More grit.  Now that Angela Duckworth has taught us that grit means applying loads of effort to our talent to develop skill, and then applying even more effort to the skill we’ve built to achieve success in a passionate, determined way, there’s only one question left.

If I don’t have as much passion and persistence, as much grit as I need to do all the work needed to achieve my goals, how do I get more?

The short answer is going to sound way too easy.  There are two paths to growing our grit.  The first is to grow, change and adapt over our lifetime by being forced to change or do things repeatedly.  We can age into loving our work and being loyal to it through the school of hard knocks.  Or, if we want to take the faster, deliberate road, we can get more grit by developing our interest, practice, purpose and hope.  The difficulty with this path lies in none of us really knowing how to do any of those four things, let alone all of them.  We might have some ideas and experience, but unless you happen to be the coach of an elite team or leadership at an elite military academy or something, which I’m definitely not, neither you nor I know how to develop interest, practice, purpose and hope in a specific, targeted, scientifically proven best way of doing it.

This became really clear to me as I read the balance of  “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance” this week.  Angela blew my mind by breaking out and explaining all four of those elements.  I quickly realized that I could spend the rest of the year doing podcasts about applying what she has to teach to a writing practice and career.  Like “The Progress Principle” by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer and “The War of Art” by Steven Pressfield, I believe every writer’s bookshelf should include a copy of “Grit:  The Power of Passion and Perseverance.”  I could blind myself opening this book to any given page by the amount of highlighting going on in there after only one read through.

But for those of you who don’t have the time to read now, but instead want to start applying as soon as possible and then refine later, I’ll sum up the high points here.  Because really, my mind is so blown by what Angela has discovered and shared that I’m still absorbing the fine points.  I’m going to be reading and rereading “Grit” until it’s dogeared.

So let’s hit the easy path to grit first.  And by easy, I don’t mean that it’s in any way easy, just that it’s more gradual and requires a lot less focus and intention.

Angela’s research shows that people in their late sixties or older are grittier than people in their twenties.  However, because she’s only been able to graph the grit scores from a short time, she doesn’t have any long term data to tell her whether we get grittier as we get older, or if we’re grittier because of the era in which we grew up.  In other words, the so-called Greatest Generation had such a hard era to struggle through that they developed more grit than the more recent generations.  However, she suspects both theories are correct to some degree.

Human beings get grittier every time they’re forced to adapt to new circumstances or situations.  Because we gain experience with age, evolving and maturing happen naturally over time.  We learn things we didn’t know before.  We do things over and over again, and that process turns work that feels unnaturally hard into second nature over time as we develop skill and experience.  We also get more capable and responsible simply because we’re expected to be.  Running into situations where there are no second chances or our old way of doing things isn’t tolerated forces us to build grit.  We become more able to handle tough jobs and sticking with hard things because if we don’t, there are consequences.

As I said, that’s not necessarily the easy way to build grit.  It’s just the more passive way.  I once had a teacher who used to say regularly that if I didn’t choose and tackle challenges in my life, the challenges would choose and tackle me.  So letting age and life build your grit over time is pretty much the letting life choose and tackle you option.

So how do we take the other road?  The deliberate path to building grit?  We build our interest, our practice, our purpose, and our hope.

So let’s tackle building our interest first.  Because finding our passion, according to Angela, doesn’t happen the way it’s shown in media.  It’s not a trudge through life until some moment of magical illumination when suddenly, you realize the purpose of your whole life in the love of (fill in the blank here).  No, finding your passion is actually a process of building interest.  Even people who claim there was one magical moment when they “just knew” actually went through a process of building interest to get to that one moment that sticks in their memory.

What’s the process?  In the beginning, a person tries lots of different things in a messy, inefficient way, because no one can predict what will capture attention and what won’t, and no one can force themselves or anyone else to be truly, passionately interested.  This is an experimentation phase, where a person may not even realize there’s growing interest.  You’re either interested in things or you aren’t.  Angela explains why you wouldn’t notice you’re developing a passion for something, even when it’s growing on you.  “The emotion of boredom is always self-conscious – you know it when you feel it – but when your attention is attracted to a new activity or experience, you may have very little reflective appreciation of what’s happening to you.”

You are playing with your interests in this phase.  Therefore, asking yourself constantly if this is going to be it, the one true passion, is actually premature and a waste of time.  Angela says you can’t even really begin this initial process until the late preteen and early teen years, so it’s ridiculous to expect any more than experimentation from the majority of people until a person is old enough to enter the next phase.

The middle part of the process is all about developing the interests you’ve found.  This part takes a long time, because your interest has to be triggered over and over again to keep your attention, again and again and again.  At first, this development is something that just happens.  However, at some point a more active interest develops where you begin to chase more interaction with your area of interest.  Having people who support and encourage this passion is really helpful at this phase of building your interest, because positive feedback always makes us happier, more confident and secure in liking something.

The interest built in a subject or work becomes a passion, a calling, in the last phase of building an interest.  Before now, everything that was new about your interest was something you hadn’t learned before.  However, in the deepening phase of building your passion, everything new you discover about your interest is about nuance.  You develop a sensitivity to details the average person on the street can’t see at all.  This is when your motivation for engaging in the interest changes, and is very much tied into the third element you need to develop to get more grit:  purpose.

However, before we get to talking about building purpose, we have to talk about what gets that interest from amateur effort to mastery.  To bridge that gap, we have to practice whatever it is we intend to master.

And not just any practice.

If we want to grow our grit, our passion and perseverance, we have to learn how to make our practice “deliberate practice.”

What is deliberate practice?  Deliberate practice is figuring out what your strengths and weaknesses are in the long list of small skills you need to become a master, and then focusing on a specific weakness to turn into a strength.  You create a stretch goal for yourself in this area of weakness.  You practice that specific aspect of your craft with full concentration and effort, and then you get immediate and informative feedback on how you did, and what you can do better, from someone who will tell you the truth, and hopefully, also help you with strategies to reach that stretch goal.  Then, you refine your practice and go at that stretch goal again, get feedback, refine again and keep going until you turn that weakness into a strength.

Thanks to the idea that it takes “ten thousand hours of practice over ten years” to achieve an elite level of mastery going viral, I know you probably can guess how much deliberate practice you need to engage in.  It’s not a little right at the beginning.  Consider this the major gut check on whether something is your passion or not.  The sheer scale of time commitment needed isn’t devoted to just any old practice.  The fun stuff.  The playing.  It’s devoted to this effortful, even sometimes painful kind of practice.  It’s time spent on deliberate practice focused on weakness, feedback, and improvement.

Yeah, deliberate practice does not sound fun.  In fact, it sounds like pure misery.  This is not what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described when he explained the concept of “flow” to the world.  He says that world-class experts in a state of complete concentration get a feeling of effortlessness and spontaneity in which they don’t have to think about doing what they’re doing, they just do it.  They feel like they aren’t even connected to the performance they see unfolding from their own mind and body.  Time slips past rapidly and they don’t want to stop because it all feels so effortless and wonderful.

Angela knows both the expert on deliberate practice, Anders Ericsson, and the expert on flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi professionally.  She says Mihaly has gone by “Mike” for years.  She convinced them to debate, but what happened was more of two parallel presentations.  It turns out, in Angela’s opinion, that they are not describing the same thing.

Deliberate practice is planned, and flow is spontaneous.  Deliberate practice is working, and flow happens when “challenge and skill are in balance.”  Deliberate practice is effortful, and flow is effortless.  When she tested her opinion, she found that gritty people who spend the time doing deliberate practice experience more flow, not less.  There’s no contradiction between deliberate practice and flow because deliberate practice is preparation, and flow is performance.

So I have to push through the pain of building talent into skill with deliberate practice to get to the pleasure of using the skill I’ve built in a state of flow to rack up achievements.  When I’m writing in flow, I’m not being challenged skill-wise.  So struggling is actually good sometimes.  It’s either pointing out a weakness I need to strengthen with focus and feedback, or it’s deliberate practice making me a better writer if I’ve done the work of setting myself a stretch goal.

At least that’s how I understand it at this point.

But there is good news.  Ericsson, the expert on deliberate practice, has discovered evidence that “working at the far edge of our skills with complete concentration is exhausting….even world-class performers at the peak of their careers can only handle a maximum of one hour of practice before needing a break, and in total, can only do about three to five hours of deliberate practice per day.”

Even better, Angela believes that there’s no reason deliberate practice can’t be satisfying, or even fun.  She’s noticed that people who practice deliberately develop a taste for hard work as they experience the rewards of that labor.  In fact, she says, “mindlessly going through the motions without improvement can be it’s own form of suffering.”  In other words, choosing not to put yourself through a little pain for the sake of growth leads to the pain of stagnating.  If you’re still in pain while practicing a new skill, Angela suggests you take a page out of the learning-to-walk toddler handbook and drop the judgement.  Let yourself make mistakes and learn from them without the shame and blame.  That makes deliberate practice much easier.

Sound familiar?

All this means I can stop imagining having to suffer all day for years before I can get to the good part.  Deliberate practice can be a small percentage of my regular work time where I get to experiment and practice without pressure, and I’ll see benefits before I get to the end of my ten thousand hours and ten years.  It won’t just be the sense of progress giving me satisfaction.

Yes!

Which leads to the third element of building grit, purpose.  Purpose is another word for motivation.  We already learned in earlier episodes that inner motivations like doing the work because it’s interesting or challenging are far more powerful than external motivations like money and approval.  According to Angela, there is an additional component to the long-term motivation of a gritty person.  Someone able to stick with building talent into skill and then skill into a lifetime of achievement might be motivated by self-focused reasons in the beginning, but when that interest builds to a mastery, usually there is an others-focused, service aspect to why they do what they do.

Sometimes that altruistic motive was there from the beginning, but often, a shift in focus to include others develops later in the process of becoming a high achiever.

However, we can increase our grit on purpose by building others into our reason we want to succeed, right now.  Angela defines purpose this way:  “The intention to contribute to the well-being of others.”  We can find something in our work and our goals that has a larger purpose.  We don’t have to twist ourselves or our work to fit anyone else’s definition of charitable or beneficial work.  There are so many other ways to contribute other than giving money or marching in a protest.  We human beings are social creatures, interconnected.  All we need to do is look more closely at what we want to achieve to find a way that our specific and personal goal will matter in the lives of others.  That larger purpose outside ourselves, helping others, too, can give us the added push to get through the sacrifice it takes to build mastery.

Why?  Because we’re not just in it for ourselves now, we’re in it to benefit, or maybe even rescue, a specific group of people we care about.  Which brings us to the last element of building grit:  hope.

Angela explains that there are two types of hope.  The first type is that tomorrow will be better, the weather will hold out, or that we’ll get a good parking spot.  This is the kind of hope that puts all the responsibility on the universe to provide whatever it is we hope for.

The second type of hope is the kind grit depends on.  This second type of hope is the belief that we can improve our future with our own efforts.  Gritty hope is the kind that gets up again after every fall.

How do we build our grit by building hope?  Through positive self talk.  Instead of blaming and shaming ourselves and telling ourselves we should just give up, we tell ourselves we can figure it out, we can work harder and smarter next time, and we won’t quit.  Suffering doesn’t automatically lead to hopelessness.  It’s only hope you think you can’t control that leads to hopelessness.  How can you hold onto control and hope amidst suffering?  By believing the trouble was caused by mistakes that can be fixed.  By expanding our thoughts beyond the present trouble and recent past to the many times we overcame failure and eventually rose above it.  By believing in ourselves and not surrendering to negativity.

Even if we tend to be negative, pessimistic people, we can learn optimism.  Instead of explaining failure as permanent and persistent, we can explain it to ourselves as having a temporary and specific cause.  A cause we have some control over.  This change of perspective is so powerful that it is the foundation of cognitive behavioral therapy.  Trained counselors help people put different interpretations on events and behave in healthier ways.  No matter what we’ve gone through or are going through, we can learn to be aware of how we talk to ourselves and change what we do about our situations.  With practice, optimism and reframing become skills we can use, on purpose, to help us move forward and become what we want to be instead of settling for whatever comes along.

Grit.  We can grow it by just dealing with life as it comes, or we can grow it by finding and deepening our interests, practicing on purpose, having a purpose, and choosing to hope because we have control and won’t give it up.

Which leads us to our piles of oranges from the last episode.  You thought I forgot about the homework.  But I didn’t!

If you have an orange that stands alone with no supporting goals, that’s a dream without a future.  You can feel good about your aspiration in the short term.  But because you have no thoughts about what you’ll have to achieve or what obstacles will stand in your way to get there, long term you’ll face the disappointment of not having achieved your goal.

More commonly, you might have lots of mid-level goals that don’t have a unifying top level goal, or a bunch of competing hierarchies that aren’t connected with each other.

The point of this exercise is to unify, align and coordinate your goals as much as possible.  Angela quotes the three step list of Warren Buffet in prioritizing where you want to go.  First, you make a list of career goals.  Then, you do some soul searching and circle the five highest priority goals.  Just five.  Third, you take a hard look at the goals you didn’t circle.  These you avoid at all costs.  They’re what distract you and eat away the time and energy you need to achieve the goals that matter more.

Once we find our most important goals, we either figure out how they all relate to some higher level goal, or we find the one, single goal that is our top priority.  We then write that top level goal in ink.  This isn’t just a priority, it’s a compass.  Everything below it is written in pencil.  Why?  Because when someone blocks us from achieving a low level goal, we can find another goal like it that will serve the same purpose in helping us move up and get back to work.

Instead of having our whole orange pile roll apart when a bottom tier orange is pulled out by a rejection, a setback, a dead end or a failure, we put in another orange in its place.  Instead of being committed to that one low-level goal, our eyes are on the compass orange at the top.  So what if we can’t have that specific bottom level goal?  It was just a means to an end.  And we’re still determined to get to that same end.  We’ll just use another small stepping stone goal, another orange, to get there.

Having a compass and a high level goal not only clarifies what you should be spending your time doing, but also insulates you from some of the emotional power of mistakes and failures when you’re working on feeder goals to the ultimate goal.

Also, you now know exactly what interest you’re focused on building and deepening, what you need to deliberately practice, why you’re reaching for that ultimate goal, and what hope you’re taking charge to make happen.  You no longer have to wait for luck, the universe, anything or anyone else.

You have a compass. You have passion.  You have perseverance.

You have grit!