Grit is defined as "the perseverance and passion to achieve long–term goals".

I have a lot of mental health challenges and completely lack the reserve capacity most people have. The advice to "suck it up and do it" fails spectacularly with me. At best, I burn out mid-day. At worst, I burn out for several weeks.

This doesn't preclude having grit.

I work to know myself and my limits. Other people do not get to define my limitations. I know me, they don't. I will never "live up to my potential" in their eyes.

To them, I lack grit in all its forms.

But grit isn't about each day, it's about the long term. If I have to give up today, it's only so I can be ready for tomorrow. Every day is a chance to start again.

That is the very definition of perseverance. It's a choice to keep going after being defeated.

I identify with this.

I heard somewhere that certain high performing folks only need five hours of sleep a night. I tried this for a week and it was a disaster. Damage to work. Damage to relatonships, etc.

But it did lead me to a years long experiment to discover my limits for sleep (while also struggling to understand how diet and caffeine intake interact).

I just finished a year where I aimed for 49 hours of sleep per week (5 nights of 6 hours, 2 nights of 8 hours, 1 or 2 naps of 1.5-3 hrs), and after 11+ months I started having the same problems I had from the initial 5hr/night experiment that last only a week.

So I've accepted I'm not a 35/hr a week guy. I might be a 45/hr a week guy, with precise diet/exercise/caffeine dosing, but in the meantime I'm comfortable accepting decent productivity at 55/hr a week.

There's that old tale of the people chopping wood but one takes a bunch of breaks but chops way more wood than the other, and it turns out every time they took a break that they were sharpening their axe.

That's what sleep is to me, the most effective nootropic "sharpening the axe" you can do for your productivity. Unfortunately, that doesn't quantify easily like "hours of sleep" so it's harder to track.

I'm not a sleep scientist, but Fitbit's advanced sleep tracking has been a boon for me to collect data on how I'm sleeping.

I agree with everything you're saying here. I'm sorry others do not see grit in you from their perspective. That must be a continually frustrating struggle.

Are you able to speak more about your daily processes?

How do you work to know yourself and your limits? How do you know if you're being lazy or recuperating? If grit isn't about each day then what psychological stat is?

> Are you able to speak more about your daily processes?

My life is defined by the absence of process and discipline. It's basically managed chaos. I do what I can, when I can.

The one process I have nailed down is medication. I use a pill planner and make it a habit to check it any time I can't remember if I took my medication. I use alarms because they are difficult to ignore and I can hit the snooze button if I'm busy. Reminders and calendar events don't work.

> How do you work to know yourself and your limits?

I've learned how my body and mind feels when I'm running low. I started with a mood tracking application, but once I learned to operate by feel, it became automatic. Once that problem was offloaded, I stopped using the app.

My therapist gave me some great advice: "go with what works". If an app becomes work that I start to avoid, then it's time to switch strategies.

> How do you know if you're being lazy or recuperating?

I generally give myself 15~30 minutes to get started on something. If I can't manage any useful focus, I move to something I can accomplish.

I may look lazy from the outside but I've had to be told by everyone (friends, family, doctor, therapist, support group, manager, etc) to slow down and take care of myself. That's been hard to accept but my productivity and happiness has greatly increased since I started doing that.

> If grit isn't about each day then what psychological stat is?

People aren't robots. We all have good days and bad days. There is no one stat, only patterns and trendlines. In a way, it's heartening. We can always make better decisions tomorrow. :)

I'm not the parent commentor, but I have MS which presents a lot of similar issues.

For me, the main things I use to determine my limits are:

- "Does doing this increase my odds of a relapse?": There are correlations between stress and risk of relapse, so I manage my stress very closely.

- "Is doing this/pushing through sustainable, or will I need to borrow energy/sleep more/create issues going forward?": This one is hard because it involves knowing oneself and one's triggers and body very well. Like I'll down a shit ton of aspirin and Benedryl to work through migraines because I know they're brought on by either quick changes in barometric pressure or my menstrual cycle, which resolve quickly and can't spiral into worse problems. MS heat intolerance, on the other hand, means I need to stop and rest if I end up too warm because my nerves will be fried until I rest even if the weather does cool down.

I see grit as a trait expressed in the long-term. It takes grit to know when you're at that point of fatigue, to walk away and take a long walk so you can come back refreshed. And then to actually come back to it.

I think that you and the author both have valid points of view that don't necessarily contradict each other.

Yeah I think a lot of people are misunderstanding "grit" as "foolish stubbornness".

These are different words for a reason.

I think of grit as just not giving up and maintaining the integrity of a schedule and the quality of the work.

It's a learned skill like anything else. Grit soon enough just becomes competence with experience, but you need to stop procrastinating first :)

You've said better than my comment here. I haven't had a single tear in the past 10 years but back then it helped kickoff the process of showing up a lot. The fighting action has its reaction that eat soul. Being strong is being painful while keeping everything functioning. I wish I had ability to cry again. Idk, it's a magic to yield back energy to start a new cycle.

>I don't feel like leveraging grit works in all situations, though? Do others feel differently?

Grit and the Sunk cost fallacy are often at odds with each other.

Grit is useful when picking up a skill (programming) and sticking with it. But within that skill, you might not want to stick to something specific for too long if it's not working out, otherwise you deprive yourself of other learning opportunities.

It also depends on what kind of success you want out of it. If you want to master a skill, no-matter-what, regardless of what kinds of jobs it has, then go for grit 100% to keep you working on it.

If you want to try something new because you're seeking a deep passion, sticking with grit 100% will have an opportunity cost of not trying something else.

Also a lot of this comes down to how hard you want to be on yourself. You can have strict goals of progress where just showing up yields no progress, so you might consider it a failure because there was no meaningful progress.

Knowing when to give up is a skill that is as valuable as grit, if not more so. Our time and energy are finite, and sometimes it is rational to redirect the resources from a goal that proved too expensive to achieve for a given benefit (e. g. due to newly found circumstances).

I do chores when I'm stuck. I strategically engage diffuse thinking to overcome my current obstacle. More often than not, I sit back down with a solution.

Give it a shot :)

I'm similar, though not necessarily chores - usually other projects.

In my goal tracker, I set high levels goals to be productive, but then about 30 different possible tasks count as productive. I track them at a low level so I can keep a good track of my time, but they all count towards the high level daily/weekly goal of being productive. That way I make sure I'm just doing _something_ productive, if not the thing I planned to do, rather than screw around surfing Reddit or something.

Of course, this strategy works much better if you're a bootstrapped founder with 40 important tasks in front of you. It works less well if you have a daily standup with a project manager stressing the importance of only doing the JIRA ticket at the top of the backlog. So YMMV.

I typically maintain a list of tasks that can be accomplished in 6 hours or less. I pick a task based on my mood and motivation. I rarely work more than 6 hours.

Usually accomplishing a small task builds enough motivation to accomplish another small task or a larger task. Getting started always seems to be the hardest part.

Yes.

Breaks are wondrous in problem-solving.

When stuck (and when not), take breaks and do other stuff.

In ~95% of the cases, solutions come to you. In the rest 5%, you reach out to someone who can help.

Breaks are miracles in problem-solving.

And I mean not only in case of programming/math, but also social situations.

This is one of the productivity boosts WFH has over the office. Two birds with one problem to work out.