Life has a way of showing up uninvited. The garage door breaks. A part falls off the car. (I wish I were making this up.) A plan that was working fine suddenly isn't. In those moments I have caught myself thinking, Mike, you could really use some resilience right now.
Valorie Burton's Rules of Resilience lays out ten ways successful people get better, wiser, and stronger. One that I particularly like is this: know when to grit and when to quit.
Know when to grit and when to quit
I don't think there's any question that grit is a good quality to have. But you have to apply it strategically. It matters where you direct your grit.
Here's an admittedly silly example I like to use. I can have as much grit as any man who ever lived. But if my goal is to drive my head through a brick wall, that grit won't beat the wall. It will just hurt me.
That's the difference between grit and resilience. Grit is the ability to keep pushing. Resilience includes knowing when pushing has stopped working. As I understand Burton's argument, perseverance takes energy, and energy is finite. Spend some of it fighting a wall and you have less left for the things you can actually move.
Sometimes the battle turns out to not be worth fighting. Maybe it was at first. But circumstances change. Seasons of life come and go. And some seasons are over before we admit it.
How to tell a hard thing from a wall
A hard thing is uncomfortable and moving. A wall is uncomfortable and not moving. Three questions will help you tell the difference:
Is there still a path forward, or am I repeating the same move and hoping?
What is this costing me, the people I lead, and my family?
Do I still want to end up where this road leads?
That last one catches more people than you'd expect. Things change, and what seemed like a good goal when you set it may not be one now. Say you pick a major, then realize you have no aptitude for it and no real interest. The answer isn't to try harder. It's to choose something that fits.
The sooner you cross that mental bridge, the sooner you get to something better.
Meet in the middle
My generation, Gen X, was raised to do the hard thing anyway. There's real value in that. But some of us older folks gritted our way through things that cost us our physical or mental health.
Gen Z gets accused of lacking grit. My wife and business partner, Michelle, makes a point I agree with: they tend to spot a harmful path early and leave it quickly. That self-care instinct is a gift.
So we sit at opposite ends of the spectrum. We tend to keep hammering at walls. They tend to see the wall quickly, sometimes when it’s not actually a wall at all but a rough patch that will pass.
When two groups sit at opposite ends, the answer is usually somewhere in the middle. We can ask earlier whether something is worth gritting through. They can learn that some seasons are just hard, and that it gets better on the other side.
One question to carry
The next time you're about to dig in harder, stop and ask: is this hard, or is this a wall?
If you lead people, keep this in mind. Before you decide someone lacks grit, ask whether they've spotted a wall you've missed.
If you'd like a thinking partner as you sort out which is which, book a free discovery call.
