Grit is overrated; the hardest worker never wins

Grit is overrated; the hardest worker never wins The people with the most grit are really poor or really neglected and they  overcome those circumstances.  But why aspire to that? We glorify it like life is one  big Horatio  Alger story. Working smart is the opposite of grit We also glorify the idea of persisting through hardship. Theres the Seth Godin book of grit  that everyone loves:  Its The Dip. He says everything worth doing has a really tough moment where other people stop but you keep going. However his idea is really about recognizing patterns, and its best in the  business world where there are  rules for success and everyone  is basically a sheep trying to get  the same thing: higher sales, new markets, more funding, etc. In Godins  scenario people are not engaging in grit so much as getting a leg up. A great example: My  friend who imported a violin teacher from Bulgaria so her daughter doesnt have to fight  to get the best teachers in Boston. Crazy passion is not grit, its craziness The other type  of grit is  the person doing something totally new. There is no dip because there is no established  upswing. And its  the upswing that  makes the downswing a dip rather than  an endless path to hell. In the cases where people are not sheep where someone is really truly doing something  new there is only a terrifying abyss. A good example:  Herman Melville writing Moby Dick. His family starved and he kept writing  even though there was no established  market or precedent for what he was writing. But a more disturbing example is Charles Goodyear in the mid 1800s: After learning about rubber  he convinced himself he could make his fortune by turning it into useful objects like waterproof shoes. All attempts ended in disaster and his life became a catalog of misery. His shoes melted in the summer, six of his children died, and his family lived  in poverty. But Goodyear was determined. When debts landed him in jail, he asked his wife to bring him a rolling pin and some rubber and he carried on inventing in his cell. He made his breakthrough when he accidentally dropped a piece of rubber on a hot stove. It cooked and shriveled into a hard black mass that Goodyear immediately spotted as the thing hed wanted all along. This is how he developed the tough black rubber we use in tires today by a cooking process now known as vulcanization. Americas economic  edge comes from entrepreneurship, invention,  creative thinking. (Political side note: its what you get from being the great melting pot where new ideas smash up against each other all the time.) But its also crazy people who somehow figure out something great, in spite of themselves. Grit is working hard because hard work is an end in itself But that doesnt come from grit. Grit is the Protestant work ethic  and its fundamentally conservative and stifling. The Protestant ethic is about  enforcing societys values on the potentially wayward so that people kept building houses, having children, and populating towns (to fight Native Americans and take their land). The Protestant ethic espouses hard work as  an end in of itself. But we know that doesnt get people anywhere. Its why the kids at Stuyvesant who test at the very top end up underperforming as adults. Its why the huge successes in Silicon Valley are not actually about people failing and trying again. They are outliers who are a little bit crazy  and build something no one can even understand until after its built. The value of an  end result is not about  how much work it took but how good it is.  And this is why Alfie Kohn has a ten-point tirade about why grit is not a productive means to a creative, innovative  society. Grit presupposes  a male outlook on life The Protestants who celebrated work so heartily did not celebrate womens work. Who is most likely to come up with an idea without spending years working on it? Women. Because they  dont  have time to fail and fail and fail again. Women can work full speed ahead until  30, then they have to start having kids. So women cant risk having  five businesses before one takes off. There is no time. And women who cant be sheep in the workplace because the paths  the sheep take to food and water are for men.  For men, time  is linear. They head toward a  goal and how they function  each day defines them: what do you do? is the ubiquitous workplace question. And flow is the ultimate goal: how much do you love your work? How engaged are you? I have thought for a long time that all the time management gurus are men  because men have huge chunks of time uninterrupted by children. And the workplace is organized for time productivity, whereas the home is organized in a non-linear way that segments time into lots of small chunks interrupted by  emergencies/breakdowns/crying etc. The workplace is about using time to get money. The home is about using time to get a nap.   Flow vs. confetti Brigid Schulte  talks about  womens time as being like confetti; little chunks float by in an unorganized way and you take them as you can. Theres no grit  here; its  just trying to stay ahead of the next problem. There is no flow because dinner would burn. There is no engagement because cumulative sleep deprivation of raising kids shifts focus to  just keeping them alive. Grit is bad for women like  school is bad for women. Both are fixed games women cant win. You go to school to get a good job and even though we know most educated women want to be  home with children, we never tell those girls that growing up to take care of kids is valuable. And we tell kids that grit is what makes adult life good, but we dont tell those kids that hard work measured by number of consecutive hours and intensity of engagement is not something that can happen in a house full of children. The patterns women work in today moving in and out of the workforce depending on their stage of life is antithetical to grit. Women are working smart and planning ahead and accomplishing their goals with fragmented  hours and alternative careers. We are far past celebrating grit. Lets  celebrate shrewd and crafty  workarounds. Lets measure results instead of process.  Thats how well crate equality in the workforce.