Today is July 8 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “How often do you remind yourself of the power of grit?”
In her 2016 New York Times bestseller Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, pioneering psychologist Angela Duckworth shows anyone striving to succeed—be it parents, students, educators, athletes, or business people—that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent but a special blend of passion and persistence she calls “grit.”
As a MacArthur Fellow, Duckworth, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, defined grit as the tendency to sustain interest in and effort toward very long-term goals.
Doing so equips individuals to pursue, especially challenging aims over years and even decades. Duckworth noted that people who “accomplished great things often combined a passion for a single mission with an unswerving dedication to achieve that mission, whatever the obstacles and however long it might take.”
Duckworth wrote “grit grows as we figure out our life philosophy, learn to dust ourselves off after rejection and disappointment, and learn to tell the difference between low-level goals that should be abandoned quickly and higher-level goals that demand more tenacity.” The literary world is filed with authors who demonstrated grit in order to get their book published.
One such example is The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter that publishers rejected so many times she decided to self-publish 250 copies. It has now sold 45 million copies.
How often do you remind yourself of the power of grit?