Research conducted by psychologist Roy Baumeister linked willpower levels to energy levels, which helps explain why our willpower erodes as the day goes on.11 People trying to lose weight, for example, often find they can stay on their diets until nighttime, then succumb to a tempting tub of ice cream before bed. This also explains decision fatigue, or the fact that, when forced to solve a series of hard problems, the quality of our solutions deteriorates over time.
Baumeister’s research has become the subject of some healthy debate, especially because he directly linked energy levels to glucose levels. But this detail is less important. If you talk to peak performers, most agree that willpower declines over the course of the day. Maybe this is just a normal drop in energy levels or maybe it’s directly related to what Baumeister termed “ego-depletion.” In either case, peak performers fight back with scheduling.
If willpower degenerates over time, don’t argue. Just start your day with your hardest task and work backward—in descending order of importance and difficulty—to the easiest. The business catchphrase for this approach is “eat your ugly frog first,” though it’s roughly the same procedure we should use for putting an order around our clear-goals list. Always start your clear-goals list, and thus your day, by attacking the task that, once accomplished, will produce the biggest win for that day.
Of course, since willpower declines over time, those second and third frogs can become the bigger issue. This is also why I have that sign above my desk that reads DO THE HARD THING. The phrase is a great reminder to attack life’s challenges, but its real function is much smaller: it’s to remind me to do one extra item on my to-do list before I take my first break. If my day’s first task is to add 750 words to whatever book I’m writing and the second one is to practice a speech, my sign reminds me to practice that speech before I take my first break. This helps me push through my tougher tasks while I still have the maximum energy for that push.
There are caveats, of course. When we’re tired, we see decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex, and this leads to serious performance deficits. Attention wavers, cognition slows, and processing errors arrive with increasing frequency. Creativity takes a bigger hit. When we’re low on energy, we don’t bother seeking far-flung connections among ideas. We take the easiest choice available, never mind the consequences. What this means: if you’re fighting a battle against lack of sleep, don’t fight one over willpower at the same time.
Finally, once the dust settles around the glucose debate, I think we’re going to find that boosting energy levels with food (Baumeister’s intervention) can help reset willpower, yet there will always be some “state shifting” required. If you talk to peak performers about resetting willpower midday, they’ll talk about eating for certain (Baumeister’s suggestion), but naps, meditation, and exercise are frequently mentioned as well. All of these latter interventions don’t just reset our physiology, they shift our state and reset our neurobiology, which seems to be another critical piece in this puzzle.
MINDSET
Mindset is what my friend Peter Diamandis means by: “If you think you can, or you think you can’t, well, you’re right.” More technically, mindset refers to our attitudes toward learning.12 Either you have a fixed mindset, meaning you believe talent is innate and no amount of practice will ever help you improve, or you have a growth mindset, meaning you believe talent is merely a starting point and practice makes all the difference. And for sustained perseverance, the research shows, a growth mindset is indispensable.
When Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck scanned the brains of people tackling tasks too difficult for them, she found a substantial difference in reactions between fixed and growth mindsetters.13 When faced with a hard problem, the brains of fixed mindsetters show a total lack of activity, as if their mindset were filtering out all incoming information. Since fixed mindsetters believe talent is innate, they didn’t believe they could solve the problem. As a result, their brains didn’t bother expending the energy to try. The problem, quite literally, didn’t register.
On the flip side, when faced with a difficult challenge, the brains of growth mindsetters showed a lot of fireworks. Their whole brain lit up and stayed that way. And with significant results. Growth mindsetters work harder, longer, and smarter, deploying a much wider range of problem-solving strategies when facing complicated challenges. They also have an easier time getting into and staying in flow.
This uptick in flow comes down to concentration. When fixed mindsetters make an error, they tend to dwell on it. This wrecks their ability to keep their focus in the here and now. Not so for growth mindsetters. “Live and learn,” says the growth mindset—and more flow is the result.
So, the critical question is: How to cultivate a growth mindset?
Curiosity is the first step. If you’re asking questions and learning, it’s hard to tell yourself that learning itself is not possible.
Next, to build on this foundation, inventory your personal history. Make a list of your skills, whatever they may be. Mostly, it’s not the skills themselves that matter, it’s the fact that you learned them in the first place that you’re trying to recognize. Be very specific. Unearth invisible skills. What’s an invisible skill? Know how to defuse an argument? It’s a talent that doesn’t show up on an aptitude test but one that’s fantastically useful in the real world.
Once your list is complete, backtrack everything on it. Deconstruct your abilities. How did you learn this skill? What did you learn first, second, third, and so on? Do the same for all your other skills. Look for commonalities. If you find overlaps in your framework, this will give you a sense of how you learn. It will also force you to realize that you can learn, often in difficult circumstances, often without noticing. This is the key shift. Once we believe we can learn, we can become curious about what else we can learn, and suddenly we’re deploying our growth mindset on a regular basis and for maximum benefit.
PASSION
We started this primer by exploring passion, and it’s necessary to pick up the thread again. Passion matters in a discussion of grit because there’s no other way to persevere for years on end. Working until three in the morning for three months straight gets old quickly. This is why author John Irving’s advice on persistence is blunt and straightforward: “Get obsessed, stay obsessed.”14
Unfortunately, his advice doesn’t always help.
The problem: genuine passion doesn’t look like genuine passion on the front end. When most of us think about the poster child for passion, we imagine LeBron James hard-scowling his way to some backboard-rattling thunder dunk. Or Einstein, wild-haired at the blackboard, brain rattling off equations. We see fire in the belly, sweat upon the brow, and think, well, that’s just not me.
But it just wasn’t them, either—and that’s the point.
Early-stage passion doesn’t look like late-stage passion. For LeBron, early-stage passion looked exactly like what it was: a little kid standing in front of a big hoop, trying to get his shots to drop. On the front end, passion is nothing more than the overlap of multiple curiosities coupled to a few wins. So yeah, the ultimate goal may be to “get obsessed, stay obsessed,” but our journey begins with “get curious, stay curious.”
A second point is worth mentioning: passion isn’t always pleasant. Quite often, passion feels like frustration on the inside and looks like obsession from the outside. Peak performers must learn to tolerate enormous amounts of anxiety and overwhelm, which is what passion feels like much of the time. Passion doesn’t make us gritty. Passion makes us able to tolerate all the negative emotions produced by grit.
A growth mindset allows us to see this tolerance for negativity as a sign of victory. It helps flip the script, forcing the brain to reframe pain as pleasure. What also helps: a clear-goals list.
Every time you ignore the frustration, delay the gratification, and cross an item off that list, that’s a little win. That small rush of pleasure you feel when you cross off an item is
the reward chemical dopamine. Passion produces little wins, little wins produce dopamine, and dopamine, repeatedly, over time, cements a growth mindset into place. But because neurochemicals play a lot of different roles in the brain, this increase in dopamine also amplifies focus and drives flow. And flow over time produces grit.
The reason?
The ecstasy of flow redeems the agony of passion. If flow is our reward for perseverance, because flow is such a gargantuan reward, we’re willing to tolerate a lot of pain along the way.
But it’s still a lot of pain.
This is why, even if you can properly utilize willpower, motivation, and passion, training this kind of gritty perseverance requires, well, training. And most experts agree, when it comes to perseverance, there’s little substitute for the physical. Work out. Engage in regular exercise. Ski, surf, or snowboard. Ride a bike. Go for walks. Lift weights. Run. Do yoga. Do Tai Chi. Whatever. Do something.
It’s that simple.
Okay, perhaps not exactly that simple. Feedback matters. Measure your progress, and every time you work out, push a little harder than the last. Stay in the challenge-skills sweet spot. Aim for those dopamine-producing, small incremental victories.
Also, prepare for failure. There will be times when working out is impossible. You’re too tired or too busy or both. It’s bound to happen. On the days when the suck embraces you (more than the other way around), have a plan in place. If you can’t get in your full workout in the morning, then have a preplanned half-workout scheduled for the afternoon.
And for those days when nothing seems possible, create a “low-energy grit exercise.” If you’re too tired to do anything else, this low-grit exercise is what you do. My version is two hundred push-ups. My longtime editor, Michael Wharton, prefers a twenty-minute run. The point is to find something hard enough to remind yourself that you’re gritty enough to get it done, especially when you can’t do much else. That reminder is the point. Over time, it’s what automatizes persistence.
THE GRIT TO CONTROL YOUR THOUGHTS
Impossible. You can hear the frustration built in. The hard work. The long hours. The voice in your head telling you to quit. The beating of your head against hard surfaces. Maybe that’s only me—but you get the point.
If you’re interested in being your best, your inner monologue needs to support the best you want to be. In fact, when it comes to sustained performance, because doubt and disappointment are constant companions, controlling your thoughts is often the ball game. “At the elite level,” explains high-performance psychologist Michael Gervais, “talent and ability are mostly equal. The difference is in the head. High performance is 90 percent mental. And most of that mental edge comes from being able to control your thoughts.”15
My favorite big-picture thinking on this subject comes from author David Foster Wallace’s amazing speech “This Is Water.”16 Originally given as a commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005, “This Is Water” is ostensibly about the value of a liberal arts education but is actually about the dire necessity of thought control. Here’s Wallace:
Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. . . . And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete. . . . There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.
Excellence requires repetition. Even if you’ve got passion and purpose perfectly aligned and completely love what you do, what you do is often reduced to a daily checklist. This means a portion of peak performance is always sculpted out of Wallace’s hallmarks of adult life: boredom, routine, and petty frustration.
This is why thought control matters.
Without the grit to control your thoughts, the boredom and frustration that come with every routine will quickly spiral downward. A great many peak performers eventually come to a very uncomfortable realization: they’re doing exactly what they love, yet completely hating their life. This is a whole new level of difficult. If passion and purpose become a prison, petty frustration morphs into blind rage. It’s the thing no one tells you about following your dreams: sooner or later you’re going to follow them right off a cliff.
Point of fact: David Foster Wallace took his own life a few years after penning “This Is Water.” His wonderful speech remains a tragic reminder of the truly difficult nature of winning this fight.17
The better news is that science has begun paying attention to this problem. Over the past few decades, mental hygiene has become a hot topic. Progress has been swift. A three-pronged approach has been uncovered. We’ll go one prong at a time.
SELF-TALK
If you want to control your thoughts, positive self-talk is the place to start. “There are only two kinds of thoughts,” explains Michael Gervais, “those that constrict us or those that expand us. Negative thoughts constrict, positive thoughts expand. And you can feel the difference. We’re looking to expand. Positive self-talk is about choosing those thoughts that provide a little more space.”
Constricting thoughts are along the lines of: “This sucks. I can’t handle this. Why is my life so unfair?” They shrink your options and abilities. Positive thoughts move in the other direction: “I choose to be here. I’ve got this. I can definitely rise to this occasion.”
For this to really work, you’ll need a lot more positive self-talk than you might assume. University of North Carolina’s Barbara Fredrickson discovered “the positivity ratio,” or the fact that it takes three positive thoughts to counter a single negative thought. “Three-to-one,” she wrote in a recent journal article, “is the ratio we’ve found to be the tipping point beyond which the full impact of positive emotions becomes unleashed.”18
Once unleashed, the impact is considerable. Positive self-talk leads to positive emotions, which expand perspective, giving us the ability to create action plans beyond our normal routines. These new action plans alleviate the boredom and frustration that come with the checklist. Better still, positive emotions drive the “bounce-back effect,” which is a fancy term for resilience.19
One thing to know: positive self-talk has to be grounded in reality. When we try to bolster ourselves with false claims, the brain is not fooled. We’re excellent at detecting the mismatch between self-fact and self-fiction. This is why affirmations tend to backfire.20 If you’re telling yourself you’re a millionaire but actually work at Walmart, the brain knows. We find the disparity between the affirmation’s fantasy and our actual reality too big—and the result is de-motivating.
The best way to talk yourself up is to remind yourself of stuff you know is true. If there have been times when you’ve faced similar challenges and succeeded, that’s where to start. Actual information trumps New Age aspiration every time.
GRATITUDE
Our senses gather 11 million bits of information every second.21 This is way too much for the brain to handle. So much of what the brain does is sift and sort, trying to tease apart the critical from the casual. And since the first order of business for any organism is survival, the first filter most of that information encounters is the amygdala, our threat detector.22
Un
fortunately, to keep us safe, the amygdala is strongly biased toward negative information. We’re always hunting danger. In experiments run at the University of California, Berkeley, psychologists discovered that we take in as many as 9 bits of negative information for every positive bit that gets through.23 Nine-to-one are lousy odds under the best of conditions—and peak performance rarely takes place under the best of conditions.
Yet negative thinking leads to heightened stress. This crushes optimism and squelches creativity. When tuned toward the negative, we miss the novel. Novelty is the foundation for pattern recognition and, by extension, the basis of creativity.24 No creativity, no innovation; no innovation, no impossible.
Positive self-talk is one solution to this problem. Gratitude is another.
A daily gratitude practice alters the brain’s negativity bias.25 It changes the amygdala’s filter, essentially training it to take in more positive information. This works so well because the positive stuff you’re grateful for is stuff that has already happened. It never trips our bullshit detector.
The best time for a gratitude practice is an open question. Personally, I like to do mine at the end of my workday, right after I’ve written up my next day’s clear-goals list. But on days when I wake up stressed, it’s the first thing I’ll do, while the coffee is brewing, right before I start my morning writing session.
And there are two ways to approach a gratitude practice.
Option one: Write down ten things you’re grateful for, and each time you write an item down, really take the time to feel that gratitude. You’re trying to recall the somatic address of the emotion, discovering where it lives in the body (your gut, your head, your heart) and exactly how it feels.
Or, option two: Write down three things you’re grateful for and expand one into a paragraph of description. While writing the paragraph, once again, be sure to focus on the somatic address of your gratitude.
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