Grit -Book Summary

To succeed you need a hang-in-there posture towards challenges. Grit may matter more than talent.

The highly accomplished were paragons of perseverance, and harshest critics of themselves. They were constantly driven to improve.

They were the opposite of complacent. And yet, in a very real sense, they were satisfied being unsatisfied.

In sum, no matter the domain, the highly successful had a kind of ferocious determination that played out in two ways. First, these exemplars were unusually resilient and hardworking.

Second, they knew in a very, very deep way what it was they wanted. They not only had determination, they had direction.

It was this combination of passion and perseverance that made high achievers special. In a word, they had grit.

Warren Buffett turns to his faithful pilot and says that he must have dreams greater than flying Buffett around to where he needs to go. The pilot confesses that, yes, he does. And then Buffett takes him through three steps.

First, you write down a list of twenty-five career goals.

Second, you do some soul searching and circle the five highest-priority goals. Just five.

Third, you take a good hard look at the twenty goals you didn’t circle. These you avoid at all costs. They’re what distract you; they eat away time and energy, taking your eye from the goals that matter more.

Important to note is that of those goals are means to an end and not end it so they help you to achieve the end goal. They help you to make progress to the Ultimate goal.

The highest-level goal gets written in ink, once you’ve done enough living and reflecting to know what that goal is, and the lower-level goals get written in pencil, so you can revise them and sometimes erase them altogether, and then figure out new ones to take their place.

The point of this exercise is to face the fact that time and energy are limited. Any successful person has to decide what to do in part by deciding what not to do. When you have to divide your actions among a number of very different high-level career goals, you’re extremely conflicted.

To what extent do these goals serve a common purpose? The more they’re part of the same goal hierarchy—important because they then serve the same ultimate concern—the more focused your passion.

Those people who succeed in history and were considered as geniuses. They had what is called the “Persistence of Motive” rewritten as passion. Few traits set them aside.

• Degree to which he works with distant objects in view (as opposed to living from hand to mouth). Active preparation for later life. Working toward a definite goal.
• Tendency not to abandon tasks from mere changeability. Not seeking something fresh because of novelty. Not “looking for a change.”
• Degree of strength of will or perseverance. Quiet determination to stick to a course once decided upon.
• Tendency not to abandon tasks in the face of obstacles. Perseverance, tenacity, doggedness.