PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT
How to Build Grit and Resilience
Five tips for pushing through difficulty and getting back on track
Being an entrepreneur is taking the hard road. You’ll have to continually work on yourself and your business at significant personal risk, and do it for much longer under harsher conditions than you might expect, to even have a chance at succeeding. Despite all of that effort, things will still go wrong, and the likelihood that you’ll fail outright is high. It’s not for everyone, and will undeniably change you forever. Through all of this, you’ll need to maintain your mental clarity and remain centered, or your decision-making ability and happiness will suffer. To do that, you’ll need to build grit and resilience — two of the most important qualities you can develop as an entrepreneur.
Put simply, grit is the ability to last, and resilience is the ability to recover.
Psychology defines grit as “passion and perseverance for long-term goals.” We all know someone who has a fantastic small business idea or innovation but can only be excited about it for 10 minutes, hours, days, etc. If you can’t sustain passion for your vision for the next 7–10 years, there’s a good chance you’ll give up before you succeed. And think about it — how can you get other people excited about what you’re doing if you’re not feeling it yourself? Grit is about staying committed to a goal for as long as necessary to see it through.
Resilience, on the other hand, is the ability to quickly and easily adapt positively after a difficult situation. When you face intense stress or adversity, can you keep your balance? When you lose your balance, can you recover it quickly? Resilience is the opposite of fragility. Fragility is giving away your power. Resilience is taking it back. We all have a breaking point — a point at which we have put up with so much bullshit for so long that we can’t do it anymore — but building resilience is about pushing that boundary as far out as possible and making the time you need to recover from intense periods of stress and adversity as short as possible. Put simply, grit is the ability to last, and resilience is the ability to heal. They’re complementary traits that contribute both to your ability to make things happen in the world and your ability to stay happy while you do so.
The theory underlying these techniques is that it’s possible to use internal and external factors to shift your perspective to your advantage.
Fortunately, humans have been thinking about grit and resilience for thousands of years, and modern psychology has elaborated on these ideas. The theory underlying these techniques is that it’s possible to use internal and external factors to shift your perspective to your advantage. You’ll be using a) language and your internal cognitive discourse, and b) your outer experiences and environment to change your perspective. I should also note that these tricks assume a certain level of self-awareness. If you’re not able to observe your internal processes, you might struggle with putting these techniques to use. Without further ado, here are five mental tricks you can use to build grit and resilience.
1. Suspend value-judgments
Technique: The next time you catch yourself making qualitative statements in your internal dialog (i.e., “That’s bad,” “She’s annoying,” etc.), identify how you’re feeling, instead (i.e., “I am feeling x because of y”). Then, remind yourself that, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet puts it, “…there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
Explanation: This technique helps you build resilience by changing the language of your cognitive discourse to shift the locus of control from something external you can’t control to something internal you can, and gives you an entry point into your value-judgment loop where you can disrupt and control it.
Everyone has an internal value-judgment loop. When you perceive something, your mind’s natural inclination is to try to figure out whether it’s “good” or “bad,” desirable or not. This is useful in some circumstances but not valuable for others.
The Stoics figured out a long time ago that the value-judgments we make about things don’t come from outside ourselves, but from within ourselves. Thus, they can be controlled. Controlling your value-judgments builds equanimity and detachment, which makes you more resilient.
2. Suspend belief
Technique: The next time you’re tempted to use language like “I know,” “I think,” “I believe,” “X is Y,” etc., use phrases like “it seems,” “it appears,” etc., or turn your statement into a question, instead. Practice arguing against yourself — every time you form an opinion, immediately take a second and third position, and argue just as hard for those in your internal dialog.
Explanation: This technique helps you build resilience by changing the language you use in your cognitive discourse to shift the locus of control from your subjective opinion to the external appearance of things, focusing your mind on what is evident and what is not. This leads naturally to a focus on real data, real results, and a generally more scientific, rational approach.
We live in a time that places a high value on personal opinion. People often form opinions hastily, with little deep thought, or delegate their reasoning to other people, instead, regurgitating views picked up in blog posts like this one or wherever else.
Founders often change direction after reading a blog post, having a conversation with a friend, or seeing something in TechCrunch, for example. Or, on the other end of the spectrum, founders will often belligerently stick to a single opinion even after it is proven to be problematic or outright wrong. Where you want to be is in the middle, between those two extremes.
The Skeptics figured out a long time ago that developing detachment from your opinion by suspending belief helps you build poise, which makes you more resilient in your most fundamental thinking and decision-making processes. Remember, our minds are pattern recognition machines, often seeing things that aren’t there. This technique helps you control that and makes it easier to follow the evidence to objective truths, avoiding the trap of clinging to a subjective opinion.
3. Take a step back
Technique: The next time you’re faced with adversity, check in with yourself on your motivation, perspective, and gratitude:
- Motivation: Why am I doing this? Do I still feel strongly about that? What are my values?
- Perspective: How bad is this issue? What’s the worst outcome here? How likely is it, and how bad would that be?
- Gratitude: What do I have going for me? How could things be worse? What unearned good exists in my life?
Explanation: When you’re under stress or experiencing a difficult situation, your objectivity goes out the window as your mind focuses on the experience itself and how awful it is. To disrupt that process, take a step back and get a little perspective.
Reminding yourself about why you’re doing this, that the situation probably isn’t all that bad, and that you have a lot of things going for you to be grateful for can help you keep a clear, calm head when you’re making tough decisions in a crisis.
Checking in with yourself this way is a good thing to do periodically, as well, but building the habit of doing it as soon as you feel yourself being pushed or pulled off-center will make you an incredibly resilient entrepreneur.
4. Immerse yourself in small hardships
Technique: It’s natural to seek out comfort and pleasure, and generally, that’s a good thing. Seeking out discomfort, though, can make you stronger. Only you can know what this means for you, but finding small ways to make yourself uncomfortable can toughen you up and innoculate you against discomfort and unpleasantness.
Explanation: This technique helps you build resilience and grit by helping you find your strength and realize that you’re tougher than you might think. Many successful entrepreneurs have origin stories filled with adversity, struggle, and hardship in their formative years. I’m one of these myself and feel that those struggles prepared me for entrepreneurship in ways that I’m still discovering to this day. To get stronger, do harder things.
This is another Stoic trick described by many writers, including Marcus Aurelius, Musonius Rufus, Seneca, and Epictetus. They realized that if you habitually expose yourself to something uncomfortable, unpleasant, or difficult instead of continually seeking out what’s comfortable, pleasant, and easy, it works like a flu shot against situations that arise in day-to-day life by helping you discover your inner strength. It also helps you develop detachment from materialism, which can help you make better decisions.
5. Have more varied experiences
Technique: Seek out experiences that fundamentally change your point of view. If you’re not adventurous, have an adventure. Try something cultural. Travel. Learn a language or other new skills. Meet and befriend different kinds of people, etc.
Explanation: This technique helps you develop resilience and grit by exposing you to multiple points of view, frames of reference, and mental models. It also gives you more ways to relate to more different kinds of people.
Various schools of thought discuss this method as a union of opposites, but the idea is simple. If you increase the variety of your experience, you can improve the subtlety and nuance of your perception and your thought.
Additional resources
- Grit on Wikipedia
- Resilience on Wikipedia
- Stoics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
- Skeptics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
- Pyrrhonism: How the Ancient Greeks Reinvented Buddhism
- Outlines of Pyrrhonism
- Genuine Pretending: On the Philosophy of the Zhuangzi
- Ecclesiastes: Annotated & Explained (my favorite translation & exegesis)
- A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy
Conclusion
If you learn how to suspend value-judgments, suspend belief, take a step back, immerse yourself in small hardships, and have more varied experiences, you’ll be well on your way to building the grit and resilience you need to be an entrepreneur and be ready to handle whatever life might throw at you. Making these five techniques habitual will also enrich and spark joy in your life in all kinds of unexpected ways.
