Develop Grit to Achieve Your Goals

The road to success is a marathon, not a sprint

When Dr Angela Duckworth started her research career, she wanted to find the answer to one specific question. Who is successful, and why?

What separates people that go on to become successful from those that never get anywhere? Is it talent or effort that makes a difference?

In her research, Angela studied elite military graduates, national spelling bee champions, and top corporate salespeople to understand what was the predictor of their success. Surprisingly, she found that talent did not explain who was successful. There was no lack of ability amongst the people who didn’t make it. Rather, the attitude towards overcoming challenges explained who went the furthest. Those who got through simply refused to give up. No matter their talent, they always kept going. They had grit.

What is grit?

‘Grittiness is the combination of very high perseverance and passion for long-term goals. A gritty person works strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress. The gritty individual approaches achievement as a marathon; his or her advantage is stamina. Whereas disappointment or boredom are signals to others that it is time to change trajectory and cut losses, the gritty individual stays the course.’ — Angela Duckworth

Grit is a mix of perseverance and passion that help you achieve long-term goals. When you’re gritty, you don’t give up even in the face of difficulties and setbacks. As you have a great passion for the goal, you keep moving forward despite obstacles.

This tendency not to abandon tasks is a great predictor of success. When you try to achieve a challenging goal, you’re likely to meet problems and obstacles on the way. But the gritty person sustains their effort anyway. Grit is stamina, not just for the week, or for the month, but years.

Grit can be trained and developed

The good news, according to Duckworth, is that grit is not something you’re born with, but something you can train and develop. You can develop your grit by putting yourself in demanding situations of increasing difficulty. By training yourself to keep going in such circumstances, you can improve your ability to be gritty in other areas of life.

A common way to develop grit is through sports. As you become more competitive, you will do exercises that put an increasing demand on your level of stamina, strength and mental focus. This training can eventually help you stay calm in other performance areas, for example, while doing a presentation at work, finishing a university assignment or handling an emotional challenge.

The application to other areas of your life will not happen automatically. It is still possible to be gritty in one area of life and lazy in others. But the experience of having achieved and succeeded in one area makes it easier to adapt to others. As your overall grit develops, you may, at some point, instinctively rise to other challenges. Eliud Kipchoge, who I wrote about in the article below, is one of the grittiest people I’ve ever heard of. According to his coach, he hasn’t missed a practice session in 20 years.

Persistence

‘We all face limits. Not just in talent, but in opportunity. But more often than we think, our limits are self-imposed. We try, fail, and conclude we’ve bumped our heads against the ceiling of possibility. Or maybe after taking just a few steps, we change direction. In either case, we never venture as far as we might have. To be gritty is to keep putting one foot in front of the other. To be gritty is to hold fast to an interesting and purposeful goal. To be gritty is to invest, day after week after year, in challenging practice. To be gritty is to fall down seven times, and rise eight.’ — Angela Duckworth

A gritty person doesn’t dream of giving up, no matter how boring or hard the task is. They know, that to get anywhere worthwhile in life, takes a lot of effort. When things are easy, it rarely feels rewarding to achieve them. If you want to achieve something truly satisfying, a long and sustained commitment is required.

A gritty person will do whatever it takes to improve. They’ll give up on short-term comfort to achieve long-term satisfaction. When you work towards a goal for months and years and then finally get there, you’ll feel tremendous pride and contentment for what you’ve managed to do.

“80% of success in life is showing up.” — Woody Allen

Consistency of effort over the long run is what matters most. We rarely achieve anything significant in a short time. Rather than exhausting yourself in a short time, try to find a steady rhythm of effort that you can maintain over long periods. As you get used to putting in the sustained effort every day, you’ll gradually increase the amount of time you can keep this focus daily.

Passion

A gritty person maintains their persistence towards a goal by being passionate about what they’re trying to achieve. It’s about falling in love and staying in love long-term, finding your reason to why you want to achieve a goal.

Having a passion for something is based upon finding interest and purpose in what you’re doing. You need to find out why what you do matters. Who are you helping through your actions? As soon as you have answers to these questions, it becomes a lot easier to motivate yourself to put in the work.

Interest makes it easier to have passion for what you do. When you develop a fascination with what you’re trying to achieve, and are curious about why things work in a certain way, putting in effort becomes easier. When you’re excited to see the result of what you’re doing, you’ll ignore the effort it takes to get there.

Stamina

Life is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s easy to be enthusiastic in the short run, a lot harder to persevere over time. That’s where gritty people get ahead. Enthusiasm is common, endurance is rare.

People often give up at the slightest sign of discomfort or struggle. If they don’t see an immediate indication of improvement, they give up or change activities. If you want to achieve success in the long run, it’s crucial to develop your stamina to push through these obstacles. Improvement isn’t linear, and sometimes you need to keep pushing, even though you don’t see immediate results. By trusting the process, you’ll see the results in the long run.

Commitment

“Many were awed by the achievements of peers who did not at first seem as gifted as others, but whose sustained commitment to their ambitions was exceptional.” — Benjamin Bloom

In a study of 120 exceptionally talented individuals who became world-class pianists, neurologists, swimmers, tennis players, mathematicians, and sculptors, Bloom found that few were regarded as particularly talented when they started. Most of them achieved success by developing a habit to practice no matter what. It took them 10–15 years to reach the top of their fields, and their willingness to put in significant amounts of time and effort was found to be the essential factor in explaining their success. By following through with their plans and commitments, these individuals were eventually regarded as extremely talented. But they worked hard to get there.

Becoming exceptional at anything requires years of hard work. The path to complex mastery and expert performance requires a lot of grit and self-discipline. If you have these attributes, you may achieve much more than someone who at first seemed more ‘talented’.

With effort, talent becomes skill

“There are no shortcuts to excellence.” — Angela Duckworth

Without effort, your talent is nothing more than unrealised potential. It’s what you could have done but didn’t. We can all become more than we are now, and the way to do it is through daily improvement. By competing against who you were yesterday, you’ll be on a steady path towards success.

The combination of talent and effort results in more skill, and combining this skill with more effort leads to achievement. This explains why effort is so important. It supports the development of the skills you need and helps you take those skills and achieve something with them.

Take home message

Grit is an essential ingredient for high achievement. By working hard, over a long time, you can achieve almost anything.

Grit is a combination of persistence and passion. By finding the purpose of why you’re working on something, it’s easy to put in the hours, even when it’s tedious and challenging.

Grit is a skill that can be developed through practice. By pushing yourself to work through challenging tasks, it becomes easier to do so in the future.

If you put in effort over time, you’ll develop skills, which you again can use to achieve something amazing.

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