Grit is not something that is used in normal conversation. When you are talking to a person, you don’t say that they were gritty. Instead, you say they were hard-working and that they persevered despite challenges. No one talks about failure.
Until I asked Niel what he thought grit was.
At first, when I asked him what he thought grit was, he answered the same answer I have heard for the past two weeks.
“Well, I think it’s probably more mental than physical. It’s related to determination or toughness,” he said. “Just keep hanging in there and keep fighting and keep plugging away.”
Niel then started to talk about failure. “One of the things that I used to tell my kids is, ‘It’s not even a question of whether you’re going to fail. You’re going to fail. The question is, how are you going to respond to it after you fail?'”
His response reminded me a bit of one of my other posts, but what he said made sense. We are all so caught up in being perfect that we don’t want to fail.
He said, “It’s tough because kids are raised to be perfect and to do everything right. And life is just not that way and you have to recognize it.
“[Failure] is not going to define who I am. We’re not going to win every battle,” he continued. “Just get back up, dust yourself off and get back at it. That defines who you are.”
Niel shared an experience of a time he failed. A time where he had to get back up and try again.
“I remember, in college, I took one math class three times to get a passing grade,” he said. “It was discouraging, but I just kept working at it.
Even then, he worked hard and finally passed the class so he could move on to finish his major.
“The most important thing was, I can tell you that 40 years later, it doesn’t matter when I graduated. I got it and nobody cares,” Niel said. He got his degree and though he failed that one class, it doesn’t matter now.
“You don’t have to be the smartest. You don’t have to be the fastest or the strongest. You just have this ability to persevere and hang in there,” he said. “You’ve got your goals, and you’re going to have setbacks. And despite the setbacks, you just have this target determination to eventually overcome and achieve.”
Failure is always going to be there. There is no way that we can go throughout life without failing at least once, but for Niel, he knows that being gritty means getting back up no matter what.
“And as long as you’re trying, you have a chance if you give up power to control your situation,” he said.
That will always be true of anyone working towards anything. You have control over your situation and will always have the ability to make things better.
Just as Niel says, “Things just have a way of working out in the end.”
