How to Develop Grit

Yesterday at the airport, I picked up a copy of Grit.

I first heard about Angela Duckworth from Seth Godin’s blog, and subsequently watched her Ted Talk. I have always known it is a subject matter that would interest me, but I under appreciated how important this book is.

I can’t stop reading it. It is filling me with inspiration, confidence, and dare I say pride.

My grit is the only trait I’ve ever seen in myself that I believe to be exceptional. I’ve never been the best or the fastest or the smartest. I’ve always been the most persistent.

I want to share with you some lessons I’ve learned about persistence and grit. I hope these lessons can help you.

Lucky Number Sevens

I was on the wrestling team in high school.

The first thing you should know about my wrestling career is that I wasn’t very good. I only started wrestling as a way to get in shape for lacrosse. I started wresting my sophomore year in high school. I grew up in Pennsylvania, and believe me when I tell you that wrestlers in PA are bred to wrestle. These kids have been doing it since they were 5. I never stood a chance.

But I also excelled, in my own way.

My coach was named Ira. Ira made a rule that every time one of us got pinned, the team had to run lucky number sevens at practice the next day. For every pin, the entire team had to run a set of luckys.

Lucky number sevens were sprints. We had to sprint from one side of the room to another. That would be one. Then we had to sprint to one side and back, that would be two. Then three, then four, then five, all the way up to seven and back down again. That completion of up and down would count as one set. For every person that got pinned, we had to run an entire set.

Mind you, this was after a full day of practice.

I got pinned almost every match. So I expected to run luckys. But I was always one of the first people to finish.

After about 30 minutes of sprints I finished and sat down next to Ira. He tapped me on the shoulder and said “did you see that?”

I didn’t know what he was talking about.

There was a wrestler on our team who was very talented, but towards the end of the sprints, his body language totally changed. His running became labored. He was flailing around. His face looked stressed.

Ira said “He’s no more or less tired now than he was a minute ago, but for some reason his mind snapped. He told himself he couldn’t go on.”

I sat there and watched this person continue running back and forth with labor and tension wrecking his body. He completely lost his flow. I’ll never forget it.

Ira was teaching me about grit. Ira and I both knew that I had very little wrestling talent, but that wasn’t the point. Ira knew that I would always show up and that I would finish everything I did with as much effort as possible.

Ten Years of Being Told No

For most of my life, I’ve been painfully shy and insecure.

I’m very anti social. When the person sitting next to me on an airplane starts talking to me, I want to burst out of my skin. (It’s true, ask my wife). I don’t enjoy small talk and I generally don’t care enough about what other people have going on in their lives to be a good listener and engage in conversation.

In spite of those personally defects, I’ve been able to mold myself into an expert salesman.

When I started Stodzy, trying to land clients was awful. I would walk into sales meetings and be so nervous that I would sweat. I would sit in my car for a few minutes and blast the air conditioner. I was fortunate enough to not have any other options. If I wanted to have a successful business, I needed to close accounts. There was no other way.

So I read every sales book I could get my hands on. I routinely made cold calls and got hung up on and was told to fuck off hundreds of times. I forced myself to talk to people.

I knew in my heart that if I could get good at building relationships I could become a great sales person. I never gave myself any other choice other than to make sales. It’s all I’ve ever thought about for a decade. I’ve obsessed about it. 10 years later, Stodzy is a multi million dollar company and I am still the only sales person on the team.

My success has not been the result of talent, but rather persistence. I’m too dumb and stubborn to quit when I should, so I keep at it. That’s all I ever do.

I keep running. Like Ira said, I’m no more or less tired than I’ve ever been.

How do You Develop Grit?

I don’t know.

I’m not sure it’s that simple.

Grit replaces talent, but ironically, grit is a talent within itself. It takes a certain skillset to have the mental fortitude to keep going. Grit is different than discipline, it’s different than hard work, it’s “stick-to-it-iveness.”

If I needed to give an answer, I would say the best way to develop grit is to not focus on the end result. 

The reason people give up is because they say to themselves “this isn’t working.” But that completely misses the point. If the purpose of your hard work is to develop, then there is no benchmark to determine whether something is working or not.

But this mindset can also be counter productive. To tell you not to think about the result is hypocritical because I also believe fully in developing your ultimate outcome. It’s critical to decide what it is you want, and use that benchmark as a mechanism to inform your decisions.

Once you know what you want, you can then measure all your choices against your ultimate outcome.

“Will this step get me closer or further away from what I want?”

The good news is that the two statements aren’t mutually exclusive. The purpose of having an ultimate outcome is to use it as a way to make choices and rid yourself of distractions. But an ultimate outcome doesn’t necessarily make you “outcome focused.”

You can live within a process and work towards an outcome at the same time.

That’s the secret. Know what you want but don’t stress about the results. You keep going, regardless of what your emotions tell you.

One day you will wake up and you will realize that you are so much further ahead than you ever dreamed you would be.