How To Be Gritty at Work

We often asked, “How do we be gritty at work?”  And we often asked this question by people who are not feeling like they’re particularly passionate and persevering about what they’re doing for their livelihood at that stage in their life.  And here’s the answer: if you asked the question, “What would it mean to be gritty at work?” it would be to be passionate; to be thinking about work, even when you’re not at work; wanting, voluntarily, to think about issues that are coming up for you, challenges, decisions that you have to make, not just between 9:00 and 5:00, but even in the evenings, or, for me, I will tell you, on both Saturday and Sunday.  So that’s one thing that it would mean to be gritty at work: being passionate about what you do during your work hours and actually after your work hours.

Persevering too, of course, that’s the other half of grit.  And that would mean working incredibly hard at what you do, and always asking yourself, “What is one thing that I can do in this job, right now, that would be a little different and a little better than I was doing yesterday?” 

Being resilient as well: trying to make sure that every challenge that you meet is something that you frame as a lesson to be learned, and not a permanent setback. Now, how do we get there?  How do we get to passion and perseverance in what we do, especially if we’re not feeling like we’re there right now?  We think one possibility is that We are not in the right position at all.  And that’s the first thing that people think about.  But we actually think that in most cases, that’s actually not the route forward. 

In most cases, We think if we want to find passion and perseverance in our work, we can find it in the job we are already in, which we choose, in some ways because it matched your personal interest and our values, and it was something that we felt like you could work very hard at, and be resilient in.