Grit and perseverance

Typically we describe visualization in the context of creativity and learning since this is a focus of our interest. Visualization is extremely useful in many other situations. Recently I noticed that many of memory masters are very good in activities that typically require grit. I think this is because of the incredible power of visualization. This post will be somewhat longer than usual and it is inspired by several resources. You can read more here, here, here, here, here and here.

What is grit?

In wikipedia, grit is described as passion for a particular long-term goal with a powerful motivation to achieve the objective. Athletes use grit to achieve top performance results, artists need it to finalize all details of their masterpiece, entrepreneurs need to be productive and optimistic surmounting all sorts of obstacles. Let’s face it: we all occasionally need some grit. Delaying gratification and mastering grit we can achieve bigger and more difficult goals.

Visualization for goals

The first step based on definition would be setting a particular goal. Most goals are quite abstract and cannot motivate us unless we use our imagination.
Once we master visualization skills and can visualize our activities very vividly, we start to visualizing the positive end result associated with reaching the goal. It trying to lose the weight we will imagine the things we cannot do and wear now but will be able to do once we reach the goal. If we build a startup we visualize the exit strategy. The visualization needs to be very vivid in order to motivate us for a long period of time, and maybe raise some supporters and followers along the way. Once we get a strong resolve to get to reach the goal and can almost feel the taste of victory, we start to visualize the road.

We should probably select some winning strategy and visualize in great detail all steps of the way including all challenges along the way. Then we visualize how we deal with various obstacles we encounter. All questions we have should be answered. Do not worry, the life will bring an additional set of challenges we could not possibly imagine. The activities we visualize and train for become familiar, it is easy to deal with familiar challenges. Dealing with surprises will be much more complex.

When you actively pursue your goals, assess your situation. Visualize what you have achieved each day and how you could have done differently. Assess your assets, including your partners, experience, and ability to progress. Think how someone else would react in a similar situation: a role model, or a competitor. Having a competitor often makes us more motivated. Imagine the day in the life of your competitor. Which behaviors may you want to adapt from your competitors?

Occasionally you will get frustrated. Each time your motivation drops, visualize. Remind yourself the end goal and why you decided to take this road, to begin with. Feel inspiration and pride for following your dreams and fighting for a worthy cause. Focus on what you have achieved so far. Also imagine how you will feel if you fail after all the things you have done.

The secret of long-term motivation

To stay motivated for a long time there we need to manage interest, practice, purpose and hope.

• Interest. We should be constantly interested in different aspects of the activity we are trying to master. The details are of utmost important. An innocent question regarding some unrelated detail, a simple word we see in a professional blog and do not understand, may open a new huge chapter of your quest. If you miss enough details, you probably will not be able to succeed. It helps to have an honest and great interest in every aspect of your activity, including the most mundane and seemingly boring aspects. Do not stop your research as you progress, instead, focus on researching more specific subjects you discovered during your activity.
• Practice. Hands-on practice, an active pursuit of your goals, is much more important than other related activities. If you doubt, use 80% of your efforts for hands-on activities and 20% for all other stuff. Try to have fun as you practice, enjoy the moments of “flow”, always try to do things better. Doing the things properly is more important than specific results of each activity.
• Purpose. Never loose the end goal. It may be easy to take the opportunistic approach and get immediate satisfaction. Then you will get astray into the direction you cannot foresee. It is also easy to try pursuing several goals at the same time. If you lose focus, your energy will be spread between too many activities and you will have very low chance of mastering critical amount of effort to achieve anything worthwhile. This may be a good life for you, but it has little to do with grit.
• Hope. There is no guarantee you will ever reach your goals. You must have hope, true belief that this time everything will turn out well. Without such a hope it is very difficult to master enough energy to succeed in each activity, even harder to get the support of other people. Even if the odds are not in your favor, you should have a strong hope that the job is doable – or you may as well stop trying and do something less challenging.

Grit is risky

Personally, I have a firm belief that we should use grit carefully since it can cause burnout and always try creativity first. What are the risks associated with grit? Athletes often suffer physical injuries. If you are not an athlete, the effects are less obvious.

• Reduced mindfulness. When we chase a far and beautiful goal, we tend to forget here and now. We may miss signs of immediate danger or opportunity, we may miss signals sent by our body. This effect can be partially mitigated by meditation or equivalent mindfulness training.
• All or nothing mindset. Strong focus on very bright goal reduces our ability to see all shades of gray. We start categorizing things as helpful or distracting with respect to the final goal. When we try to photograph the moon we see a similar effect: either we see a clear moon and everything else dark, or we see a clear landscape with saturated flare where the moon should be. Very few sensors have the required dynamic range to cover all shades of gray. It is possible to switch focus between the far goals and the everyday activities, merging the two views together, but it is not easy.
• Increased risk taking. The long-term goal is usually quite hard to reach. We do our best to increase our chances of getting there. On the way we make sacrifices. We may put more money in training and gear than what is justified by the situation. Taking huge business loans and school loans is very common, and typically we will need to return much more than we gain. Journalists risk their reputation and personal safety to get a good story. Politicians make dark deals that occasionally result in imprisonment.
• Cutting corners. As we become impatient we may start cutting corners, ignoring things that we would usually stop to fix, delaying things associated with organization and neatness. At the beginning, these steps will save us valuable time, but at the end, there may be more mess than we would like to admit. That mess can cause us a painful failure, yet we take our chances.
• Exhaustion. Grit makes us more productive, we work harder and invest all of our resources. Our bodies can handle both sprint and marathon, but we must adjust our strategy to the task ahead. Running a marathon at sprint speed will exhaust us and cause a burnout. It is simple, and everybody knows it. Very few people have enough experience, wisdom, and self-discipline to keep a steady pace for long periods of time. Most of us will get exhausted and will experience a burnout, recuperate and repeat the cycle.
• Failure. High risk means the chances of failure are very high. Most probably you will fail many many times before you succeed. Some people get lucky, others quit, yet many of us simply keep trying, dealing with failures and hoping for the best.

Pay now or pay later

Cutting corners and ignoring the risks are some of the biggest temptations you will run into. Both can absolutely ruin your progress. Healthy progress is built on strong foundations. Every time you cut corners you generate some mess you will need to clean later. If you generate too much mess, you will have to redo everything from scratch and that is a painful experience. Have patience, increasing the chances of success is much more rewarding than cutting a small portion from the road ahead. If you do something right you will have an asset, otherwise, you will have to pay later with compound interest. Each time you feel a temptation, remember you will pay now or pay later. Which do you prefer?

For a hammer everything is a nail

When you are highly focused and motivated, you see opportunities other people miss. Seemingly unrelated daily cues and mundane subject open valuable insights that bring you closer to your goal. The universe itself is your teacher. Open up to as many experiences as you can, try to stop and look at the minute details. Think creatively how each experience and each detail can help you in your quest.

There is also a downside to this highly focused approach: we will likely ignore things that do not correlate with our goals and dismiss them. Do try to empathize with other people: their perspective is different from yours and may show you fatal flaws in your logic.

You have to use your imagination

I quote from one of the articles I cited in the beginning:

Thought precedes creation; the idea guides energy in the physical world in order to create certain behaviors. There are three requirements for creative visualization to be fully effective: 1.) the desire to create what you have decided to visualize, 2.) the belief in what you have chosen to attain through your visualization and the certainty that you will attain it, and 3.) the acceptance of having whatever you have visualized as your goal.

Creativity can often be more important than grit. Your initial goal may become irrelevant as you progress, and you may need to “pivot”. Startups pivot all the time. They come up with a great idea, build a great story, amass team and assets just to find out unexpected difficulties making further progress improbable. Risks are high. Giving up is the last resort and not a good one, so they need to come up with a new goal to follow. Smart teams use not only threats, but also new assets, new opportunities, and even their own weaknesses as sufficient reasons to pivot.

Be open to considering a pivot, but do not pivot unless you are absolutely sure it will benefit you. Even then do not pivot too often. Try to modify the way you do things before you modify the goals. Be creative, try various tools and solutions, actively brainstorm with other people. Make a pilot project and see how it goes. If you are trying a diet and it is not working for you, try another diet or modify your physical activity and see how your body reacts. Often it makes sense to hire a consultant.

We had tens of thousands of students. Some of the students practice alone and fail, then they reach out and buy 1:1 with Anna and succeed. Consultants may have seen many cases similar to yours, and their experience may help to find challenges and solutions you could not find alone. Occasionally it makes sense to see how the masters in their field are handling a similar situation. If you take a masterclass, you will see many solutions used by leading masters and practitioners in their field.

If you need to modify your goals, try to minimize the risks you are taking while maintaining a high level of reward. Use the resources and experience you already have to make your road shorter and less bumpy.

The surprising power of giving up

Not always we can control our lives. Occasionally it may be best to give up. When we give up we are no longer obsessed by our goals, become open to the universe and may find things that eluded us in our search. The zen moments of enlightenment are often generated by simply giving up, accepting our limitations and making peace with the human condition. Failure is just another step in our journey, and accepting the failure may be the first step on the road to the new success.

Giving up is also a healing moment. We stop analyzing what we do and why we do it, we just do what makes sense. Our energy gets replenished. We get a new appreciation for the people around us and more mindful.

While we pursue our goals we often resist the way our journey is trying to change us. Once we stop resisting we may actually succeed, and get back on our track.

Giving up is painful and frightening, but occasionally the most rewarding part of the journey. Failures are unavoidable. If we learn from them, our biggest failures are also our biggest assets. Do not be afraid to try again, just do not repeat the same mistakes.

Personal perspective

I am not an athlete and not a classical success story. I failed many times, in many different ways, and still find new ways to fail. My friends tell me that I have survivor instincts, and occasionally praise my achievements. This is not how I perceive my own story. There is some element of bravado, a show I pull off to defend my vulnerability. Internally I am very humble and thankful to the universe for each lesson it gives, even the most painful lessons.

Recommendations

Be creative and visualize as much as you can. Combine interest, practice, and purpose. It’s OK to pivot or give up. Never lose hope.