4 Steps to Achieving Long-Term Goals and Career Success

Fostering Self-Motivation & Grit

With Time telling parents “Why It’s Great to Have a Stubborn Child” and Inc. telling parents “Stubborn Kids Are More Likely to Be Successful” based on the findings of a 2015 study, it makes you wonder if the positive aspects of stubbornness – persistent pursuit of goals in spite opposition, etc. – would be more appropriately classified as self-motivation or grit.

The results of this study that followed over 700 kids from age 9 up to the age of 40 were published in Developmental Psychology. It noted their sense of entitlement, studiousness according to teachers, defiance against their parents, and tendency to break the rules as measures of stubbornness.

Looking more deeply into these articles, it would appear that the greatest benefit from being stubborn is that these kids grow up to make more money. Because the study only examines the correlation and not the causality, it is the generally held speculation that stubborn kids grow up to be adults willing to hold out longer for a chance at greater pay when negotiating salaries.

Fatherly on the other hand, wouldn’t want you to forget the possibility that these rule breaking kids could also be growing up to be unscrupulous career criminals.

In a more positive light stubbornness might also be defined as stick–to–itiveness, which is the topic of Angela Duckworth’s book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.

When interviewed by Stephen J. Dubner of Freakonomics Radio Duckworth described grit as being comprised of 4 components: well developed interest, a capacity to trade novelty for nuance, an ability to engage in deliberate practice, and optimism.

Duckworth was also very adamant that grit is something people develop over time. It isn’t a quality you are simply born with or without.

So how do you develop your grittiness or ability to self-motivate?

 

#1. Make Decisions Everyday

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Charles Duhigg and author of The Power of Habit discusses the impact of habits on our motivation in his new book, Smarter Faster Better, as he explores the means by which we can all can improve our productivity.

More specifically, Duhigg discusses how freedom in decision making is one of the little know ingredients that contributes to the high levels of effectiveness in the most productive of individuals.

In an interview Duhigg gave for the Tony Robbins’ podcast he describes how teaching recruits autonomy was one of the greatest breakthroughs that the U.S. Marine Corp. has had in decades.

Duhigg goes on to talk about how assigning new recruits the task of cleaning the mess hall without any direction on how to fulfill the orders from their commanding officer, recruits naturally set an impressively high standard of cleanliness and worked very productively to meet that standard. They self-assigning roles within their platoon, and did so without conflict over who would fulfill what duties.

As part of the interview Duhigg suggests that the recruits’ power to decide what they should do in the given situation and what the criteria of success was, gives them a sense of control that sparks high levels of motivation. Duhigg believes that motivation is key to productivity and that self-motivation is fostered by one’s belief that they can impact a situation’s outcome.

For marines, he says that couldn’t be any more important. These servicemen are dropped off in the middle of nowhere with little to no communication with anyone else and they are tasked with carrying out the most challenging of missions under the most dangerous conditions. By simply making their own decisions, marines gain a sense of control over a situation. This allows them to stay motivated, continue their mission through to success, and come home alive when others might shy away from the fight.

Even though the majority of people are looking for the inspiration to excel in far less life threatening arenas, it is this same kind of relentless self-motivation that is coveted by the un-stubborn or gritless among us. It is this kind of sitck-to-itiveness that we need to get through the 10,000 hours of effortful practice Anders Ericsson describes in his book Peak, which was later popularized as the 10,000 hour rule by Malcom Gladwell in Outliers.

 

#2. Give Yourself Permission to Succeed

It’s hard to stay motivated if you’ve already decided you can’t succeed. Impostor syndrome and other limiting beliefs are nothing more than the impact of logic being applied in the wrong circumstance says Jesse Elder in an interview with Geoff Woods.

If you consider logic to be a mental model, like probability, you know that it has a great application in playing chess, balancing your check book, and playing blackjack, but according to Elder it has no place in pursuing your career aspirations.

Elder describes logic is a mental model used to keep people safe from failures that would result in mortal danger, but the truth is that most professional failures will never result in a saber-tooth tiger enjoying you for lunch.

That said, the logic that says you’re unlikely to succeed in taking on a new career challenge only serves to protect you from consequences (temporary embarrassment, egocentric afflictions, ect.) that are far outweighed by the positive outcomes that can be attained through you persistent pursuit of success.

In an article for The Atlantic, Paul Tough describes a similar phenomenon as a significantly limiting factor to the success of students in the most impoverished American public schools.

Many of these students come from families with house hold incomes below the poverty line, which means they might not have many examples of life-long success through excelling in school. These children experience an understandable stress because of their socioeconomically situation. Many of them have also experience a degree of trauma –emotional or otherwise. Studies have found that this can put children into a state of perpetual fight-or-flight in which they have higher blood pressure, increased adrenaline, and greater vigilance on a regular basis.

All of these things together can make it hard to focus for long periods of time, engage in the executive brain function that school work requires, and persist beyond failure or a few poor test grades. In a state of fight-or-flight failure is not an option, after few bumps in the road a high-stress student is more likely to give up or act out rather than search for a new way to mater their school work.

According to Tough, researchers and educators have found that by creating environments in which failure is an acceptable part of the learning process, students believe they belong in the academic setting, that they can be successful in school, and that their success in school in valuable, students can begin to flourish.

There are several layers to systematically creating such an environment, but it all hinges on students to a feeling comfortable enough to give themselves permission to succeed.

Angela Duckworth might say that this is the optimism component of grit. Without optimism you will self-sabotage your own success.

 

#3. Pursue Your Passions

Duckworth mentions in her Freakonomics interview with Dubner that the genuine interest in a subject matter is what allows people to “substitute nuance for novelty.” When people with grit start to get bored, which is human nature, they dive into the subject even deeper instead of moving on to something entirely new.

This kind of extensive education or even experimentation within a certain field is what drives industry experts to new discoveries and becoming the exemplar of best practices.

But still a passion has to remain, which is why Duckworth says she doesn’t think people should berate themselves for deciding that they don’t want to complete – say- medical school after the first few years.

Duhigg would agree, but he also thinks that a passion can even be used to motivate you to do tasks you really don’t enjoy.

In an interview for Slate.com, Duhigg talks about a cancer researcher he had interviewed who hated grading papers. By tying the task back to his life’s work however, the researcher found a way to motivate himself to grade the papers.

“Every time he sits down to grade a student’s paper he goes to his little mantra, and the mantra is, ‘If I grade this student’s paper then the university gets their tuition dollars, and if the university gets their tuition dollars then they can pay for my research, and if they pay for my research, then I’m going to find things out about cancer, and if I find the right things out about cancer, I’m going to save people’s lives. So by grading the students’ papers, I am saving people’s lives.’ ”

 

#4. Create Habits for Success

In her interview with Dubner, Duckworth also talks about an ability to engage in deliberate practice as a component grit.

The discipline to carry out mind numbingly repetitive or unenjoyable tasks in the name of a greater goal is a feat plenty of people struggle with, especially if it is paired with the demoralizing effects of prior defeats or failures.

Being able to persist in spite of these things is what we call grit, but if you’re among the hundreds of thousands of people that have viewed BJ Fogg’s 2012 TEDx presentation, Forget Big Change, Start with a Tiny Habit, you might be apt to think that becoming more gritty is more a matter of working smarter rather than working harder.

In his presentation Fogg described his tiny habits methodology for creating behavior change. Fogg’s method relies on existing behaviors to serve as triggers for performing a new behavior that is so small in nature only minimal amounts of will-power are required to create a desired new habit.

Fogg uses the example of building up to a daily routine for flossing his teeth. Instead of starting with the commitment of flossing every tooth on his first attempt, Fogg only commits to flossing a single tooth every time he brushing his teeth. The trigger in this situation is brushing his teeth and after having brushed his teeth he will then floss a single tooth.

Once this tiny habit of flossing a single tooth is established he can slowly scale the habit to two teeth, three teeth, and eventually flossing all of his teeth every time he brushes.

Fogg equates his method of associating tiny habits with trigger behaviors to planting a seed. Planted in the right spot, with all the water and nutrients it needs to grow, a seed can grow with little or no effort (will-power) required from the farmer.

In creating a new habit the greatest obstacle is often a lesser supply of self-motivation than is required to actually implement the desired behavior change. The method of tiny habits however, accounts for that limitation through incremental progress that won’t exhaust a finite amount of available motivation.

Charles Duhigg touches on this same method of success in his book The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, and suggests that the key to creating new habits is achieving small wins.

“Small wins are exactly what they sound like, and are part of how keystone habits create widespread changes.  A huge body of research has shown that small wins have enormous power, and influence disproportionate to the accomplishments of the victories themselves.  ‘Small wins are a steady application of a small advantage,’ one Cornell professor wrote in 1984. ‘Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small win”

This same kind of escalation in behavior change could be applied to foster the frequency in deliberate practice necessary of a professional to stand out among their peers and excel in their field.

 

The Importance of Self-Motivation & Grit

There is no doubt that grit, the ability to self-motivate, and persistence in spite of setbacks and failures are characteristics of the most successful and influential members of society.

With good reason we continue to be intrigued by how we can best foster these abilities within ourselves and within our children. The hope is to better position ourselves and future generations for making the most of the opportunities before us, that they would see our aspirations through to success, and that we earn greater incomes by performing at a higher-level as professionals.

 

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