Grit.  It’s appropriate that this week’s topic is grit after having to research, write, record, edit and post three podcasts in one week instead of just giving up after falling behind on vacation.  I did think about packing it in and quitting.  There are other people out there doing podcasts that seem like the same sort of thing I’m doing here.  Better qualified people.  More successful people.  Prettier people with more friends, etc, etc.

However, as I said in the last podcast, I get a lot more out of making this podcast than anyone who listens will.  If I stop, I lose out.  I won’t keep working on a consistent, weekly basis to figure out how to coach myself as a creative person effectively and knowledgably to get all three kinds of work done to reach success:  planning, doing and growing my skill and knowledge.

I also lose out on learning grit by being gritty.  Which is apparently how you learn these character and creative skills.  Not by studying alone, but by doing.  I tackled this episode with only a vague, contextual kind of idea of what grit is, but by sticking to something I promised I would do, I learn grit by doing.  And also – bonus! – by having what I understand explained clearly to me by an expert.  How it works, why it works, and when it will work for me.

So grit.  What is grit, anyway? 

Grit has long been defined as a character trait.  It was about integrity or a spirit that couldn’t be broken.  And that definition wasn’t helpful at all.  But the questions about what it was and how important it really was bothered Angela Duckworth, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, researcher, academic, psychologist and author, so much the she stuck to them for years, observing, researching, and testing what she learned.  Angela redefined the concept and explained how it works in her book, “Grit:  The Power of Passion and Perserverance.”

Thus demonstrating her own grit, by the way.

Grit, as simply stated in her book title, is a combination of passion and perseverance.  But it’s not a shallow concept.  Dive a little deeper and you find out what it means to have the kind of passion and perseverance that lead to grit.  Passion is a word we use in modern parlance to mean intense or sexual love.  However, Angela uses the word in its historical meaning, which was a sustained, enduring devotion.  It’s not just falling in love, it’s staying in love.  It’s loyalty.  Perseverance, of course, means to stick to something no matter what.  Not giving up for anything.  Starting again and again and again on the same problem or pursuit no matter how many times you fail.

As Angela describes the combination of these two traits, “the highly successful had a kind of ferocious determination that played out in two ways.  First, these exemplars were unusually resilient and hardworking.  Second, they knew in a very, very deep way what it was they wanted.”

She wrote an equation to explain grit clearly:

Talent x EFFORT = Skill

Skill x EFFORT = Achievement

Angela explains the equation this way:  “Talent is how quickly your skills improve when you invest effort.  Achievement is what happens when you take your acquired skills and use them.”  Talent is in the equation, but effort is in there twice.  It matters twice as much as talent, and twice as much as skill.

Working that hard to get something which won’t come easily isn’t sexy or showy.  It’s boring.  It’s hard.  It’s mundane.  Mundanity is a hard sell.  We want to be dazzled by sudden, easy talent.  But it’s actually grit that leads to  excellence and a superlative performance, no matter what other talents, privileges and skills are also in the mix.

How does Angela know this?  She tested hundreds of accepted West Point applicants who seemed to have everything going for them.  On paper, they all looked alike.  Smart, physically fit, accomplished, well respected.  The ones who got high scores for grit passed the grueling entrance week schedule.  The ones who scored low for grit washed out.  She did what no other researcher invited to West Point could do for the school.  Answer the question of which candidates would succeed and which would wash out before they even started.

Like Angela, Dan Chambliss is a sociologist who studied competitive swimmers.  In his study, titled “The Mundanity of Excellence,” Dan says: “Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then are fitted together in a synthesized whole.  There is nothing extraordinary or superhuman in any one of those actions; only the fact that they are done consistently and correctly, and all together, produce excellence.”

Opportunities and luck matter.  But “luck favors the prepared” as Louis Pasteur said in so many words.  If, you’re not going to be presented with many opportunities in life, you need to be prepared to take them when they come…or make them, with grit.  With passion and perseverance.  With effort, twice over.  First, to turn talent into skill, and then, to turn skill into achievement.

Scott Barry Kaufman is an academic psychologist  who has degrees from Carnegie Mellon, Cambridge University and Yale.  He also plays the cello.  But as a kid, as a result of lots of ear infections that affected his hearing, he was classified by the school system as a slow learner and put in special education classes.  He did terribly on an IQ test.  It wasn’t until he was fourteen that an observant teacher got him on the right track by convincing him he had potential.  He worked hard.  He discovered he had a talent for playing the cello.  He practiced eight or nine hours a day, skipping lunch and sometimes even classes.  He wanted to study intelligence, and applied to Carnegie Mellon University.  They rejected him due to his low SAT scores.  So he auditioned for their opera program because they didn’t look at SAT scores, but only musical aptitude and expression.  The first year, he took a psychology course as an elective.  The next, he transferred his major from opera to psychology.  Then, he graduated with honors.

He made his opportunity.  He used grit to compensate.  He slid into that university sideways, finding a back door because he wouldn’t take no at the front door.

I’ll bet you can think of any number of stories where others have done the same.

Angela explains in “Grit” the book that talent is not a bad thing, but it can be a handicap.  When the world at large insists on applauding and focusing on your talent, you’re at risk of losing sight of all your other assets.  Of not learning that with dedication and hard work, you’ll get far further than on raw talent alone, even in areas where you have no talent, or are less talented than others.  The people with little talent get further in life using hard work than the talented get using only talent.  There is a huge gap between potential and actualization, and human beings tend to live far below their limits.  We fail to use our powers, expend less energy than we have, and behave below ideal.

We all have enough talent to succeed, Angela insists, because talent is just the starting point in the achievement equation.  It’s effort that builds skill, and effort that eventually builds achievement.

“Potential is one thing,” she says.  “What we do with it is quite another.”

When you notice things which escape the attention of other people, observe, document, follow and stick with this same questions and observations long after someone else would move on to an easier or more exciting problem, when you keep that question alive at the back of your mind, ready to bring up whenever something relevant appears, you are exercising grit.

When you spend thousands of hours practicing the same strokes in a cold pool day after day after day, often alone, to create a single flawless performance at a swim event years in the future, you are exercising grit.

Intellectually, we might understand this.  But Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th Century philosopher, says deep in our gut we protect our vanity, our ability to think well of ourselves, by believing great achievement is magical.  Instead of running the risk of comparing ourselves honestly and finding we’re lacking, we confer a superhuman, godlike status on the achiever, to make the contest permanently unequal.  We tell ourselves the lie that we, as mortals, could never do that.  Thus, we excuse ourselves from trying.  From working toward anything worth having.  Because after all, only people bitten by radioactive spiders or tapped by the genetic fairies of scientific chance can do anything worthwhile.

More insidiously, in my opinion, Nietzsche also says our vanity leads us rate the achievements of these superheroes and demigods much lower if we actually find out how much work it took to get where they got and do what they do.  We think less of high achievers when we find out they worked to be awesome instead of just being awesome.  Why is this so awful?  Achievers are motivated to lie by omission.  To downplay or hide the work they did to get in order to get more praise and admiration.  They can’t get credit for the work, only for the achievement.

No wonder most people quit at the first real obstacle, or the first long plateau in progress.  No one hands out praise for sweating, eating bran toast or typing for long hours.  Think about all those dusty exercise machines sitting in the basements and corners, of all the healthy food bought with good intentions thrown away moldy, and of the millions of half-written draft novels.

It hurts to think we aren’t superhuman or demigods.  But it hurts worse to see the success of someone who pushed through when we didn’t, and got what we wanted.  That kills.

We’re not stuck feeling miserable, though.  This is something we can decide to fix.

In his book, “Creativity:  The Psychology of Discovery and Invention,” Mikhail Csikszentmihalyi says some people biologically inherit perseverance, and others who grew up having to cope with a precarious emotional environment develop perserverance.  It’s nice to finally hear something good about having a dysfunctional family, rejection, isolation or marginalization in your background.  Usually the news about that is all bad.  But when it comes to grit, it’s an advantage to have lived through all that nonsense.

In “The War of Art,” Steven Pressfield says that the military training he went through was incredibly valuable to him as an author.  It taught him to be miserable.  It taught him perseverance.  The observations made by both these men are backed up by the research Angela Duckworth did on grit.  Sticking loyally to a goal despite the pain, boredom, confusion and misery of the pursuit of that goal is not just a character trait you either have or don’t.  Grit is both genetic and environmental.  You can grow grit if you have less than you want or need.  You can learn where you currently stand, figure out how grit works, and make yourself grittier.

At a conference, Angela was tracked down right after a talk she gave on grit by a guy who aspired to be an entrepreneur.  He bragged to her about how hard he’d worked to raise money for his startup, thinking he was bragging about his grit.  After all, it had taken months to pull in that money, and he’d done an incredible amount of work.  She was impressed, but knew something this guy didn’t.  Grit isn’t about intensity, it’s about stamina.  She told him to email her in a year or two if he was still working at that same project with the same amount of intensity.  She said she’d be better able to comment on his level of grit at that point.  That confused the guy.  Angela had to point out to him that if in a year or two his startup failed and he was following a totally unrelated pursuit, his story of heroic fundraising wouldn’t be a demonstration of his grit.  He didn’t understand that working incredibly hard wasn’t grit, commitment to excellence over the long term was grit.

But you’re getting it, right?  I’m starting to get it.

Grit is not a fireworks show, it’s a slow banked fire.  An ember you keep alive, or that won’t die no matter how much water or sand you pour on it.  And that’s good news, because a lot of aspiring authors don’t have unlimited time and energy to pour into their determination to become a successful career writer.

Reading Angela’s thoughts on passion and perseverance is reminding me so much of what I learned about genius in an earlier episode, when I realized that the creative process wasn’t a result of genius, but genius was the result of doing the work involved in the creative process.  Angela’s research on the question of effort versus talent has definitely validated that observation.

So how do we practice grit as a writer?  How do we help ourselves be gritty as a patron and self-manager?  I haven’t had time to read the last two thirds of Angela’s book, so I don’t know yet.  But I do have a homework assignment from Angela to complete before next week’s episode on how to become more gritty.  And happily, it looks like it ties right into the last episode featuring the trash compactor method of dealing with everything you have to do.  It might just help make that sorting and crushing process easier.

So here’s the assignment:

Imagine you have a pyramid made of three levels of oranges.  This pyramid is all the things you need to do and want to do.  The top orange is your ultimate goal.  The big thing you aspire to having, being, or doing well.  The oranges in the next level down, propping it up, are the mid-level goals you need to achieve before you can get to the top orange.  The bottom layer of oranges are the lower-level goals you need to achieve to get to those mid-level goals.  In her book, Angela draws this pile of oranges two dimensionally as a pyramid of circles.  But I like the image of oranges, because it’s almost lunchtime.

Between now and next week, make a list of all the things you need to do and want to do.  Then, try to organize those into pyramids.  Which goals exist to lead to which other goals, to achieve what top level goals?  Angela says the easiest way to figure this out is to ask yourself why you want or need to do whatever it is.  The Because is the next level up goal.  When you reach the point where you’re asking yourself why you want to do something and the only answer you have is “Just Because I Want To,” you’ve hit the orange at the top of the pile.  An ultimate goal.  She says not to be surprised if you have more than one ultimate goal, or if those ultimate goals clash with each other.  The familiar example she gives is the competing ultimate career goal and ultimate family life goal.

I’ll be doing this too, and reading the rest of the book so I can tell you what we’re going to do with our orange piles in the next episode.  Based on the story of the young braggart who thought intensity of effort was grit and missed the concept of faithful dedication to one particular pursuit, though, I’m guessing next week Angela is going to have us asking ourselves some pretty deep questions about those stacked goals.