Grit is firmness of character. Grit is indomitable spirit. It is the pluck that keeps you focused on a cause regardless of the negative hits and failures that you encounter. Grit is a sign of how much you seek the attainment or manifestation of a desire. And because you have a burning desire, you make the desire a goal driven or goalbound one. This is a great way to look at grit.
The question of having desires is good but desires without goals do not give specific focus and guide towards accomplishments. How does this relate to the concept of grit development? If we have a compelling goal, which we set through a thorough process of critical thinking, it means that we have designed something so strong that our memory and conscience will never forgive us if we miss out on it. With such a condition, it is impossible for us not to develop the personal power to keep seeking its attainment. That personal power is grit.
A goal set through such a thorough process goes from the conscious mind [the physical] to the subconscious, which we have no control over. And because it features in our spirit, it affects the Infinite Mind or the Infinite Consciousness. At this level, it has not only become one with us, it has reached the place of transcendence. At that level, you cannot but have all the push you need to live your dreams and to make actual potential. Grit is the virtue [strength] that makes this happen.
Resilience and persistence are key features around grit. It is like patience, a fruit or virtue of divinity. Patience holds longsuffering, endurance, and persistence. These make you resilient because you have envisioned promise. This keeps activation alive however grim the prospects of attainment are. Patience is uncommon wisdom. You can develop grit because you have a revelation of the prize before you. Then you are willing to pay the price.
Stages to Grit: Grit is personal power earned by being persistent. Persistence is what we exhibit when we want something so badly and we have been denied access to it. And because we refuse to quit despite denials, we persist. It does seem right to say that failure helps us to get gritty. When we persist despite failures and rejections, the essential quality we are exhibiting is grit. Grit may have been with us therefore prior to the failure. The adversity of failure exposes the grit that laid buried in our essence.
Charlie Hutton said: Failure is the chance and the opportunity to see first hand how much willpower, grit and determination you really have.
Grit appears to be synonymous with persistence. It does seem right to say that if you know your why, if you know why you are on to something, you should maintain status quo in pursuit and unleash relentlessly however long. And when you fail repeatedly, you cannot continue if you don't know your why. You cannot keep trying unless you know why you have to attain. Resilience is impossible without a clear purpose. Grit stays deployed because you clearly understand the purpose you seek to fulfill.
If you truly believe in a cause, your actions will express your belief. You would commit to the spirit of the cause. Your life is synonymous with the cause. Anything otherwise is lipservice. If you must overcome, you first have to fight. If you have to fight, you have to know why you have to fight. You pick your battles because not every battle is worth it. If you have to know, you have to seek. If you have to seek, you have to thirst, and in thirst, if you seek, you will be filled.
Based on the thought that adversity throws up resilience and therefore grit, what can we say about those who give up their pursuits? Can we say that such people are gritty? Gritty people end up winning because they did not give up. They win because they did not lose focus. Those who lost focus may never have envisioned anything that compelled them. But same persons may envision some other things that compel them to stay in reckoning till they attain it. Yet, there are others who never amount to anything because they altogether failed to develop the mental and emotional muscles to stay on course to win. Men who are unstable in their ways may find it difficult to develop grit.
Angela Lee Duckworth in her TED talk, Grit: The power of passion and perseverance, used some 7th Graders she taught as examples of exhibiting grit. Is it possible for 7th Graders to know their why? 7th Graders fall within the age bracket of 12 and 13 years old. At this age, it is not out of place that such children have already been programmed to believe that unless they find a niche in formal education, they will not amount to anything great in life. That why is a strong enough one.
I am sure of this because I grew up thinking that way. I guess many of us did and many still do, even if there is a shift to this tradition presently. Though I cannot say who it was that had such a program [thought] installed in me but I knew that such program ran in me. It was there. I saw no future outside formal education and that was the reason that I ensured that I went to college. I set my mind to the task completely even if it seemed impossible. And despite school closure for 9 months and another hitch caused by my own misconduct, I returned to school after a session to complete my degree programme.
Something kept me going. Sometimes we develop grit when we see no other alternative or have no other choice. We pursue and stay with the only option we have. The only vision that we see keeps us gritty and optimistic in the face of crippling and repeated failures. We keep holding on and pushing forward. In this case, when we have no Plan B, we become gritty and grittier each time.
Thus, it does sound reasonable to say that our beliefs, those compelling ideas that we have come to accept, determine to a great extent how we behave, the force or energy we invest in, and the cause or causes we pursue.
These beliefs are like what I refer to as 'A Knowing.' There are things we know that we are not sure how we came about them. There is a certainty to them within us. Each time we feel frustration, it is because we struggle to manifest them our own way and time after we have been brought into the knowledge of them. When we hit the brickwall because it is not the time, we feel disappointment. We have to wait for Him who both equipped us with such knowledge and brought us into the awareness of it because every purpose has its time and season.
Grit therefore does have something to do with faith. When we have a belief in something, even if it is in ourselves, we express faith in ourselves or in that thing. It seems right to say that the way to have Grit is to have faith. It is the same way we admonish people or even ourselves when we do have conversations with ourselves. We tell ourselves to have faith, to persist, to believe, to be optimistic as we endure. We do hold such conversations with ourselves just as we do with others when we share ideas with them.
As faith works with knowledge, so does Grit work with knowledge. You use and exhibit Grit by the knowledge of possibility in the belief that your persistence shall pay off and your pursuits shall come to fruition.
With Grit we can stay steadfast and focused on a cause or on the path we have chosen. We have something in view; we have something we are chasing; we believe so much in it and therefore, we invest almost all our resources, if not all, in it.
To bring these thoughts to a close, we must first understand that Grit is the strength and virtue to persist, stay determined and optimistic. Goals, well-crafted from burning desires, keep us burning regardless of ill fortunes. A revelation of the prize before us keeps us paying the price [getting grittier and grittier]. Failure thus continously energizes us because we also have a compelling vision of who we are. When we know 'the why' for [our what], the reason for the endeavour, we build the 'know-how' to forge ahead and win at it. Lastly, we develop Grit when we have only one option and see no other options; when we have no Plan B. This condition seems to be the biggest source of developing Grit. These keep us determined. We can empower and keep energizing our will power, our can-do faculty when we are so convinced.
