Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (Pt. 3)

Hello and welcome to Readers, a podcast where the real-life lessons and applications of books are talked about by a 16-year-old, me, Prithwiraaj Chhabda. Welcome back everyone. Today marks yet another milestone in our journey. This is the third and final part of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. With me today I have again Dr. Rodriguez, how are you doing today?

I'm doing great, thanks. Thanks for having me.

Of course. So, so far we have talked about what grit truly is and what it means. We've also conversed about how to grow grit in ourselves. How can we discover our passions and maintain long-term perseverance for them? In the final part of this book, we will talk about growing and encouraging grit in those we love. So we start off in Chapter 11, named The Playing Fields of Grit. So Angela Duckworth starts this section off with asking a question: How do I encourage grit in the people I care most about? About— even growing grit in ourselves is hard, but growing grit in others, that seems next to impossible. Whether you are a caring parent trying to increase internal discipline in their child, or a coach trying to boost morale and work ethic, many people who take responsibility for others would love to have a cheat code to increase grit. Some believe that grit is formed in the crucible of adversity. These are the parents who force their children to do things, get mad when they get an A-, and physically punish their children in the hopes that they will understand when they grow up. Of course, there's also the other extreme, which are the parents who believe that true passion can only arise in a child if they are extremely overloaded with affection, if they believe that everyone's a winner, that they are just so special regardless of effort or achievement. So which is the right route? Is it overloaded affection, or is it formed from the hard mold of high iron standards?

So Duckworth talks about how you can be both a supportive parent and a demanding parent at the same time. And this has been studied by psychologists and, uh, Some of you guys listening are probably already familiar with these terms. So authoritative parenting is what Duckworth calls wise parenting. That concept has been in existence for some time now and it's been well studied, but Duckworth kind of reterms it wise parenting because it's, it sounds very similar to authoritarian parenting, which is different. That's where you're demanding and unsupportive. And remember, authoritative is is demanding and supportive. So again, the wise parenting is that kind of sweet spot of demanding and supportive. If you're supportive but you don't really have any demands or expectations of your kids, that's called permissive parenting. And if you're undemanding and unsupportive, then that's really just neglectful parenting. So studies have found that parents whose kids rated them as warm and respectful and demanding were more self-reliant, suffered from less anxiety and depression, earned higher grades, and were less likely to engage in delinquent behavior.

And here you may be thinking like, these two things sound like complete opposites. But here she gives an example of Steve Young, legendary two-time football MVP and quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, kind of to show how a lot of successful people have really had this kind of mix of the two in their parenting, and that has led to their success. So using this example of Steve Young, she says that his parents had achieved a good balance and were stern yet supportive. She says that if their kids signed up for an activity, whether it was poetry club or football, they had to see it through. There was no quitting in between, and they had to learn grit to keep persevering. However, his parents would always show up for him and would even go as far as to discipline kids on opposite teams if they were not following rules. His mother, Sherry, even talks in an interview about how she had to spend weeks on end in a second-grade classroom with him because of his separation anxiety.

Speaking of parents, it's not just them who can be support structures. There's a larger system of adults that have an influence on children and adolescents. Psychologically wise mentors can have a great impact as well. And not every grit paragon had this wise mother or father, but they could all identify someone who had that influence at the right time and in the right way. So switching gears, Duckworth highlights the experience of a technology entrepreneur and the founder of Shopify, Tobi Lüdtke, to illustrate this point. Tobi did not excel in school and dropped out of his German high school at the age of 16. He then worked as an apprentice at an engineering company and met his soon-to-be mentor, Jürgen, there. Each morning, Tobi would arrive at work to find a printout of his code covered in red marker with comments, suggestions, and corrections. Tobi described that he saw this feedback as a gift. Jurgen asked Toby to lead a software assignment for General Motors. And then when it was the day before the installation, Jurgen casually told Toby that he would not be there and that Toby would be visiting alone. So he kind of pushed him to do that. The installation was a success, but Toby describes how this pattern kept repeating itself because Jurgen knew the extent of Toby's comfort zone and manufactured situations which were slightly outside of it. And then so Duckworth again highlights the importance of the way successful mentors phrase things in an experiment by David Yeager and Jiaf Cohen. So these researchers asked teachers to give feedback in one of two ways. They had a control group which had a placebo note, a placebo Post-it note, and the teachers would put this Post-it note on the essays that they're, they were handing back to their students and wrote, I'm giving you these comments so that you'll have feedback on your "and that was all the Post-it note said." And then there was an experimental group where the teachers wrote on the Post-it, "I'm giving you these comments because I have very high expectations of you, and I know that you can reach them." So a little different. And then they asked, you know, the following week the students were given an opportunity to revise their essays. And what they found was that 40% of the students in the placebo group decided to turn in a revised essay compared to 80% in the wise feedback group. So the way you phrase your feedback can really make a difference in whether you're nurturing grit or really not making any difference in grit.

So there's also another study that she kind of introduces here. And this study was done on several thousand students. Researchers actually followed these students for 5 years starting from their senior year of high school to see what variables were the strongest predictors of success. So what they found through this research was that one variable stood out above all the others, and that was follow-through. This is something that they define as purposeful, continuous commitment to certain types of activities, and they contrasted this with sporadic efforts in diverse areas. It was worth noting that whatever activity that these students and these people did didn't matter. It was just the follow-through on each activity. They could be doing any activity, any different thing, but none of that mattered as long as they had the follow-through to keep going.

And I'll just add an important point to that study that Veer is referring to, which is that Duckworth found that it was the students with multi-year commitments, in other words, more than one year, and high achievement in these activities that not only scored higher grit scores, but they actually created a scale just to look at their commitment to activities. The longer they were in the activity, the higher the score, the higher their achievement in the activity, the higher the score. And then they, if they had more than 2 years or 2 years or more of a high, high achievement in 2 activities, that was actually the highest score they could get. And what they found was that 69% of students who scored the highest score in their commitment and achievement in activities remained in college, contrasted with 16% of students with the lowest score in their activity commitment and achievement. So again, just repeating that point that the students who, who committed more in high school were more likely to finish college. So then you ask yourself after hearing all this, are the students who are following through on their commitments, uh, um, are they already gritty? And that's, you know, they're already gritty, so they— that's why they're scoring higher on their grit scores. Um, and because they're gritty, they're following through on their commitments. Or is it that doing these commitments for more than a couple of years, more than a year, up to 2 years or more, um, and, and working really hard at them, does that kind of ingrained grit or foster grit in these, in these students. And so Duckworth thinks that it's probably a combination of both of these. It's not usually exclusively one or the other.

And here she kind of introduces something that she, that she's named the Hard Thing Rule, right? And this has 3 different parts to it. The first is you must do a hard thing. And the second is You're allowed to quit, but you can't quit on your worst day. You have to quit at a natural stopping point. And the third is that you get to pick your hard thing. So this might sound cryptic to some people, so I'm going to kind of make that a little bit simpler and give you an example of, say, an athlete, which is something many people might be able to relate to, right? So the first thing for any professional athlete I'll take the example of Michael Jordan, right? So his hard thing must have been to be an NBA player. It takes lots of commitment, lots of work, lots of blood, sweat, and tears, right? And, you know, of course at some point he retired, right? And, but he didn't retire at the point where, you know, he got not accepted into his high school team. He didn't retire when he might have lost in the semifinals or in a bad game or had an injury. He quit after he realized, I have done a lot, I have lived my passion, and this is the point where I need to stop now. And the last thing is, of course, he had to pick his hard thing. It wouldn't be something that his parents told him to do or something that external factors forced him, but rather something he internally had passion, that internal desire and fire for. And that was the hard thing that he picked. For you, it might be something else. For me, it might be something else. But that is the hard thing rule, is that you have to do something that is extremely difficult for yourself, something you chose yourself, and to follow through on it until a natural stopping point. And here she moves on to Chapter 12, which is about the culture of grit, right? And a lot of us must be thinking, you know, there's the quote of Show me your friends and I'll show you your future, right? And how true is that? So here she talks about if you want to be grittier, find a gritty culture and join it, right? And if you're a leader and you want the people in your organization that you're already part of to be grittier, which might be the case for many people, whether they're students in their school with a group of friends or whether you're in the workforce and you're trying to make your team a grittier team. Create that gritty culture.

So here Duckworth talks again about Dan Chambliss, the sociologist who studied Olympic swimmers, and he found in his research that to be a great swimmer, you really had to join a great team. Of course, it's your individual efforts that make a difference, but if you're on a team where it's the culture for everyone to wake up early and do swim practice at 4 AM, then you're much more likely to do the same.

And adding on to this a little bit, one word that really stood out to me in what was written in this part was standard, right? Although your individual efforts might be great, many of you might think, I don't need a team to become great, I can do it all on my own. And you might be able to, and you might be able to achieve a lot. But what Duckworth is trying to introduce here is that a team standard that they set, of course, if the team is one that doesn't really care about it, If the team is one that really just believes in slacking and getting over with things, that's a different story. But if you want to join a team that has those same values as you, that wants to persevere and follow through, then join one that aligns with those values. And a team standard that they set will never enable you to fall behind or slack. Often individuals might fall complacent and not finish through. However, if you make a team, you have no choice. I'll use an example from my own life in basketball. I might some days feel like I don't want to work out right now, I don't want to practice right now, I'll be fine, I promise I'll be fine for the game tomorrow, it's just the season opener, it doesn't matter, right? But if I have my team with me, which I usually do, pushing me, texting me and letting me know that, hey, practice is tomorrow, be there, we have to, you know, we have to go for 2 hours, run our laps, practice our shots. I have to keep doing that even if I don't want to. And hopefully that internal authority may kick in. But as a great starter, as a great internal, uh, starting motivator, it's great to have a team to set that standard for you.

So Duckworth also talks about how the concept of grit important to the people of Finland. Finns have a term called sisu, which means perseverance, to keep fighting for something after others have quit. And it's this tenacity. And so Duckworth's graduate student, Emilia Lahti, studied this concept. And she asked 1,000 Finns about sisu and whether they thought it could be learned or developed. And what she found was that 83% of participants felt that yes, It could be learned. And thus, in this culture, success doesn't only depend on your natural talents, but actually your ability to persevere too, or your sisu.

So another example that she kind of gives in this book is about a man named Tom Der Lane. Um, Tom Der Lane was a former Airborne Ranger who got his pelvis shattered by a sniper in war. So the doctors told him he might never walk again, right? And Tom simply told them, he responded with a very simple phrase. He said, you don't know me. And just because of that, he made a promise to himself, not to anybody else, but to himself to run the Army 10-Mile, which is the Army 10-Miler, which is a 10-mile marathon. So after about 7 months, um, Tom began physical therapy, and slowly he started feeling shocking bolts of pain in his legs after workouts. This might sound bad, but it was actually a good thing because it meant that he was starting to feel, and he was regaining feeling in his legs. After a while, he could just barely make do with a walker, but he kept working kept practicing, kept doing his exercise, and he got to the point where he ran for over a full minute on the treadmill. Although his therapist and the doctors told him to stop, he didn't. He set a goal to run and complete this entire 10-mile marathon in 2 hours. And guess what his finish time was? 1 hour and 56 minutes. I think that this is an incredible example of sisu, the pure perseverance to fight on even though everyone has quit. And I think that that drive, that internal fire and desire can only come from inside. It can't come because your parents are telling you to do something or because your friends gave you a dare or anything like that, but it has to come from your internal desire. I don't think Tom would've made such progress if he didn't tell the doctors, you don't know me. And hadn't made that same promise to himself. And I think that that internal fire and authority is what really brought him to where he was able to do. And I think that's possible for everyone.

So remember that Duckworth is really trying to highlight some important kind of concepts around the culture of grit here. So another example she gives is about the University of North Carolina coach Anson Dorrance. And he's the winningest, winningest coach in women's soccer history. So many have thought that his success is due to recruitment. And Anson says this is incorrect and that he's out-recruited by 5 to 6 schools on a regular basis. And he has attributed his team's success to their gritty culture. So Duckworth kind of highlights different aspects of the team culture that really have developed, have helped develop grit as a culture for the team. So part of this was tracking metrics and then posting it for everyone to see so that you know not only how you compare to others, but you can actually see some measurable metrics of your own success. And then another part of the culture was having these core values. He would pick 12 core values and then he would ask them, players, to memorize 3 different literary quotes to communicate each core value. And they would then be tested in front of the team on these so that not only did they need to memorize them, but they would need to understand them. And to have reflected on them so that by their senior year, every member on the team could recite these core values and they had an understanding of what they all meant and why they were important for the team culture. He felt that it was through these kind of small, different grit-building culture techniques that he really created teams that, that could win and that did win.

So here Duckworth kind of touches on vocabulary and how a winner, how somebody successful speaks, right? And this is kind of interesting we're talking about this right now because I'm actually recently also reading a book called Awaken the Giant Within. And there's actually an entire chapter actually dedicated to the vocabulary of somebody successful. Slight detour, but I definitely think that it's incredible how affirmations, the way you speak to yourself, to others, can really influence and impact the way you do your performance. Um, and I don't know if you guys still remember West Point Military Academy, which is something we discussed in episode 1. Um, but they actually, at West Point Military Academy, and this is what Duckworth kind of talks about here, is that verbatim memorization of songs, poems, codes, etc. is actually a long-lasting tradition there. However, they do not simply believe that words sustain a culture when they diverge from their actions. So they believe that the mental conditioning, the words you say to yourself, in combination with your actions backing it up, can change your life. Of course, if you're somebody who uses those words, that vocabulary, not one of a winner, but rather one of somebody who's dejected, depressed, somebody who's down and not doing well and doesn't want to do well even, then of course you're not going to get anywhere. But if you use the vocabulary and combine it with the actions of somebody who really wants to succeed and really wants to go above and beyond, it truly can change your life. So going back to the West Point example, she talks about two models that it's seen. So she says the first is an attrition model where hazing and even bullying to some extent is not only tolerated but encouraged. So this is a model where those who survive succeed. And she talks about a second which is called a developmental model, and this is one where you lead by treating all the cadets with unconditional respect but setting extremely high standards. However, you still get support to everyone, even those who fall short, right? So if you think about it yourself, which, which one sounds better to you? In both, of course, the standards are extremely high. You have to work hard in both. You have to survive. You have to have that grit, that perseverance. However, the culture of that place is completely on opposite ends. In one, it's bullying, it's pushing, and it's hazing to the point where if you survive, you're somebody who might suffer trauma, you're somebody who's only doing it or only has done it because of fear of what might happen to you if you don't. And in the other, it's that you wanna maintain that unconditional respect. You want to feel like these people have worked hard their entire lives, they're still working, I want to work as well, and I want to keep that respect because I want to earn that and I want to go even above that. I want to be respected by everyone and I want to respect myself, which is I think most important of all. So in the final pages of this book, Angela Duckworth closes by talking about finishing. So what does this mean? Does this mean to only close out well? Does this mean to make every clutch shot, to only finish your last paragraph of your book or your essay really well? No, it means to consistently focus and do your absolute best at every moment from start to finish. I think that this is something that's incredibly important because people think that Just how you end is the only thing that matters. And here Angela Duckworth talks about how it's important to put that grit, that perseverance in at every single step of the way from start to finish. And I would like to end with a quote. We're at the end of our journey for grit right now, and I would like to end this book with a quote that Angela Duckworth mentions. It's by John Wooden. Success is never final. Failure is never fatal. It's courage that counts. So welcome to the end of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. We have talked about what grit is, how to grow grit from the inside out, what internal beliefs can do for your mental state, and finally, how to grow grit in those we love the most. I'm almost sad that this book is over. It seems like it's gone by so fast, and it's been an incredible journey. But I'm also extremely excited for what is to come. So thank you to everyone who's been listening, who's been staying consistent, and a big thank you to Dr. Rodriguez. Thank you so much.

Thanks again for having me. I had a lot of fun.

Hopefully we can definitely do this again sometime soon.

Absolutely.

Stay tuned for our third book, and don't forget to keep on learning, keep on changing, and keep on growing. We'll see you next time.