Get Grit in Your Life
At the World Scrabble Championship in Lille, France, on September 4, after Brett Smitheram laid down the word “braconid” for a staggering 176 points, he was crowned the new world champion. To many onlookers, it may have appeared that he was a natural linguistic genius, a word wizard, a veritable vocabulary Viking.
It may have looked like he was fortunate to have extraordinary natural talent with language.
But in a September 7 interview with the Trumpet, Mr. Smitheram, 37, explained that being crowned World Scrabble Champion 2016 was not the result of natural ability, but the product of grit.
The victory was the culmination of 20 years of working with passion and perseverance.
“I started playing Scrabble around 1996,” he said. “I wanted to master the key building blocks of the game straight away, the two- and three-letter words. So I started learning them—all 1,465— and committing them to memory.”
This was no easy process. He wrote each word out on its own card and tested himself on them over and over until he knew them by rote. Then came the longer words, 160,000 in total, up to nine letters in length. For each of these, on one side of the card, he wrote the letters of the word in alphabetical order (i.e. “aadnp”), and on the other side, he wrote the solution (i.e. “panda”).
“Some days I would spend two to three hours or more cramming these into my head,” Smitheram said.
Memorizing words was only a fraction of the total effort. “It’s like buying a carpenter’s tools without possessing the skills to use them,” he said. “The block of wood would remain a block of wood.”
To acquire the skills to use those words, he played Scrabble—a lot. “I had friends with whom I’d sometimes play all night [from] 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.,” he said. “[T]he clink of the milkman’s bottles arriving on the doorstep would tell us it was time to stop.” Those endless hours of playing gave him the skills he needed to sand the block of wood into unmatched ability.
(Listen to the episode of The Sun Also Rises on this topic.)
Then, with the advent of computer analysis, Smitheram’s grit took on another retrospective dimension. “I started poring over my games once they’d been played, trying to eke out where I went wrong, and to master the subtle differences between playing, say, ova or avo,” he said.
Meanwhile, he had to constantly refresh his word knowledge with the note cards, and each time the source dictionaries were updated, he had to add thousands of new words and forget thousands that had been removed. When Mr. Smitheram played “braconid”—which is a kind of parasitic wasp—it was the culmination of two decades of grittiness.
Grit is not just for Scrabble players. It is what compels some Olympic athletes to exert grueling effort for nine hours each day, month after month, year after year. Grit turns students with dyslexia into best-selling authors. It makes soldiers who are not as strong or intelligent become Green Berets, while the brawnier and smarter ones quit the program.
In determining who will excel in competitions, school, work and life, grit outweighs talent and genius hands down.
Can We Get More Grit?
Grit is obviously a desirable trait for a person to have in abundance. But many have assumed that a person’s grittiness is like height or eye color: fixed and unchangeable.
This is not the case.
Angela Lee Duckworth, author of new book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, said in an interview with Stephen Dubner, “[W]hen you actually get to the specifics, you know, what specifically are gritty people like? What do they do when they wake up in the morning? What beliefs do gritty people walk around with in their heads? When you get to that level of specifics, you realize there’s no reason why these things couldn’t be taught, practiced or learned.”
The main message of Duckworth’s book is that you can develop grit. “You can grow grit from the inside out,” she writes in her book.
Through more than a decade of extensively studying and interviewing soldiers, athletes, musicians, businesspeople, students and more, Duckworth has identified four main qualities that gritty people, like Mr. Smitheram, develop in abundance.
1) Bear Down on Your Main Interest
Grit begins with people who enjoy what they do. Some aspects of their work may be less enjoyable, but “gritty people are captivated by the endeavor as a whole,” Duckworth writes.
And, in order for interest to be of the type that develops grittiness, it can’t dwell on one thing for a few months and then scamper off to the next. Instead, it has to be steadfast. “[P]aragons of grit … have extremely well-developed interests,” she said. “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.”
One vital part of having well-developed interests is realizing that the idea of “following a passion” is flawed. That idea implies that there is a fully formed passion just floating around out there and all we have to do is discover it. In reality, we have to foster a passion. And that requires some work, exploration and trial and error.
Duckworth said, “Part of grit is actually doing enough exploration early on, quitting enough things early on, that you can find something that you’re willing to stick with.” There is no easy, universal method for this process, and it can be arduous. But once you have explored several areas and developed a strong interest in a few of them, it is crucial to maintain that interest.
Maintenance of this kind is rare because people easily become bored. “It is human nature to get bored of things and to seek the novel,” Duckworth said. But although this pitfall is common, it is not unavoidable. The key to dodging it, Duckworth said, is leaning to “substitute nuance for novelty.”
Instead of perpetually shifting your attentions from one interest you have grown bored with to another interest that you will soon grow bored with, you must strive to discover a new facet or a new level of the subject you are already focused on. That will inject your old interest with thrilling new challenges.
If your interest is in the ukulele, incorporate flamenco strumming patterns into your skill set. If it is in cooking, expand your menu with some new ethnic flair. If your interest is canvas painting, consider tackling a full mural. If it is in Asian geography, it may be time to expand your borders into Europe. If your interest is in welding, add a little mig to your tig.
2) Practice Deliberately
Once the bedrock of disciplined, continual interest has been laid, a person seeking to boost his grit levels must practice. But it can’t be just any kind of practice. Kaizen is the Japanese term for avoiding the plateaus of stagnation. It translates literally to “continuous improvement.” And for practice to yield grittiness, the person practicing must exude copious quantities of kaizen.
In other words, the practice must be deliberate. And deliberate practice is hard work.
For a runner, it’s not taking relaxing jogs as you catch up on npr podcasts. For a guitarist, it’s not noodling around on pentatonics while watching old episodes of Malcolm in the Middle. And for a writer, it’s not producing some kind of stream-of-consciousness flow of unedited words.
“Deliberate practice,” Duckworth writes, is “more effortful, and significantly less enjoyable” than other types of practice and preparation. It is “working at the far edge of our skills with complete concentration.” It is about “trying to do things [you] can’t yet do.”
World famous Chilean-American violinist Roberto Díaz says deliberate practice is “working to find your Achilles’ heel—the specific aspect of the music that needs problem solving.”
When Benjamin Franklin was young, he used deliberate practice to improve his mediocre writing. He read excellent essays published in the Spectator, then reread them, then put the originals away and attempted to rewrite them himself. “Then,” Franklin said, “I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them.” This was tedious and arduous work, but it helped Franklin to become one of the most influential writers of his time.
In her essay “I Am a Dancer,” American choreographer Martha Graham painted a vivid description of deliberate practice: “Dancing appears glamorous, easy, delightful. But the path to the paradise of the achievement is not easier than any other. There is fatigue so great that the body cries, even in its sleep. There are times of complete frustration; there are daily small deaths. … It takes about 10 years to make a mature dancer.”
Whether your interest is in dance or design, sprinting or sailing, writing or wrestling, flute or falconry, blacksmithing or songsmithing, landscaping or cityscaping, to become excellent you need to become gritty. And to become gritty, you need days and years of deliberate practice.
3) A Polished Purpose
Once you have a keen interest that you are committed to sticking with and a method of deliberate practice that lets you steadily improve in it, the next step to building grit is developing purpose. In this context, purpose means giving to others.
“At its core,” Duckworth writes, “purpose is the idea that what we do matters to people other than ourselves.” It is “the intention to contribute to the well-being of others.”
When Duckworth interviews “paragons of grit” about the purpose of their work, they always—always—mention other people. “Sometimes it’s very particular (‘my children,’ ‘my clients,’ ‘my students’) and sometimes quite abstract (‘this country,’ ‘the sport,’ ‘science,’ ‘society’),” she writes. “However they say it, the message is the same: The long days and evenings of toil, the setbacks and disappointments and struggle, the sacrifice—all this is worth it because, ultimately, their efforts pay dividends to other people.”
Jane Golden is an exceptionally gritty individual who devotes her efforts to public art in Philadelphia. Over the last 30 years, despite living with the chronic pain of lupus, Golden has helped convert the walls of more than 3,600 buildings into murals.
Six or seven days a week, she works from early morning to late evening. But she does it because her work enriches the lives of others. “Everything I do is in a spirit of service,” she said. Since Golden is focused on contributing to the well-being of other people, she is able to continually accomplish more, despite her pain. “I feel driven by it,” she said. “It’s a moral imperative.”
4) Hard-nosed Hope
The final component of Duckworth’s grit formula is hope—even when all seems lost. And it is not the type of hope that places the onus on “the universe” to sand rough circumstances into something smooth. Instead, it must be the kind of hope that “rests on the expectation that our own efforts can improve our future,” she writes.
People who believe they are victims of circumstances are seldom gritty and seldom achieve excellence in their field. “The hope that gritty people have has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with getting up again,” she writes.
“You really do need hope from beginning to end,” Duckworth said. “Because, of course, no matter where you are in your journey, there are going to be potholes and detours and things that might make you think that it’s not worth staying on this path.”
Back in 1999, Brett Smitheram traveled to Melbourne, Australia, for his first attempt at the World Scrabble Championships. He entered into the final day ranked in the top four competitors, but played badly, and plummeted a heartbreaking 40 places. Without hope, that might have been the end of his career with the game. But hope compelled him to try again.
Hope, in this context, is basically the conviction that we have the power to do something to rebound from challenges, problems and stumbles—small and large alike. Whether the rough patch requires P40 grit sandpaper or P400 grit, this kind of hope stays sure that it can be smoothed.
To Mythologize or to Strive?
But if we see that grit—years and years of passion and perseverance—was crucial in producing that excellence, then we should not be so quick to give ourselves a pass. We should be driven to develop grit in ourselves so that we can achieve more excellence and attain more of our potential.
In Matthew 5:48, Jesus Christ commands His followers to “[b]e [or become] ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” The depth conveyed in this passage encapsulates God’s gospel message.
In the January 2012 issue of the Trumpet, editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote about this passage, saying, “It is all about human beings actually becoming like God Himself! God is a perfectionist! … Being a perfectionist is a godly quality—which is why it works.”
Mr. Flurry continued:
How much of a perfectionist are you? Do you strive for the perfect marriage, the perfect children? Do you labor to produce the most perfect product possible at work? If we do this, good things will happen. God tells us to develop that quest for perfection in everything we do!
Ecclesiastes 9:10 conveys this same truth: “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might ….” Colossians 3:23 issues a similar command: “And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men.”
Mr. Flurry’s article continues, answering a vital question that Duckworth’s book does not tackle: What types of interest are most worthy of our grittiness, time and might?
Christ challenges us to apply it in the areas of our life that really matter most! … Above all He wants men and women “after mine own heart, which shall fulfil all my will” (Acts 13:22). He tells us, through the Apostle Paul, to “seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God,” and to “Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth” (Colossians 3:1-2).
We can get more grit. Each of us can work to develop it from the inside out. If we use grit to “become perfect,” even as God is perfect, and to “seek those things which are above,” we will be paragons of success far beyond the most famous athletes, artists or Scrabble champs. We will be devoting our energy, might and grittiness to the most important important work on Earth.
To understand more, read Mr. Flurry’s booklet about how to bear down on flaws and weaknesses, How to Be an Overcomer.
