Finding Grit

For anyone consistently reading these posts, you probably realize I often get my inspiration from what I’m currently reading. Hence this week’s thought on finding grit.

The inspiration? Angela Duckworth’s book Grit – The Power of Passion and Perseverance.

Let’s get into it.

Indiepreneurs Must Have Grit

First, what is grit?

We all know people who are gritty. For fans of BYU or Virginia football, you’ve certainly heard the term from the head coach.

Defining it is a little harder.

It’s not just perusing something with passion. It’s perusing a single thing for a long time despite setbacks. It’s working through problems and rejections, being humble enough to find what needs to change and work at it until you get it right.

Entrepreneurs must have grit. You have to work through a million different tasks and setbacks to come out on top. If you’re pushing creative work, it can be even harder to shine through that noise. To make your work really stand out.

Authors With Grit

Since I enjoy writing, let’s talk about authors for a bit.

How many people have you met you plan on writing a book? My guess is a few.

How many of those people then follow through?

Thanks to programs like NaNoWriMo, which helps encourage people to get a novel done in a month, it’s probably more than it used to be. But there’s still vastly more people who have a great novel idea and intention compared to those who actually finish their work.

Now there’s the next step: how many keep on writing and working and honing their craft after their finished work gets rejected? Or when they self publish on Amazon and nobody picks it up.

If you can keep going, that’s grit.

One of my favorite authors is Brandon Sanderson. He reported wrote a dozen novels before his first one got published. That’s grit.

Stephen King famously kept going for 6 years between his first rejection letter and finally getting published. Carrie, his first novel got 30 rejection letters.

Obviously, both of these examples are outliers (in both effort and success). But while there are a few people who write one book and have it picked up at the start, most authors work for years and years through rejection and trial and effort to get an idea from their head to be something that people actually pay to read.

And authors aren’t some exception in the creative field.

Am I Just Not Gritty?

For the vast majority of people who want to succeed in this field, you’ll have to have grit. You’ll have to be willing to setbacks and grief and being ignored. Day after day.

So if you don’t have grit, are you just screwed?

According to Angela Duckworth, no.

Certainly some people are born with that innate drive to stick to something and work at it. And some people develop it thanks to their childhood.

But once you’re an adult, you can still work at it. You can still develop that perseverance you need to make this work. Grit can change over time.

Developing that grit is through the other things that we’ve discussed on this blog. Developing good habits. Finding purpose in what you do. Finding someone to help push you and hold you accountable.

Then comes the perseverance. And as much as I’d like to give some great, wonderful prose that will make you find that power deep down inside of you, it doesn’t work that way. It’s something you’ll have to find in yourself.

For those interested, Angela Duckworth offers a Grit Scale test on her website. I currently rank a 4 our of 5. I’m working to push that up. How do you score?