Grit

And so then just last week, Angela Duckworth, do you know Angela Duckworth?

Yeah, Grit was so phenomenal.

So she just came out with Situated.

So 10 years after Grit, she came out with Situated.

And she talks about this issue of willpower and seeking friction.

And so this is maybe informing my thoughts.

In fact, it is one of the ways we stay strong.

Angela Duckworth, the psychologist best known for her work on grit, in a recent article writes, "You might think I'd love the image of the solar striver triumphing, triumphing over every challenge.

After all, I'm a psychologist who wrote a book called Grit about the necessity of passion and perseverance for achieving long-term goals." The truth is, she says, I hate it.

Without exception, every high performer I've studied credits a host of supporters for their success.

As Duckworth explains, the truth is that people who accomplish extraordinary things almost always have a host of supporters behind them.

Mindset is the spark.

Grit is the marathon endurance.

Right.

But I'm starting to see a gap in the literature here.

Grit, as Duckworth defines it, is intensely focused on long term passion and perseverance.

Yes, it's a long term metric.

It's about sticking to a unified goal over years or decades.

That's a great point.

What if nothing could knock you down? What if there was no meeting, no tough stakeholder, no hard question that could get in the way of you expressing yourself with confidence? This is the power of becoming gritty.

And in the final installment of my series on bringing your dreams to life, I'm I am going to be teaching you about the power of grit.

Grit is what helps you speak with confidence even under pressure.

It's what helps you thrive in those tough situations that you are faced with as a leader.

And it's what helps you take situations that would normally kill your self-confidence and transform them into opportunities to deepen your confidence and feel unstoppable.

And grit is not a personality trait.

So it's not like extroversion or charisma or interpersonal skills where people have different personalities and you're sort of born certain ways.

Grit is a muscle that you can choose to strengthen and develop.

Mentally strong people have grit.

But that might not mean what you think it means, right? There's a famous TED talk about what is grit and do we have grit? But mental strength and grit are not the same thing.

Grit is your ability to push through.

Mental strength is your ability to know your capacity and grow your capacity, right? Because We can have all the grit in the world, but if we just keep pushing through, keep pushing through, we're basically in survival mode.

You are just surviving.

So yes, grit is amazing.

Mentally strong people do have grit, but it is a component, one characteristic, one skill that your mental strength journey.

So what is that skill? What is grit? Grit is that ability to never give up.

And that's what the situations that you put yourself in will matter for you.

Her first book, Angela Duckworth's first book was called Grit.

And I read that book first 20 years ago when I was raising my kids and trying to bring my kids into having grit.

Having grit is extremely important.

If you don't have grit by the time you're 20 years old, it's hard to learn grit.

And certainly your environment can put you into a situation where you need grit, okay? So your situation, if you're struggling at something and you have to succeed, you need to get there.

Grit is going to get you there.

But your situation that you put yourself in and the objects, the people, the environment that you put yourself in to achieve your goals, is equally important as the grit that you have.

You can make temptation easier to resist, good habits easier to follow, and even bring out a different side of your personality without relying so much on willpower.

That's especially interesting coming from Angela Duckworth because she is famous for studying grit the power of passion and perseverance but she has come to realize that grit alone isn't always enough Angela is a psychologist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania her TED Talk is one of the most watched TED Talks of all time and her book Grit was a number one New York Times bestseller her new book is Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best.

Hi Angela welcome to Something You Should Know

Thank you for having me Mike I'm excited