Resilience, Perseverance and Grit
When we were young, remember how our teachers/parents used to motivate us by phrases like “Work Hard!”, “Don’t give up!”, “Be Strong!”, “Follow Your Passions!”, right ? But, I was never exactly sure how well these phrases actually worked to motivate us. Well, for starters, when I was young I was really passionate about being a guitarist, DJ and also an F1 racer. As I grew up, it turned out that I was really bad at being the first two and lacked resources for the third. Fast forward a couple years later, I spent a good chunk of my workday crunching numbers in Excel and making reports as an Analyst. The point is, that as we grow up, our times change. With changing times, the challenges that we face everyday and the problems we tackle also become more complicated. Be it on the professional front or the personal. As a result, the high school final exams which seemed to be end of the world at that time stand nowhere near the complications/problems that we face at work or outside, today. And thats why anyone who said that “just graduate from school/university and your life would be amazing!” was straight up lying.
The idea is that as we grow up simple phrases like “Work Hard!”, “Don’t give up!”, “Be Strong!”, “Follow Your Passions!” just don’t feel enough to get us through the turbulent times, the painful situations that we often face. Hence, with time as our life and challenges become and more more complicated there is a constant need to update our set of values and virtues so that they enable us to cope up with anything that life throws at us. Now, thats where the three buzz words : Resilience, Perseverance and Grit come into picture.
Not going into too much detail I will briefly explain what these words roughly mean :
- Resilience : Bend, not Break. We all have heard this (or similar) term somewhere or another. This is an intrinsic resilient behaviour. Resilience basically means your ability to cope up with any defeat, distress or disaster in your life. A person with good resilience has the ability to bounce back more quickly and with less stress than someone whose resilience is less developed.
- Perseverance : As Google says, perseverance is not giving up. It is persistence and tenacity, the effort required to do something and keep doing it till the end, even if it’s hard. Perseverance asks you to do a task no matter how difficult, boring or painful it is, till the end, if it helps you to achieve your ultimate goal or moves you forward on your path of success.
- Grit : I believe it’s a mix of both of the above. As defined by Wikipedia, Grit is a positive, non-cognitive trait based on an individual’s perseverance of effort combined with the passion for a particular long-term goal or end state. It’s also a measure of firmness of your character. How thick-skinned you are. Your indomitable spirit.
If you listen to any successful entrepreneur narrating their story “from zero to unicorn” chances are very high that you will hear any one, two or all three of these buzz words. This is maybe due to the fact that these words really sound good and are really up there in the entrepreneurship vocabulary. Or, maybe the truth is that actually these virtues are really essential when you are dealing with super complicated things like building a company from scratch or fixing a relationship. These journeys involve really really though situations and wether or not we can cope up with them depends on the fact that did we evolve our values and virtues with time ? or are we still handling or rather, running away from our problems like its high school?
Wrapping up this article I would like to urge everyone reading this to sit back, relax and think about these three qualities vis-a-vis your current situation in life. We all might need to build, improve or improvise on any one, two or maybe all the three qualities to cope up with a current situation and eventually lead a better life.
Also, always remember all of these three are within you.
This is an excerpt taken from my speech given at a Toastmaster’s meeting last weekend. You can find a toastmasters club near you : https://www.toastmasters.org/find-a-club
