Grit, Delayed Gratification, and Loooooong-Term Perspective

I remember one time watching a YouTube video where a fitness instructor was asked by someone how they could lose a hundred pounds.

 

To paraphrase the start of his answer: “The first thing you need to do is to say hello to your new best friend, looooooong-term perspective.”

 

In other words, that weight took a long time to put on and it’s going to take a long time to take off. Get yourself ready for a long fight.

 

The truth is that most things that are worth doing require a sustained effort over a long period of time. Whether you want to lose a hundred pounds, or start a business, or get a six pack, or become a millionaire, or write a novel, or master the guitar, you’re going to have to put in the work.

 

The very first step is knowing what major goals you want to accomplish. You can’t do everything, so you need to decide what you really want as specifically as you can. This is one of the reasons why I consider my 10 Year Plan for a Remarkable Life to be such an important and foundational post. You need to be honest with yourself about what you really want and what you would choose to accomplish if you knew you couldn’t fail.

 

You need a goal to actually work towards. A vague wish like “I want to lose weight,” or “I want to be rich” is worthless. Everyone wants those things and virtually no one is consistent in doing anything about them.

 

Vague wishes are powerless because they promote passivity and stalling. Specific goals are magical because the promote action.

 

If you have the perspective to look deep into the future, you will start to see how the life that you want won’t happen by accident; it will have to be intentionally built, and you’ll have to start now to make it a reality.

 

Once you have your 10 year plan, the hard part begins.

 

Grit

 

One of my favorite Ted talks ever was called Grit: the Power of Passion and Perseverance, given by Angela Lee Duckworth. In it she delivers this gem of a definition of the word “grit”:

 

Grit is passion and perseverance for very long term goals. Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working really hard to make that future a reality. Grit is living life like it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

 

Grit is sticking with your future.

 

Your future.

 

I can’t remember the last time a single pronoun excited me so much.

 

Your future.

 

She just referred to your dreams, your ambitions, your goals, your 10 Year Plan for a Remarkable Life, as your future.

 

The future that you will create.

 

The future that belongs to you.

 

One of the biggest things that holds people back is the notion that life is something that happens to them. This notion isn’t completely false, it’s only false by omission. There are lots of things that happen to you, but there are lots of things that you have the power to control. To change. To create.

 

Your future is something you can create if you stick to it and put in the work.

 

In Angela Lee Duckworth’s research, grit is the most important predictor of success in a wide range of contexts. It’s more important than your social intelligence, you good looks, your health, your IQ, etc.

 

People who succeed do so because they put in the work over a long period of time. They don’t start and then quit, they keep going.

 

I’m not saying that you should never quit anything. Far from it. There are lots of things you should quit. If you are smoking you should quit. If you are reading a bad book you should quit. If you’re locked in a career path that makes you miserable, you should quit, or at least seriously pivot.

 

However, when it comes to your future, you cannot quit, you must not quit, and if you have grit, you will not quit.

 

This is another reason why the 10 Year Plan for a Remarkable Life is so important. You need to spend some serious mental energy working out what the things are that you want so badly that you can keep pursuing them for 10 years (or more) without quitting.

 

Everything else you can quit as soon as it’s reasonable to quit.

 

Don’t quit your future.

 

Delayed Gratification

 

Applying grit over the long haul is going to demand many situations where you choose discipline over laziness. You will have to chose the punishment of sacrifice over the short term pleasure of mindless entertainment.

 

There’s no way around this.

 

As Jim Rohn has said: “We all must suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret and disappointment.”

 

Discipline is unpleasant, but regret is brutal. and there’s nothing you can do about it.

 

To make it to your goal you need to master the virtue of delayed gratification, an essential life skill.

 

In the classic book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman describes the famous Stanford “marshmallow” experiment where researchers tested the ability of children to exhibit delayed gratification. They did this by putting them in a room alone with a treat in front of them. They were told that if they could wait 15 minutes before eating the treat, they could have a second treat.

 

Some kids ate the initial treat right away, but among those who tried to hold off about a third were successful.

 

These kids went on to have more success than their peers in a number of arenas, and further studies have also indicated that the ability to practice delayed gratification is hugely beneficial.

 

Delayed gratification is critical because it lets you do the more difficult thing in the moment in pursuit of the best overall outcome.

 

I highly recommend that you do whatever you can to develop an ability to delay gratification. Here are some ideas to get started.

 

First, buy a candy bar or some other decadent treat for yourself (for me this would be Green and Black’s Organic 85% Dark Chocolate bar). Put it somewhere that you will be able to see it on a normal day. Then set a length of time, and a set of conditions that you have to meet to eat your treat. So maybe if you have been inconsistent with your workout routine, you can say something like: “I’ll eat my treat on Saturday, but only if I make it to the gym four times between now and then.”

 

Not only do you have to practice waiting, you are forcing yourself to accomplish something tangible that brings you closer to your goal.

 

Another would be that in order to watch television in a day, you have to spend a certain number of hours studying, working on your side hustle, at the gym, etc.

 

Basically any time you can put off the ephemeral experience of consumption in favor of putting in the work, you are creating a positive change and building your capacity for delayed gratification.

 

Not only does this help you get more done, it also brings more enjoyment to your life. People who are able to practice delayed gratification enjoy the anticipation just as much if not more than its fulfillment.

 

Final Thoughts

 

If you’re someone who dreams big (and you should dream big), you need to take the time to look way into the future to figure out exactly what life you want to create. Creating a life is like building skyscraper, it’s going to take a lot of work and it will go much better if you have a blueprint.

 

Once your plan is in place, you need the grit to stick with it. Your beginnings will likely be humble. If your dreams are as big as they should be, you’re going to think at the beginning that your pace is too slow to ever accomplish what you want to. That’s perfectly. Stay gritty, make progress, and one day things will start to accelerate.

 

The other thing that you need to master is the concept of delayed gratification, the notion that you can do the uncomfortable now to enjoy the comfortable later.

 

These things aren’t easy, but part of the value of becoming successful isn’t the success itself, it’s the person that you have to become to get there.