Our Obsession With Grit (Part 1) - The Limitations of Willpower
It is counterproductive to measure a person’s value by what they are able to endure.
You have to want it. And if you don’t have what it takes to see it through, then you didn’t want it bad enough.
Whatever it is. You’ve read the articles, you’ve heard the sports coaches (in real life or in movies), you’ve watched the motivational speakers, and hell, you probably learned this from your own upbringing. Desire, determination, will, willpower, grit, balls, resilience, heart.
To clear up any concerns right now, I am not about to say that any of those things are bad, because they aren’t bad. Determination is good. Resilience is vital. In my own life, I was taught this lesson and it has been reaffirmed time and time again: sometimes — many times, even — you really do just have it suck it up and get through it. It’s a huge part of the human experience and it always has been. So before you think I’m about to make the claim that we should drop these constructs, rest easy.
The claim that I am making, however, is that the relationship that we have given between a person’s will and their want is significantly more tenuous than we treat it to be, and most damagingly, how we associate those two things with worthiness is making our lives worse.
Yes, if a person wants something bad enough, they’ll keep working at it. Yes, if you see a person working at something diligently, they clearly want it pretty bad. There is a relationship there. And yes, that type of ambition is a very good trait to have. But not acknowledging all of the other elements at play is a misapplication of these values. This leads to a misreading of situations at hand, which leads to a society not operating in the most efficient way possible. And when you have a culture that is as gung-ho about efficiency as ours is, that seems like it would be a pretty big deal! Yet we end up handicapping ourselves based on principle, which suggests to me, it’s probably not a great principle (at least not when we apply it as universally as we do).
First, I need to hammer out some technicalities, because we have a lot of words, and we often use those words interchangeably, even when we shouldn’t. Determination, for example, and willpower do not mean the same thing. Perseverance gets tossed around too, but that’s also different. They’re closely related, they often rely on each other, but treating them as synonymous or mutually inclusive is one of the ways we got to this thinking in the first place. I know the political left has sort of co-opted the phrase “words matter” in a way that’ll make half the people reading this tune out, so let me make this distinction: the definition of words matter, and applying them correctly is necessary to parsing the finer specificity of our human experience.
Because we use these terms interchangeably, we often treat them as falling into one large conceptual umbrella. And to an extent, they do. Perseverance is aided by determination and willpower, sure, among an assortment of other things. It makes sense to lump them all together, but the ways in which they differ — more specifically, the roles in which they play — need to be respected. Perseverance is a behavior, determination is a mindset, willpower is a resource. These things make up a person’s…whatever you call it. Grit, heart, drive, etc. There may be times when I use these terms or concepts interchangeably myself (I already have), but I’m doing so only because that is how they are often understood. And also, yeah, depending on the context, they can mix together enough where they might as well be the same thing.
My key focus here, though, is willpower. Of all the things that go into our idea of what it means to be successful in an endeavor or even worthy as a person, willpower is the star of the show. It is the measure of strength, it is vital to our survival and momentum, and it is the first thing that will betray us. And that is because…
Willpower is a finite resource. While things like determination and perseverance and discipline are traits and attributes, part of our personality and identity, willpower is an active ability that commonly — but not always — manages those things. Think of it as the assist, keeping yourself in line, like bumpers on the side of a bowling alley. Your ball won’t always hit the side, but when it does, your willpower is there and it can keep you out of the gutter and on track. But when willpower goes, everything else is put in jeopardy.
Some have more willpower than others, some have less, but we all have an allotment of it that needs to be replenished, especially when it’s relied on too often. Willpower itself, however, is in no way an indicator of a person’s drive or desire (although choosing to never use it might be). Most of us know the feeling of just saying “fuck it” after a particularly tough day and going hog on a family size bag of potato chips even though we’re trying to drop 20 pounds by summer. But you’re not going to keep gorging when you wake up the next morning, because you no longer feel the need to. You’re still able to go to work even if you don’t want to because you rested and got some juice back. Maybe not all of it — if you’re constantly taking hits day after day you’ll need more than one nights rest to fully recharge — but generally speaking, that’s how the cycle goes. We burn some gas, we fill the tank. But just because someone’s tank runs dry doesn’t mean they’re weak or uncommitted or lacking in some area. It doesn’t mean they just couldn’t hack it or didn’t want to hack it. It means they’re a normal person with normal human limitations.
Any time you will yourself to do something you don’t want to do or resist something you do want, you use willpower. That’s literally what willpower is, and so there is a certain sensibility as to why we choose that for our focus. We know if a person wants something bad enough, they’re going to do what it takes to see it through, even when things get difficult. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. And since willpower is the thing that keeps us on track, we largely credit it for our success. Makes sense, right? But then we apply it to desire. Whether it’s losing weight, or getting off drugs, or any other arduous endeavor, we go around saying things like, “It’s just a matter of willpower. You’ve got to make the choice, how bad do you want it?”
But that’s antithetical to the entire concept. By definition, if it’s a matter of wanting it bad enough, you’d never need willpower in the first place. But desire and motivation are feelings, and feelings don’t go in a straight line like that. They are fickle and fleeting. Willpower is needed for when you explicitly don’t want it. (Or, in the case of junk food and drugs — when you crave the thing you’re trying to resist.)
It might seem like I’m just being picky and pedantic here, but there’s a real downside at stake. Namely, all of this suggests that we can simply grit our way through anything, through sheer force of determination, perseverance, willpower. If you choose to do so. If you really want it. Through this mindset, we begin to view failure as a choice as well as a result of not wanting to succeed bad enough. Success then, is also a choice, and a matter of achieving some vague pre-required level of desire. But how bad do you have to want success in order to achieve it? Seems to me the only answer anyone gives is “bad enough,” which is…pretty meaningless. How is anyone supposed to actually apply that advice in any sort of constructive manner?
Sure, maybe the sentiment works for motivation, when your football coach is trying to hype you up before a game or when you’re down by three touchdowns at halftime, but practically speaking, it might be one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard. Actual success and failure looks nothing like that.
And here’s the wild part. We know this. We are fully aware of the amount of other stuff that goes into success. The knowledge, the planning, the organization, the diligence, the learning, the practice, the adaptation, the thought, the instinct, the circumstances. And we know that even if you do all of that stuff, you still might fail because you didn’t do it well enough, or someone else did it better than you or before you, or maybe you did everything perfectly and beyond expectation but things just didn’t break your way. Maybe your success was sheer dumb luck and maybe failure was too. Look around you, and you’ll see these things in action every day.
Yet we still stick to these platitudes, to the point where this is how we truly think of, and talk about, success, even when we know the reality is far more complex. And I’m not sure why. My best guess is that when we say these things we sound strong, we feel strong, and people will recognize us as strong. Maybe if we say them enough, we’ll actually be strong. And there’s value to that! A strong mindset and a confident self-image is an important part of handling any situation you find yourself in. But when we mistake motivational platitudes for real life procedures of success — that is, functional actions we take in order to reach our goals — we damn ourselves to failure. We associate success with willpower, even when it doesn’t apply. Determination? Sure. If you’re not motivated to do something you’ll never do it. Resilience? Yep. You gotta pick yourself back up and try again when things go wrong. But willpower?
Okay, yes, sometimes willpower. But the thing is, a lot of things take a lot of willpower—more than the majority of us have the capacity for—and as such, it’s not something we can rely on. Think of it like anything else. You don’t blame the circuit breaker for blowing a fuse because you plugged twenty counter appliances into one kitchen outlet. You don’t blame your muscles for tearing into a hernia because you tried to lift a thousand pounds. And that’s probably because it’s all tangible. There’s a physical, observable cause and effect. Yet when it comes to our mental and emotional struggles—things that aren’t external or tangible—we just go “mind over matter,” like its fucking magic.
With this mindset, as well as our ability to conflate the finite resource of willpower with our level of determination, perseverance, and desire, it’s easy for us to look at failure or bad circumstances as an inherent fault of character. We can look at people like drug addicts and go, “This is their choice. They could stop if they just wanted to, but they don’t. They want to get high,” without ever considering what is actually, realistically, functionally needed for their successful recovery. We take for granted that if people deserve success, then they’ll get it, and if they don’t, they won’t.
For those who have never experienced withdrawal, consider hunger. Not that “oh I could use a little snack” bullshit. I’m talking about the deep, nauseating, feel-like-you’re-going-to-vomit hunger. It’s horrible, right? Now imagine feeling that in every cell in your body, each one screaming for relief. It’s a process that wrecks havoc on your system, both mentally and physically, and it doesn’t last for one training session. It’s not going to stop once you push out two more reps on the bench press. It can go on for days. It can be so intense that for some substances, stopping cold turkey risks killing you outright. And even when you get through that major hurdle, most addicts have been using for so long, they need to relearn how to interact and cope with the world — with life itself — with all the anxiety and poor functioning that aimlessness and helplessness can bring. That’s why it’s so easy to fall back into abuse. Heroin specifically is famous for making you feel better than you ever have or ever will, in a way that someone who’s never used it wouldn’t be able to imagine. And we expect people to just push through that? Most of us can’t even eat a fucking salad for lunch more than two days in a row.
If getting off drugs were simply a matter of willpower or personal strength or any of that, nobody would get clean. If getting off drugs were a matter of simply wanting to do so, almost every one would. “Suck it up and get it done” simply does not apply here. What you’re asking of people in this situation is Herculean. You might as well tell them to hold their breath until they die. That’s about what the recovery process feels like anyway.
Addiction and recovery is one example, but on a larger scale, this is a detriment to our society itself. When we measure worth and character by what a person is able to endure, we put no value in making things better. We’re actually incetivized to make things worse. The struggles of addiction, the struggles of poverty , the struggles of anything, really — we have the same answer to them all: Suck it up. Rise to the occasion. And if you can’t or don’t, then you weren’t worth a damn anyway.
That is bonkers.
Personal willpower is only one necessary tool out of many at our disposal, and we need all of them to succeed. It doesn’t matter how hard you work or how much determination and willpower you display if effort is the only thing you have. This applies from the drug house all the way to corporate America.
It doesn’t matter how desperately you want to kick your addiction, if you don’t find an ironclad support system and adequate mental healthcare, you’re likely to relapse.
It doesn’t matter if you’re the most persistent cold-calling, fast-talking, businessman since Alec Baldwin introduced himself as “Fuck you,” in Glengarry Glenn Ross, your company will crash and burn if your business strategy doesn’t meet the needs of the market.
Those things won’t suddenly succeed because you tried, tried, and tried again. You’ll just keep spinning your tires, wondering why all your efforts refuse to pay off even though everyone said they were supposed to.
