This article is a summary of the book titled “Grit: The power of passion and perseverance” written by Angela Duckworth.
The author started to think about this topic when she as a teacher of 7th grade noticed why all her students cannot perform well in basic mathematical topics in 7th grade. She started to research by observing who performs best in some situations and why? She studied different situations such as which person survives a military schooling and who will drop it. They tried to find out which student will succeed to the next level of competition and why? She did similar research on such different contexts and noticed every successful person in each context she studied has a common characteristic, that is the title of the book Grit. Grit is passion and perseverance for long term goals. She mentioned, grit is like living life like a marathon with lots of risk and uncertainties. In life we might have crossed across many talented people who didn’t succeed. Maybe they lack grit. The people who are willing to fail, start over again with lessons learned are those with grit and often successful.
The book has powerful takeaways. The author conveys clearly through the book that the willingness to work hard and grit are not the same. People usually do hard work with the drive of an initial enthusiasm and then give up eventually if their hard work is not resulting in appealing immediate results. The important thing is to stick with something long run, long after the initial excitement. The gritty people stick to their goal till they achieve it like staying in a marathon and finally they shine.
People believe talent is directly associated with success. But actually, talent counts but efforts count twice. Society is conditioned to rate the performance of a naturally talented person with higher rank compared to an equally well performed person who did it with hard work. But the person who possesses grit eventually becomes successful.
Society convinces us talents cannot be developed and certain traits are fixed. The author discusses in detail how you can develop grit and how your life changes after practicing it. The book underlined the fact that consistency of effort over the long run is everything. Low level goals can be achieved quickly but hard problems demand more tenacity.
Like many of you, I too experienced social pressure while pursuing my passion, but my perseverance always strives me ahead in life and still helps me to strive further and further towards my goals. I realized the sense of satisfaction we feel once we reach our goal through perseverance is something incomparable and pleasant to feel as an ecstasy of life.
Incredible achievements take time. On the way to such incredible moments, there can be plenty of setbacks, failures, moments of hopelessness etc. The author gives an enlightenment that it is not the suffering which creates helplessness but our thought that we can’t control the suffering lead us to a situation of hopelessness.
“Enthusiasm is common, endurance is rare” Angela Duckworth. This is a great take away message I feel to pay attention in life.