What is Grit?
by Zain Amjad
Grit is passion and perseverance for long-term goals. Grit is about having the stamina for pursuing long-term goals. It links up to consistency and continuous struggle to achieve the desired outcome and create your desired future. Reason for its study goes back to success literature. Angela Duckworth is one of the pioneers who took the initiative to study this factor as a predictor of success. Grit is a distinct combination of passion, resilience, determination, and focus that allows a person to maintain the discipline and optimism to persevere in their goals even in the face of discomfort, rejection, and a lack of visible progress for years, or even decades. Research for grit was conducted in a diversity of environments and professions i-e West Point military academy, high school performance, swimming competitions, spelling bee competitions. It turns out that the grittier kids (people) had a high success rate as compared to the other side. External and internal variables were taken into account to see their contribution to huge success rate. Unfortunately, factors like IQ had an inverse relation to grit. Regardless of the factors like IQ, EQ, talent, potential, skill; Grit turned out to be the most common denominator of success as well as retention.
Why is it required by our Children?
Importance of this particular quality, namely, grit can be judged by the value it holds in its contribution towards success rate. When grit is labelled as the common denominator for high success rate, this means that the ability to achieve the desired outcome can be enhanced and improved. So this room for change enables kids to realize their potential and put in 100 percent of their effort towards a single top goal rather than sticking out to corrupted words like talent, resources, family background etc. Because of its importance in all kinds of areas; researchers and educationists are looking for ways to cultivate this quality in their people to encourage top performance and resilience.
2Can we create Grit for our children and how?
Yes, grit can be inculcated in the young students through a new model of learning. This model is centred on PBL (Project-based learning) and experiencing the inner depths of learning. The prerequisite to grit is having a growth mindset. A growth mindset knows no such thing as failure. It means that your abilities are not fixed and they can be improved with efforts. While Grit is the motivational drive that keeps you on a difficult task over a sustained period of time and involves the ability to get back up when you’ve been knocked down or to come back fighting stronger after a loss.
Surround yourself with people who perseverance and join company centred on grit culture. Encouragement is a common attribute of grit culture.
Factors that affect your growth mindset:
- Beliefs about yourself
- Your goals
- Your feelings about social connectedness
- Your self-regulatory skills
Steps for building Grit (as guided by the book)
- Discover and Develop your passion
Passion refers to any kind of skill and activity that you have to need to master. It’s not something you like, but deep interest in a particular area. Discovery of passion can take years and sometimes a decade. The only way to discover your true passion is by gaining experience in unrelated activities. One of the most important in discovery is your duration of the activity being performed. Any chosen activity has to be performed for more than a year to know if it’s your true passion or not.
- Practice, Refine and again Practice
Regardless of all the difficulties, challenges; you have to complete deliberate practice. It does not matter that the practice plan has to interest you, however, what matters is you keep doing. Make sure you build time in your day for reflection and feedback from somebody expert in the chosen interest. Deliberate practice is not easy but it’s essential for growth of grit. The only way to handle deliberate practice is “Change the way you experience it” (Angela Duckworth)
- Finding a purpose
Behind the passion and practice, there will be the driving force of why. Purpose refers to a greater meaning of work. It’s about questioning yourself whether the chosen passion is other-centred or solely self-centred. Although, helping others may not make you gritty. However, it makes you love what you do which leads to higher levels of satisfaction. Finally, that leads to an upward spiral of grit.
- Hope
Hope does not limit itself to wishing things will. It’s actually a strong self-belief that our own efforts can improve future. As mentioned in the book “I have a feeling tomorrow will be better” is different from “I resolve to make tomorrow better.” Hope and growth mindset gives you the inner strength to face adversities and comes up with better strategies to get closer towards top goal. This is where you need to persevere.