#02 The Line Between Grit and Stubbornness

Hope the weekend was kind to you. Mine involved a tennis match I refused to lose even after it was obvious I already had. More on that in a minute.

This newsletter isn't a productivity guide, and it's definitely not going to tell you to "never give up." If anything, it's the opposite.

Today I want to talk about a difference we've all blurred at some point, at work, with people we love, and in our own heads at 11 PM when we really should've stopped two hours ago.

Exhibit A, B, and C

A founder friend of mine kept "iterating" on a product nobody wanted, for fourteen months. He called it conviction. Those are not the words that I would have chosen. The words would have been less flattering (for sure, maybe. Definitely.)

Another friend stayed in a job that was clearly done with him and he was done with. He called it loyalty. It looked a lot like waiting for a bus that had already left.

And me, on the tennis court, down a set, on the verge of being down two sets, still serving to my opponent’s backhand that he had figured out by the third game. I called it sticking to the game plan. I’m sure my opponent called it foolish. (They may have been an f word before foolish, not important. Moving on)

Say hi to the door

The thing about grit and stubbornness: From the outside, they look identical. Both involve trying again. Both involve refusing to back down.

But grit is knocking on a locked door, trying the handle again, then trying the doorbell, then walking around to check if there's a side entrance. And then perhaps pick the lock. Stubbornness is knocking on the same locked door, over and over, convinced that repetition is the missing ingredient.

One of them eventually gets inside. The other just gets a story about how hard they tried.

I heard someone say that,  most people can't tell the two apart until they're already three years deep in the wrong one. I didn’t make much of it then. But I see it now.

Two Places I See It Most

At work, it's the manager who keeps running the same process quarter after quarter, watching it fail slightly differently each time, and calling the pattern "consistency."

But the one that actually surprises me are the second time founders. Doing the same things they did the first time they started up, calling it culture. 

The Only Difference

It's not talent. It's not resilience, whatever that word means anymore. The people who get this right are the ones willing to occasionally step back and ask a few questions: is the door even locked? Can I possibly pick this lock? Is there another door? Is it worth going inside? or is it just not my door? Or, or, oh, can I kick this door down? (I’ve always wanted to do that)

That's it. That's the whole skill. 

Until next time.