Life Journey from a Reader’s Perspective — Book: Grit
Grit is the other stack of books a church mentor gave my friends for the Thanksgiving holiday gift exchange a couple of years ago, along with Atomic Habits by James Clear. I listened through Grit on Audible when I was fighting against mental anxiety. It was a good book because it gave me hope and confidence that following through in the tough time would eventually get further than I felt. But besides that, I cannot recall much more. Therefore I read through it again recently to retrieve the significant points that resonate with me.
Why are we talking about ‘Grit’?
In the Preface, the author Angela Duckworth recalled her childhood memory of being told, “You know, you’re not a genius” by her father. After many years when she received the MacArthur Fellowship, sometimes called the “genius grant,” she hoped she could travel back in time and share with her father:
I’m going to grow up to love my work as much as you love yours. I won’t just have a job; I’ll have a calling. I’ll challenge myself every day. When I get knocked down, I’ll get back up. I may not be the smartest person in the room, but I’ll strive to be the grittiest.
(p.xi, Preface)
In the book, Duckworth explored the word ‘talent’ as an overemphasized notion. Thus everything else can be underemphasized. Her quote from Nietzsche might explain the underlying reason:
Our vanity, our self-love, promotes the cult of the genius. For if we think of genius as something magical, we are not obliged to compare ourselves and find ourselves lacking … To call someone ‘divine’ means: ‘here there is no need to compete.’
(p.39, Effort Counts Twice)
Our tendency to praise talent can also breed a toxic culture among already ‘talented.’ The author borrowed Journalist Malcolm Gladwell’s critique on The War for Talent, where he pointed out that Enron epitomized the ‘talent mindset,’ demanding their employees prove that “They were smarter than everyone else inadvertently contributed to a narcissistic culture, with an overrepresentation of employees who were both incredibly smug and driven by deep insecurity to keep showing off. It was a culture that encouraged short-term performance but discouraged long-term learning and growth.” (p.30, Distracted by Talent)
Talent and Grit
After more than a decade of research on the theory of the psychology of achievement, Duckworth published an article containing two simple equations:
Talent is how quickly your skills improve when you invest effort.
Achievement is what happens when you take your acquired skills and use them.
Through this statement, the author recognized the importance of talent in pursuing achievement and emphasized talent factors in the calculation twice because “Effort builds skills. At the same time, effort makes skills productive.”
How to cultivate Grit?
The author laid out two approaches to cultivating grit, the Inside out approach and the Outside in approach. I want to elaborate more on the Inside out approach as I experience every part of this grit-cultivating framework that resonates with my understanding of how to keep going under adversaries. As I call it, the grit-cultivating framework or process has four components: Interest, Practice, Purpose, and Hope.
I don’t have a field of achievement or expertise to prove this framework works out. But in the past ten years, I have been actively involved in campus ministry for international students in various colleges in the U.S. I’m nowhere excellent nor talented but filled with many humbling and frustrating moments. Nevertheless, I never quit or switched to another kind of Christian ministry. Partially, I might have been even less ‘effective’ if I had changed to other ministries. Looking back, I can testify that one of these four components in the grit-cultivating framework gave me a spur of energy when I was about to give up.
Purpose
The initial reason I started to get involved in ministry for international students was not because of a self-oriented interest but more for a cause. I’m sincerely thankful for my mentors in college who introduced me to Christian belief and later helped me to grow in my faith, so I considered it a worthy calling to imitate their footsteps and allow people to find meaning and purpose in life.
Practice
Throughout my college and postgrad years, I have had many opportunities to live, mentor, and work with international students. I enjoyed it initially because it gave me a sense of honor and privilege to help people and hence often get recognized as a ‘good man.’ But the issue arose when my ‘good work’ was not recognized or appreciated when people did not change as I hoped, and significantly when my own life did not evolve in the ways I expected, and when I had to give up time and resources that I did not want to. Those were the dark valleys that made me regret my own decisions.
Hope
But through those moments, I was brought to the realization that Christian ministry is not about the work of philanthropy; it’s not about doing ‘good work’ to please people and earn a good name for myself. It’s more about personalizing daily how my life is saved internally and eternally from the murmuring voices of my tiny heart filled with pride, insecurity, and laziness. It’s about reassuring I have received the new power to overwrite these voices with the voice that calls me beloved and blessed; It’s about celebrating I have received the new wisdom to discern what is true and significant in a world filled with noise and lies. This inner peace gave arise a sense of hope and strength for me to continue on this journey that seems never to end and never guarantees external rewards.
Interest
As much as doing ministry can be fun and exciting since we play sports, go on trips, enjoy good food, and get to know people of various kinds. I had difficulty relating this to being satisfying according to my definition of interest. I delight in fulfilling my intellectual desire to learn new knowledge and make my system of understanding the world more complete. I used to feel frustrated that the things that fascinate me, such as art, architecture, literature, and history, have no direct use in the ministry context besides giving me some approachability as someone who reads and is curious about a wide range of topics. But as I gradually understood, the core Christian message on salvation and sanctification can sound foreign and irrelevant to most international students. I want to create good content to illustrate the ways and wisdom of our Creator are consistent with many values highly uphold by other cultures. My passion and interest in knowledge can be redirected to help people discover the ways, and the truth of our Father and Creator is not so distant. It can be found in the good and things many people appreciate and pursue. As it says in Psalm 19:
The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.
Renewed Purpose
After being in ministry for international students for many years, I asked myself again what keeps me going and feeling passionate about it. It's about seeing people miraculously transformed, from aloof to relational, from fearful to courageous, from disinterested to passionate, from competition to mutual strengthening, and hostility to reconciliation. I wish I had the space and privacy to tell some of the stories, but I trust you understand the joy when someone overcomes the mental barrier that seems to trap them forever and experiences triumph and new life.
Many people follow sports, whether football, basketball, baseball, or soccer; as a sports fan, I also taste the pain and frustration that our favorite sports team or player always falls at the same challenge. Despite their tremendous talent, effort, and hope placed by their fans, most of them failed to live up to the more extraordinary legacy we’d like to see.
I started following Argentina’s national soccer team during the 2006 World Cup and witnessed the first World Cup game of the 18-year-old Lionel Messi. Since then, Messi was onto the journey of establishing his legacy as one of the greatest soccer players. But despite his victories and champions at the club level and countless personal records and achievements, he could not lead Argentina to an International championship, not even in Copa America. After losing to Germany the for the 3rd time in a row in the 2014 World Cup final, I disappointedly thought 2014 would be the highest achievement Messi could ever accomplish with his national team. I once thought Messi would give in to his fate when he announced retirement from the national team when Argentina lost to Brazil in the Final of 2019 Copa America, the 4th consecutive runoff in six years for Messi’s national team. I thought Messi would be one of those great players with excellent records but not enough toughness and leadership to lead his team in adversaries.
But in the 2021 Copa America, Messi finally won a championship with his national team. Even though it’s not World Cup, it’s not the Euro Cup, where most of the world’s attention goes. It was huge for Messi to have the confidence and hope to win a championship with his national team. Then it was the miracle of the 2022 Qatar World Cup, and we witnessed the 35-year-old Lionel Messi, more confident and fearless than ever, in his physical prime. He carried his team to the ultimate championship by scoring goals in each single knockout round, which he had never scored a knockout goal in his previous four World Cup journeys. Out of Messi's total 13 World Cup goals, seven were accomplished in the 2022 World Cup. No one can pinpoint what leads to such a miracle. But I believe the 2021 Copa America enabled Messi to defeat his last mental enemy on the final stretch of completing his legacy.
I want more international students to experience their version of the ‘2021 Copa America’ moment; it’s a moment that might seem insignificant at the time. Still, it will become the anchoring point they can look back on for the rest of their life, the tremendous force that helps them break out of the self imposed prison in their minds and hearts.
Growing grit from the outside in
I don’t want to make it sounds like cultivating grit is a self-improvement project because Angela Duckworth expanded on the fact that cultivating grit can be an endearing trait passed down from parents to their children, from a team to its player, from an organization or community to its members. And often, it’s the more feasible way to cultivate a culture of grit, best explained by her quote from the sociologist Dan Chambliss, who studied how great swimmers achieve world-class excellence by joining a great team. He said:
There’s a hard way to get grit and an easy way. The hard way is to do it by yourself. The easy way is to use conformity — the basic human drive to fit in — because if you’re around a lot of people who are gritty, you’re going to act grittier.
(p.247, A Culture of Grit)
I also want to echo that with my personal experience. As I grow grittier over the year as a minister, which has to do with my constantly renewed interest, practice, purpose and hope. But essentially it’s the church community around me gave me constant support during my time of valleys and hills to buy me the time and space for recovery, nurturing and restoration after many times of personal shame and sense of defeat. Without my countless mentors and friends, I would not even read this book; I would not be sitting here and recounting this story.
Goodness over greatness
More shall be discussed in this book, such as setting goals aligned with your mission to cultivate your grit instead of unthinkingly jumping into anything and never giving up and calling it cultivating grit. But I will leave for next time when the context is more suited. And essentially, the author pointed out at the end of the book that grit isn’t everything for a person to grow and flourish because Character is plural. These also include “moral character,” which David Brooks described as “eulogy virtues” because “in the end, they may be more important to how people remember us than anything else. When we speak admiringly of someone being a ‘deeply good’ person, I think it’s this cluster of virtues we’re thinking about.”(p.274, Conclusion)
I hope you may also find your mission field to cultivate grit and foster a culture of grit for more people.
But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.
2 Corinthians 4:7–9
