What Grit Actually Feels Like on a Tuesday
A question from one of my spring read-throughs has stuck with me. There was this woman who read three different books on the topic of discipline. Apparently she got excited about each book for a week but then drifted back to her old habits. She said she wanted to know what disciplined people did on Tuesdays that had nothing important or exciting happen. Neither on Book launch days nor during crises. In the middle.
I did not have a good response for her that night, but I’ve thought about it since. Most writing on discipline, including my own, emphasizes the dramatic moments. Those are the relapses and breakthroughs, the mornings “everything changes.” Almost all of this literature ignores the specific elements of a Tuesday in week six when the goal has lost its shine and the end result is too far in the future to be perceptible.
Angela Duckworth’s research on grit gives that Tuesday more attention than almost anyone else in the field. Her studies followed people through demanding, multi-year pursuits, West Point cadets during a brutal initial training program among them, and she found that grit predicted who finished considerably better than raw talent did. Cadets who dropped out had strong physical scores and impressive records. What separated the ones who stayed was not intensity. It was a willingness to keep showing up on the unremarkable days, the ones nobody photographs and nobody applauds.
That detail changes the meaning of the entire question the woman asked me. For Duckworth, grit isn’t about dramatic effort. It more closely resembles something that is done even though the reason it is done has little to no meaning. The biggest obstacle in any endeavor is probably not the first of the twenty-eight thousand days it takes to do that thing when the decision to do it is still fresh and exciting. It is on day forty, after the excitement and novelty has worn off and the goal is still far off. After the announcement at the start was so much easier and more entertaining than the actual day of the announcement, no one tells you about day forty because, looking at it, day forty is a depressing photo and a boring story at the dinner table.
I recognize this pattern from writing every book I have written, including the one that took the longest, From Dreamer to Achiever. The first two weeks of that manuscript felt almost effortless, carried along by the sheer relief of finally starting. Somewhere around week seven, the relief ran out and nothing had replaced it yet. No one was checking the manuscript. No reader existed yet to disappoint. Four hundred words was my minimum daily writing goal, even on uninspired mornings.
According to Duckworth’s studies, this would not be an example of grit as a personality trait. This more so seems to be a standard that is maintained. This standard is visible in hindsight and is formed more so by numerous mundane Tuesdays rather than one eventful Monday. The steady, strong, resolute person that you eventually become is formed after the fact. Discipline and grit is a record that is achieved rather than formed. There is no substance to a record that is made without it being formed.
This is where I think the woman’s question is answered. True disciplined individuals do not have more exciting Tuesdays than everyone else. They have some form of commitment to something more specific. It is one promise that they have decided to enforce. Something that they would deem it a ridiculous to break, not because it is a big commitment, but because of the nature of Tuesday that is in its sixth week. It is safe to say that motivation is something that is usually the first to go.
The hard part rarely shows up on day one. It shows up on day forty, unphotographed and unapplauded.
Now I remember her question from that night. At that point in my life, I was either learned enough to know the answer, or inexperienced enough to know I didn’t have one, but I had no response that I could give her. I imagine she would have been disappointed with the answer. There are no tricks to skip the dull Tuesday. There is only the commonplace normalcy that gets by, and sits quietly so no one notices until the accumulated records become something worthy of mention.
The One Thing to Do Today
Pick one unmotivated Tuesday to keep something tiny, just ten minutes or four hundred words, or a single phone call. Let that be the accumulating record so it can begin to be noticed.
If you are working through your own long middle stretch right now, From Dreamer to Achiever was written for exactly that stretch, one small standard at a time.
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See you next time,
The BSJ Team