Grit
This piece is the first attempt I’ve made at writing in 2019.
Where I live in the United States there’s what I would describe as a cultural egregore around making plans, setting goals, and striving towards an improved life at the beginning of every calendar year.
There’s also an almost tacit understanding that the majority of these plans will fizzle out as we navigate through the year facing constraints on time, distraction, and unforeseen events.
Interestingly, I find myself in a place of reflection thinking about the year past and how many of the metaphorical seeds that were planted in 2018 need nurtured, tended and brought to completion.
The year 2018 was incredibly interesting. In lieu of resolutions, I like to frame my year thematically with a root word. Last year I chose “spontaneity” and I explored how that unfolded in a previous piece.
To summarize, stepping outside of familiar patterns and habits was incredibly liberating.
It also led to some of the most intense periods of progressive self-awareness and maturity the I’ve experienced thus far during this go-round at life.
This liberation was also tempered with some moments of turmoil from the health of family members to poor decisions I made in the process of making spontaneous decisions from an immature position.
One development in myself that I feel incredibly moved to tend and nurture is the discovery (and the attempt to embody) of a doctrine called universal self-acceptance.
I shall explore this topic in much greater detail with a full essay, but for now Here’s a quote that I think encapsulates the concept nicely:
“I accept myself because I’m alive and have the capacity to enjoy my existence. I am not my behavior. I can rate my traits and my behavior, but it is impossible to rate something as complex as my ‘self.’ My self consists of innumerable traits, not just this one. I strive for achievement only to enhance the enjoyment of my existence, not to prove my worth. Failing at any task cannot make me a failure.” — Nick Rajacic
This concept helps me extract the innumerable benefits of moving towards goals in life while minimizing the potentially negative tendencies of excessive self-criticism.
With this doctrine in mind, I’m choosing this year the word “grit” as a root word for 2019.
I’m specifically hoping to evoke the idea of grit that Angela Duckworth studies in her 2016 book Grit.
The book comes highly recommend, but to summarize all too briefly here are two quotes by the author:
“Grit is passion and perseverance especially for long-term goals.”
“If “talent x effort = skill” and “skill x effort = achievement,” then “talent counts. But effort counts twice.” — Angela Duckworth
Before encountering and seriously cultivating the grit personality trait I needed to discover the doctrine of unconditional self-acceptance.
These ideas compliment each other nicely and I’m excited to explore holding them both through the process of getting gritty.
Briefly, I’ll take a look at the research of Piers Steel to further elaborate on how I’m approaching grit. The aspect of Steel’s work that I’m referencing is a meta-analysis that he did on the science of motivation.
This work led to an equation to help capture the sometimes abstract concept of motivation.
Motivation = Expectancy x Value / Impulsivity x Delay
Expectancy measures the extent to which the subject actually believes they can accomplish what they're moving towards. We could also call this confidence.
Value measures the extent that a subject actually wants to accomplish the goal. We could also call this desire.
According to Steel’s work, the best strategy for maximizing the probability that you make regular effort and progress on a goal or project is to make both expectancy and value as high as possible. Another way to say this is we want to increase the numerator in the abstract equation.
The other half of the equation includes impulsivity and delay.
Impulsivity is simply distraction. Whether it’s new inputs and requests for time or a new idea that quickly takes on a feeling of infatuation before fizzling out.
Delay is pointing to the idea that if the end goal is too far into the future it becomes challenging to stay motivated and continue plugging away.
Sidebar: In the next section I’ll apply this equation to a few concrete examples, but briefly the antidote for a high delay factor is to break larger goals that we value immensely into chunks that we can make regular progress towards. See the work of Teresa Amabile for more on this concept.
Now, I’ll transition to an outline of how I’ll apply these concepts of grit and the motivation equation to some projects from last year that I will birth forward into this one.
First, I’ve written about starting a practice of drug and alcohol counselling and designing a clinical experiment to test the efficacy of dream treatments for substance or behavioral abuse disorders.
There are a few loose ends that need to be completed:
- The creation of two long-form essays that explore the two types of treatments that I’m studying (Smart Recovery treatment and dream treatment)
- An elevator pitch and slide deck that help me summarize the project succinctly and intelligently to both popular audiences and specialists
- Recruiting the final volunteers into the study and starting the experiment with cohort 1
- Completing the final steps to officially launch a freelance dream analysis practice
- Flesh out a marketing plan to attract the first 10 private analysands
Next, something I’ve written less about on this blog is the series of astrological lectures I was privileged to lead in 2018. I am a strong believer that astrology is both a useful tool and essential discipline for understanding both personality and cycle theory.
For some readers reading along since the scientific turn of the blog, this statement may upset some prior beliefs.
This is ultimately a positive development in our relationship because we’re starting to get to know each other better.
For long-term readers, this is most likely a welcome return to the weird.
Whether you fit into one of those behavioral segments or not, if you continue to follow our work on the blog you’ll see some work building up to a piece I’m submitting to The Ascendant which is the literary arm of the Association of Young Astrologers.
The piece I’m ultimately submitting is tentatively titled The relationship between natal astrology and Jung’s psychological alchemy.
I’ve read through and am processing the work Carl Jung did on synthesizing his psychological ideas with the ideas of classical, taoist, medieval and renaissance alchemists.
In particular, the work I’m referencing is found in the following volumes of his Collected Works:
- Volume 12 — Psychology and Alchemy (1968)
- Volume 13 — Alchemical Studies (1968)
- Volume 14 — Mysterium Coniunctionis (1970)
As Jung synthesized his ideas with alchemists, I will attempt to do the same with astrological ideas.
While this will be an unfolding process encompassing various astrological ideas from the Greco — Egyptian Alexandria to the modern age I’ll keep the Ascendant piece focused on the ideas of four astrologers.
- The classical astrologer Vettius Valens
- 17th-century astrologer William Lilly
- The modern astrologers Dane Rudhyar and Liz Greene
My hope is that this piece will be a contribution in an ongoing effort to refine, discipline, and add rigour to the practice of natal astrology as well as suggesting a path forward towards a counselling methodology to complement the insights brought forth during a chart reading.
Likewise, it will also contribute to a reenchantment of psychology helping to return the numinous to its proper place in the study of the mind.
Alas, before making such bold claims I must finish the work! Like my previous objective there are loose ends to complete:
- Move knowledge I gained from readings Jung’s work on alchemy into a deeper, more intuitive parts of my brain through more detailed notes, mind mapping, and contemplation.
- Select the aspects of the three volumes that best map on to my astrological synthesis
- Turn these aspects into 4 videos and essays to share via blog
- Compile this work into a long-form essay that will make up the submission to the Ascendant
The submission date is January 23rd (20 days from the time of this publication) to nail this deadline I will need to reduce impulsivity and increase grit as a conservative estimate tells me I have between 18 and 20 hours of work to complete before publication.
Finally, the last project to test my grit on is a series of poems I wrote based on a dream series I had in 2018. I’m calling this collection A few for Lily named for the dream figure who frequented me during that time and the demon Lilith who may be one and the same.
What’s interesting about this series is how easy it flowed. Essays like this tend to take a lot of discipline and time, but the poetry came to me in bursts of ecstatic imagination sometimes in the middle of the night or on the bus.
It’s been received fairly well and I’ve been invited to read it on two occasions, however, I have yet to have it published in 3rd party publications.
There’s a goal to get 5 of them published before self-publishing the entire collection. These are some of the things that need to happen beforehand:
- Thorough editing of each poem to improve following technical elements: words and images, lines and stanzas, meter, rhythm, and patterns
- Begin to systematically submit them to 3rd party publications
- Synthesize the poems with dream magic in the Greek Magical Papyri (more on this in a later post)
- Develop a launch plan to convince 100 people to download the collection upon publication
Of all three projects, this seems the most daunting and least approachable. I’m not sure why this is, but if I had to guess it has to do with a fear of editing poems I like and still having them rejected again and again.
Also, there is a weird feeling as an artist when your work is so personally meaningful and significant, but it’s time to publish it and risk ambivalence.
However, because creative expression is so intrinsically valuable to me I’m going to push through this barrier and use grit to finally finish this project.
It’s now time to marry the first and second part of this essay. First, grit. While writing this piece I took a break to shower and instead of using that incredibly valuable time to further explore the ideas I’m thinking about in this essay my mind wandered to an idea of speaking for corporations on how dreams can increase creativity and innovation.
Now, I don’t think this is a bad idea. In fact, it could be a great one! However, just the three projects I’ve outlined above is an ambitious workload on top of my other responsibilities.
A key thing to focus on as I’m cultivating grit is an infatuation with new ideas.
Returning to the motivation equation excessive time starting and dreaming up new projects or ideas contributes to impulsivity and distraction.
To mitigate this tendency the strategy I’ll use is a morning journaling program where I revisit the numerator of the equation reminding myself why I find them valuable.
Then, I’ll review what I have left and what I can do on that particular day. These efforts will increase the likelihood that I’ll stay on track by increasing the numerator of the motivation equation.
This post was more of a personal reflection than my typical essay, I’ll be back to updating the blog with some of the pieces listed above in the coming days.
Thanks for reading, tweet or reply if you’re trying out any of these strategies!
