However, the degree of pain must correspond with the optimum impact on tissue and metabolic restructuring.
A bit of pain in marathon is natural and helps to incrementally improve performance over years. We should all love and admire Bolt and Kipchoge, use them as an inspiration, but keep our dreams realistic. Most adepts fail, and many get seriously hurt. Thousands or millions try to emulate the champions. Those at the top illustrate the survivorship bias. Grit has destroyed the lives of many sportsmen. As West Point analyses are tainted by mixing those two qualities, they are also questionable. Instead of recommending "grit", we should shelter passions that fuel the self-cultivating learn drive Sports and schoolĪngela loves talking about sports, however, in the field of grit, we need to clearly separate passionate learning from the grit in sports. See: Formula for healthy self-discipline. The rational approach to self-discipline is to apply its coercion within the optimum push zone. I disagree with their emphasis on grit in education. I see a great deal of similarities between those three gritty ladies with cultural roots in Asia. She seems to commit the same offences as the Tiger Mom Amy Chua, or Teru Clavel. She seems to ignore the fact that grit can hurt you! See: Harms of self-discipline. She extols sportsmen who get up at 4:30 am to do their workouts. When Duckworth speaks about James Heckman showing grit by working with "walking pneumonia", she does not see it as a side effect of his passion, but a thing worth admiring. A passionate student can then use 10,000 hours marker as an incentive to show patience when initial results are meager. In the same fashion, Gladwell's 10,000 hours is making people work super-hard with an expectation of miracles, while the right formula would start from passion. Angela would do more good if she called her book "passion" rather than "grit", because many people today read it as the need to clench their teeth and to grind through life in glory (see: The grind is the glory). She paints the two as a correlation, while the only good depiction of healthy grit is the one that shows it as a direct consequence of passion. But where she is wrong, she may be dangerously wrong.ĭuckworth does not clearly separate the causal links between grit and passion. This is where Angela Duckworth hit the nail on its head.
This is a great motivator for more learning. At the same time, I love to be criticized back. Due to my natural cognitive bias, I have no doubt that I am right in my criticism. Loud criticism of genius makes it possible, in the long run, to find out who is wrong. This is where new precious inspiration can be found. It is extremely satisfactory to navigate their fantastically coherent models only to find golden cracks. In this text, Duckworth's grit should be understood as self-discipline boosted with passion and perseverance. I explain in self-discipline that grit is trainable. Using extroversion, I explain that I am very skeptical of the Big Five as being resistant to training. If there is a true genetic trait called conscientiousness, it is not what I mean by grit in this text. I separate "grit" as a trainable skill from qualities that come with the genes. She adds optimistically that grit is trainable.ĭuckworth has been criticized by Dr Marcus Credé for using the term "grit" instead of a well-known personality trait "conscientiousness". She claims that grit is one of the most important factors of success in life. Angela Duckworth defines grit as a combination of passion and perseverance.