Grit and Hard Work. Crushing It.

I really like the word “grit.” Grit is a wonderful attribute for startup founders to have.

I recently ran across some comments about grit in a blog:

Grit. Yes. An admirable trait. Can it be learned? Most of the people I know who have grit endured neglect, failure, rejection, racism and/or poverty and kept their heads up stubbornly and repeatedly.

Grit is not usually learned in the traditional classroom, but if a child is the first person in their family to work towards traditional academic success, I see this as taking a ton of grit. On the other hand, if a child is from a fourth generation phd family, then maybe their grit needs to be found outside the box.

It’s not enough, in my opinion, to give our kids time to find passions. I don’t see how the pursuit of a passion alone is a grit building experience. Put your passion to a test and see if you can break it and rebuild it or compete with it or be laughed at while defending it or figure out the money to pay for it and you might have some growth. Practice having your passion be ignored and still care about it.

And here is excerpt from a post that discusses hard work:

Hard work is hoeing corn from sunup to sundown, picking strawberries for six hours, swinging a machete for eight hours in the heat, throwing hay all day long every day for two weeks, putting in two miles of fence (digging the holes and tamping the posts), logging any time of the year, and whatever else is needed to survive the elements and keep food on the table. Hard work is becoming a lost commodity.

To me, grit is about gritting your teeth and pushing through tough moments and naysayers. It is about doing things that are hard to do.

Hard work is about pushing the limits of exhaustion. It is about not complaining and about taking pride in a full day’s labor. More often than not in tech startups, yesterday’s physical labor has become today’s focused and undistracted crushing of computer programming or sales pipeline working tasks.

On the topic of crushing things, I end with a video that one of my co-founders sent out to our team yesterday. This co-founder is particularly good at crushing important tasks for our startup and constantly uses the word “crushing” … enjoy!

What are your thoughts on grit and hard work?