Grit

What People Think It Means

Passionate perseverance toward long-term goals despite obstacles and setbacks. The ability to keep going when shit gets hard. This is treated as maybe the core predictor of success – gritty people achieve ambitious things, quitters don't make it.

This is heavily moralized because it provides a simple success narrative that doesn't require examining luck, structural advantages, or whether the goal was worth pursuing. If success is just about grit, then failure means you gave up too early. It also creates sunk cost traps – you should keep going because quitting means you lacked grit, even when continued effort has negative expected value.

What It Actually Is

Grit is what it looks like when you have effective error recovery protocols, chunked goal decomposition, and accurate sunk cost assessment.

The Actual Mechanisms

  1. Error recovery scripts that restore momentum after setbacks (if X fails, execute recovery protocol Y)
  2. Incremental progress tracking that maintains motivation during plateaus (you can see you're still moving even when it doesn't feel like it)
  3. Meta-cognitive awareness that temporary setbacks don't invalidate the strategy (this is noise, not signal)
  4. Identity-based motivation where goal pursuit is tied to self-concept (I am the kind of person who does this)
  5. Regular strategy reviews that keep the goal actually valuable (is this still worth pursuing given new information?)

When "Lack of Grit" Is Actually Rational

What people call "lack of grit" is often just the brain correctly computing that continued effort has negative expected value.

If you keep "giving up," maybe you're actually good at cutting losses rather than bad at persisting.

Sometimes grit is rational – you're pursuing a valuable goal and obstacles are temporary.

Sometimes grit is dysfunction – you're stuck in a sunk cost trap, persisting because you've already invested so much even though the goal is invalidated.

How to Build It

Build persistence systems rather than trying to develop determination as a character trait.

Implement Progress Tracking That Makes Incremental Gains Visible

  • Streak counters
  • Metrics that show trend lines even during plateaus
  • Checkpoint celebrations at regular intervals

This keeps your dopamine system engaged during the long middle.

Build Explicit Error Recovery Scripts

When X type of failure happens, I do Y.

This prevents the "I failed so everything is ruined" spiral. You have a protocol, you execute it, you keep moving.

Schedule Strategy Reviews

Every 30 days, assess whether this goal still has positive expected value given new information:

  • Are you still learning?
  • Is the path still viable?
  • Are you actually making progress or just going through motions?

Chunk Big Goals into Phases with Distinct Milestones

Don't try to stay motivated for a 5-year goal. Break it into quarterly objectives with concrete deliverables.

Celebrate at each checkpoint (see Discretization).

Use Identity Reinforcement

  • Join communities of people doing the thing
  • Make public commitments
  • Frame it as "this is who I am" rather than "this is what I'm trying"

Identity-based motivation is more durable than outcome-based.

Accept That Strategic Abandonment Is Sometimes Optimal

Measure opportunity cost and expected future value, not just effort already invested.

If continued pursuit has negative expected value, "quitting" is the correct move.

Grit that pursues invalidated goals is computational dysfunction, not virtue.

The Goal

The goal isn't to be gritty. The goal is to build systems that produce persistent forward motion toward valuable objectives while retaining the flexibility to abandon invalidated paths.

Key Principle

Persist with periodic reassessment – Build error recovery and progress tracking while maintaining strategic flexibility to abandon invalidated goals.