To Grit or Not to Grit

How do you tell whether you need more grit or a different goal? The trouble is that a difficult week can look the same in a worthwhile project and a hopeless one.

Eric Barker’s Barking Up the Wrong Tree is the inspiration for this question. Its discussion of success includes the awkward business of deciding when to quit.

That makes it more useful than a command to keep going. Encouragement is cheap; deciding where to spend another year is expensive.

A rough stretch can be worth enduring if the destination still matters. Keep going if the goal matters. Leave if it doesn’t.

Unfortunately, that answer collapses as soon as the goal and the current method acquire the same name.

Consider a hypothetical researcher who wants to understand a disease. They have spent years trying to make one experiment work.

Giving up the experiment might release time for a better approach. Giving up the scientific question is a much larger decision.

Calling both of them quitting hides the choice that matters.

Angela Duckworth, whose work made grit famous, draws this distinction herself. She argues for persistence toward high-level goals and flexibility about the tactics used to pursue them.

In a conversation with Steven Levitt, she explicitly agreed with his concern about students spending years on hopeless research topics. Even the advocate of grit leaves room for abandoning a method.

The difficult part is deciding whether your method has become your identity.

A researcher can keep saying that one more attempt will settle it. A founder can keep calling the same unbought product a mission.

Neither description tells us what the next attempt is expected to teach. I’d rather hear a specific prediction than another account of how much someone has already sacrificed.

But that can become its own mistake. Progress may be slow, feedback noisy, and a promising idea hard to explain to outsiders.

A rule that demands visible improvement every month would kill some worthwhile projects. There is no calendar interval that turns patience into foolishness.

An unusual experiment makes the opposite danger harder to dismiss. Levitt built a website where people struggling with decisions could receive a randomized coin-toss recommendation.

For important choices, including leaving a job, those encouraged to change were more likely to do so. They also reported greater happiness six months later.

These were volunteers already considering a change, not a random sample of contented workers. Follow-up responses and self-reported happiness also create limitations.

The result does not tell everyone to resign. It suggests that some people near the decision boundary may require too much evidence before they move.

I find that more interesting than the coin.

Staying can feel like postponing a decision, even while it consumes the time in which another option could have been tried.

So I would ask for the next commitment to be described in advance. What would another three months buy: a qualification, a decisive test, or information that could change the plan?

The period is an example, not a scientific threshold. Its purpose is to make the expected gain discussable before disappointment or pride takes over.

The alternative deserves the same scrutiny.

Leaving a difficult job for an imagined perfect one is a comparison tilted in favor of fantasy. A real opening, a small trial, or a conversation with someone doing the work gives the alternative something firmer to stand on.

This still leaves room for being wrong. You can stop before the breakthrough; you can stay until the better option disappears.

No personality label removes that risk. My best answer is to protect the purpose while making the next stretch of effort answerable to evidence.

If nothing that happens could persuade you to change the method, it is worth asking what you expect the next attempt to teach you.