Six Types of Grit

You are capable of so much more than you know! This is the core message in Steven Kotler's newest book, The Art of the Impossible, which outlines six types of grit. Building upon cutting-edge neuroscience and over twenty years of research, bestselling author and peak performance expert, Steven Kotler lays out a blueprint for extreme performance improvement.

You need grit to persevere, grit to control your thoughts, grit to master fear, grit to be your best when you're at your worst, grit to train your weaknesses, and grit to recover.

1) Grit to Persevere

"Perseverance needs patience, discipline, perspective, tenacity, relentlessness, and unwavering pursuit." - Cal Ripken Jr.

Grit to persevere is the most common type of grit, as described by Angela Duckworth. It's all about zeal + capacity for hard work. Do the hard thing. Embrace the suck. It’s not opening new doors or windows that suck. It’s the hallways between them where you need the grit to persevere. Based on Kotler's research, the grit to persevere needs willpower + mindset + passion.

1a) Willpower = Self-control + Delayed gratification

Willpower erodes as the day wears on and decision fatigue sets in.

You need to eat the ugly frog for breakfast.

You can increase your willpower over time by training yourself to do the hard thing...and then doing one more hard thing before you take your first break.

1b) Mindset = Growth Mindset (Carol Dweck)

"If you think you can or you think you cannot, you’re right." - Henry Ford

Live to learn more, and you will experience more time in flow.

Learn how you learn (i.e., I learn by reading books, underlining key passages, handwriting the key topics, and then synthesizing those notes into book reports like this article to teach others).

1c) Passion: Early-stage passion != Late-stage passion

Your early-stage passion is not equal to your late-stage passion. Your early-stage passion will be a result of multiple overlapping curiosities. You need to get curious and stay curious. One of the first self-reflection activities in the book is to "Write down 25 ideas that you are intrinsically curious about and motivated to learn more on the topic."

Your late-stage passion requires you to get obsessed and stay obsessed in a good way. It feels like frustration inside and looks like you're obsessed on the outside.

You can reframe pain as pleasure with a clear goal list, and the ecstasy of flow redeems the agony of passion. Passion makes you able to tolerate all the negative emotions produced by grit. For example, you can practice physical training to develop gritty perseverance training.

2) Grit to Control Your Thoughts

Your inner monologue must support the best version of yourself that you hope to create.

At an elite level, high performance is 90% mental, so you must create a mental edge by being able to control your thoughts. Listen to This Is Water commencement speech by David Foster Wallace. Be conscious and choose what you pay attention to. You control the power of choice to construct meaning from your experiences. Excellence requires repetition, so create a daily checklist for yourself. What are the habits and skills that the best future version of yourself will possess?

2a) Self-Talk

There are only 2 kinds of thoughts. Constricting thoughts vs. Expanding thoughts. Negative thoughts vs. Positive thoughts. You can eliminate negative thoughts by self-inspection to form a Positive Mental Attitude.

Your lizard brain (amygdala) is designed for fight/flight/freeze responses and therefore seeks to identify more negative inputs. On average, it will tell you about 9 negative bits of information for every 1 bit of positive information. Research shows that our brains need to see at least 3 positive bits of information to balance out every 1 negative bit of information. This is a large inequality. How can you develop the habit of positive self-talk to quiet your amygdala?

Your positive self-talk must be grounded in reality for your brain to believe it. You can practice and train your bounce-back effect aka resilience by reminding yourself of the stuff you know is true (i.e., the last time you faced a big obstacle like this and overcame it).

2b) Daily Gratitude

Gratitude alters your amygdala's negativity bias. You can look for novel things to express gratitude for them. Novelty is the foundation of your brain's pattern recognition. Novelty is the basis for creativity.

Option 1: Write down 10 things you are grateful for

Really take time to feel that gratitude and recall the somatic address of that emotion to discover where it lives in your body (i.e., gut, head, heart).

Option 2: Write down 3 things you are grateful for, and expand 1 into a full paragraph

Focus on the somatic address in the body to feel where it lives.

Positive Mental Attitude + confidence from gratitude will lower your anxiety.

2c) Mindfulness

Option 1: Single Point Meditation

Focus on your breath. Sit quietly and focus on one point (i.e., your breath) for 5-20 minutes. Equal length inhales and exhales through your nose will balance your sympathetic nervous system responses (fight/flight) with parasympathetic nervous system responses (freeze). This calms yourself down quickly to focus better. Be non-judgmental with yourself as your mind wanders and gently bring your focus back to your breath. Single point meditation heightens convergent thinking and dampens divergent thinking.

Option 2: Open Senses Meditation

Simply pay attention to everything floating in your brain. Watch the show. Don’t engage. It’s like playing Frogger without ever hopping forward because you can patiently sit on the sidewalk and watch all the cars (your thoughts) race by and be non-reactive. You can also imagine all your thoughts as clouds floating in the sky that pass you by without needing you to take any actions. Open senses meditation heightens divergent thinking and dampens convergent thinking.

You are most effective at dealing with life’s challenges when you are aware, observant, non-reactive, and non-judgmental. You can experiment with options 1 and 2 for mindfulness cross-training.

3) Grit To Master Fear

Fear is the most common emotion in life. Fear can be a fantastic motivator, and you can treat fear as a challenge to rise to. You can make your primal needs for safety work for your benefit.

Fear is a constant in peak performance. Fear drives attention, heightens memory retention, and enhances learning.

3a) Fear Practice

Develop an awareness of your fear, so you can start to notice fear in the body. Embrace your fear. Ask yourself what your fear is trying to tell you.

Do it anyway because of the fear. Look at fear as excitement. Treat fear as a playmate. Practice regular risk-taking.

You can confront your fears by slowly building up a tolerance OR systematic desensitization to go all in at once via flooding – like the two ways you can enter a swimming pool – slowly on the stairs in the shallow end OR all at once with a cannonball in the deep end.

Your brain releases dopamine when you take a risk, including physical risks, emotional risks, intellectual risks, creative risks, and social risks.

You need to become comfortable with being uncomfortable and recalibrate your relationship with this sensation.

3b) Fear as a Compass

Fear can become a directional arrow to point you in the direction that scares you the most. If you can expand your capacity by confronting your fears, then you get rewarded with focus and flow!

4) Grit To Be Your Best When You’re At Your Worst

Josh Waitzkin says training at your worst is a higher level of training.

You can learn to maintain balance when exhausted. This is especially valuable for sleep-deprived parents. This is the difference between elite-level performers and everyone else. You must train this kind of grit on its own to achieve real power. And unfortunately, the training will suck because you will need to be at your worst (exhausted, burnt out, overtired, undernourished, etc.) to be able to train it.

William James says humans can access a 2nd, 3rd, or 4th “wind” to tap into new levels of energy.

One way the author trains this type of grit is finishing each workout with high-intensity jump rope to ensure exhaustion, and then 10 straight minutes on an Indo balance board.

You can cognitively reframe burnout as a good step if the exhaustion is offering you a worthy goal, and then you transition into the recovery zone. This reframing can create immunity to total exhaustion, decrease anxiety, and free up higher levels of thinking.

5) Grit to Train Your Weaknesses

"We don't rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training." - Archilochus

Under duress and exhaustion, you fall back on habitual patterns you have done over and over. Identify your biggest weaknesses and get to work. Cognitive bias impacts perception, so ask for help from loved ones to identify your weaknesses.

When asked about (only) three of my weaknesses, my partner identified three emotional weaknesses I need to train. I always seek control and autonomy and get upset when I don't have it. There are times when I am not empathetic to others if I don't understand what they are going through. I am too attached to materials things, especially those with strong nostalgia effects.

What weaknesses do you need to train?

3 Categories of Weaknesses = Physical, Emotional, and Cognitive

Train up physical or emotional weaknesses head-on, slowly. Expect to be uncomfortable and be kind to yourself when you backslide.

Train up cognitive weaknesses with the method of asking yourself: "What did I believe 3 months ago that I know is not true today? Why did I believe that? What kind of thinking error did I commit to get to that erroneous conclusion?"

Weaknesses tend to have categorical root causes, so you can train the root cause to improve the whole category of weaknesses.

6) Grit to Recover

The dark side of grit leads to burnout. Burnout symptoms include exhaustion, depression, cynicism, and feeling overwhelmed, depleted, or lost. Burnout is a byproduct of repeated and prolonged stress, which is especially common among entrepreneurs.

It's time to get gritty about recovery.

Real, active recovery requires shifting your brainwaves into the alpha range. Alpha brainwaves are dominant during quietly flowing thoughts and in some meditative states. Alpha is 'the power of now,' being here, in the present. Alpha is the resting state of the brain. Alpha waves aid overall mental coordination, calmness, alertness, mind/body integration, and learning.

Watching TV, staring at your phone screen, or vegging out is bad for recovery because it shifts your brain waves into the beta range. Beta brainwaves dominate our normal waking state of consciousness when attention is directed towards cognitive tasks and the outside world. Active recovery is the opposite because you want to keep your brain at a lower frequency, so your body can mend and recover. This involves flushing hormones from the system to shift from alpha to delta brainwaves to reset. Protect your sleep because memory consolidation takes place during deep delta brainwave sleep.

Design an active recovery protocol that engages your mind, body, and senses, such as yoga, Tai Chi, nature time, Epsom salt baths, saunas, meditating, or a relaxing/engaging hobby like needlepoint. The author shares that sauna + mindfulness meditations = hyperactive recovery. Post-workout recovery nutrition is essential in maximizing the training effect, so you can refuel, rebuild, and rehydrate.

Total resets are vital. Find time each month or at least each quarter to fully unplug from work and technology for a few days in nature and quality time with loved ones to recharge.

Stress + Rest + Recover + Repeat

When you find yourself in the survival zone or burnout zone, how can you consciously shift to the recovery zone?

Are you an entrepreneur interested in developing these six types of grit? I would love to work with you if you apply to the Halcyon Incubator before the deadline on April 9, 2021.