Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth
How To Be As Tough As Spartan Warriors
“With effort, talent becomes skill and at the very same time, effort makes skill productive.”
— Angela Duckworth
SCORE: 7.9
What You Will Learn:
Why effort and perverseness is a greater predictor of success than talent.
How to get the most out of practice.
How to identify your passion or calling.
Reading Time:
4 hours 32 minutes
Tactic To Do Today:
Grit requires deliberate practice: An activity with focused attention conducted with the specific goal of improving performance. But how can we dedicate hours of focused practice while holding an 8 - 5 job. Try Micro Practice.
Identify an area you wish to improve.
Dedicate 10-20 minutes a day of focused practice to that area.
Find an expert or someone you look up to that will critique your practice.
Example: To help improve my writing, I will journal an event that happened that day, wake up the next morning, edit, and take note of any errors.
Review
When Angela Duckworth published Grit in 2016, It didn't take long for her Grit Scale to land on a PowerPoint slide during a company all-hands meeting. I'm sure my boss wasn't the first to pump the idea into the workplace. Duckworth's message strikes at the heart of American corporate management; that hard work and stick-to-itiveness predicts success more reliably than talent or IQ; and that anyone - no matter the background - can learn grittiness.
Businesses love this book. Hard work has once again become the great equalizer. CEO’s can stick out their chest and say, “Sure, your company may have Harvard graduates, but my company has a team of Spartan warriors. Let the showdown begin!”
While we let the Spartans and Athenians tape their knuckles. Let's discuss what matters to us. How vital is Grit to young professionals?
Let’s start with the pioneer of grit, Angela Duckworth. A professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, Duckworth studies the stuff of success, more specifically, tackles questions like “who are the people at the top of industries? What are they like? And What makes them special.” Her journey to answer these questions has taken her to West Point’s BEAST training center, backstage and the national spelling bee, training camp for the Seattle Seahawks, and USA’s Olympic swimming training center.
Duckworth argues that talent is secondary to effort and passion. Even further, our culture fosters a gross naturalist bias - we reward talent at the expense of effort. We might say we value hard work at our jobs, in sports, and art but our choices and money indicate the opposite.
This observation leaves us wanting. American’s certainly value grit. We are all taught the value of hard work from a young age, if not from our parents, then from coaches or teachers. Nobody thinks Tom Brady wins six super bowl rings without outworking everyone on the field – he was the 199th pick in the draft after all!
We throw money at talent because it’s scarce. It’s an achievement reached with physical and mental gifts that only individuals can possess. But there’s a dilemma all genius must face, others have talent too. Once again, grit becomes the great equalizer.
We all need Grit to achieve, now the challenge becomes quantifying Grit and putting it into action.
Quantifying Grit
At my company’s all-hands meeting, the PowerPoint slide read Talent x Grit = Skill, Skill x Grit = Achievement. Sans algebra that means effort counts twice. Ignore grit, and your talent goes to waste.
“Without effort, your talent is nothing more than unmet potential, without effort your skill is nothing more than what you could have done but didn’t. With effort, talent becomes skill and at the very same time, effort makes skill productive.”
So how do we solve for Grit? How can I become grittier? Duckworth has an answer to that. She devised a GRIT SCALE that measures your passion and perseverance against the average person. A simple 10 question exam in which you read a statement and answer on a 1 – 5 scale ranging from “Not at all like me” to “Very much like me.”
Here are a few example questions
New ideas and projects sometimes distract me from previous ones.
Setbacks don’t discourage me.
My Interests change from year to year.
I’ll admit, it’s scary accurate. I took the test and posted a 3.9. Okay, but I’m no Jocko Willink. I scored highly on the perseverance portion of the exam, but poorly on passion. I’ve always been a hard worker, but my interests change with the wind. I can’t help it! Boredom is my Achilles heel.
Grit Lifestyle
The answer to improving your individual grit can be found within part II of the book. The bulleted summary is below.
· Interest: The first leg on your journey towards gritness is discovering your passion. You’re more likely to persevere if you love what you’re doing every day. More on this later.
· Practice: But not just hours clocked at the gym. You need pre-meditated deliberate practice. Time allocated with a specific goal in mind, an idea of improving upon a weakness, seek feedback, and repeat till that weakness becomes a strength. Think Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule on steroids.
· Purpose: “The intention to contribute to the well being of others.” To give back and spread your message. Purpose fuels longevity.
The rest of the book discusses how to instill grit within an organization which was clearly written for the Blue-Chip CEOs and private school principals. However, there are many elements of Duckworth’s book meant for twentysomethings and young professionals – worldly advice for her students navigating early careers.
Young Professionals and Grit
America’s War For Talent
A war you’re likely engaged in daily at your job. This is a corporate strategy of recruiting the most talented employees while at the same time weeding out the less talented. It’s a smart, but cruel practice. The salary gaps create a dog-eat-dog culture that encourages talent to stick around and entices all others to quit in defeat.
Duckworth argues that when you create a dog eat dog environment, that’s exactly what you get. A company full of people ready to dunk someone’s head beneath the water so they can breathe above the surface. A company breeds stress and rewards deception. Enron is a great example of this type of culture.
Interests – Finding Your Passion
If you read nothing else from this book, read chapter 6 about interest. It’s as if Duckworth wrote this chapter for her former students who have no idea what their passion is or have yet to find a calling in the real world.
This chapter is spot on. Twentysomethings tend to overstress about finding their calling for two reasons
1. We have high expectations.
2. We think we will fall in love at first sight.
Sound familiar? That’s because we treat our career like Bumble – hoping to bump into our Juliet who will make us forget about that wench Rosaline.
Duckworth says if finding your calling is the issue, then experiment, try new things. More than that, we need to experiment and give those things a real chance. Don’t quit right away because it’s too hard. Everything is hard at first, you might learn to love it!
There’s a viral Gary V clip where he’s talking to someone in their late twenties and the kid asks, “I have so much drive, but I don’t know what I want to do.” Gary in his normal quick high-pitched voice says, “Well, have you eaten enough shit?!”
Meaning, have you experimented with things you enjoy?
And so, if you’re stressed out about finding your true calling, ask yourself, “have you eaten enough shit?”
Deliberate Practice
I don’t think anyone will disagree that skills improve with concentrated deliberate practice. But it’s in the execution of such activities Duckworth seems to abandon twentysomethings.
Most of us work and will continue to work 8 - 5 jobs which mostly revolve around meetings and projects. We come home, maybe workout, cook dinner, and hit the sack – rinse repeat. I’m not saying it’s impossible to squeeze in a few hours a day to dedicate towards deliberate practice, but how could you ask an entire generation to incorporate deliberate practice into their daily lives without knowing the physical and mental strain this could cause?
As it happens, I have a solution. Perhaps instead of hours of deliberate practice, we create something called micro-practice. Find an area you wish to improve and dedicate 10-20 minutes a day of focused practice that you or someone you know could critique. For example, to improve my writing, I will journal an event that happened that day, wake up the next morning, edit, and take note of the errors. (See things to Try Today for your own drill).
Final Thought
We don’t want to be a brittle generation. We want to be Spartan warriors full of leaders who understand their talents and work hard to meet their full potential – talented or not. So I buy grit, I buy the CEO’s that instill Duckworth’s philosophy into their company. I’m buying all of it, and so should you.