“Grit” is a word we don’t hear much these days. Years ago, Grit was an enjoyable weekly newspaper to read at the grandparents’ home in rural Kansas. Grit is still around but is a magazine now and is often found at rural-oriented supply stores.
Sometimes we equate “grit” with courage.
But grit is something else. University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth learned as a seventh-grade teacher that IQ wasn’t the only thing that separated struggling students from successful ones. She found that “grit,” which she described as “passion and sustained persistence applied to long-term achievement with no particular concern for rewards or recognition” was a quality that indicated success. She wrote a best-seller about her research, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. The subject also is addressed by Caren Baruch-Feldman and Thomas R. Hoerr in The Grit Guide for Teens.
It is also addressed in direct terms by Dr. Crane.
IT TAKES GRIT
It takes Grit to do anything worth doing.
All real progress is upstream.
All the real crowns—soul-crowns and achievement crowns, not gold crowns—are rewards for fighting.
It takes Grit—
To be Patient,
To keep your Temper,
To improve your Mind,
To Exercise, and keep your Body fit,
To diet, that is, to eat for Health and not for Sport,
To save Money,
To push your business,
To tell the truth,
To keep your mind clean, your Mouth clean, and your Soul clean,
To say No,
To do what you don’t want to do, which means Discipline,
To pay your Debts,
To be Loyal—to yoru ideals, to your Wife, to your Husband, to your Friend, to your Country,
To say “I don’t know,”
To do your own thinking,
To resist the mob,
To be honest, simple, and straight,
And not to worry.
But these things are easy:
To be irritable,
To give way to impulse, to say “I can’t help it,” and to make no effort to control yourself.
To be mentally lazy, read nothing gbut trash, and have no habits of study,
To loaf, and to exercise only when you feel like it,
To eat what you please,
To wait for something to turn up,
To lie, to be disloyal, and to be unclean,
To agree with those you feel to be wrong, just to avoid trouble,
To side-step,
To go in debt, and to say, “Charge it!”
To join something and use partisanship for loyalty,
To go with the crowd,
To acquire a bad habit, and to nurse it along,
To follow your impulses and not your intelligence,
To fill your body with disease, your mind with error, and your soul with evil,
To slump, to pity yourself, to make excuses for yourself, to magnify your ego and ruin your character,
And to commit suicide.
It’s easy going down.
It takes Grit to go up, to get on, and even to keep decent.