Grit(84)

Before I can answer, another player says, “Well, man, maybe he’s just not capable of A’s.”

I shake my head. “From what I’ve been told, your brother is plenty smart enough to bring home A’s. He was doing it before.”

The player agrees. “He’s a smart kid. Trust me, he’s a smart kid.”

I’m still thinking when Pete jumps up and says, with genuine excitement: “First of all, there is absolutely no way you give that game to your brother. You got him motivated. Okay, that’s a start. That’s a beginning. Now what? He needs some coaching! He needs someone to explain what he needs to do, specifically, to get back to good grades! He needs a plan! He needs your help in figuring out those next steps.”

This reminds me of something Pete said at the start of my visit: “Every time I make a decision or say something to a player, I think, ‘How would I treat my own kid?’ You know what I do best? I’m a great dad. And in a way, that’s the way I coach.”

At the end of the day, I’m in the lobby, waiting for my taxi. Pete is there with me, making sure I get off okay. I realize I haven’t asked him directly how he and the Seahawks found the courage to continue after he’d made “the worst call ever.” Pete later told Sports Illustrated that it wasn’t the worst decision, it was the “worst possible outcome.” He explained that like every other negative experience, and every positive one, “it becomes part of you. I’m not going to ignore it. I’m going to face it. And when it bubbles up, I’m going to think about it and get on with it. And use it. Use it!”

Just before I leave, I turn and look up. And there, twenty feet above us, in foot-high chrome letters, is the word CHARACTER. In my hand, I’m holding a bag of blue and green Seahawk swag, including a fistful of blue rubber bracelets stamped in green with LOB: Love Our Brothers.





Chapter 13


CONCLUSION





This book has been about the power of grit to help you achieve your potential. I wrote it because what we accomplish in the marathon of life depends tremendously on our grit—our passion and perseverance for long-term goals. An obsession with talent distracts us from that simple truth.

This book has been my way of taking you out for a coffee and telling you what I know.

I’m almost done.

Let me close with a few final thoughts. The first is that you can grow your grit.

I see two ways to do so. On your own, you can grow your grit “from the inside out”: You can cultivate your interests. You can develop a habit of daily challenge-exceeding-skill practice. You can connect your work to a purpose beyond yourself. And you can learn to hope when all seems lost.

You can also grow your grit “from the outside in.” Parents, coaches, teachers, bosses, mentors, friends—developing your personal grit depends critically on other people.



* * *



My second closing thought is about happiness. Success—whether measured by who wins the National Spelling Bee, makes it through West Point, or leads the division in annual sales—is not the only thing you care about. Surely, you also want to be happy. And while happiness and success are related, they’re not identical.

You might wonder, If I get grittier and become more successful, will my happiness plummet?

Some years ago, I sought to answer this question by surveying two thousand American adults. The graph below shows how grit relates to life satisfaction, measured on a scale that ranged from 7 to 35 and included items such as, “If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing.” In the same study, I measured positive emotions such as excitement and negative emotions such as shame. I found that the grittier a person is, the more likely they’ll enjoy a healthy emotional life. Even at the top of the Grit Scale, grit went hand in hand with well-being, no matter how I measured it.



When my students and I published this result, we ended our report this way: “Are the spouses and children of the grittiest people also happier? What about their coworkers and employees? Additional inquiry is needed to explore the possible downsides of grit.”

I don’t yet have answers to those questions, but I think they’re good ones to ask. When I talk to grit paragons, and they tell me how thrilled they are to work as passionately as they do for a purpose greater than themselves, I can’t tell whether their families feel the same way.

I don’t know, for example, whether all those years devoted to a top-level goal of singular importance comes at a cost I haven’t yet measured.

What I have done is ask my daughters, Amanda and Lucy, what it’s like to grow up with a gritty mom. They’ve watched me attempt things I’ve never done before—like write a book—and they’ve seen me cry when it got really rough. They’ve seen how torturous it can be to hack away at innumerable doable, but hard-to-do, skills. They’ve asked, at dinner: “Do we always have to talk about deliberate practice? Why does everything have to come back to your research?”

Amanda and Lucy wish I’d relax a little and, you know, talk more about Taylor Swift.

But they don’t wish their mother was anything other than a paragon of grit.

In fact, Amanda and Lucy aspire to achieve the same. They’ve glimpsed the satisfaction that comes from doing something important—for yourself and others—and doing it well, and doing it even though it’s so very hard. They want more of that. They recognize that complacency has its charms, but none worth trading for the fulfillment of realizing their potential.