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 attention. When I spent some thinking about where I see grit -- the focus of this post -- my mind kept returning to sports and the many stories out there of athletes who do whatever it takes to become the best at what they do. Think of those feature stories in the Olympics about athletes who faced significant adversity, self-doubt, injury or some other challenge along their journey, but managed to become among the world's best at what they do. 

The current coach of the United State Women's National Team soccer, Emma Hayes, started in the position a few months before the team would appear in the Olympics in Summer 2024. She stepped into the role following a year in which the team under-performed and failed to live up to its own expectations in the Women's World Cup the preceding year, let alone the expectations that is always be competitive at the highest levels and in the biggest tournaments. The team faced heavy scrutiny going into the Olympics about whether it could return to its prior world-caliber form, particularly with a roster of players with many new faces. A few months later, they won Olympic gold, the first time since 2012, and perhaps more importantly, demonstrated the hard-to-name "it" factor that shows up, in this instance, as a goal or a defensive stand when it was absolutely needed. And shows up in a way that isn't just about the technical soccer skills, but illustrates a collective mindset of rising to the occassion.

In several post-game interviews during the Olympic tournament, as the narrative began to unfold that the U.S. team was back to world class form, Hayes and several players were asked what had changed. In those interviews, Hayes regularly cited the team's perseverance, each player's unwavering belief that they could and would find a way to win no matter the circumstance. In several interviews, she mentioned that plenty of teams can match the U.S.'s technical skill level, but what sets the team apart, in her view, was an intangible resilient "refuse to lose" mindset. She used the term grit to describe it at times. Several players interviewed spoke about this as well, that the team's mindset had returned to  

The USWNT's Olympic performance -- like so many others who are the best at what they do -- has a lot to do with technical talents and physical stamina, but as Emma Hayes described, 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 potential to achieve at a level of a USWNT player, Katie Ledecky (swimming), Steph Curry (basketball), Courtney Dauwalter (trail runner), and others, but of course only a few reach that level. So what sets these individuals apart? When you read about their individuals' stories, there is a common thread: their deep love for their sport, and their unwillingness to let anything interfere with the goals they set for themselves within that sport.

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 four years and 220+ episodes, a show where she and her co-host Mike Maughan dive into the social science behind a specific human behavior in each episode. Angela Duckworth's own expertise includes the study of individual factors that contribute to success and triumph in life. Her explanation for the type of success experienced by people world class athletes 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 to 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), it is a combination of passion and perseverance for long-term goals of personal significance. Think of it as an unwillingness to abandon a goal. It has overlaps with resilience and determination, as well as a tolerance for the mundane: world class swimmers don't always love long swim workouts and weight room sessions day in and day out, 6-7 days a week, but their grit empowers them to persevere. Maybe the closest thing I can compare it to is graduate school. Most days, the academic part of graduate school was far from anything I would describe as "enjoyable." The drudgery of reading another article, entering more research data, trying data analyses that didn't work; graduate school has some low points, almost by design! But keeping an eye on the end goal, and the alignment of the context of the work with a passion, helped get me through.

In some research articles, authors also label this stuff as the "non-cognitive" attributes of success. Grit explains the stuff that is beyond skills or expertise needed for a job or task. And get this: grit regularly predicts achievement more strongly than cognitive measures. Ever tell yourself you just don't have the skills to achieve something? Well, grit has something to say about that. Grit is the mindset to do whatever it takes. 

Grit is also 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 the most rigorous standard of experimental design. For example, researchers can't randomly assign people to two groups and apply a "grit" treatment to one and the other as non-grit. Similary, researchers can't sample a group of swimmers, and ask one group to compete with grit and the other group not to. So in these instances, social science often will apply the best possible research methods available. In this case, that means identifying gritty people, compare them to less gritty people, but no one was randomly assigned to either group. They were assigned based on actual prior behavior.

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, 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 in the face of challenges? Self-efficacy, patience, self-awareness, intrinsic motivation, self-discipline, 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. Grit is a complex concept that is explained by other complex concepts.

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, several which are not what I think I would have hypothesized.

• Grit was positively correlated with higher educational attainment overall. Interestingly, grit was highest for those who earned an Associates degree (higher than groups with a bachelor's degree or post-bachelor's). Since community colleges often draw individuals who are working, care-taking or carry other responsibilities, it may be that they need grit more than others to finish the degree.
• Grit is one predictor of the number of lifetime career changes for an individual, suggesting that people with more grit are also more willing and likely to change jobs.
• Grit was higher for people who scored lower on standardized tests (e.g., SAT), indicating these test takers work harder to overcome limitations.
• 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 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 for sure 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. If you're unsure of what you're passionate about, start dabbling. Volunteer somewhere. Try a new hobby. Join a group with a special interest. Take a class. And then pay attention to your reaction. Passion is a "you'll know it when you see it" sort of concept.
• When 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 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 economic and social stability, while others do not. It's one thing for Olympic swimmer Katie Ledecky to utilize her grit to become the world's greatest female swimmer ever in several events, or an entreprenuer to tap into their grit to work evenings and weekends to develop their business and eventually pitch it to investors. And it's quite another scenario when grit is needed for a young person from a tumultuous household to complete high school. Duckworth talks about this in some podcasts. We should question and redesign systems that require some people to act with grit (e.g., an underresourced or poorly led school) but not from others. 

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 isn't leading to basic stress-free stability in life. Someone working two jobs but still enduring stress every month to pay the bills. Grit requires stamina, passion and an enduring belief in the possible outcomes, and much of what people believe they are tirelessly working toward feels unattainable, and also just very basic. Working two jobs isn't necessarily leading to a lot of extra savings, it's just to keep the household afloat. I'm not sure if this hypothesis is empirically true, but I wonder how grit ebbs and flows as our belief in the whether we can achieved a desired future ebbs and flows. 

I have a decades long fascination with The Muppets, and as I write this I have an Indiana Jones-inspired Kermit figure on my desk. If Kermit is anything, he is driven by logic and manages to maintain some level of order within an otherwise emotional cadre of colleagues who create constant disorder. I respect, and relate, to that. So I will shoehorn a grit linkage to this wonderful cast of characters. This would also be a good time to click away from the page if you're losing respect for a man in his 50s writing about The Muppets.

In the Muppets Take Manhattan, the 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 (but was eventually fired due to emotional management issues), and so on. They had (temporarily) resigned to a reality that the show couldn'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 -- persevered and found an investor, called the group back to New York City, added more bears, pigs, rats and chickens to the cast, and it was a smash hit. Of course. If we are to learn something from this about grit, maybe it's that grit can indeed ebb and flow, but if you hold onto a certain amount, you will persevere. 

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

Image credit: www.tcm.com