The Powers, and Perils, of Grit
To grit and grind, or quit and be fine
Mind Candy is a newsletter on practical philosophy and human flourishment—aka how to live “the good life.” Each month we tackle a new theme.
This month we’re exploring the theme of resilience.
Success is built through continuous passion and effort in our endeavors. It is impossible to accomplish anything without these two traits. But while these are necessary for success, they can be blinding attributes that prevent one from making the best decisions in a given situation.
Resilience is built by passion. When one has passion, they are able to go after goals with an effort and determination they may not otherwise have. Passion enables one to pursue an end goal with true vigor.
People who most often build a resilient mindset in their pursuits are those who hold what the psychologist Carol Dweck calls a “growth mindset.”
Dweck distinguished between two different mindsets people hold: the fixed mindset and the growth mindset.
A fixed mindset is one where the individual does not believe they can change the traits they have. They’re either born with talent or they’re not. Their skills are unmovable, stuck with what they’ve got in life and that’s it.
But a growth mindset is one that believes in potential, that what they are capable of has yet to be determined and tapped into. A growth mindset is one of stretching, in giving themselves time to learn and practice, to mold themselves, to adapt to their craft or situation.
The growth mindset is what leads to resilience, or, as the psychologist Angela Duckworth may call it, grit.
Duckworth summarizes her theory on grit as:
Talent x Effort = Skill
Skill x Effort = Achievement
“Many of us, it seems, quit what we start far too early and far too often. Even more than the effort a gritty person puts in on a single day, what matters is that they wake up the next day, and the next, ready to get on that treadmill and keep going.”
In other words, grit, and in turn resilience, is having the ability to consistently take the skill we have at any moment and work at it, putting in effort over long stretches of time. It’s about finding something you’re passionate about and consistently working at it.
Or, as Duckworth said, “consistency of effort over the long run is everything.”
So there’s no doubt that grit is necessary to life as it helps make us resilient in our pursuits because we’re passionate about what we’re doing and we’re consistent about doing it, constantly trying to improve.
But when is it taken too far? When does grit become a bad thing?
Aristotle believed that it was our deliberate choices in situations that helped to provide us virtue. But in order to achieve virtue, we need to ensure the deliberate choices are good choices. Aristotle said that it was through practical wisdom that we came to make the right decision for the right situation at the right time.
“Virtue, then, is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e., the mean relative to us, this being determined by reason and by that reason by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.”
It is in this vein, then, that we must work to understand when and how we push on, keeping a growth mindset, and dig in for the long haul, and when we need to throw in the towel and quit.
“Contrary to popular belief, winners quit a lot,” writes professional poker player turned writer Annie Duke. “That's how they win.”
Sometimes in order to find the success we’re looking for, we need to quit. Maybe we’re trying to build a product and the design is critically flawed. It’s better to quit on that design and redesign rather than launch something that never should have begun.
Or maybe we’ve sprained our ankle and are running on it. We could continue running because we’re determined to lose those last two pounds, but then injure ourselves worse and gain back five pounds because we were forced to be immobile from our injury.
Or maybe we got into business with someone we shouldn’t have and we realize the partnership just can’t find success.
Being gritty in these situations doesn’t make sense. The sensible response to any of these would be to quit.
“We all tend to poorly calibrate our grit/quit decisions,” writes Duke. “In particular, when the world gives us bad news we tend to persevere too long, but when we get good news, we tend to quit too soon.”
Quitting gets a bad wrap because it is often conflated with giving up or failing. But when done correctly, quitting is not a liability but an asset, it’s an investment in our future, it’s our ability to strategically align our present self to our desired future self.
In each of the examples above, gritting it out leads to failure—a product that is subpar in a competitive market, a busted ankle, a partnership that tears each other apart.
Quitting in these scenarios isn’t failing, it’s succeeding by stopping bad decisions from compounding on one another.
We all make bad decisions, that’s natural, we’re all human. But when we use reason and can properly survey the scenario we’re in, when we say it’s time to quit rather than dig in the heals and grit it out, we’re compounding bad decisions. We’re basically standing in a two foot hole digging ourselves a deeper one. Sooner or later, the easy quit costs too much.
“Whenever we commit to a course of action, by default we are committing to not pursuing other things,” writes Duke.
Grit, resilience, and perseverance are necessary for success in any endeavor. But the idea that these traits lead to success, or that they are blindly virtuous can lead us to make bad decisions. Practical wisdom, as Aristotle and others believed, was our ability to properly determine appropriate action for the appropriate moment.
It is therefore critical that we have resilience in our pursuits but also the wherewithal to quit when all signs point to letting go.
Before you go…
If you enjoyed the above article, you may be interested in the following one to continue your exploration:
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Until next time,
D.A. DiGerolamo
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