conform to that conclusion. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We tend to focus too much on talent, but what we get out of life depends a lot on our grit.

Fortunately, you can develop grit within yourself. You can cultivate your interests and work hard every day on building your skills. You can connect your work to a purpose. And you can maintain hope, even when the chips seem stacked against you. Of course, success and hard work aren’t everything. You want to be happy, too, and there’s a correlation between grit and happiness and well-being.

We all have our limits. Maybe you will never be another Mozart, but that’s no reason to give up playing piano. It’s important to learn from failure, which means failure is important. You’ve just got to learn from it and move on, don’t let it defeat you. You can achieve amazing things. Believe it.