This was the 8th book I read in 2020.
When I talked about the 5 AM Club, I mentioned that it was a revolutionary book and certainly a life changer. After finishing that book, I had doubts whether any other book will be able to charm me as much as the 5 AM Club did. Boy, I was so wrong.
Reading GRIT followed by the 5 AM Club is the best thing I did so far. The book “GRIT” is so good, backed by scientific evidence that you get mesmerize all the time. I would definitely score this higher than the 5 AM Club, due to reasons that are hard to explain in words.
Talking about the author of the book – Dr. Angela Duckworth, a McArthur Fellow. Oh man, what a wonderful profile she has. Just looking at her credentials makes you wonder how smart, talented, and “genius” this woman is. But, as she has mentioned it in her book multiple times – she is not “genius”, it is her hard work that has paid off and she has backed that by numerous examples and scientific research.
Shall we dive in, then?
Motivation behind the book
Growing up, the author’s Dad used to tell her “You are no genius”, yet she was awarded a McArthur Fellow Grant, which is also known as the GENIUS GRANT. Even after receiving this coveted prize, that most of us can only dream about, she was certain that she was no genius, and that’s what led to her research about how truly is a measure of long-term life goals? That was the motivation behind the book.
Effort Counts Twice
In the book, the author has mentioned, to accomplish/achieve anything in life, you must have skill. If you don’t have the skill, then skill can be developed with efforts. But the path from skill to achievement is incomplete with efforts. In summary, if you don’t put effort, you won’t be able to build skills and once the skills are acquired, if you don’t put the effort into your skills, you won’t be able to achieve that coveted accomplishment.
That’s what “Effort Counts Twice” mean:
Talent X Effort = Skill
Skill X Effort = ACHIEVEMENT
The GRIT Scale
After determining that Effort is an important factor to achieve anything in life, her next question was how to measure this effort. Prior to her work, there was no scale that could measure efforts successfully.
As someone has said, “curiosity is the mother of all inventions”, she took matters into her own hands and designed what is known today as the “GRIT Scale”. Her research with National Spelling Bee, NFL Seahawks, other professional athletes, and teachers in the not-so-good neighborhoods showed that you can’t use IQ to measure someone’s success, it was “GRIT” which was a common factor between everyone you could imagine and was the correct predictor of a lifelong success of an individual.
The GRIT scale worked like a charm for her. The Scale is constructed by asking a participant with a set of questions. Each question is given a weighted point and at the end of the questionnaire, you are graded between 0 and 5. The higher the number, the grittier you are, the more chance of you succeeding in your long-term goals.
You can check out the grit scale in the third picture of my Instagram gallery below.
Goal Hierarchy
For me, personally, this has been the biggest learning from this book. It is such a simple concept, however, I missed it to implement in my life until I read this book. I have been an ardent follower of this when I was preparing for my MS and trying to come to the US, but, somehow, over the last three years, I got sidetracked and completely forgot about it, until now.
That’s why I love reading. It helps you learn new and important things to improve you and your surrounding.
To talk more about what the Goal Hierarchy means, simply put, to accomplish big goals, you must accomplish small goals first. This sounds logical and makes sense. But, still, I missed it. The author has given plenty of examples to buttress this and I immediately implemented for my running goal and some of the financial goals.
Let us talk about my running goal. If you read about my ultramarathon preparation posts, you would know that I have a goal of running 1,000 miles in the year 2020. So, that is my top-level goal. For achieving this top-level goal, the medium level goal would be at least 100 miles of running per month. And for achieving these medium level goals, I must accomplish my small-level goals which is running 20-25 miles per week. As you can see, my mind is focused on running 20-25 miles per week, without much thinking about running 1,000 miles for the year.
The only thing that I think is important here is to make sure you are on track. If you have a plan, that doesn’t mean you have achieved your goal. You must stop and check whether you actually achieved your goal or not. For me, personally, I like to keep my weekly and monthly check-in to see whether I am achieving my goals or not, and if I don’t what else I can do to fix that.
So far, I am well on track to beat this goal of mine. Hopefully, I will be able to do that.
Building skill is a testament of your patience
The next question while reading this book was whether I can build skills or not and if I can how much time I should spend on it?
The author very cleverly addresses this topic with relentless efforts and dedication, we can certainly build skills. The only thing that we should be very careful that we must know it takes time to build a skill. The fifth picture of my Instagram gallery below will show you the timeframe which is called THE DROPOUT ZONE, where less-gritty people try to quit while building skill. If you want to be successful, you have to stick through this dropout zone, because, if you stick with it for some more time, you will come back stronger and more successful.
As you can see in the picture, the world-class experts are made with more grit over time. One sentence answer – stick with it.
Growth Mindset – the way you build GRIT
This is one of the most important concepts that the author shared in this book. So far, we have seen how important it is to have the GRIT to be successful. But, the next logical question is how you build it. The author has a two-word answer for that – “GROWTH MINDSET“. The author has gone to extreme lengths with her examples to show the importance of the growth mindset and how to cultivate it.
I appreciated her efforts to make sure that the readers completely get how important it is. This goes on to show us how thoughtful this book is and the extreme care she took while writing it.
The sixth picture shows how to build a Growth Mindset. This picture was super helpful to draw the difference between what is and isn’t a growth mindset. I loved how the author used her own experience as a parent and a mother to show this differentiation.
After reading this chapter, it was clearer to me how to foster a growth mindset, for both myself and people surrounding me.
How to parent
& the last thing I wanna talk about in detail is the way it teaches you how to parent. If you know, I have been staying with my friends, who have two wonderful, beautiful, and awesome kids – Mr. Aryan & Mr. Arnav. Being their godparent, I knew I would need to know how to positively influence them to do the right thing and take care of each other. This book has been super helpful in teaching me different ways how to interact with kids and how to teach them life lessons in a positive way and how to make sure they are always smart, nice, and curious about their approach to life.
The things that the author talk about in this book are so so so helpful if you want to be an awesome parent. Over the past month, I have used some of the sentences from this book as-is to enhance the kids’ curiosity levels and to teach them to be respectful, curious, studious, and always keen to learn and improve upon things.
Some of the sections of this book are so well written especially to teach you how to parent as the author has taken her own example, being the mother of two daughters, and their stories of picking up a habit and giving up another, until they stick to the one that they love, have liking about it, and are ready to learn more about it. Simply put, this book is a must for new or expectant parents.
Conclusion
I will keep the conclusion short. If you wanna learn more about GRIT and are not an avid reader, I will highly recommend checking out the 6-minute clip below where the author talks about GRIT. It is a TED talk, so definitely worth checking out.
To put the entire book in a single sentence – “HARD & CONSISTENT EFFORT IS THE GUARANTEED WAY TO SUCCESS!”
See you at the next book review.
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