Grit

Some of the topics I write about easily fit in both the "live well" and "work well" sections of this site, and this entry about GRIT is one of them. Arbitrarily, I chose to include it in the "work well" section. 

I'm a sports fan, and my interests are pretty varied when it comes to specific sports and events that can hold my viewing attention. Like many viewers, when the (summer or winter) Olympics come around, I can be pulled in to all kinds of events that I otherwise don't pay regular attention to, and captured by the stories of athletes who dedicate years and years of their lives toward becoming the best in their respective sport. 

Katie Ledecky has been at the center of Olympic success and visibility since she debuted at the London Olympics at age 15. FIFTEEN. The closest I might have been to anything at Olympic caliber at age 15 would be the use of hair mouse to spike out the hair on one side -- that's right, just the one side -- of my head. I was a walking example of the difficulties of knowing who you are as a teenager. Spiked out punk poser from the left, normal looking kid from the right.

A typical week for Katie Ledecky includes 10 pool workouts and 5 weightlifting workouts, and that accounts for 25-30 hours a week of physical training. Of course nutition and sleep are a vital component of training, and then there's time allocated to appearances, interviews and life in a spotlight. If you've seen her interviewed or listened to what peers and coaches say about her, she lives life from a place of humility and grace. 

Katie Ledecky is other-wordly in terms of her performance, as the holder of several world records. Here's a reference point of her talents for me: her World Record time in the 1500 meters -- just under a mile -- is 15 minutes, 20 seconds. If for some unfortunate reason I was in a race with her, she would finish somewhere around a half hour before me. She could swim, watch an episode of her favorite show, and I'd be finishing up right around that same time.

Katie Ledecky's performance -- like so many others who are the best at what they do -- has a lot to do with her technical talents and physical stamina, but it most likely doesn't have everything to do with it. In a country of 340+ million people, there are certainly many people who have the physical talents or potential to achieve at the level of a Katie Ledecky, Steph Curry (basketball), Eluid Kipchoge (marathon), Courtney Dauwalter (trail runner), and others but of course only a few really do. These individuals, year in and year out, are or have been, the world's best at what they do for sustained periods of time.

Angela Duckworth is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and for years hosted one of my favorite podcasts, No Stupid Questions. The show recently ended its run of 4+ years and 220+ episodes, a show where she and her co-host Mike Maughan dive into the social science behind a specfic human behavior. Angela Duckworth's own expertise includes an area of study she terms "grit," or the factors that contribute to success and triumph in one's life, particularly when faced with adversity. Her explanation for the type of success experienced by Katie Ledecky and others is grit, the stuff that extends beyond talent, intelligence and skills, and serves as an extra gear of motivation, ambition and focus. And while I've only used examples of top-performing athletes so far, grit applies a myriad of contexts: an entrepreneur who doesn't give up on their idea, a college student who works two jobs and graduates with honors, an equal rights advocate who works tirelessly until a policy is finally passed. These people are not deterred, and will keep working and fighting for their dream. 

What is grit? According to Duckworth (and several others who cite her work), it is a combination of passion and perseverance for long-term goals of personal significance. Think of it as an unwillingness to not give up, no matter the circumstance, skill level, and so on. In some articles, they also label this stuff as the "non-cognitive" attributes of success. Grit goes well beyond skills in problem-solving, situation analysis, strategic thinking or the particular expertise needed for a job or task, and get this: it regularly predicts achievement more strongly than cognitive measures. Ever tell yourself you just don't have the skils to achieve something? Well, grit has some veto power on that. Grit is the mindset to do whatever it takes. 

Grit is one of those constructs that has some limitations when it comes to research design because it doesn't lend itself, from a practical perspective, to a level of experimental design that is the most highly regarded. For example, we can't randomly assign people to two groups and apply a "grit" treatment to one and the other stays non-grit. We can't sample a group of swimmers, and ask one group to compete with grit and the other group not to, or try to apply some kind of grit "treatment." Grit is sort of "you got it or you don't" type of thing in a given context. So in these instances, social science often will apply the best possible research methods to understand, in this case, what makes gritty people act with grit? 

When I start peeling back what it means to act with "grit," I feel like I'm pulling at a string that has no end, or a peeling an onion with endless layers, and I suppose it takes grit to get to the bottom of what it means to have grit. With passion and perseverance at the core of grit, that raises additional questions of what makes someone passionate about something? What leads someone to not be deterred by obstacle, and persevere? Self-efficacy, patience, self-awareness, intrinsic motivation, risk/reward analysis....this would all seem to have something to do with it. Human behavior is complex, and while passion and perseverance are helpful to distill it down to something my brain can handle, I need to remember not to oversimplify a complex world; we are constantly encouraged by politicians, influencers, journalists and others to oversimplify. 

Duckworth and her colleagues created a scale to measure grit (the scale is located here, and quick and easy to take) and used it in several studies. In their studies, here are some intriguing findings.

• Grit was positively correlated with higher educational attainment overall. Interestingly, grit was highest for those who earned an Associates degree (higher than Bachelor's and post-Bachelor's). Since community colleges often draw individuals who are also working, care-taking or carry other responsibilities, it may be that they need grit more than others to finish the degree.
• Grit predicted number of lifetime career changes, suggesting that people with more grit are also more willing to change jobs
• Grit was higher for people who scored lower on standardized tests (e.g., SAT), indicating they work harder to overcome limitations such as those suggested in standardized tests
• Grit was higher for West Point boot camp graduates who remained at the Academy compared to those who chose to withdraw
• In the same study of West Point students, grit was a stronger predictor of graduation and academic performance than cognitive ability.

While Duckworth is clearly a leading published scholar on this topic, other researchers study grit as well. Similar to the limits described above, there are limits on what we can extrapolate about grit in terms cause/effort, correlation/causation and similar boundaries that are typical in social science. But, for what it's worth, grit is also linked to the following positive outcomes:

• Greater life satisfaction
• Gratitude
• Optimism
• Better mental health
• A sense for one's meaning of life

Again, what we don't know exactly is whether a gritty person becomes more optimistic, satisfied and happier as a result of grit, or are more optimistic, satisfied and happier people just naturally more gritty? 

I prefer to end these entries with applied and practical guidance. In this instance, there isn't super clear research that points to how to be gritty, or how to train ourselves to act gritty; to some extent it's a mindset, and shifting mindsets requires some deep reflective and deliberative work. But we can focus on creating environments where grit can flourish for ourselves and our teams: 

• Grit is aligned, in part, with passion. Put yourself in roles and scenarios that are aligned with what you are passionate about. 
• In a position of leadership, set goals with your team that are both ambitious (requiring grit) and attainable. We only act gritty when scenarios need us to persevere, and lofty goals will more likely require some perseverance at times, but the goals can't also be unrealistic.
• Live and work with a growth mindset. Be open to new ideas and strategies, which will fuel perseverance.
• Role model gritty behavior. I find this guidance to be pretty standard leadership guidance, to walk the walk, model the way, and similar verbiage that is so ubiquitous in organizational management guidance.

As I read through grit literature, I had some mixed reactions, not on the rigor of the science, but to the realities that we know some people really need grit to just get to a place of, let's say economic and social stability, while others do not. It's one thing for Katie Ledecky to need grit to become the world's greatest female swimmer ever in several events, and quite another when grit is needed for a homeless youth to complete high school. Of course we wish the latter weren't true, but it seems to me that some of the frustration in recent years in our (U.S.) economy is people's grit tanks are running low, and their grit expenditures haven't led to basic stress-free stability in life. Some of the rhetoic of the last few years along the lines of "people just don't want to work anymore" might miss the mark, and I think grit provides some of the explanation. Grit requires stamina, passion and enduring belief in the outcomes, and I think some of what people believed they are working toward has begun to feel unattainable, and without believing you can achieve something, grit kind of becomes moot. I'm not sure if that's empirically true, but I wonder what the ebbs and flows are of grit depending on how our belief is the attainability in something also ebbs and flows, or does grit really only activate when we have an unwavering belief in an outcome. 

I have a decades and decades long fascination with The Muppets, so I will shoehorn a grit linkage to this wonderful cast of characters. In the Muppets Take Manhattan, the usual Muppet crew shopped around Broadway trying to find someone to invest in their show, but they hit one road block after another, and eventually everyone went their individuals ways: Fozzie to the forest, Gonzo to the circus, Miss Piggy worked retail at a department store, and so on. They had  resigned to a reality that the show wouldn't make it to the big stage. Of course, no Muppet movie is going to end on such a low note, and sure enough, Kermit -- in between his shifts at a breakfast cafe of course -- persevered, called the group back to New York City, added even more bears, pigs, rats and Gonzos to the cast, and it was a smash hit. Of course. There's an unresolved (to this day, for real) on whether Miss Piggy rigged a final wedding scene and married Kermit for real without his knowledge, but that debate belongs elsewhere. If we are to learn something from this about grit, it's that grit can indeed ebb and flow, but if you keep believing in the dream, you will persevere. 

I have a long admiration for what Jim Henson created with The Muppets.

Image credit: www.tcm.com