The Importance of Grit

Yes, staying up all night to finish your Extended Essay for IB is a reflection of your hard work and intelligence. Sure, throwing yourself into any and every extracurricular activity shows you are an “involved student.” However, when these things are combined to build your “Harvard-worthy portfolio”, you might be missing one thing — grit.

According to GoStrength.com, grit is a personality trait possessed by individuals who demonstrate passion and perseverance toward a goal despite being confronted by significant obstacles. The earlier our generation starts to get gritty, the higher we can raise the bar.

Grit is driving up to the school parking lot and working on homework because VPN doesn’t  work at home. Grit is asking your soccer coach what you need to work on over the summer to come back prepared next season. Grit is being passionate about the essay you are writing for English class, so when you hit writer’s block you bounce back fast.

 Grit is the happy medium between passion and hard work. Let’s say you’ve loved soccer since you were four years old: your dad was the coach and Dom Dwyer was your favorite Sporting KC player. You eventually moved up to the club level and played for a few years. Then high school hits — a much more competitive field plus actual homework. 

You played freshman year then realize it’s not what you want anymore. Biology tests are getting harder, the center forward is faster than you and there’s no spare time to practice juggling — so you quit.

When your passion leaves, your perseverance fades. Coming from the generation that slams their fists onto the keyboard when the answer doesn’t auto-fill fast enough, delayed gratification isn’t a time-earned value.

“[Generation Z] expects to be able to communicate quickly and easily through instant messaging, social networks and email,” says Information Age. “Compuware research found that 80% of today’s consumers expect a mobile application to transact in three seconds or less.”

Since our parents never had to grow up with struggles like tapping their phone twenty times when Safari won’t load, they have the patience needed to be successful. As teenagers, our attention span is only ten to 15 minutes long, according to InformED.com. The internet allows us to find what we want in the quick time we need it — but if we had to find information the old-fashioned way? That’d take grit.

Portfolios with great grades, masses of extracurriculars and service hours may get you into a great school, but understanding how to problem solve when faced with obstacles, small or large, will lead you to success post-college.

Companies like Koru — who help select and develop talent into businesses say the number one characteristic in potential employees is grittiness.

In Psychologist Angela Duckworth’s book, “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance,” she shares the type of questions companies should ask when looking for workers with grit. The number one question that should be asked is ‘what is one of your biggest failures?’ Most people tend to admit their mistake, but don’t share the most important part — how they learned from it.

It seems easy to tell yourself to persevere through tough obstacles. But what we fail to realize is “grit” won’t happen overnight — it’s a trait that must be practiced over and over.

The quicker students start practicing grit, the faster it turns into a habit. We can show the world that Shawnee Mission East students have a mix of everything. Intelligence, involvement and most importantly: grit.