Grit, discipline and resilience: The experts’ tools of survival

Resilience is a skill you can add to your repertoire, not an innate quality that you are born with or without. It comes down to grit, the ability to grind through tough moments for a long-term goal, and discipline.

Highly-resilient people have a mixture of passion, a hatred for complacency, a sense of hope, and are always centred in the reality that things can (and often do) go wrong.

In this Expert’s Playbook, SmartCompany Plus distills advice on how to get grittier, persevere, and work through the hard times to make it through to the other side.

Accept that you can’t control everything

“The first trait that resilient people have is an acceptance of reality,” writes Paul Jarvis in Company of One: Why Staying Small is the Next Big Thing for Business.

“They don’t need for things to be a certain way and don’t engage in wishful thinking. Instead of imagining ‘if only this changed, I could thrive’ they have a down-to-earth view that most of what happens in our lives is not entirely within our control and the best we can do is to steer the boat a little as we float down the river of life. For example, I’m not going to stop writing today because my neighbor is using his deafening chainsaw. Rather, I’m just going to close my window, turn on some electronic music, and get back to work.”

Resisting complacency

“To be gritty is to resist complacency. ‘Whatever it takes, I want to improve!’ is a refrain of all paragons of grit, no matter their particular interest, and no matter how excellent they already are,” writes Angela Duckworth in her widely-reviewed Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, where she explains the four ‘psychological assets that mature paragons of grit’ have in common.

Duckworth’s four psychological assets of grit

1. Interest

   “Passion begins with intrinsically enjoying what you do. Every gritty person I’ve studied can point to aspects of their work they enjoy less than others, and most have to put up with at least one or two chores they don’t enjoy at all. Nevertheless, they’re captivated by the endeavor as a whole. With enduring fascination and childlike curiosity, they practically shout out, ‘I love what I do!’”

2. Practice

   “One form of perseverance is the daily discipline of trying to do things better than we did yesterday. So, after you’ve discovered and developed interest in a particular area, you must devote yourself to the sort of focused, full-hearted, challenge-exceeding-skill practice that leads to mastery. You must zero in on your weaknesses, and you must do so over and over again, for hours a day, week after month after year.”

3. Purpose

   “What ripens passion is the conviction that your work matters. For most people, interest without purpose is nearly impossible to sustain for a lifetime. It is therefore imperative that you identify your work as both personally interesting and, at the same time, integrally connected to the wellbeing of others. For a few, a sense of purpose dawns early, but for many, the motivation to serve others heightens after the development of interest and years of disciplined practice. Regardless, fully mature exemplars of grit invariably tell me, ‘My work is important — both to me and to others.’”

4. Hope

   “Hope is a rising-to-the-occasion kind of perseverance. In this book, I discuss it after interest, practice, and purpose — but hope does not define the last stage of grit. It defines every stage. From the very beginning to the very end, it is inestimably important to learn to keep going even when things are difficult, even when we have doubts. At various points, in big ways and small, we get knocked down. If we stay down, grit loses. If we get up, grit prevails.”

Freedom within a framework

“A culture of discipline at its best is about freedom in a framework of values and responsibilities,” writes management guru Jim Collins in Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0.

“It is not about disciplining people; it is about finding self-disciplined people who always fulfill their commitments. It is not about expecting mindless obedience to rules or submission to hierarchy; it is about having the right people who crave wide latitude to do their best work.

“Never forget a key lesson from our research into what makes great companies tick.

“All companies have a culture, but few have a culture of discipline, and even fewer build a culture of discipline while also sustaining an ethic of entrepreneurship. When you blend these two complementary forces together — a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship — you get a magical alchemy of superior performance and sustained results. This is the genius of the AND that eludes many entrepreneurial companies as they grow up. Deadlines can be a powerful mechanism to achieve the AND, to cultivate a rare blend of freedom and structure, creativity and discipline, which are distinguishing marks of the truly great. Use deadlines to achieve the AND … or use them not at all.”

Busting resilience myths

“We hear about resilience so often that it’s being steadily emptied of all practical meaning,” writes research professor Andrew Shatte in Fast Company.

Here are a few of the main misconceptions that Shatte says need knocking down so we can get back to making resilience actually mean something useful to modern workers.

The three myths

1. Resilience is about bouncing back

   “Many of us see resilience in terms of what it gets us — as the ability to steer through setbacks or overcome adversity in order to achieve what we’re striving for all along … Sure, resilient people bounce back, but how? … At the University of Pennsylvania, I was part of a research team that identified seven key factors of resilience: emotion regulation, impulse control, causal analysis, realistic optimism, self-efficacy, empathy, reaching out … By breaking resilience down into these factors, we can pinpoint employees’ strengths and help them work on their weaknesses.”

2. We only need to be resilient in times of trauma

   “Resilience is usually associated with traumatic events, like when a city has to bounce back from a natural disaster or an individual experiences something life-changing. But in actuality, we flex our resilience muscle every day … By practicing resilience and encouraging it in the workplace, employees are better equipped to handle everyday stress, not just the the most rattling moments. In fact, our recent research has found a strong correlation between employee resilience and business outcomes, including reduced absenteeism and perceived stress and increased job satisfaction, and overall health. These gains aren’t especially surprising, but they’re hard to achieve if we only focus on resilience under extreme circumstances.”

3. You can’t teach resilience

   “Humans, as the saying goes, are creatures of habit. We continuously scan our surroundings for threats and develop habitual responses to protect ourselves … These contribute to the big, overarching beliefs we hold — most of them unconsciously — about ourselves, our world, and our future … One way to improve resilience is better understand your own thinking styles (the beliefs and rules you’ve shaped for yourself) and to develop new habits for getting around the most constricting of them — not only in the most trying times but every day.”

There are costs to quiting too early

“Serial quitters spend a lot of time in line,” says Seth Godin in The Dip: The Extraordinary Benefits of Knowing When to Quit (and When to Stick).

“Observing the supermarket over the years, I’ve determined that there are three common checkout strategies. My local supermarket may be like yours — it usually has four or five checkouts open. If you watch carefully, you’ll see people adopting one of three strategies: The first is to pick the shortest line and get in it. Stick with it, no matter what. The second is to pick the shortest line and switch lines once (at a maximum) if something holds up your line — like the clueless person with a check but no check-cashing card. But that’s it, just one switch. The third is to pick the shortest line and keep scanning the other lines. Switch lines if a shorter one appears. Continue this process until you leave the store.

“The problem with the third strategy is obvious. Every time you switch lines, you’re starting over. In your search for a quick fix, you almost certainly waste time and you definitely waste energy jumping back and forth. There are queues everywhere. Do you know an entrepreneur-wannabe who is on his sixth or twelfth new project? He jumps from one to another, and every time he hits an obstacle, he switches to a new, easier, better opportunity. And while he’s a seeker, he’s never going to get anywhere.”

“Some people are naturally resilient. They have a positive attitude and find ways to overcome obstacles in order to achieve their goals,” write Azeem Azhar and Ceri-Ann Droog in this op-ed for PriceWaterHouseCooper’s strategy+business publication.

“But anyone — even those who aren’t resilient by nature — can build this capability … In a work context, it’s never been more critical for people to develop resilience. Changes driven by a dramatically accelerating rate of technological innovation are rocking the very foundations of how we work and live … Such changes could be psychologically, logistically, and financially taxing, underscoring the need for workers to arm themselves with new disciplines, in both senses of that word. People will need discipline — meaning self-control and orderliness — to help navigate a chaotic world, and they’ll need new disciplines, meaning a series of new mental faculties, an attitude of flexibility, and different skills, to be successful. The benefits of building resilience won’t be just personal; business will gain, too.

“Imagine if Thomas Edison, who grew up poor and without much formal education, hadn’t persevered through the hardships in his life.”

Almost entirely deaf from an early age, Edison created the carbon transmitter, which made it easier to hear sounds on the telephone. That invention led to a string of others, including his most widely recognised: the phonograph and the lightbulb.

“What kept Edison going? Biographers describe his inclination to solve problems and tinker, as well as his persistence, but there was something else, too. Persevering in the face of adversity requires resilience. ‘I have not failed,’ Edison famously said. ‘I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work’.”

Just keep working

“I’ve learned to expect a stage when things are not happening as I had planned and frustration sets in. When these moments come, it is essential to just keep working,” writes Randy Grieser in The Ordinary Leader: 10 Key Insights for Building and Leading a Thriving Organization.

“Starting the work is the first step; continuing to work through frustration and discouragement is the second. One must work not only when things are going well. Perseverance in times of frustration is essential to making ideas come to life. One of my favorite quotes on the importance of perseverance is attributed to the writer William Faulkner. When asked if he wrote on a schedule or only when struck by inspiration, he is said to have responded, ‘I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately, it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.’ The meaning being, we must keep working regardless of how we are feeling on any given day.”