[Grit:] passion and perseverance for especially long-term goals.
Interest:
They cultivate something which grabs their attention initially, but that they become familiar with enough, knowledgeable enough that they wake up the next day and the next day and the next year, and they’re still interested in this thing. And I think that is something that we can actually intentionally decide: “I want to be the kind of person who stays interested in something.”
One of the skills is to learn to substitute nuance for novelty.
Practice:
The second stage really does have this quality of laboring in a very methodical way and in a very unfun way for most people to get better and better at this thing that you’ve become interested in.
“Do you love practice?” And he said, “are you asking me if I love getting up at 4 in the morning, jumping into a cold pool, and swimming laps looking at a black line on the bottom, at the very edge of my physical ability where my lungs are screaming for oxygen and my arms feel like they’re about to fall off? No, I don’t, but I love the whole thing. You know, I have a passion for the whole sport.” And so that passion really does have to come first.
Purpose:
The third stage is purpose. Connecting your work, or even your hobby if that’s where your real passion is, to people who are not you. So it’s a beyond-the-self purpose that I’m particularly observing in grit paragons.
Hope:
The final component is hope.
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One of the psychologists that I interviewed said shame is usually not helpful as an emotion, and I would second that.
All measures suck, and they all suck in their own way.
you’re comparing yourself to a different standard than other people might be comparing themselves — a very high standard. That’s probably, in part, why you do finish things. So that reference bias is another problem of self-report questionnaires.