Getting down and Gritty

When people speak of Einstein or Leonardo Da Vinci it's often to marvel at their genius, innate talent, and accomplishments rather than their daily routines of doing math or physics (or whatever smart person things they did). Yet maybe we should focus on those daily routines instead. That’s what Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania and leading world expert on what she calls “grit”, would say. Duckworth defines grit as a passion and perseverance for long-term goals and the ability to keep pursuing that goal regardless of how high or how many hurdles you come up against. Duckworth began researching this concept after her experience teaching math to seventh graders in a New York Public school. She realized that IQ was not the determinative factor in what students would be successful; some of her “smartest” students were doing the worst and vice versa. After several years as a teacher, Duckworth went to the University of Pennsylvania to become a psychologist, focusing on trying to answer the question: why are some people more successful or “grittier” than others?

Duckworth worked with Dr Martin Seligman, whose concept of “learned optimism” promoted the idea that people could teach themselves to be more successful by shifting their perspective on how they viewed challenges. Instead of experiencing a defeat and giving up, one could view that defeat as temporary and not a result of some innate flaw. With this in mind, Duckworth and her team started to study various groups of people who were pursuing long term goals, from recruits at West Point to students in a spelling bee. Her team developed this character trait of “grit” in order to describe the people who, despite not being the most “talented” or having the highest IQ, did not quit until they reached their goals. Duckworth applied her new grit scale to high school seniors and found out that even after controlling factors of the students such as family income, standardized test scores, and how safe they felt at school, students who scored higher on the grit scale were more successful in school. According to Duckworth, grit “isn’t talent. Grit isn’t luck. Grit isn’t how intensely, for the moment, you want something”. Duckworth believes that even though grit can be impacted by genes, it can develop with time and practice. That is all well and good, but then what is grit, and how do you actually put it into practice in your daily routine? Unfortunately, this is a question that Duckworth has not quite answered yet. Nevertheless, I think there are a few tangible practices that can help increase someone’s grit.

In mulling over 2020, and my own personal struggles this year, I decided to take Duckworth’s grit scale myself. I was intrigued to see that I scored higher in grit than 80 percent of American adults (I am not trying to brag here I have a point!). Now I am not a world-renowned psychologist and certainly no expert on the science, but this idea of grit and Seligman’s work on learned optimism resonated with how I have coped with challenges. I began to pinpoint exactly how I have grown my own grit, and some of the methods I use in maintaining a positive outlook on even the worst events while navigating the already challenging obligation of graduate school.

First, I have a mantra. When something difficult presents itself, instead of thinking about how awful the issue is, I go for a walk and think about how things “could be worse”. I know this sounds like some magic fix, but I find that thinking about all of the positive things that are happening and how much worse a situation can be helps put the issue or challenge into perspective. For example, going through law school in a virtual environment has been challenging for a number of reasons and I, of course, would prefer to be in person. Yet if we had been in person this year, I would not have been able to come home and go through a major surgery to donate a kidney to my father. In fact, I am grateful that I was able to do school from an environment that is at least semi-conducive to learning at all. Whenever I am stressed or anxious, I will repeat to myself “it could be worse, I could not have WIFI at all”, or “it could be worse, I might not have been a match for my dad, and he could have gone on dialysis”. Sometimes when you force yourself to face an even darker potential alternate reality, your current reality doesn’t seem so gloomy.

This mantra tool isn’t something that works automatically, but this is a tangible way I implement Seligman’s learned optimism into my day-to-day life. In thinking of Seligman’s learned optimism, I realized that I have been using this “it could be worse” coping mechanism for a very long time. My father has been ill most of my life and my mother was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer in high school, and now has severe brain cancer. Even though my life is objectively difficult, I can still take a step back and think about all of the ways it could be way worse and in a strange way it is soothing. I have been honing rationalizing difficult challenges as “no big deal” for most of my adult life and now I feel like there are few curveballs that could send me really catatonic because I am always aware of things that could be worse. When you take this idea of learned optimism and apply it to my mantra, I see it as tweaking how I view challenges and remember that there is always a path forward, and as my dad says, all issues are just passing clouds and I am the sky. Cheesy, I know, but I have found it helpful in the past year to be reminded that no matter how awful things are, they can get better.

So then how do you work on developing grit in your day-to-day life? On top of shifting your perspective to think about challenges as temporary and creating a mantra to remind yourself to keep things in perspective, I think that choosing a group of people dedicated to the same goal is critical to learning and strengthening your grit for a specific goal. In other words, though Duckworth sees it as an individual trait, I would hypothesize (with just my Psychology B.A.) that grit can actually be developed and trained in a group mentality environment. In high school, I was surrounded by gritty people. My two best friends were first-generation college students, who worked multiple jobs through high school and college. When we hung out, we studied and helped each other with our classes. I did not realize it at a time, but we were helping each other develop grit simply by encouraging each other to keep working.

My grit has further developed in law school. As a 1L advisor, one of my biggest tips to my students is to find a study group. I recommend this not only because they might need help with the material, but because having a group to sit and do the sometimes-gruelling nightly readings with you, to ask those questions you were uncomfortable asking in class, and to cheer you on when the dreaded imposter syndrome hits, is critical to maintaining a consistent work schedule and not getting behind. Jim Rohn, a David P Brown Motivational speaker once said that “we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with”.

In other words, when you see your friends overcome challenges, you are able to visualize yourself overcoming those same hurdles. Now I know this sounds less like developing an individual trait, but if you accept that humans are social creatures who learn from each other, then why can grit not be learned as well? Regardless of how you view the nature versus nurture argument of human development, nurture is an agreed-upon factor in creating an individual’s personality which includes traits such as grit. Overall, I argue that simply surrounding yourself with gritty people can help you become grittier.

Finally, I think the most important and overlooked factor in building grit is the willingness to ask for help. Just because grit is describing the acts of one individual does not mean that it is not related to how much a person is willing to recognize their own strengths and weaknesses and fill in the gaps. I think that even the grittiest people achieve their goals because they know how and when to ask for help. For example, when my mom got sick, I knew that there was no way I could run the house, be in school, and take her to her daily chemo treatments at a facility over thirty minutes away. My goal was to excel in school and be a supportive daughter and I knew that in order to reach these two goals I would need help. I also knew that my mom’s friends wanted to support us but did not know-how. Hence came the idea for a driving and dinner spreadsheet. I had my friend who is a Google Sheets master make a yearlong online calendar where anyone with the link could sign up for any day to either drive my mom to her appointments or bring dinner. In this way, I was exercising my grit by utilizing all of my resources in order to achieve my dual goals of being successful in school and supporting my family.

Everyone exists in their own perception of reality, which means that the first step to becoming grittier is to see yourself as capable of overcoming challenges and to develop specific daily techniques and methods to achieve your own goals. Whether that means finding a mantra to tell yourself, joining a group of people with similar goals, or figuring out how to let people help you in those goals, grit is something that can be grown. In fact, it grows the best in difficult situations, such as grad school in a global pandemic.