Yes! You CAN Develop Grit!

For the past couple of weeks we’ve been talking about grit. You may be thinking that grit is kind of a “you have it or you don’t” type of quality, but I promise it isn’t. Grit is the quality of being dedicated to pursuing your long term goals. That means that with (you guessed it) effort and perseverance, you can grow your grit! What it comes down to, I think, is keeping yourself motivated and dedicating your time and effort to whatever it is you’re undertaking. Can you develop grit? Absolutely.

I found a great article by Patrik Edblad on Medium that expresses a lot of this beautifully. I won’t of course re-state here what he said there. I did want to call out a few things that I think are especially important for those of us that are trying to develop grit!

Being Passionate

If being gritty means pursuing your goals with dedication and purpose, then you have to be passionate about those things. I talked a lot about this in Coffee Break podcast episode 10. I’m not especially passionate about finances, so it’s hard for me to manage them. However, I don’t need to master it – I just need to be good enough. What I am passionate about are the things that being competent at finances will allow me to do. Things like build our house, or travel. So managing my finances is a step on the road to the longer term stuff I really want.

I’m also super passionate about this blog, talking to you about stuff that interests me. When you’re passionate about something, it’s a little easier to keep at it, because you are invested in the process and the results. Spend your time on things you’re passionate about. Figure out ways to relate what you’re doing that you may not be as passionate about, back to the things that you are.

Visualize Your Goal

One thing that can help keep you motivated and focused is to really visualize your goals. Heather talked about this in one of her journaling challenge posts: visualizing your results.

Your mind believes what you tell it. So the more detailed you can make your vision of the future, the more you will come to believe it’s possible. The end result you’re moving towards will be more real to you. That will add meaning to the stuff you need to do in order to get where you’re going.

Let Go of “Failure is Not an Option”

Something that I think people who are trying to develop grit forget – myself included – is that failure IS an option. It will happen. We have to get comfortable with the idea that not only are we going to fail, it’s going to happen multiple times. And we will survive! We will learn from the experience, and figure out what didn’t work. If we want to be gritty, failing just means a chance to learn something new, then get back on the horse and try again. We have to fail like champs!

I tend to hate it when I fail at something. Sometimes it’s hard to feel comfortable with even making a mistake. When something like that happens, I feel inadequate or like I’m trying to do something I’m not good at. Some of the best advice I ever got though, is that failing is how we learn. Making mistakes is how we learn. We find out what didn’t work, and then we know for next time. If we’re developing grit, then we know that failing is all very well, but we need to get back up and try again. We know that we will need to persist, and persevere, even in the face of failure.

Practice Makes Progress

I hate the saying “practice makes perfect”. We’re never going to be perfect. Practice does, however, make progress. Spending time every day on whatever it is that you’re working towards is what will hone your skills and start giving you mastery over it (or at least, competency). It’s literally the only way to improve. Just thinking about it won’t do it. Wishing it into being won’t do it. Unfortunately, just visualizing it won’t work in this case either. You have to put it into practice, and keep practicing it.

Practice may mean something different depending on what you’re doing. If you’re learning to play guitar, then playing regularly is practice. If you’re running, then going for runs might be your practice. If you’re trying to improve your performance at work and you’ve identified some soft skills you need to work on, then practicing those skills in your interactions is practice. Doing the thing you’re working on as often as possible is practice. You have to just do the damn thing.

But Why Develop Grit?

I guess it’s funny to wrap up a post by saying why all of the above is important. I think it’s good in this case, though, because everything I just talked about is hard. After reading through this and all the other resources you might find online and elsewhere, it may be easy to start wondering why you should do this.

I can’t tell you what your reasons should be, unfortunately. That has to come from you. What I can tell you is that I believe all of us are worthy of achieving the things we want in life. We are all worthy of having wonderful lives, with cups that are filled with whatever fulfills us.

Life is short. So short. It makes sense to me that we should use our time here effectively, to make life the best we possibly can for ourselves and our loved ones. Finding out what interests us, and having the grit to carry out our dreams, is what makes life rich, fulfilling and rewarding. I believe we all deserve that!