December 20, 2024 - Good Job Creations

Excellence: The Beginning Of It All

gjc on December 20, 2024

In my previous article of this series, I wrote about Grit vs Talent: What’s The Difference and Why Does It Matter? has unravelled what sets apart high achievers and their counterparts and how they exude excellence effortlessly.

In this article, I would like to explain that although we’re all gifted with different talents, born with different genes and into different family backgrounds, these should never be the deciding factors of one’s success.

The journey to excellence is a road less travelled, and not many are resilient enough to stay on that path. But there’s always a small group of people who do, those are the ones who took the time to figure out their interests and stuck to them with deliberate practise. They are the grittier ones.

Defying all odds with Grit

Have you ever wondered how Chairmans, C.E.O.s, and Directors of a company get to where they are? What about those colleagues of yours who get yearly promotions, and exude nothing short of excellence? You can’t help but wonder out loud if you had half their brains, genes, support system or even their degrees…perhaps you might be in the same position.

There was a period of time when academic performance was the determining factor to what higher education one pursues and in return, which career they end up in. Parents with financial means were able to afford extra tuition and enhancement activities, providing their children with a head start in life, while the rest with less were placed at a disadvantage.

But, there were also countless stories of children who defied all odds despite their limited resources and poor living conditions, pushed through with grit and created something out of nought, the unwillingness to allow their circumstances to define their future. They changed their destiny.

Rewiring your mindset and changing your perspectives on how you perceive difficult circumstances and limitations determines the actions you’ll take.

Interest: How it all begins

Contrary to popular beliefs, personal interests do matter—it’s what starts your job search, and what you ultimately decide to settle for, it also influences how you perform on the job.

Not everyone has the luxury of choosing from an array of occupations. Circumstances prevent most from doing so, and the rest take what they can get just to get by. And while we may envy those who proclaim they love their jobs, we shouldn’t be too quick to assume they have started from a different place.

Here’s the thing: Interests are not discovered through soul-searching, instead, it’s sparked by interactions you make with the outside world.

Before hard work, comes play—it’s something fundamental that’s long forgotten. Long before committing to the ‘real deal’, you should go about experimenting and get your hands dirty in everything you find yourself drawn to because you’ll never know what you may find.

It is only through experimenting, you’ll eventually figure out the interest that sticks, and eliminate the ones that won’t. And when you decide on what you intend to pursue long-term, don’t be quick to abandon the pursuit that you chose to invest in.

Take a marriage commitment for example. After some time, romantic feelings between the couple eventually fade. But we both know that what keeps the marriage going is the effort invested by both parties that keeps it going.

Just like interest, it must be triggered over and over again, exercise patience to see it develop into something great and keep showing up. Because falling in love is one thing, sticking with it is another.

Always be bold and ask plenty of questions, seek those who share the same interests and goals, build meaningful relationships, and get a mentor with expertise to lead, challenge and encourage you.

Expect growth in your knowledge, expertise and skill and don’t be afraid to put them to the test. Be hungry for more.

Practice: A cure to your Achilles’ heel

Practice is an assiduous desire to do better. It resides in the minds of optimists who only look forward and want to grow further. Management consultant expert, Peter Drucker suggests to be effective is to “concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results…“

Grit isn’t purely devoting a large quantity of time to your passion and interests, it’s the quality of time—it’s what you do with your time and to focus on the things that bring you one step closer to your goal.

A simple illustration is this: Remember when you had your first bike ride, you had exactly four wheels, including those pesky training ones you despise so much the second you get the hang of riding.

But then, dad tells you that you’re not quite ready and that you need to work on your posture and stability, and especially to keep your eyes peeled on the road ahead. Once the training wheels are off, you’re riding freely. And one fine day, on your usual bike ride, in an effort to avoid some crazy cat that sprung past your lane, you hit the brakes a little too hard and fell from your bike.

What do you do then? Get up, keep riding or give up bike riding altogether for the fear and pain it caused you?

The first half of the illustration shows that we all start somewhere and from the bottom. The training wheels are the resources we have, the knowledge we acquire as we deliberately practise.

Soon, you’re riding with ease, there’s a certain flow—a feeling of spontaneity that comes with it. You feel exhilarated because you know all that hard work has finally paid off, and your work is bringing you to places you never thought you could go.

But success is hard-earned and it’s not in the absence of challenges and setbacks—those things come at you unexpectedly (like that cat). You break down, your ego gets bruised and you feel demotivated, but remembering why you got started in the first place gets you back up and to keep going.

Learn to embrace the failures and setbacks instead of shunning away from them. Make it teach you how to improve your pursuit of success and keep moving forward.

Consider another story of the famous inventor Thomas Edison who invented the lightbulb. No one expected to see him go far in life. In school, teachers labelled him stupid, at work, well, he was fired from multiple jobs.

But what’s intriguing was how determined he was to not let failure and people define his worth and future. This man clearly knew what he wanted and went pursuing it. Edison was a great example of grit and resilience.

His interest lay in inventing, and he certainly put it to work. He relentlessly improved one failed lightbulb to the next, figured out what went wrong and changed his tactics, and after what seemed like forever, he succeeded. So, imagine if Edison had given up on his second or third try, the course of history in this modern lifestyle would forever be altered.

Your interest is what gets you to the starting line, but deliberate practice, resilience and grit are what get you to where you want to be.

Written & Illustrated by Destiny Goh
Marketing Communications Executive

Grit vs Talent: What’s The Difference And Why Does It Matter?

gjc on December 20, 2024

At times, exceptional performances at the workplace leave some wondering whether it’s a matter of talent or grit. The article series on Grit will unravel how high achievers succeed and why they stay successful, with part one helping you understand what true passion and perseverance can do for you.

Many will recognize talent from a mile away. When we see someone perform a task almost effortlessly, we often conclude that they’re extremely talented. But what most of us fail to see is the arduous hours spent in toiling, preparation, and practice that’s invested behind the scenes.

Academic Psychologist Angela Duckworth, who wrote Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, has done extensive research on thousands of individuals ranging from military cadets to salespeople to students at a public school and spellers at a Spelling Bee contest.

Duckworth’s research has pulled back the curtains and unravelled what made high achievers so successful and also staying successful. After fine-tuning the results of her research, she concluded that a combination of passion and perseverance is what makes these people stand out from the rest; in other words, they have grit.

What is Grit?

Grit, in simpler terms, means perseverance and effort—to demonstrate an unusual ability that combines exceptional zeal and a capacity for hard work that strives beyond excellence. It’s a ‘never-give-up’ attitude.

More often than not, our passion for certain interests dwindles mainly due to a lack of commitment and perseverance. If we are looking for a certain outcome or success yet only put in meagre effort, chances are, we might also miss out on the improvement that slowly trickles in. And what’s worse, is that our impatience causes us to walk away just as quickly as we started.

Why does grit matter in what we do?

When we start something, the end goal is always to get the job done. But as for high achievers, they don’t just want good; they want to produce the best work. What separates excellent work from mediocre ones is this: High achievers tend to think they are not good enough; they are satisfied being unsatisfied—a huge contrast to being complacent.

However, some would argue, the ones who are naturally talented are just as capable of producing equally excellent results. So, what are the factors that set the gritty and the talented apart?

William James, a Harvard psychologist, declared “human individual lives usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum, and he behaves below his optimum.”

What James was trying to say, is that we humans are only making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources. Hence, merely having talent without investing an ounce of effort, discipline, and perseverance will only remain stagnant—it will never reach its fullest potential. It’s almost as if there’s a gap between potential and actualization.

Therefore, talent alone is no guarantee of success.

Journalist and author, Malcolm Gladwell suggested that talent promotes narcissism in some—a behaviour that encourages short-term performance but discourages long-term learning and growth. We risk leaving everything else that matters in the shadows by placing talent on a pedestal. By doing so, we inevitably send a message to the other factors—including grit—are less significant that it ought to be.

Nietzsche, a German philosopher, once wrote “Our vanity, our self-love, promotes the cult of genius. For if we think of genius as something magical, we are not obliged to compare and find ourselves lacking…To call someone ‘divine‘ means: ‘here there is no need to compete.’”

Grit behaves the opposite, it challenges why must we emphasize plenty on talent and fixate such extreme limits on what we might do, rather than the actual effort put in that will decide where we would end up in the long run.

The ‘natural bias‘ is this: There’s a prejudice hidden against high achievers because they worked so hard for it but we would rather be inclined to those who we think arrived at their destination merely by being naturally talented.

By now, you would have understood that grit is not something built but practiced—it’s a high level of consistent effort and discipline. It’s about acknowledging your weaknesses and finding ways to improve. It’s not to yield to setbacks no matter the temptation but to press on despite unfavourable circumstances and challenges that come your way and to take rejection as merely a stepping stone to extraordinary achievements.

Grit, or talent, there’s no one better than the other, but rather, it intertwines with one another because what it does, is produce skill. To develop a skill is to spend hours upon hours beating your craft to create something refined.

One thing to take note of about skill is this—it isn’t the same thing as an achievement. To further illustrate this, in the absence of talent, your effort is barely anything more than your unmet potential. In the absence of effort, your skills are nothing more than what you could have achieved but didn’t.

The takeaway is this: A skill is produced when talent and effort intertwine, and at the same time, effort makes a skill valuable.

It’s no secret that there are no shortcuts to excellence. After all, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Grit pivots ‘This is all you can do’ mentality to ‘Who knows what you can do?’

Written by Destiny Goh
Marketing Communications Executive

Photo by David Köhler on Unsplash