GRIT

Photo by Greg Shield on Unsplash

The second foundational element to developing leadership skills is “GRIT”. (Recap first being “Growth Mindset”.)

Grit is the combination of passion / direction (knowing deeply what you want) and perseverance (resilient and hardworking). Angela Duckworth in her book GRIT lays out two key concepts.

1. Role of Effort and Talent in Accomplishments

   1. Skill = Talent x Effort, where Talent is how quickly your skills improve when you invest Effort.

   2. Accomplishment = Skills x Effort, Achievement is what happens when you take your acquired skills and use them.

   3. Accomplishment = Talent x Effort to Improve Skill x Effort to use skills to produce results

   4. Effort counts twice in the accomplishments we produce.

2. Direction or Top level goal

   1. Grit is about holding the same top-level goal for a very long time. Visualizing your goals as a goal hierarchy, where there is a single overarching goals with sub-goals and eventually tasks. For example my top level life goal is to “Help people develop leadership skills and change their career trajectory.” The subgoals under it are:

      1. “Develop great product leaders ”

      2. “Teach leadership skills to a broad audience”

      3. “Become the best student of leadership skills”

   2. GRIT is about doggedly pursuing the top level goal while being flexible with bottom goals. Sometime you need to give up / revise the bottom level goals to achieve the top level goal.

   3. Grit is about having subgoals that are coherent with each other and add to the same top level goal. it is about have clear next steps that you will work towards instead of a visionary goal with no actions.

GRIT was something I developed later in life and that is good news. :) Angela Duckworth shares clear ways to develop them.

I’ll share a few examples in my life of demonstrating GRIT. Please share your own stories of GRIT. It is awesome to hear stories of people persevering to accomplish their goals.

Timeline: 2000 - 2010

Over-arching goal: Build products leveraging cutting edge technology that I invent

Original Subgoals: Do a PhD at a top 10 CS school in computer vision, build some cool technology and build a company that leverages that technology.

Iterated Path:

• Got rejected by the top 10 CS schools twice, had funding do it at Penn State.

• Chose to go full-time at a computer vision startup founded by my advisor at Penn State.

• Led computer vision research and eng. Got grants from NSF, DARPA, NIST.

• Built great computer vision tech and build products for retails industry

• Got 20+ patents.

• Stayed committed to building computer vision based products for 9 years.

Timeline: 2010 - 2020

Over-arching goal: Build products that impact large audiences

Original Subgoals: Get into top 10 b-school, PM at FAANG or start a company

Iterated Path:

• 2010: Rejected by all top 10 b-school

• 2010: Rejected by Google, YouTube, Amazon FB, Apple, LinkedIn, Netflix

• 2011: Got foot in door at Yahoo building video infrastructure, personalization and consumer product at Flickr. Learned to build consumer products at scale.

• 2014: Moved to Yelp and learned to deliver impact across consumer and business products at scale.

• 2017: Hired by FB and have worked on products that impact significantly larger audiences and on more challenging problems.

Timeline: 2016 - 2021

Overarching goal: Become a better leader

Original Subgoals: Transition into management and grow scope

Iterated Path:

• 2016: Missed out on leadership opportunities at Yelp due to gaps in the leadership skills pyramid

• 2016: Identified gaps in skills and started taking a series of courses

• 2017: Moved to Facebook after bridging some of the gaps.

• 2017 - 2022:

  • Became a great student of leadership skills and apply them daily.

  • Earning more leadership responsibilities along the way.

  • Breaking down leadership skills into a stack, building deliberate practice methods to improve these skills, and teach them as a way to internalize them.

Timeline: 2021 - >

Overarching goal: Help people become better leaders

Subgoals:

• “Develop great product leaders ”

• “Teach leadership skills to a broad audience”

• “Become the best student of leadership skills”

You have all had your own stories of GRIT and doggedly pursing a high level goal. Developing leadership skills can be a new top level goal that you identify subgoals for and doggedly pursue.

Please share your own stories of GRIT in comments or DMs. It is awesome to hear stories of people persevering to accomplish their goals.