Note: This article is based on the blog post by Christine Carter, in which she tells us about her personal experience in achieving success.
Instead, I intended to get a prestigious job with a high salary. At that time, suitable opportunities were available and interviews were conducted for jobs in advertising and brand management, and it seemed to fit my training experiences and creativity.
I got a prestigious, well-paying job in marketing management, but unfortunately, I didn't like it because I only felt like I was clocking in, checking done tasks, and clocking out. Therefore, I began therapy to get rid of my anxiety because I didn't know who I was or what I wanted in life.
Six years later, I started studying the sociology of happiness, and I started to feel passionate. No one else particularly thought what I was doing was such a great idea. One professor told me to stop calling it happiness as long as I was studying how to stay healthy because people think I'm not smart enough.
After battling the anxieties of corporate America, I could have cared less about what other people thought of me. I was content with everything I was learning and paid no attention to the kind of research that would help me find employment in the right field. For me, I believe it worked really well.
In my first article in the series on high performance and grit, I was emphasizing that success requires a lot of practice, and it is often not fun. However, high performers always have an innate interest in what they do, which serves as the foundation for their constant and deliberate practice. In other words, grit requires passion as a key ingredient.
According to research, we actually detect interest, not talent, when we recognize that a child is naturally gifted or demonstrates a skill that foretells a promising future in a particular field. While a four-year-old who exhibits an unusual interest in classical music or the violin may one day become a violinist, they may not appear to be talented.
However, their interest in music at such a young age may stimulate many factors that lead to their proficiency in this field, such as encouraging parents to practice deliberate and continuous training, but early interest is not the same as early achievement. Achievement requires effort and skill, which a four-year-old child lacks.
Bottom line: The practice and effort that leads to long-term success and happiness is driven by a basic desire for it, not by parents or social expectations. This is because there was no one to motivate me to make it happen.
Failure
Passion is another thing that characterizes high performers, in addition to strict practice and strategic comfort. As all this passion becomes useful when we consider another important component of success: Failure.
Adversity is transformed into success by high performers, and most great people don't achieve one success after another. Where failure is an essential part of development, J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series was rejected by 12 publishers, and even before the series was written, she suffered a series of devastating personal failures.
The most well-known example of a failure that leads to success is Abraham Lincoln, who lost several elections before going on to become one of history's greatest presidents. Also, Michael Jordan was kicked off his high school basketball team.
Keep in mind that 75% of people experience some trauma in life, and about 20% are likely to experience a traumatic event in their life in a given year. Therefore, the odds confirm that our life will not be free of pain and suffering, regardless of our situation. However, social and economic status is important, while wealth does not protect us from adversity, it does limit shocks.
Since suffering in life is unavoidable, our ability to handle it and grow as a result of it is essential to our success and happiness. Professional growth is most likely when we push ourselves outside of our comfort zones in our field. To develop new skills and capabilities that will support our excellence and success in the future, we must take the risk of facing fear, embarrassment, mistakes, or even total failure.
Adversity is crucial in fostering the development of perseverance and passion in us, and grit is a combination of both. It's interesting to note that the majority of scientific research indicates that the amount of stress brought on by adversity and how we handle it tends to predict how much we will gain from it. Not those who completely withstand stress in the face of adversity, but rather those who experience stress, including post-traumatic stress, are those who report significant growth after going through hardship. Therefore, it is likely that we won't be able to overcome a challenging situation and be able to grow and develop if we don't experience some stress in response to it.
Therefore, failure and adversity in general are the foundation of life, and while there is nothing good about misfortunes, it is possible to gain something from them. For example, we know that negative events and misfortunes, like a plane crash or a terminal illness, can stimulate feelings, but what most of us don't realize is that post-traumatic growth, as researchers refer to it, can help us discover our strengths and impart wisdom. Adversity and even disaster have the power to give our lives new meaning and a sense of purpose, and in this way, adversity contributes to the emotional part of grit.
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