Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (Pt. 1)

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, Prithviraj Chavda. Welcome back everyone. I know it's been a long time since the last episode has been released, but now we're back and we're ready to get back into it. If you all remember, we last took a look at Atomic Habits. Our new book is Grit, a piece of literature that is all about achieving your long-term goals through a combination of passion and perseverance. With me today, I have Jennifer Rodriguez-Shaw.

Hi everyone, and thanks so much, Veer, for having me. I'm very excited to talk about this book. Uh, just a little bit of background on me. I'm an academic hospitalist physician at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose, California. We are a county safety net hospital and serve as a training hospital for medical students and fellows from Stanford Medical School, as well as other affiliated medical schools. I did my undergrad at UT Austin, my medical school at Baylor College of Medicine, and my internal medicine residency at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. After that, I decided to stay on at UPMC to do a general internal medicine fellowship and get my master's in medical education. And it was actually while I was working on my master's that I first read Grit, and I was captured by how I could apply the principles in this book not only to my— to further my own grittiness, but also to foster resilience in medical training.

Thank you so much for that little bit of background. Now that we all know each other, let's dive right into it. Part 1 of Grit. This is called What Grit Is and Why It Matters. The title kind of speaks for itself, so the intro is not much needed, but it really is all about what grit truly is and what it truly means. We talk about the misconceptions people have on success in relation to grit and why it matters in our daily lives. The book is started off with a small story about West Point Military Academy. This is an incredibly grueling program for military students who start their application process in their third year of high school. It has an incredibly low acceptance rate of 8.6% and has proven that one-fifth, one-fifth of all of the students will drop out before their graduation, many of them in their first summer. So the author of this book, Angela Duckworth decided to do a bit of research on this topic, on this school, and think about what separated the outliers, the successes, from the people who dropped out. And she found a combination of two main qualities that led to the successes versus those who dropped out. The two that she found was a combination of passion and perseverance for your long-term goals. She learned that grit was not only applicable to the military. However, Angela Duckworth also wanted to measure grit using what she calls the grit scale on many other fields such as sales, high schools, and colleges, as well as the National Spelling Bee. In all of these, the grit scale was able to predict who stayed, who left, who succeeded and who got further.

So just to— this a little bit more, in one study, Duckworth actually found that the grit scale was able to predict which students would graduate on schedule at Chicago Public Schools, and that it was actually a better predictor, the grit scale, than how much students cared about school, or how much they rated themselves as caring about school, how much they rated themselves as feeling conscientious about their studies, or how safe they felt at school. School. She applied this grit scale to a number of other areas. And another area where she found that the grit scale was predictive is that she was, she was able to see that the grit scale predicted which adults were more likely to get advanced degrees.

And another thing she realized was that grit and talent— talent is something that our society really puts a lot of emphasis on. And really values. And she realized that grit and talent have absolutely no relationship with each other. This is something that may surprise a lot of people, but she found it to be true. And she provides a bit of backstory here, and she talks about where she first realized that talent is not the only thing that plays a role in success. So before Angela Duckworth became a psychologist and wrote this book, She was a teacher. This is where she learned that the common misconception of talent equating to success was just not true. In many of her classes, many of the kids with natural aptitude for a subject would often be complacent and did not always pay attention. In this way, even though their grades may have started off high, they did not always get the best grades in the end. However, she found that the students who came every day ready and prepared to ask questions and take notes, even if they weren't at the best at the beginning, did the best in the end. These were students who tried over and over, and even though they might not have initially done the best, they did end up on top. She found out that sustained effort equates to success. Not how you start off, but how you continue and you keep pushing and you keep learning. So even if you started off with what many people think has— what many people might have as a natural aptitude for, for example, math, if you don't try, if you don't keep learning, if you don't ask questions and you get complacent with your knowledge, you probably won't end up on top at the end. So here she moves on to talk about a man named Francis Galton who determined that those who stand out, the outliers in society, are remarkable in 3 different ways. And this is a quote, she says, they demonstrate unusual ability in combination with exceptional zeal and the capacity for hard labor. So a Harvard psychologist named William James asserted that the human individual usually lives far within his limits, that he has so much potential and so much that he can do but they simply don't put it into use. We look forward and we think that these are our limits, even though we've never even tried to reach them, and look forward and say, I can do so much more than what I am doing. Now, again, this is not meant to be misunderstood. Talent is great. There's nothing wrong with it. However, in the society that we live in, there's— we put too much emphasis and label it as the X factor that is needed for us to succeed. From a young age, we participated in talent shows. On television, we watch America's Got Talent or Britain's Got Talent, and we strive for the kids in society and teenagers in society like me to make it into the gifted and talented programs. In the author's own words, by shining our spotlight on talent, we risk leaving everything else in the shadows. We inadvertently send the message that the other factors, including grit, don't matter as much as they really do.

So Duckworth was very intrigued by the notion that successful people had this special substance. It wasn't just about talent. There was this level of perseverance, of dedication, of resilience that seemed to be a common thread in the stories of success. They had a never-give-up attitude, and this is what Angela Duckworth decided to study in her second year of graduate school. She wanted to capture this concept, and she wanted to be able to measure it, and so she ultimately named this concept grit, and she found that it stems from both passion and perseverance.

Once again, talent should not have a negative connotation. Talent is great, and it's something that everyone in the world is born with. We all have a natural aptitude for something or other. So Angela Duckworth came up with this interesting formula that can turn your talent into achievement. So she found that talent times effort is equal to skill. You can create skill through your previous talent and putting more and more effort into them. And this skill, if you take this skill and you put more effort into that it can create achievement. If you take a skill that you might have previously learned, for example, for me, playing basketball was something I always wanted to do. So if I take a basketball, I put effort into it, I go to practice, I practice outside of times that may have been said by my coaches, then I can create a skill. After I have a certain skill, a certain aptitude for it, I can keep going, keep going, and get achievements within the sport. So talent is how quickly your skills improve when you invest effort. Achievement is what happens when you take your acquired skills and use them.

So Angela Duckworth noticed that effort counts twice, right? So in that formula that Veer just described, talent times effort equals skill, skill times effort equals achievement, effort is in there twice. So if you have a natural talent, it still takes effort to develop that talent into a skill. If you have a natural talent and you don't put an effort into it, you're going to be left behind compared to somebody else who may not be as talented naturally as you, but really put a lot more effort into it. And then you may have achieved a skill, but it really— it takes more effort put into that skill to turn that into an achievement. So I'll give a personal example. When I was in, in high school, I was in the lower, um, lower achievement level of math. I did not, uh, I was not in the higher level math class. I didn't take any AP math-level classes. And when I became a senior in high school, I was again in the, in the senior math class that was not the AP or the IB program, um, and we only got through maybe the first 3 or 4 chapters of my math textbook. And I distinctly remember that we could not get through the textbook because the teacher didn't feel that we had, um, the ability to go all the way through that textbook. So when I got to college, I didn't know any trigonometry, um, but I took a math test at the beginning of college passed the math test to a degree where I was able to take calculus if I wanted. So I could take the prep course for calculus or I could go ahead and take calculus. And I already knew at this point that I wanted to go to medical school and I knew grades were important. So I wanted to take a class that I knew I could get a good grade in. But I also, you know, I was determined to take that calculus class even though I didn't realize what a challenge it would be. So at the very beginning, uh, my first class, I remember thinking as I walked out of there, I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't understand anything the teacher said. I went to the TA session, which is where, you know, a teacher's assistant kind of goes through the lesson and reinforces, and again, totally lost. Um, so I decided I was going to attend different— the same math class with with a different professor. And I went to multiple math classes, math lectures that I was not enrolled in until I found a professor that I could understand the lesson better. So I thought, okay, this is a professor I feel like I can digest the lesson. And then I found different TA sessions and I tried different ones until I finally found a TA session where I felt like I could digest what the TA was saying. And then I did the homework. And I would do the homework for the lesson 2, 3 times, my own homework over and over again until I felt like I understood the problems. And I had to teach myself trig along the way because I didn't know trigonometry. I went to all the free tutoring sessions. I was determined not to pay for tutoring. So I went to all the free sessions. Um, and then I actually borrowed my, um, other students' homeworks, um, and would complete their homework. So because it was— we would often— the homework assignments were the same problem but different numbers, and I started to memorize the numbers in my homework. So I wanted to be sure that I could do the problem when I didn't have the numbers memorized because I had done my own homework multiple times. And this is how I prepared for exams, was I would do the problems over and over again until I felt like I knew how to do these problems, how to solve them. And I ended up getting you know, an A in both classes, a 4.0 in calculus. And on the very last final of the second semester of calculus, I got 100% on the final. So I didn't have talent, actually. I had zero talent when it came to math. I had always told myself growing up that I was not good at math. I felt, you know, I labeled myself as I'm not a math person, not a numbers person, not good at math, but I managed to get a perfect score on the final in calculus and, and, you know, an A in both semesters. And it was solely because of my effort, not because of my talent. Um, so it's just an example that, you know, effort does count and maybe I didn't come into college knowing what other students knew. Um, but I was able to put a lot of effort into that class and get a good grade.

Wow. That, that's an incredible story. Um, and just to elaborate just a little more, um, for me, how I kind of look at it is effort— effort's like energy, you know, and your skill can give that energy a direction, an outlet. Another example for me is this podcast itself, right? I enjoyed reading and writing, and I wasn't bad at it, but I had to realize that I should make a podcast to help exercise that energy, and I had to put in a lot of effort to help create it as well. Without effort, nothing would have happened, and it would have been latent potential.

So Duckworth gives the example of John Irving, who has actually been termed as the great storyteller of American literature today. And she, um, she, she highlights how Irving actually, he got a C in high school English. He got a 475 out of 800 on the SAT, which was a pretty poor score on the SAT. Almost 2/3 of other students who took the SAT did better than him. And he was severely dyslexic. So he had to read really slowly. It actually took him 2 to 3 times as long to read something as his classmates. And he really had to learn that to do anything well, he had to overextend himself. When he wrote his stories and books, he actually spent more time on rewriting and the drafts of the book than he did on writing it in the first place. And he might rewrite something 10 times before he felt like it was ready, but that's where he felt like his strength was. It was the persistence and the perseverance that he had with taking the time to just spend hours and hours rewriting his books and his stories. She, you know, I, it's funny because as I was kind of preparing for this podcast, I was also listening to a medical podcast. The, the host was commenting to the guest speaker on the podcast and basically commending her because she published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. Now, the New England Journal of Medicine is one of the most highly regarded medical journals, and publication in, in the New England Journal is a huge accomplishment. And so the host was kind of saying, wow, you know, congrats, what a great job, you, you, um, you, what an achievement. And her response was striking and it stuck with me. And I think it particularly stuck with me because I had been reading this book. Um, but, uh, she said to the host that her motto is to quote unquote, keep showing up. And she went on to explain that she had actually been working on this article and on trying to get it published for 5 years. But through all the rejections, she just kept showing up. And it was funny because I was, again, I was rereading this book as I was preparing for this podcast. And Angela Duckworth includes almost the exact same quote in her book, which is where she describes a quote by Woody and his quote is, quote, "80% of life is showing up," end quote. So it's funny how these people who are termed to be geniuses or, you know, highly successful, or, "Wow, you publish in the New England Journal, you must just be so smart and so talented," but really, this physician, she just kept showing up. She kept showing up when it was rejected. She kept working on it, um, and it took her 5 years to publish, but she didn't give up. So it's this attitude that helps successful people move their skills and their talents towards true achievements and mastery.

Wow, that's an incredible story. Yeah, you know, in conclusion, just to quickly recap it, without effort, your talent is nothing more than your latent potential. Without effort, your skill is nothing more than what you could have done but didn't. With effort, talent becomes skill. And at the same time, effort makes that skill productive. So in the next chapter, moving forward, she starts off with another story about a young and aspiring man who is working incredibly hard on his startup. And she told him something very important, that even though we talked about all of this in this last part, that grit is not only working incredibly hard. Work ethic is only part of it, an incredibly important part, but still not the whole thing. Many people fall in love with a certain project or idea. I can think of many projects or ideas that I've had in the past that I really just wanted to do but didn't follow through. And grit is staying in love. It's keeping that work ethic, that passion for the subject. You can't succeed without perseverance. Even if you have an incredible idea, you really want to do it, But maybe after a week, maybe even after a month, you lose that passion, you lose that drive, you can't go ahead, you will not become successful. And she talks about how she knows a lot of mathematicians, scientists, businessmen who feel the same drive, that same spark inside of them as they did on the first day when they started either writing that theorem or creating that startup or whatever their project was. And that's the key to grit, is staying with it, keeping and maintaining that passion, and having the perseverance to keep going for it.

Yes, I actually remember feeling surprised when I first read this chapter that I didn't quite understand what Duckworth meant when she said passion. You know, we often think of passion as this intense emotion, infatuation, obsession. But really what she means with passion, her definition of passion, at least when it comes to grit, is it's actually being able to— it's more about consistency than the level of intensity of emotion. It's working on that same thing over the years, and it's actually keeping that same interest in something over time. Like Vir just said, the first day you start working on something and you're so excited by it and you're so interested in it, feeling that same level of interest and excitement after days, after weeks, months, years. And so it's really sustained, enduring devotion that, that, that encompasses what she means by passion. And she kind of talks about how enthusiasm is very common. We often feel very enthusiastic about a new project or a new venture or a new life goal. But it's the endurance that's rare. You know, We want to, we want to work out and we want to get really fit, but we don't do it every day and we don't keep up with it. We're interested in a new diet. We want to lose weight, but we don't keep up with that. And so it's that endurance that really makes a difference. And that's the part of passion that she's really talking about. It's having the same level of interest in something that you did at the beginning.

So I can give an example from my own life. And this was a couple of years ago. I started on a new venture, and this was to write a journal, a journal with 365 introspective questions, one for every single day of the year. I designed the front cover, I got the book binded, I made copies, and I even sold it at a business fair. This sold out within the first 2 hours. Now, this is all great, this is good, but the problem was that this is where it stopped. I was offered a lot of help by many successful people to take it to the next level, to get it published and sell more copies, but I was complacent. I mean, sure, I was in 6th grade at the time that this was created, and I didn't have the length of mind to think that far ahead. But the point was I didn't stay in love. I didn't follow through, and I really regret that decision now. But the point is that I was missing that long-term work ethic And this is what led to my journal not reaching what it could have been, its full potential. And now today, if I had been working on it this whole time, I realized it— I could have created so much more, um, but I didn't because I didn't have that longevity. Um, so here onwards, she moves on to a slightly different topic, um, and this is about finding your life's philosophy. Right, you may go through many adventures in life, um, you may find many different roads, but what she says is you always have to have a strict life philosophy to keep yourself grounded and to keep yourself going towards a certain end point. You know, you, you, your life may go through many windy roads, many challenges. You may not love sharks like you did when you were 5 years old. You may love something else now. But what keeps you centered. So she shares, um, she shares a very famous football coach whose name is Pete Carroll, and his life philosophy is to do things better than they have ever been done before. And she urges us to think, what is yours? What's your life philosophy? What do you want to achieve at the end of your life? What do you want to look back at and say, this was my life philosophy since I was blank years old, I wanted to do this and I achieved it because I always chose a road, a path that would lead me to that end goal.

And so this is where Duckworth first introduces the concept of goal hierarchies. Duckworth's perspective is that you should ideally only have one career or professional goal. This is your high-level goal, and it should not be a means to an end. It should be the end, so for example, for me, that includes— I probably have a couple of professional career goals, which is what she says not to do, but I want to be a really good physician, take really good care of patients, but I also want to be a really good teacher for medical students, for residents, for other trainees, so then you have all these mid-level goals that help you get to that end goal, and then you have low-level goals that help you get to that mid-level goal, She gives an example of the professional baseball player Tom Seaver and that his goal was to be one of the greatest pitchers of all time, to pitch the next day better than he did the day before, but to get to that, he had a lot of low-level goals. He had to eat healthy. He had to get enough sleep. He had to avoid getting a sunburn. He tried, he made sure to pet dogs or to throw logs with his non-pitching hand. So these are small goals, but they're a means to an end. Getting enough sleep helps him perform better during practice, which helps him do better during games, which over time helps him develop himself into the all-star pitcher that he ultimately ended up being, and then he was inducted into the Hall of Fame. So it's these, it's these goal hierarchies that can help you build up to that life philosophy.

And once you have a philosophy, a track that your life is headed towards, kind of like you mentioned, make these goals for yourself in this hierarchical pattern. At the bottom of this pyramid, you have your short-term goals, right? For me, it might be I want to wake up at 6 AM every morning, I want to finish my school project by tomorrow afternoon, etc., etc. From here, the goals, she says, get more and more abstract and in general. For example, your low-level goal can be to finish your homework as soon as you get home. Why? Because you want a form of habit of doing things as soon as they are given to you. Why? So you never have to be, uh, so you never have work to be done while you are lounging. Why? Etc., etc. So she mentions that these goals are not built from bottom up. You make these goals from up to down. You can set the goal to become the greatest basketball player ever, or the greatest writer ever, or the greatest physician ever, then work your way down by setting goals such as working out every day, eating healthy, practicing 2+ times, etc., etc. Now, if you do not yet know your top goals, how do you find them, right? All of us may not have life goals that we have on standby ready to choose from. Um, So how do you find these? She mentions a story about Warren Buffett and his pilot. Now, Warren Buffett asked his pilot, you know, I'm sure you have life goals that you want to do. I'm sure you don't just want to drive my helicopter around for the rest of your life, you know. Um, so he broke it down into 3 simple steps. First, you write down a list of 25 career goals. Second, you circle the top 5 priority goals. Then you take a look at the 20 that were not circled and you avoid them at all costs. These are distractions. So Angela Duckworth added one more, and she, she adds to ask yourself, uh, to what, what extent do these goals serve a common purpose? The more they do serve the same purpose, the more focused your passion is.

I remember reading this part of the book and thinking, "Wow, well, I know one of my goals is to be this wonderful hospitalist physician who can take excellent care of acutely ill patients," and wrapped up in that professional goal is also, like I said, to teach trainees, and then I have this other part of my life, and I'm a mom. I have two young children, and actually those two goals very often compete with each other, and I'm thinking to myself as I'm reading all these stories about these super successful people and how much time and effort they dedicated to their goals, and some of them spent 9 hours a day practicing their instrument, and I thought to myself, "I wish I could spend that much time, you know, studying medicine, studying medical education, but I can't. I come home and I have this other, um, this other responsibility that matters to me very greatly, and it's my children and my husband." And I remember reading this part of the book and actually thinking about that. And I felt, I felt very connected to Duckworth when she actually brings that up herself. And she brings up how she's, she's a mom of two young girls. And so am I. I have two young girls. And she talks about how your professional— you may have more than one goal, but that One of those may be a professional goal, and ideally it would be one, but then the other one would be this whole goal or things that are, things that are going on in your personal life that, that may not be related to your professional goals. So having multiple interests that are not related to each other, it can make it difficult to achieve these goals, but we have to be able to separate what's what's truly a distractor, which I'll go more into, and what's just a different goal that is very important to you. So one, you may have a goal to be a great parent and you also may have the goal to be successful in your professional career and you will need two different goal hierarchies to do this, right? For my professional career, it's important for me to show up at work by 7:00 AM. For my personal life, it's very important to me to drop my kids off at school. So I may not be able to do both those low-level goals, and I may have to pick and choose between them. And then what she really warns against, having multiple kind of professional goals, for example. So she wants you, like Vera described with the example with Warren Buffett, write down what are the other things that you're interested in and figure out what on that list might be serving as a distractor. From the goal that you care about most. As an example, not a personal example, but maybe if my goal is to be a great parent, maybe I can't also play golf every day. I may have to choose to be home with my children in the evenings, and so my professional goal and my goal of being a parent, those are the two things I can focus on. I can't also become this great golf player because I just don't have the time to dedicate to that. And it would be a distractor from the things I actually care more about.

That makes a lot of sense. And she says that in order to work your way up, you know, your, your first, your top foremost goal has to stay the same, but your low-level goals might change. They might not always be your choice and they might get changed because of other factors. Like you mentioned, kids, um, there might be a lot of other playing factors that come into it. Life is a mix of a lot of different things, right? So you may fail at low-level goals. She says that this does not make you not gritty. You may have to abandon a low-level goal, but she says that what shows grit is that you're able to find other low-level goals to continue on your path to your ultimate goal rather than abandoning your pursuit altogether, right? So, you know, there's a bunch of rivers that lead up to the ocean and maybe one river gets blocked off, but will you just stop there or are you going to get on another river and continue to your path onto the ocean, right? So from here, she completely changes tracks and she asks us, is grit something that is genetic? Can you get it genetically, or is it only something that you have to establish in yourself? And is it something that is founded completely only yourself? So she found that over different tests, it was a force that was genetically altered at a certain level, and that it's also influenced by experience, right? So of course you can change your level of grittiness and, um, influence it based off of what you do, how you do it, and the amount that you do it. But it's also influenced by a lot of the experiences you have. And she mentions that over the course of human existence, we have obviously gotten better in a lot of ways, right? We've gotten smarter, we've gotten taller, we've basically gotten more advanced in a lot of ways. Now in the book, there is an example of this given in the context of basketball. As television became a household regular object, people started to watch more basketball and therefore play it more as well. They would try the different moves that they saw on TV and get better. Now these kids would match up against others who might have been doing the same thing, and they had to change and evolve to get a little better. In this way, the game of basketball has advanced to where it has gotten today. This same phenomenon, which is called the social multiplier effect, has happened with so much in the world, such as scientific advancements. She says that necessity is the mother of adaptation, and grit changes as a function of the cultural era in which we grow up. She says that there are 4 major psychological assets that each person who truly embodies grit exercises. The first is interest, passion for your field, your work, whatever your goals are. The next is the ability to practice and persevere even when you don't want to. The third is purpose. What is your conviction behind the work? Why does that matter? Why does what you do matter to you and to others? And the last one is hope. Hope that you can achieve your goal, your purpose, and hope to keep going even even when life knocks you down multiple times.

At this point, you may be thinking, well, grit sounds great, but I don't feel like a particularly gritty person. How can I become more gritty? I, at this point of the book, I not only wanted to learn how I could be more gritty, but I actually really wanted to learn how I could help medical students and the residents that I worked with develop their own grit. And I was convinced that grit and resilience might be the solution to burnout in medicine. And so, Part 2 of the book focuses on how to grow grit. Duckworth specifically addresses these 4 aspects—interest, practice, purpose, and hope—to give us actionable ways that we can grow our own grit.

So, thank you all for listening. This concludes our Part 1 episode This time we talked a lot about grit, what it means and where it can come from. Next, in the next part, in the next episode, we will talk about growing grit from the inside out. Keep on learning, keep on changing, keep on growing. Thank you so much, Ms. Jennifer, for coming and being here today. I really appreciate it.

Thank you for having me.

And thank you to all the listeners out there.