Quitting is Easy. Living with Quitting is Hard

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Your son doesn’t like 7th grade band? Let him quit. French IV is too hard? Drop the class. Training for that marathon is too hard? Just quit. Feeling frustrated or detached from your work. Quit. It’s easy. Tired of not making progress on your writing project? Drop it, lose it, let it go. Yah! That felt good.

Go to Google and start typing “top reason to…” The #1 result is “…quit my job.” Don’t misunderstand. There are plenty of valid reasons to quit your job including toxic cultures, lack of professional growth, and more.

But remember when you quit something you have to live with quitting, so you should have a pretty good reason. Because while quitting might feel thrilling and easy, it’s hard to go back. Not impossible, mind you, but pretty hard. I once heard a story about a rich guy who kept giving so much money to his alma mater they named the football stadium after him. Why did he keep giving so much money? Because when he was a junior at the University he quit the football team because practice was too hard. He has regretted it for over thirty years.

It’s also important to distinguish the difference between quitting and taking a break. Since 2000 I have started a marathon training plan almost every year. I’ve only made it to the starting line twice over the past 14 years but I always start the training plan. Last year my wife and I got up to 18 miles and stopped. With the kids’ schedules it was too time-consuming. But if I bail out midway because of injury, travel or time constraints, I don’t think I’ve quit the sport. I just had to adjust to changing circumstances.

Or to take a work example, some of the happiest and most successful people I know have a portfolio life in which they change careers and take sabbaticals in the middle of their careers. It’s not impossible, it just takes thoughtful planning.

There are legitimate reasons to quit something, but commitment to hard work is not one of them. Legitimate reasons to quit include:

  • It’s making you sick: Stress-inducing work, school or sporting environments are intolerable. You can try to turn it around and be the change you wish to see in the world, but if the toxicity is overwhelming, I think it’s OK to quit. Because you bring that stress home, and infect your family and friends. Your health, and the health of the people you love, is more important than your job.
  • It’s a professional dead-end: Unfortunately it’s becoming increasingly common to pigeon-hole workers into particular jobs, roles and responsibilities. It seems gone are the days to working your way up through the mailroom and getting job experience throughout the organization – the kind of professional experience that leads to personal and professional growth. Companies with the highest retention, highest levels of innovation are when people get to work in varieties of positions in the company. Or as they say on the soccer field, when you play different positions, you “see all sides of the ball.”
  • It’s devoid of challenge: The saddest expression I heard recently was describing people who “quit and stay.” Meaning of course, they have emotionally and psychically checked out, yet remain in their job, punching a clock, either for the money or the simple inability to conceive of doing anything else.

But don’t quit because “it’s too hard.” That place where you feel challenged – that spot right on the edge of your capabilities where you have to step up your game – is the place where you are at your most creative and productive. When you feel right on the edge of what you are capable of, that’s where you’ll learn the most.

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Shawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building powerful human and digital learning experiences based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.

Last summer, my son and I bicycled across America with two other dads and their teenagers. We published a new book about it called Chasing Dawn. I co-authored the book with my cycling companion, the artist, photographer, and wonderful human jon holloway. Grab a copy. I’ll sign it and send it to your doorstep.

Your Expertise Might Be An Illusion

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Here’s an old brain trick: Look below. Which line is longer? You know this trick. They are the same, right?

MullerLyon1

 

But I changed the trick. Here are the same lines as above but I took the fins off. Look again.

MullerLyon2

 

Yes. You see they are different now. Ten percent different.

MullerLyon3

Maybe you weren’t fooled because you anticipated a trick. But your brain still recognized that old familiar illusion. It’s called the Müller-Lyer illusion. Even when you know it’s a brain trick – a visual illusion – it’s still hard to see it differently. In your mind you know they are the same length because you have learned that the lines are the same, despite what you see.

But visual illusions are different than cognitive illusions. We can mentally adjust to what we think we see, but it’s much harder to adjust or change what we think we know. Cognitive illusions can be more persistent and harder to dispel than visual illusions.

Years ago, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman was invited to give a lecture at a financial management firm that specialized in managing portfolios of very wealthy clients. Before his presentation, he was given a spreadsheet which reflected the previous eight year investment performance of the top twenty-five financial advisors at the firm. Each year’s annual performance was the basis of each advisor’s bonus. The better the return, the higher the yearly bonus. Using the data, Kahneman could easily compute the correlation coefficients between the advisor rankings in each pair of years. So he could compare year 1 with year 2, then year 1 with year 3, year 1 with year 4, and so on for each advisor at the firm.

Kahneman anticipated that he would find only small differences in persistence of trading skill over the years between the top twenty-five advisors. But what he found instead exceeded even his own expectations. The average of all correlations comparing all advisors’ performance over an eight year period was .01, or effectively zero. In other words, the firm believed it was providing bonuses based on trading skill, but in fact the data showed nonexistent, or negligible, difference in skill between the top twenty-five advisors. The firm was clearly rewarding luck, not skill.

Armed with this bomb, Kahneman gave his presentation to the executive team and the response was yawns around the room. It was as if he had reported some obscure statistic which was irrelevant to their work. Kahneman thought the financial executives would be shocked and astonished to discover there was virtually zero statistical difference in their skill as traders, and furthermore their own reward system was based on a fallacy!

The reaction of the executives was instead blasé. The audience clearly believed the results that Kahneman presented – how could they dispute facts? But their reaction was as if the information was peripheral or entirely unrelated to their work. They reacted as if it was meaningless and extraneous information.

The reason is the illusion of expertise, or what Kahneman calls the Illusion of Validity. When we, as highly trained experts and professionals in our field, are presented with information that is contrary to our deeply ingrained experience or way of doing things, we ignore or invalidate the information. We dismiss the finding as extraneous and unconnected. And these persistent beliefs are further reinforced by the professional cultures we work in.

The point here is that high levels of confidence, when highly subjective and only reinforced by homogenous cultures, can be unreliable sources of accuracy. When weighing a decision, get not only second and third opinions, but get them from different perspectives and areas of expertise. Or as Daniel Gilbert advises in his book Stumbling on Happiness, get the advice from people who have actually experienced what you are contemplating.

It’s OK to Rehearse Life’s Calamities

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In my dream we are in a small bedroom near the top of a very tall building. And the building itself is floating, and bobbing in a slow ponderous way. While outside the window, the winds are howling and a storm is raging. We are adrift in a gigantic building in a typhoon, and the building is slowly, softly sinking below the waves. I’m with our children, and they are scared, yet alert and ready. Not panicked, but looking at me for direction.

In my dream we are sinking in this titanic building and the water is rising up to our daughter’s waist. While outside the dark water is inching up the window.

I think the window will eventually burst with the pressure. It’s a hunch, a premonition. I’m not certain but I think it won’t hold long. And when the window breaks we will be swept by the torrent into the hallways and be lost, entombed and adrift inside the building.

But maybe, I think, if we close the bedroom doors in this little room and allow it to fill with the ocean water rushing in, the pressure will equalize and allow us to swim out the window. In my mind’s eye I’m certain this will work.

In my dream I am confident and assertive. Deliberate, but not hurried. I speak clearly and slowly, and direct the kids to hold hands. I tell them we must never let go of each other, whatever happens. I explain the plan. We will open the window and let the room fill with water. Once it rises, we will all take a deep breath, and swim outside to the rooftop. Mom is waiting I tell them. She is safe and waiting for us anxiously. We will do this together and go find her and assure her we are OK. My voice is unwavering, my eyes clear and connecting with each child. I convey no sense of doubt. I am certain, and I see no sense of doubt in their eyes.

In my dream we are holding hands when I crack open the window and allow the water in. And surely, it rises to swallow us. And at the moment when our noses are nearly pressed to the ceiling in the vanishing air, we all take a breath.

At this point in the dream I detach. I see omnisciently, as if floating like a movie camera above the unfolding scene. Annie has my hand, and she has Will’s hand, and finally our oldest Charlie is swimming in the dark warm water as we all escape through the window and swim to the surface.

In my dream, once we break the water together the sun is shining, the storm is drifting away, and the waters are calm. We are together, just a short swim from a beautiful beach. And there my wife is waiting, happy and relieved. There is no sinking building. There is only our calm, surprised faces.

Years ago, my father once gave me a small piece of advice I’ve managed to remember. He told me it’s often those who don’t mentally and emotionally rehearse the calamities, difficulties and losses of life, are sometimes the ones most unprepared and shocked into paralysis and despair. He was telling me it’s OK when we are visited with terrifying visions. It makes us stronger and more able to deal with the unexpected calamities, which will surely come at some point in life.

Embrace the terrifying movie in your mind. It’s just a rehearsal, a metaphor. It allows us to be more emotionally and psychologically prepared when real life emerges unexpectedly.

Nourish Your Pack First

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The Iditarod dog sled race in Anchorage

Rona Cant, of Oxford England, should change her name to Rona Can.

After being an English housewife and raising two children, she decided life was missing something. She wasn’t the type to host afternoon tea, so she started a business in fabrics and upholstery. That wasn’t quite satisfying enough, so she decided she needed another degree and enrolled at a University. Something was still not quite right. She felt a bit unfulfilled, so she started taking sailing lessons.

Finally realizing she was confusing busyness with fulfillment, she signed on to a yacht crew to race around the world. But before she could feel competent to race, she completed the arduous Yachtmaster ocean certificate to ensure her capability and contribution on the boat. And just for good measure she also completed a diesel engine mastery course just in case the ship’s engines needed repair while far from harbor.

Then she participated in another around the world yacht race. Then a third race around Great Britain and Ireland. And this time winning. Now you are introduced to the kind of flinty, tenacious, can-do person that Rona is.

So it won’t surprise you to learn that after winning the sailing race around Great Britain and Ireland, she signed on to be part of a three-person expedition to drive dogsleds through the remote wilderness and mountains of Norway 500km to the very tip of the Norwegian landmass where it touches the arctic ocean. To a remote outpost of snow and ice on the edge of the world called Nordkapp. It wasn’t even a trail. In fact the goal was to create the trail – pioneer it – so that it could be done again.

In our interview last week, Rona described to me something I found fascinating about dogsledding in the northern wilderness. Each evening they would camp near a frozen lake or river. While Cathy erected the tents and Rona built a fire and untethered the 28 sled dogs and inspected them for cuts and injuries, their guide Per Thore would take an immense auger and drill a hole through a meter of ice. Then Rona would hike to the well he had created on the lake, post-holing her way through the waist-deep snow to ladle 40 litres of water into a plastic container and haul it to the campsite.

This required several trips to deliver all of the water to where Per Thore was busy sawing chunks of frozen reindeer meat to mix with dry food and water, and then set over a campfire to make a stew for the dogs. The dogs required over 60 kilos of food per day.

And then Rona would return to the hole in the ice to retrieve 10 litres of water for the humans. You see, only after the dogs were fed, and cared for, would the humans take their first sip of water. When you hear her tell the story the reason is obvious. Without the dogs in the wilderness you die. Without the dogs you are going nowhere. They are the engine that makes the expedition possible, and without their health and well-being, and rest and focus, all is lost.

The same is true on teams. The people on our teams, in our organizations, are the reason our companies exist at all. And when the boss spends all of his time working, refining and forwarding their own agenda – their own mission and aspiration for promotion, or money, or recognition – it’s the beginning of the end. Things start to break down. Not just the processes and integrity and quality of what your company delivers, but the very people within the organization begin to suffer emotionally and even physiologically.

Remember, nourish the people first. The expedition will go great places.

The High Cost of Conformity

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Imagine you are in a room with seven other people, and the person running the meeting presents everyone with two cards. On the left-hand card is a line. On the right-hand card are three lines of differing lengths. You are asked to pick which line on the right card matches the length of the line on the left card.

The answer is obvious. Any fool can see the right answer. But each person, in turn, around the table picks the wrong line, the wrong answer. Now it’s your turn. What do you do? Do you speak your mind? Speak the truth? It’s baffling that these people can’t see what you see so obviously. What’s wrong with these people?

About a third of us would agree with the group. Against our opinion, against what is so clearly obvious, we would reluctantly agree with everyone else’s wrong choice. These are the results of a series of psychology experiments conducted in the 1950s by Solomon Asch. In fact, in control groups during the experiment, over 98% of the participants recognized the correct answer, and yet 32% voted incorrectly along with the rest of the group.

When we perform tasks or engage in activities because “we’ve always done it that way” or because the person with the greatest seniority in the room suggested it, we’re acting out of conformity. Don’t misunderstand, conformity can be a great thing – it can allow teams to soar, military groups to function seamlessly and efficiently, and allow decisions to be made faster. Conformity is acting in accordance with social standards and conventions. I’m certainly glad we have accepted communication and behavioral conventions over at Air Traffic Control, and the people over at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. (Here’s the audio feed from ATC at my home airport in Portland, Maine. I’m certainly glad they’re not just making it up as they go.)

In fact, Charles Efferson and his colleagues demonstrated that social conformity can present a higher rate of correct decisions, and higher performance in specific tasks. Conformity is how we deal with the complexity of life, the tsunami of data and information we are presented with, the unmitigated firehose of media we are bombarded with. We look at what other people are paying attention to. What they are looking at, what they are doing. And we do that.

But positive and creative deviance is what drives change. On December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks, at age 42, refused to obey bus driver James Blake’s order that she give up her seat to make room for a white passenger. In her own words, she was “tired of giving in.”

Know that we are all vulnerable to conformity. Think of these small awarenesses when participating in a group decision:

  • be aware of our vulnerability to conformity
  • cultivate healthy skepticism towards our own group
  • be willing to disappoint people

It’s the difference between belonging to a group, and simply fitting in. When we fit in, we conform. When we feel a strong sense of belonging, we feel enabled to be ourselves, wholly and authentically.

To learn about how build a culture of continuous learning see:

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SmallActs-3DShawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful online learning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Bibliomotion) will be out in October, 2016. You can pre-order a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.

Twitter: @gshunter
Say hello: email@gshunter.com
Web: www.shawnhunter.com

Is Luck a Choice?

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Rabbit’s feet, four leaf clovers, and rain during sunshine are all signs of fortune and good luck. The good luck ritual of “knocking on wood” comes from pre-christian rituals in which it was considered important to invoke the powerful and benign influence of the tree gods.

Cats throughout history have been both powerful and good (ancient Egypt), and powerful and bad (medieval England). In the 1560’s in Lincolnshire England, the story goes that a father and son chased a black cat into an alley, and then threw stones at it before it escaped to the home of a nearby woman suspected of being a witch. The next day they returned to discover the woman limping with bruised legs, presumably from the stones the night prior. Thereafter it was believed witches could transform into black cats.

When a ladder is propped up against a wall a natural triangle is formed, symbolic of the holy Trinity. To walk under the ladder would break the Trinity, and therefore bring ill fortune. Yet numerous experiments demonstrate such superstitions have no real worldly effect. (Unless of course some higher power is influencing you – just watch BF Skinner get a pigeon to turn in circles in less than 60 seconds.)

In his book The Luck Factor, Richard Wiseman describes luck in terms of choice. In his research working with more than 400 individuals, he found several key attributes of those who describe themselves as “lucky”:

  • They create opportunities for uncertainty and embrace change. They are creative and curious. Wiseman has a fun game in which participants write down six activities or experiences they have not tried but would be willing to try, then roll a die and do the activity that corresponds to the outcome. This game reinforces our willingness to try something new.
  • They make good decisions without consciously knowing why or how they did. Those who describe themselves as lucky make better gut decisions. Intuition-driven decision making seems impossible to control, yet Wiseman discovered those lucky decision makers actually spent more time reflecting and meditating on the decision once considered, and spent more time envisioning hypothetical circumstances in which they may have to make decisions. So when the situation arose, those who were “lucky” were actually better prepared to make a decision in the moment.
  • They have dreams and ambitions that have a knack of coming true. Lucky people expect the best outcomes, despite any negative past experiences, whereas unlucky people allow past negative events to dictate future expectations. The lucky people also described their expectations of upcoming interactions with other people as generally positive. That is, they anticipate their own good fortune.
  • They turn their bad fortune into good luck or opportunity. Wiseman describes two primary ways people turn bad luck into good luck. Basically they interpret the bad as “could have been much worse.” And when they reflect on past events, they spend a greater amount of time visualizing and selectively remembering the positive. In other words, the bad wasn’t all that bad, and the good was pretty great.

You too can create your own luck. People who consider themselves lucky put themselves in the position of having chance encounters that lead to interesting new possibilities and opportunities, see the upside of the experience, and harness the power of curiosity to be creative. Good luck!
Start one small act at a time. Try our course Small Acts of Leadership to build action into your life every single day.

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Our company Mindscaling, is busy building powerful human and digital learning experiences for companies of all sizes. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? I love to work with groups large and small. Let’s talk.

Last summer, my son and I bicycled across America with two other dads and their teenagers. We published a new book about it called Chasing Dawn. I co-authored the book with my cycling companion, the artist, photographer, and wonderful human jon holloway. Buy a copy. I’ll sign it and send it to your doorstep.

You are Successful. But Distracted. Possibly Bored. What Happened?

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You are successful. You worked hard for years with laser focus developing unique and sought-after expertise that no one else could quite replicate at your company. It paid off. You are highly valued. People ask your opinion. They invite you to join projects. They buy you drinks.

But lately you are distracted, almost bored. It’s not that you don’t have lots of projects going on. You do. Actually a ton of interesting people and projects keep arriving at your feet. They are all fascinating and exciting, and brimming with opportunity. For five minutes.

The problem is they aren’t your projects. They are someone else’s. And while their enthusiasm is contagious and fun, in the end it’s their project, not yours. And for that reason the buzz doesn’t last. You became sought-after and valuable because of your unique and unparalleled expertise. And that success has brought opportunity. And those opportunities have created distractions which leave you unfocused, drifting, and wondering when you can get back to what you love. Which is hard to do since all of these enticing opportunities keep presenting themselves.

Only Do What Only You Can Do: You became passionate, and excellent, and sought-after, by focusing the bulk of your time on only doing what only you can do. In other words, taking on the kinds of projects and challenges that you are uniquely predisposed to do.

Let’s take a few tips from choice expert, Sheena Iyengar, on how to bring some discipline to your decisions.

Step 1: Write down all of the things that you do in a given work week. What is extraneous, redundant, or can be offloaded to someone more qualified? According to Sheena, it should be at least 50%, ideally 75%.

Step 2: Of what’s left on the list, ask yourself, “When I work on this task do I experience greater frustration or greater joy or reward to others upon accomplishing it?” Of those items high in frustration, you want to 1. do quickly 2. offload, or 3. just stop doing. Because remember that tasks you find frustrating, someone else finds easy or rewarding.

Step 3: What’s left should be tasks in which you create greater value than frustration, produce greater joy than pain, and build greater value than distraction. Categorize them by type of task. Ah, you just learned something about the types of things you do.

Step 4: Finally, of what’s left in the high impact, high value, high reward, low frustration category, ask yourself, “Am I the most qualified person available to be doing this?”

You have now arrived at Only Do What Only You Can Do. In this place you have found the intersection of skill, passion, and impact. In this place you love your work, learn quickly and deliver high value to the team around you. In this place you can recapture your mojo.

But this does not give you license to become a prima donna, or shirk shared obligations. There are always chores that need to be done by any team, and you likely have specific deliverables that make you yawn every week. Step up. Lean in. It’s what keeps the trains running.

My suggestion is to remember what made you valuable in the first place, and not lose sight of honing that expertise.

Start one small act at a time. Try our course Small Acts of Leadership to build action into your life every single day.

    ____________________________________________________

Our company Mindscaling, is busy building powerful human and digital learning experiences for companies of all sizes. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? I love to work with groups large and small. Let’s talk.

Last summer, my son and I bicycled across America with two other dads and their teenagers. We published a new book about it called Chasing Dawn. I co-authored the book with my cycling companion, the artist, photographer, and wonderful human jon holloway. Buy a copy. I’ll sign it and send it to your doorstep.

Three Tricks to Seeing The Bigger Picture

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onsummit

“I can’t recall a period of time that was as volatile, complex, ambiguous and tumultuous. As one successful executive put it, ‘If you’re not confused, you don’t know what’s going on’.”
– Warren Bennis

In 1961, Edward Lorenz was a junior professor at MIT working on meteorology. He used a rudimentary computer called the Royal McBee to crunch algorithms which simulated weather patterns. Using the computer program, he could plug in different variables into the equation and then let the virtual weather unfold. So it was sort of a weather simulator in that each time he would run the program, there would be underlying trends and patterns but no two sequences would be identical. He was trying to recognize the patterns – to see the big picture.

One day, he decided to revisit a particular weather formula which intrigued him. He plugged in the original numbers, intending to let the program run for a longer period this time, and then went to get a cup of coffee. When he came back to the computer the virtual weather pattern unfolding was drastically different than the first time he ran the same numbers.

In fact, the result was so incredibly unlike the first result using the very same numbers that he assumed the computer must have malfunctioned. What he discovered instead was that he had accidentally abbreviated one of the input variables from .506127 to .506 – an abbreviation which he thought was so small, as to be inconsequential.

Lorenz’ revelation in the power of seemingly inconsequential small actions, led him to write a paper in 1972 called, “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” This beguiling idea crept into pop culture and time travel movies and later became known as the Butterfly Effect.

But what if we could learn to see the big picture, to simplify the complex, to develop what the French call “coup d’oeil?” Coup d’oeil is an expression meaning literally “stroke of the eye” or “at a glance.” It’s the ability to glance at a complicated terrain or environment and immediately see opportunities and understand the situation more simply – to grasp possibilities and connections within complexity.

Your turn. Here are three ideas to hone your coup d’oeil:

Draw a picture: Instead of writing down your next big idea, draw it. Turn words into pictures on a whiteboard. Or draw a map with plenty of circles, dotted lines and arrows. Or draw emoticons associated with the different ideas. As we know from researchers, when we can visualize something, we can often make new mental connections to simplify the situation.

Say it out loud: According to Harvard medical researcher Jenny Rudolph, often the best advice is to say what you are thinking out loud, in the presence of those whom you trust and who will hold you accountable. By simply saying our understanding out loud, we force ourselves to consider our opinions and biases. We not only hold ourselves more accountable, but implicitly ask those around us to also check our judgment.

Let it rest: Ever work on a hard problem that feels impenetrable, and then wake up and it clicks easily? If you study music, that piano sequence was impossible, yet felt easy in the morning. As sleep expert Dr. Robert Stickgold from Harvard Medical School describes it, ““When we first form memories, they’re in a very raw and fragile form.” But when we sleep, “the brain goes back through recent memories and decides both what to keep and what not to keep.”

This was written in memory of Warren Bennis, who contributed so much to big thinking. We cherish his immense contributions to the world.

Yes, You Will Succeed: Three Keys to Building Persistence.

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mousetrap

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration. The rest of us just get up and go to work.”
– Stephen King

Back in the early 90s we used to go to a club in Charlottesville VA to see Dave Matthews and his band play. It was free to get in. One time we drove there and the doorman asked for $5, and we were like, “What!? What a ripoff, it’s just Dave.” During that same time period, I found myself president of the Student Activities Union at my college in North Carolina, a job which mostly required throwing parties and sometimes managing intramural leagues. I discovered if your job is to throw parties, people often recommend bands to you. A friend recommended some band from Columbia SC I had never heard of, but he assured me they would rock the house. So I called up Darius Rucker and asked if his Hootie and The Blowfish band would come play at our school. He asked for a keg of beer to play.

It seems like I blinked, but once I picked my head up to pay attention to popular music a couple years later, Dave Matthews and that Hootie band were playing stadiums at $200 a seat, and touring the world.

But here’s the thing: All of those blockbuster songs like Ants Marching, One Sweet World, Only Wanna Be With You, Hold My Hand, and so on, they were playing those same songs in little bar clubs for fourteen people back in the day. And had been playing them for years. They didn’t get famous and then write hit songs. They wrote hit songs and the world didn’t know it, until after they had played and played them again and again.

This is the myth of “suddenly” becoming famous. We don’t become successful overnight. We become successful as a result of showing up every day and putting in the hours, developing deep expertise and finding our tribe over time. Or as Aristotle so wisely put it, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit.”

The standout word of the day is Grit. We implore our kids to persevere, to stay in the game, to try new ways of solving a problem. We encourage our colleagues to “fail faster” in expectation of finally arriving at an innovative breakthrough. We all just need to be a bit more gritty. One parent in California has a Kickstarter campaign to develop a line of dolls action figures for boys called Generation Grit.

But how do we instill a sense of stick-to-itiveness in our kids, and our colleagues? There are a few clues in recent studies from Brigham Young University in which researchers followed 325 families over a period of four years, examining the behavior of the families with kids between the ages of 11 and 14. After examining parenting styles, family attitudes and subsequent goals attained by the kids, the researchers concluded that three key ingredients consistently created higher levels of persistence:

  • supportive and loving environment
  • high degree of autonomy in decision-making
  • high degree of accountability for outcomes

There it is again – that word autonomy. From previous research by Teresa Amabile and others, we have known for some time that high levels of autonomy lead to more creative outcomes. But here we also see that high levels of autonomy also build greater persistence.

According to Paul Miller, associate professor of psychology at Arizona State University, “When held accountable in a supportive way, mistakes do not become a mark against their self-esteem, but a source for learning what to do differently. Consequently, children are less afraid of making mistakes, are more inclined to try to make better choices in order to demonstrate that they can accomplish and live up to the expectations they share with their parent(s).”

The Importance of Showing Up

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ridebikeFrom the kitchen window Christopher could see his wife was getting frustrated. Over and over again, Dana was running awkwardly, hunched over, down the driveway while holding on to the back to Will’s bicycle. At the time, six year old Will was still terrified of riding without his training wheels, or without his Mom holding him up. Christopher watched as his wife and son repeated the same failed routine again.

Finally, Dana came inside exhausted and frustrated. Christopher Reeve said to his wife, “Let me try.” He rolled his wheelchair gently down the ramp outside and onto the driveway where his son was wiping away tears. Christopher spoke to his son slowly. Since the accident his voice had become soft and measured. He told Will to place both hands on the handlebars and hold them steady. He explained by doing this the bike wouldn’t shake as much. He told Will to look up, far ahead, to where he was going and not down at the pedals or the front wheel. He told his son to first place his right foot on the pedal and his left foot on the ground, prepared and poised to push hard.

Will froze. Then Christopher reminded his son that he would never let him do anything too scary or dangerous – that riding a bike was something he knew Will could do. He told Will he was going to count to three, and on three, it was time to go. Christopher counted slowly and when he reached three, Will pushed off hard and rode down and around the driveway. The first time he circled back, his face was a mask of concentration and focus, and the second time around his face only reflected joy.

In his book, Nothing is Impossible, Christopher Reeve writes that before the accident that left him paralyzed he was a whirlwind of activity. He constantly took his family sailing, horseback riding, traveling, hiking and adventuring around the world. He writes that he never really asked if they wanted to go, he just took them. And after the accident he learned to listen. He learned to speak to them where they were, at their level, with a deep sense of empathy.

Christopher writes that prior to his accident he would not have believed that he could teach his son to ride a bike simply by talking to him. Teaching was about showing, demonstrating, and leading the way. But during his recovery process, he learned the power of conversations, words, intention and meeting people at an intersection of where they are ready to learn. Because each day the physicians and care-takers around him would introduce an idea or an activity that he was ready to tackle, or else it would fall unnoticed. It’s all about introducing learning opportunities when people are ready to learn.

An important nuance of excellent leaders is that they have the capacity to recognize when someone else is ready to go to the next level – ready to take on a new challenge. And instead of doing it for them, encourage their heart and prepare them to make that leap. And it starts by simply showing up and being willing to share your skills and experience.