Growing Grit
Carved out of stone, the person with grit is unperturbed by the hardships of life
Back in grade school, I never really had to try hard to succeed. I was a natural at pretty much every subject, so when I got into college, I really struggled climbing on top of the mountains of work we had to do. I was far from lazy; I had worked hard every day in track that earned me a place on the ECU track team (honestly, it was more of a drinking team with a running problem). But, my lack of having to put hours into studying to get a good grade made me unconditioned to fight tooth-and-nail to achieve the same results in academia.
This quality, the ability to persevere with passion for long term goals, is called grit. While this word has been in the general lexicon for centuries, in 2007 it was given this scientific definition by Angela Duckworth and her colleagues Christopher Peterson at the University of Michigan, and Michael Matthews and Dennis Kelly at West Point Academy. Their initial hypothesis was that the ability of high achieving individuals was dependent on their ability to "work strenuously towards challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress." Despite this being a relatively inherent relationship between work ethic and success, they found there was no scale in which to measure it with. So, they created a set of 12 questions to validate this claim scientifically. They found that those individuals who found success in any field owed their achievements to their sustained and focused efforts, while those individuals who relied primarily on innate talent rarely found success in more than one field.
This is something that I confronted within myself many years ago. My ability to learn and regurgitate facts had in fact sabotaged my ability to succeed in life, as it conditioned me to believe that success was guaranteed if I just showed up. I had found success in track not because I was inherently hard working, but because the hyper-vigilance of my PTSD made it easy to withstand the pain of pushing myself to my limits. In the years that followed college, I struggled to figure out how I could fix myself. I had sunk into a deep depression, because when combined with my other mental illness, I felt like a complete failure, and did not see how this could be remedied.
With the help of a friend, I eventually came to see the light within myself and began striving to remedy this situation. I got the idea to learn to juggle, as I saw it as a passive activity that would add another tool to my toolbox. But juggling became more than this. Aside from discovering that juggling was the singular thing that resonates with me to the core of my being, it taught me how to persevere. When I began, I dropped my balls more than I can possible have counted. It took me a week to even land my first cascade, despite trying every day for upwards of hours. I was determined to not be a failure anymore, and that desire drove me to stay true to that sustained and focused effort I set out on.
Then things just kept happening. Progress built on progress, and I soon found myself with many tricks under my belt. Similarly, as I got better with juggling, I was conditioning myself to work hard. I began applying this to my writing, which was mostly a hobby at the time. That, too, evolved from my fledgling attempts to write a novel, to a plethora of different abilities that I could churn out regularly. In time, these efforts blossomed and made me an industrial machine, coming to fully embrace my now core philosophy: free will is a skill. If we walk down a new road every day, eventually we will be able to navigate to any destination. The more we step out of our comfort zone and push our boundaries, the easier it is to consistently manifest what we desire.
I just took the test Duckworth created, and score 4.40 out of 5.00. How do you measure up? Do you consistently achieve your dreams, and keep setting new goals once you succeed at old ones? If you have difficulty as I once did, do not fret! Agency can be built. If we make incremental progress every day, we can radically transform ourselves from dough to diamonds. You just have to believe that you can grow.
