Grit

Grit is passion and perseverance for very long term goals. Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years and working very hard to make that future a reality. Grit is living life like it’s a marathon, not a sprint!
Excerpt from the talk on TED by Angela Duckworth.

https://embed.ted.com/talks/angela_lee_duckworth_the_key_to_success_grit.html

There is a lot of research happening currently around the psychological trait ‘Grit’. Most people will claim that they know what grit means but it’s not an easy task to develop it. Actually I feel the other way, it’s the ignorance of our own nature that stops us from becoming grittier. If we look back at our lives, there are some things we are good at today because we have worked on them for very long, maybe months, years or perhaps decades. A small child learning to walk, climb, talk is the best example of grit. Those skills aren’t just mastered suddenly, the muscles develop over time and the child keeps trying. The way children learn how to read and write is again an example of grit. Learning alphabets is just too much work for a small child, but as the time goes, with repeated application and persistent effort the child becomes better at it and if the effort continues forever she might become a good prose writer someday. The same goes for any other skill.

So the bottom line is this. If we really wish to develop a new skill, we should not quit let happen what. We might fail, we might give up for some time, but come what may we should come back and start over again. Just give that skill enough time to flourish. Think of it as an insurance policy that would mature in a long foreseeable future. If a good health is your goal, make it a habit to workout at least 5min every day. Whenever you feel more motivated put in more effort, but 5min. should be your everyday target no matter what. Trust me it will improve your physique like it never did. Grit is not the perfection of a discipline but a process of building up a discipline with sincere effort. We would fail like we always do, we might lose touch for some time, we might give up but if we really want to achieve we will come back to it again and again and never stop.

The topic of Grit is worth a post because if one can understand its role in fulfilment of one’s goal, one can truly achieve it. Please note though grit is useful only when used in action not in thought. Thinking about mastering a particular programming language over a course of 1 year won’t make you any good at it. Instead, writing few lines of code every single day in the same language and giving some 10min. reading time to its documentation will surely make you a master in no time.