The Mundanity of Grit (#100)
“If you are going to achieve excellence in big things you develop habits in little matters. Excellence is not an exception it is a prevailing attitude.”
General Colin Powell
General Colin Powell rose from humble beginning in New York City to become the first African American National Security Advisor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of State. Whether in combat in Vietnam, leading troops in training in South Korea, or the halls of the White House, Powell had an incredible work ethic and habits. He later said, that “success is the result of perfection, hard work, learning from failure, loyalty, and persistence.”
A habit is something that a person does often in a regular and repeated way. The US Army is a compilation of habits. From the way to clean your weapon, to saluting superior officers, to how to spit shine your shoes (fresh shoe polish, small circles with water, not, spit), make your bed, and to shaving every day, one habit after another defines how people operate in the Army. One habit in Iraq -- the tendency for US Army convoys to use four of the same type of vehicles, as well as keep Iraqi civilian cars outside a protected bubble of the convoy -- enabled Shia insurgent groups to target the vehicles with an advanced Improvised Explosive Device. These habits I learned in the US Army still resonate with me -- I still find myself waking up at 5:30 in the morning to get my exercise in for the day.
It takes time to form a good or bad habit. There is a popular misconception that it only takes 21 days to build a habit. However, recent research has shown that on average, it takes 66 days of repetition before a habit is formed or it is stopped. No matter how many days it takes to build a habit you have to put in the work.
Charles Duhigg in his book The Power of Habit highlights the research that asserts that a simple three-part neurological loop is at the core of every habit: a cue, a routine and a reward. For instance, if I lay my bike shoes and my kit out at night, when I wake up in the morning, the shoes and the kit are my cue to go riding. I take off and go for a 25-mile ride down the Dragonfly Trail path by the river. When I finish, I get the reward of endorphins and a healthy feeling all day.
Once you understand the loop, then you can experiment with yourself to figure out why you have a current habit or how best to end a bad habit. For instance, if you have a bad habit, what is the trigger or cue? Most cues fall into five categories: location, time, emotional state, other people, and immediately preceding action. Once you have categorized the cue is, it is worth examining what the reward you receive. Changing the cue or the reward can change your habit.
For me, a bad habit I have is drinking coffee in the afternoon which then keeps me up at night. I find that on the days I go pick my daughter up from school, I grab a cup of coffee for the drive at 2:30 PM. So, the cue is having to drive to pick her up, the action is drinking the cup of coffee, and the reward is alertness and the ability to do work while waiting in the carpool line. However, the downside is staring at the ceiling at 10:00 PM trying and failing to go to sleep.
Or, if you are trying to create a habit, what works for you as a cue? What reward do you find compelling? Each of us is different -- experimenting with different cues and rewards are helpful for understanding what creates a habit for you.
“The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification of Olympic Swimmers,” is a 1989 article written by Daniel Chambliss. The author spent five years examining swimmers at every level from novice to Olympian to understand what makes swimmers excellent. He concludes that “Excellence is mundane. Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then fitted together into a synthesized whole.”
Like excellence, grit is a habit. And grit is built upon the mundane. There are dozens of small skills and activities that each must be mastered, drilled into a habit, and then combined and synchronized into a whole that enables us to have grit and accomplish a gritty goal. I have found that to pursue and achieve a long-term goal people must improve and enhance their perseverance, their resilience, their courage to deal with the fear of failure, and their drive. Although each of the tasks are small in themselves, improving each until mastery is achieved, enables you to gradually achieve your goal. In short, the little things count.
This idea seems daunting. At the end of the movie The Martian, after spending 560 days alone on Mars before his rescue, Mark Watney (the astronaut played by Matt Damon) talks to a new bunch of astronauts. He tells them "At some point, everything’s gonna go south on you… everything’s going to go south and you’re going to say, this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That’s all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem… and you solve the next one… and then the next. And If you solve enough problems, you get to come home."
Now, we aren’t faced with the gritty problem of how to survive on Mars by ourselves for over a year, but the concept is the same. Whether you want to run a marathon, earn an MBA, or balance your check book every month, you must break your gritty problem down into parts. Then spend the time figuring out ways to enhance, optimize, and habitualize elements of your perseverance, your resilience, your courage, and your drive makes the journey more manageable. You may also need to figure out things that you are currently doing that must be abandoned so you have the bandwidth to do the new things necessary to accomplish your gritty goal.
Go on the offensive and habitualize your grit, persevere, and accomplish your gritty goal.