Many times, individuals go into business but are doomed to failure even before they start. This is because too much focus is placed on a person’s natural talent as an indicator of success. Unfortunately, a person’s technical skills and natural talent are poor predictors of eventual business success. More than natural talent, the best predictor of business success is grit.
What I typically hear when I ask someone why they are considering the emotional and financial risk of starting a new business is: “I’m really good at [fill in the blank].” They mistakenly believe that simply because they have a skill they excel in or are always the smartest person in their field, they can build a successful business around it.
The flames of their mistaken beliefs are often fanned by the person’s own network of friends and family. It is much easier to recognize a person’s skills than to assess their level of commitment and determination to see things through. As a result, the individual’s network sees the most observable talents and encourages them to build a business around what they clearly see as their area of excellence.
For example, a person may be great at baking cookies, so their friends and family encourage them to create a business around baking cookies to sell to local shops. Or perhaps they recognize that the individual is great at creating social media posts that everyone loves and has lots of followers, so they encourage the person to hang out a shingle and become a freelance social media contractor.
However, according to Angela Duckworth, the author of the book “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, she says that grit can predict a person’s success in business much better than their natural talent or IQ.
But what is grit exactly?
Grit is a positive, non-cognitive trait based on an individual’s perseverance combined with a passion for a particular long-term goal or end state.
Wikipedia
Basically, I define grit as a person’s work ethic or ability to follow through on commitments.
Unfortunately, according to Angela, grit is often inversely related to a person’s talent. Without grit, these same people, though naturally talented, abandon their business idea before the business can gain traction if they encounter any obstacles. Without grit, talent is nothing more than unmet potential. However, gritty people stick with things that are important to them and seek ways to overcome obstacles and bounce back from failure.
Grit is the ability to persist in something you feel very passionate about and show a willingness to persevere, even in the face of obstacles. Grit involves passion, a clear understanding of one’s direction, and a commitment to follow things through.
New ideas and projects sometimes distract me from previous ones
Setbacks don’t discourage me; I don’t give up easily
I often set a goal but later choose to pursue a different one
I am a hard worker
I have difficulty maintaining my focus on projects that take more than a few months to complete
I finish whatever I begin
My interests change from year to year
I am diligent and never give up
I have obsessed over a particular idea for a project for a short period of time but then lost interest
I have overcome setbacks to conquer an important challenge
Depending upon the answers provided, she gives you a “Grit Score” between one and five and lets you know where you rank in comparison to other Americans.
Angela recounts that at one point, while she was a 7th-grade math teacher in New York City, the epiphany of grit struck her. While she had many students that were really good at absorbing math concepts, they were often not the ones that got the best grades in her class. She noted that motivation and not IQ was a better predictor of a student’s final grade. She concluded that social intelligence, looks, health, or IQ were not good predictors of success, but passion and perseverance were.
As it turns out, grit is living life like a marathon and not like a sprint. Grit is the stamina to stick to long-term goals day in and day out. Not for a few weeks of intense effort but for years so that goals become reality.
I have been writing this blog since 2004. In the first few years, traction was little, but it slowly built up over time. Then a change in Google’s algorithm caused our impressions and clicks to drop significantly. Since this site is not monetized and is a labor of love, my friends and family encouraged me to move on. However, my grit caused me to dig in even deeper, and after several months of agony and effort, we emerged on the other side. Then we got hacked, corrupting our database of past posts, and not long after that, I suffered a motorcycle accident. It would have been easy to use these as excuses to move on, but grit was the fuel that prevented me from giving up.
I remind clients that there are few examples of businesses that had overnight success. Most businesses that we know today, such as FedEx, Amazon, Turner Broadcasting System, ESPN, and Tesla, took many years or even decades to reach a basic level of profitability and success. Had the founders not possessed grit, many of the businesses we rely on would never have made it.
As humans, we have a bias toward looking at a person’s innate abilities. We see their talent as an indicator of future success. The unfortunate thing is that there is a gap between having a gift for something and being able to capitalize on it. This is where grit comes into play.
To succeed at anything requires both talent and effort. However, when it comes to achievement in life, effort counts twice. Let’s break it down. Talent is the speed at which a person learns a new skill. It is the strengths that they possess that impact their ability to learn new things in a particular discipline. The effort, in contrast, is the work that a person is willing to put in to develop and apply that talent. The reason effort is so important and why it counts twice is that not only will effort allow you to accomplish your goal, but at the same time, it will help you improve your related skill.
The idea that effort counts twice comes from Angela, where she provides two equations in her book (Talent x Effort = Skill) and (Skill x Effort = Achievement). The key takeaway is that talent alone is not enough.
What grit does is set the right conditions for continued effort over a longer period of time. So, if you have grit, you are more likely to invest the time and energy necessary to achieve success.
Angela points out that there are four psychological assets attributed to grit:
Interest. When you enjoy something, you tend to spend more time exploring, and it creates the desire to learn more.
Capacity to practice. This is the daily discipline to invest the necessary effort to improve. As they say, “Practice leads to mastery.”
Purpose. This is the desire to do something that matters. It is difficult to sustain any long-term amount of effort if what you are doing does not matter. Your purpose can either contribute to something personally rewarding or contribute to the well-being of others.
Hope. Hope acts as a multiplier of the other three attributes in that it is the driver that keeps us going when things get tough.
Do you have the level of grit to make your business a success?
