Notes on Grit

the book and its ideas

Grit by Angela Duckworth has proven to be a sticky book. I finished the audiobook a few weeks ago and have continued to ruminate on it since. It’s already 10 years old (my to-be-read pile is more aggressive than my reading speed) but her argument seems evergreen. Duckworth, a psychologist, professor, and researcher, delves into what makes a person “gritty.” She defines this characteristic as passion and persistence for long-term goals. Looking at West Point cadets all the way to spelling bee champions, Duckworth pulls from multiple disciplines to support her thesis.

My TL;DR of Grit is -

1. talent matters less than grit (mostly)

2. consistency is more effective than intensity

3. grit begets grit

4. it’s nature and nurture

5. there are ways to develop one’s grit

As an artist, a Pisces, and an enneagram 7, parts of the book were severely triggering for me. I see myself as fun-loving and go-with-the-flow. A rolling stone who has accidentally stayed put for 12 years. I can wing it with little preparation and get by. My personality is my calling card. Professionally and creatively, I’m a generalist. Bouncing between things has led to having a wide array of fairly dull tools.

‘Breadth Over Depth’ and ‘options! options! options!’ would be good slogans for how I tend to operate.

Here’s the problem - those aren’t great slogans when building things of substance, things that result from grit.

Things of import require depth. Your oncologist is probably terrible at watercolors and rhythmic gymnastics. This is a good thing. If an oncologist tells you all about her water color awards and her rhythmic gymnastics olympic dreams, you need to ask her when she last read a medical journal. Time is finite and expertise requires depth. Excellence demands it.

Same thing with ‘options! options! options!’ That is all well and good until it’s time to make choices, choices, choices. I get paralyzed, frozen in limbo, by the magical infinitude of options, options, options. Making a choice feels like a death. It’s the death of all the other possible options, all the other possible futures. Because it is. To get anywhere means you didn’t go somewhere else. And that’s the name of the game. The game being life (I think).

I’ve woven a narrative about myself that I lack all grit. I’m just a soft, gelatinous court jester incapable of finishing things, sticking with things, and achieving things. Here for a good time, not an accomplished time. My pile of unfinished creative endeavors - books, blogs, plays, podcasts, businesses, brilliant ideas - are irrefutable evidence of my gritlessness. They are a collection of scarlet letters whose presence rushed to the front of my brain while reading Grit.

Maybe it was my upbringing, where everyone had to help the baby of the family because oh-god-we’re-running-late-where-is-Pat-why-isn’t-he-wearing-pants-someone-get-his-pants-let’s-go. Getting a family of 5 out the door necessitates extra assistance for the runt of the pack. That might have carried into middle school, high school, and beyond, though my sisters would have a better gauge of this. For the record: I can do my pants all on my own now.

Maybe it was testing into the Gifted and Talented program early in school. Duckworth touches upon this as being a potential roadblock to grittiness. Sure kids in those programs, myself included, get access to better schools, better teachers, better curriculum. We are told early on that we have the goods, that we are preternaturally smart with rarified abilities. We are the chosen ones, the specialest of the specials.

But hard work often took a backseat to inherent gifts, if it was mentioned at all. Brilliance was seen as divine ordination, not the byproduct of busting ass. We were rewarded when things were effortless. Work smarter, not harder. The messaging that my specialness will always carry me through still resonates even after decades of evidence that my specialness will often, in fact, not carry me through.

But fear not! Duckworth goes into strategies to develop grit. This is good news given that I am a 36 year old man lamenting about how testing into a Gifted and Talented program in kindergarten somehow fucked him over.

One of her strategies, alongside connecting to purpose, practicing with intention, and developing a growth mindset, is to surround yourself with gritty people. This is one area where I have excelled by chance and by circumstance. I have, and have had, exceptionally gritty people in my life but there are 3 who I would classify as Grit Paragons. These souls have proven time and again their ability to lock into a goal and to grind their way toward it.

There’s my roommate JA. She decided very early on, while we were in high school, that she wanted something different for her life than the examples she saw around her. Tireless is a word I would use to describe her pursuit toward that end ever since.

A few years after earning her Bachelors, she spent 14 grueling months getting her Masters in heath sciences. From there she climbed the ranks at Georgia State University and Grady Memorial Hospital, the nation’s 10th largest public hospital and the only Level 1 trauma center in the region. She eventually became a program director. Like so many healthcare workers, she took an emotional beating during the Covid pandemic but continued her work with patients and students.

After a decade in academia, she pivoted to a career in rare disease pharmaceuticals. After only a year in this position, she has been given committee assignments and leadership opportunities. Between constant travel and unending meetings, she is also pursuing her PhD. Even she is bewildered by this decision.

I know she will get that degree. I know she will continue to climb the ladder at her company. I even predict that she will make her way to the C suite someday. And though I know what a hot mess she can be, I know that nothing is off limits for her ambitions. Hence, grit paragon status.

Then there’s my sister SD.

While I could spend all day psychoanalyzing her, I think her grittiness boils down to a high threshold for discomfort - physical, emotional, mental - coupled with a degree of fearlessness. This girl picks projects that most would wisely run away from. House projects, furniture projects, painting projects, life projects. Whereas most people would throw money at a problem or ignore it completely, she will simply roll up her sleeves and get to work.

Some time after graduating college, she gathered her things and headed to New York City without knowing a soul who lived there. Life in NYC can be hard. Long commutes, crowds everywhere, expensive everything. Anyone who can survive for more than a week has a certain amount of grit. She remained there for 8 years and lived in almost as many neighborhoods. She carved out an entire existence. When she left she talked like a proper New Yorker, knew the city up and down, and had multiple social circles.

Then came grad school. At age 34, she got herself into the architecture program at Georgia Tech which is ranked #5 in the country. She gathered herself up, left Brooklyn, and bought a house in Atlanta all on her own. Then came the long march through a challenging and, as she would probably admit, sometimes soul-depleting academic experience. With her Masters in hand, she eventually became a licensed architect after thousands of supervised work hours and passing 6 exams with such thrilling topics as Codes & Regulations and Site Analysis.

She came by her grit honestly. My dad was the grittiest person I’ve known. He saw himself as a globetrotting sailor with a free spirit and the heart of a jazz musician. But a more thorough investigation reveals a profoundly persistent and tenacious man that gave up on nothing.

Much like my roommate, Dad was forever in school. For the better part of 3 decades he worked toward a PhD in chemistry. It started with a winding, unfocused meander through a Bachelors degree. His girlfriend and eventual wife lit a fire under his butt which helped at first but only lasted so long. University of Missouri-St. Louis eventually handed him a Masters, a rarity in the sciences, because his doctoral dissertation was taking so long. A pity degree. But he kept going. When the dust settled, he walked across the stage at age 50 to finally become Dr. Donohue.

All the while he took on impossible house projects - demolishing a two-story patio, installing tubs and toilets, replacing hardwood floors, and every other manner of home restoration endeavor. He accomplished all of this during his nights and weekends while working 40 hours a week and raising a young family. Inside that swashbuckling, free-spirited maverick was an unshakably gritty man.

Or maybe it was the other way around.

In any case, what do I do with these exemplars of grit? How can they help me develop my own ability to persist and pursue? What can they teach me?

In writing out their stories, I noticed that their grit looks different from each other. For one, it’s consistently grabbing something just a hair out of reach over and over. For another, it’s running headfirst into the hardest option. For another, it’s simply staying in the game over the long haul. In all cases, though, it’s messy. It’s nonlinear. It’s complicated. It’s dirty.

Grit is, dare I say, gritty.

So while the fruits of my labors haven’t yielded the results I desire, with no full-time acting career, no full-time writing career, no book contracts, no financial security, no accolades, perhaps there’s some messy grit in me yet. It might just be unique to me. Grit: Patrick style. Yes I am an artist, a Pisces, and an enneagram 7. Yes I have a mound of unfinished projects. Yes I can sometimes be a gelatinous, blobby court jester. But when I step back, I have to acknowledge the instances where I have managed to pull something across the finish line.

I wrote and produced an episode of TV. I published a book. I’ve run two half marathons (which equal a whole, obvi). I’ve done CrossFit for over 12 years. I’ve moved across the country multiple times. I’ve held down one job for 8 years and another for 6. And this summer, PDW turns 9. In that regard, I’ve gritted my way through hundreds of essays and brought them into the light of day.

In other words, I keep trying.

The first step in every 12-step program is admitting you have a problem. It might just be that the first step in developing my sense of grit is to honor the ways in which I am already gritty. I have examples of hardworking, persistent, and passionate people in my life. I just never suspected that I might also be one of them.