Summary of the research masterpiece by the famous author Angela Duckworth. It will be a short but insightful summary. The book is titled "Grit," which means "the power of encouragement." The subtitle highlights "the power of passion and the spirit of perseverance and effort."
In this work, the author also explains why a person's talent cannot guarantee success, while many other factors may be more important. For example, understanding and being able to identify one's passion, knowing what one wants, and fighting with determination without giving up to achieve any goal in life. These things do not come from talent or luck. In this book, the first key concept the author raises is hard work. She says that proper hard work always pays off. Even if it's not an immediate reward, it will pay off at some point in the long-term future.
You may have heard people say that this person is talented or that person is talented because they were born with a certain bloodline or from a talented family. This is not true. You can achieve anything in life if you are determined and work hard consistently, combined with the right mindfulness towards those goals. It's not done blindly. Everyone wants to succeed, but when it comes to the actions that lead to success, people hesitate, and very few have the motivation and courage to take those actions. This is the difference between ordinary people and extraordinary people.
In this work, the author tries to uncover all the secrets related to success and debunk various beliefs that have been passed down from generation to generation, stating that talent is the factor that leads to success. But if you have both talent and hard work, and you don't give up, you will move towards success much faster. In this book, the author also reveals that if you want to become a person who stands out, you have to work harder than ordinary people. The author emphasizes that our potential is one thing, but how we use our potential is another.
We observe that many people who succeed in different fields have one thing in common: all their decisions are made after careful consideration, and they know how to motivate themselves to overcome whatever they are doing. No matter what happens, they remain determined and focused on their goals. Even if they fail, they continue to do it until they succeed.
The mission in the journey to find success has no place for people who think "that's enough" or people who like to do easy things, following others. There is only a place for people with a character of trying to do things right, with intelligence, patience, and who do not give up. To achieve success, you must have a firm determination, know which direction to go, and be strong both physically and mentally. Not swayed by the environment, pressure, or external influences, combined with relentless effort.
These are all important values that can help you successfully get through the starting phase. This spirit of grit or motivation is the result of passion combined with the spirit of perseverance and effort. Therefore, having talent alone cannot guarantee that this motivation or grit will emerge. Not everyone has the same talent. Similarly, there are some things that may be easy for others but not easy for you. But even so, it is still clear if you put your heart and soul into working as hard as you can. You will be able to do what you want to do, even if it is not easy for you, because hard work with the right mindfulness towards a specific goal will produce more results than those who only have talent but do not know how to use it.
Whether in academics, business, or sports, people with motivation, persistence, and grit often achieve great success in the end. Of course, success cannot be predicted just by having motivation or grit alone. There are many other factors, such as past experience, support from parents and friends, and even physical energy and health. But among all those factors, persistence or grit, combined with the spirit of perseverance, is still the most important predictor of an individual's journey to success.
Two famous psychologists, Francis Galton and William James, after extensive research on the question of why some people are more successful than others, found the answer and concluded that every human being has different talents and can control and master many resources. However, only extraordinary people know how to use all these resources for their own growth. Talent is not a bad thing; on the contrary, it is a great value.
But the problem lies in the tendency to value only talented people. Talented people are people who can learn or do something faster and better than others, as we have seen on famous TV shows like America's Got Talent. Because society values talent so much, some people who are not talented, who work with their strength, are considered followers who just walk behind others. This trend makes them all believe that other factors, such as motivation, grit, persistence, and the spirit of perseverance, are not important.
This trend has severely damaged human progress and cut off their thinking from understanding the importance of that one factor: hard work and perseverance. Your potential is just a dream if you don't take full action to a certain level to achieve it. In this book, the author also emphasizes that although talent can help us achieve good performance more easily and faster, it still depends on the results of various habits that you have practiced correctly and regularly over a certain period of time. To illustrate this problem, the author also provides an equation that says: Talent multiplied by effort equals skill.
And if we take that skill and multiply it by more effort, it will equal achievement. So, through this equation, we can see that effort appears twice because your talent can develop and improve, it must come with effort. Because your work will become easier and easier to perform as long as you practice it regularly and you put your heart and soul into working hard without giving up on those tasks. To build a great achievement, an achievement that you have created by keeping a large gap from others, where they dare not even think, but you have taken the necessary actions to get yourself to the destination you want to go.
A study conducted at Harvard University in 1941 with 130 students showed that students who could endure difficult and exhausting tasks for a long time were all students who had received mental education and psychological training when they were teenagers. The book title that the author has given, "Grit," which in Khmer means motivation or perseverance, must be associated with passion and the spirit of dedication and absolute effort. This idea remains true and can be tested in all circumstances.
The question is, why do we want to have talent? The answer is because we want high efficiency and productivity. High efficiency and productivity can only be achieved if you turn talent into skill through hard work, perseverance, and patience to the limit. In the end, what you have done and can succeed in is only because you did not give up. I think at some point in our lives, we will surely face all these problems. Sometimes we start doing something and stop halfway through. This situation is normal for some people, but it will become normal if you don't let it happen often.
The word "Grit," which in Khmer means motivation or perseverance, does not only emphasize hard work. But it is resilience, patience, not giving up easily, and focusing on one thing and doing that one thing to the best of your ability and waiting to see the result at the end. In creating or developing any skill, it requires a certain amount of time, so you have no time to waste doing a little bit of this, a little bit of that, starting this and that without a clear direction. The term motivation is the result of two main factors. One, passion. Two, the spirit of perseverance.
Passion is a very important factor in building motivation. Sometimes in our lives, we are always excited with any new ideas when they come into contact with our emotions, making us eager, happy, excited, and want to start doing it immediately, but when we start implementing the action plan, we start to give up. This is not what we always call Passion. Passion is the compass to lead us to the goal we want to go. It is a consistent effort of dedication over a certain period of time.
Perseverance is something that can make you stick with it, inseparable from your Passion, which can help you do any work, even if that work is something you don't like to do. Having a clear purpose is one of the most important steps towards maintaining your motivation. When you are clear about which option you really want among the other options you have, it will make you walk on the right path and may help you set priorities correctly and in order. When someone lacks motivation, it means they lack a structured purpose in life that should be well-planned and implemented.
Sometimes when you have more than one purpose, it can also cause conflict with each other. But you have to remember that every purpose you set should be aimed at something that can make you grow in whatever field or path you have chosen to walk. The author also clarifies that this motivation means that we focus on doing something without giving up and persevering, but it doesn't mean that we have to be obsessed or do something with stubbornness and inflexibility. Understanding clearly when it's time to give up is a very important part of each of our lives.
Some goals sometimes we have to hand over to others to continue the task because our lives may encounter new turning points that change differently from what we had anticipated. So we can take some shortcuts or some detours, not necessarily a straight path. This is the art of achieving goals in life. Taking shortcuts or detours does not mean you lose your motivation. Another thing you need to remember is that when you have more than one goal in life, you can ask yourself whether all those goals can support you in achieving something you want to do or have in life or not. If not, you should give it up.
Please don't be discouraged if you lack motivation and can't follow a set plan or expectation because this motivation will grow little by little over time through your various actions. According to research by psychologists, this motivation is influenced by experience and genetics. From one generation to the next, nature has made humans evolve in a variety of ways with such conditions through trial and error and through making new mistakes. Your past experiences have helped shape you into the person you are today, and it has also changed your perspective and perception of life.
To be able to have this motivation, you need to have four mental assets. One, interest. Passion starts from being able to enjoy what you do, even if sometimes it's not something you completely love, but you can still feel excited and happy. Two, the ability to practice regularly. When you try to do something regularly, it will make you do it better and better. Find what you love and try to do it better every day. Don't lower your quality at all.
Three, purpose in life. It is very important that you know the reason why you decide to do something because it can determine the quality of the outcome at the end of your actions. Four, hope. This is the most important component of motivation because when things don't go as expected, this is something that can motivate you to keep going. Finding what you love to do without getting tired means you have taken one step closer to success.
The editor-in-chief of the New York Times, Will Shortz, and Jeff Bezos both agree that doing something you love is the most important factor for success because it can make you feel happy and satisfied with your life. Not many people decide to do something they love, but in this, you must also be sure that you will continue to do it consistently because this is just the beginning stage. To be able to find what you define as your Passion, it requires three stages in life as follows.
One, the exploration stage. Two, the development stage. Three, the deepening stage of what you are doing. One, the exploration stage. This stage started when you were a child, and it has evolved and improved with your age and has been greatly influenced by the people around you. This is a long process that has created a love or what we call a passion for you.
Two, the development stage. This is the stage of growth that you have gone through in an environment full of encouragement. Teachers, parents, friends, etc. All of them have provided you with input, feedback, and reactions that can help you strengthen your skills.
Three, the stage of deepening what you are doing. This stage occurs when you constantly and regularly ask yourself questions like "what are you doing?" and "how can you do it better?" With such questions, you will continue to find new methods to make what you are doing achieve better results.
You have to promise yourself that you will pay attention to increasing your practice a lot to make your skills even better. According to a famous psychoanalyst, Eric Ericson, he stated that to hone a talent to a good level, it requires regular and correct practice for up to ten thousand hours.
But the question is, is ten thousand hours enough? There are many successful people who always show ambition to improve their skill level, which is already good, even further to reach the peak of their talent. This requires even more and more practice, requiring decades of time.
Regarding this practice, psychologist Ericson also revealed that the secret in practice does not depend on the number of years you have spent. But it really depends on what you do, and it has to be different from before every time you practice.
This method is called Deliberate Practice. The process of Deliberate Practice has three stages. One, setting a goal. Focus on the weaknesses of your actions and try to make them better than before. Two, focus on the goal.
In this stage, you need to focus strongly on both your senses and your efforts. Three, seek feedback. This stage can help you fix the points you did not do correctly. Practicing these three stages regularly will definitely make you more and more capable.
Although this Deliberate Practice method requires you to work hard and may make you feel stressed sometimes, it is the best method to improve your skills in a way that other techniques cannot help. The purpose of life is not just your own story. It is also related to the feeling of happiness and satisfaction that comes from the act of helping others.
Finding the reason for life is one of the other important things in igniting your passion. The reason for life can penetrate to the depths of your heart better than just having a desire to achieve something. It is true that everyone has different purposes and reasons for life. But if the reason for life and the purpose in life can contribute to the peace of humanity by making this world a better place for everyone, it means you have fulfilled a great mission for all of humanity.
It doesn't matter how old you are, what position or role you have in society. With a reason for life, you can change your life as well as others'. On the adventure to success, even if you have found your reason for life, you still need someone you consider your role model and who can motivate you in various ways, and from whom you can seek help whenever things don't go as expected.
Hope is the only precious thing that can keep everything in the same situation. When things don't go as planned, with effort, you can make everything better. It's not luck or opportunity. But it's what you've worked hard for. You can't avoid problems. Problems will always come to you from time to time, but if you have Grit in you, you can overcome all those problems easily and effectively.
Maintaining a strong, positive mindset depends on your history of success and failure, as well as the reactions of others to something you have done in the past. Therefore, associating with the right people and being around them often will help you to be optimistic and have the motivation to continue to develop yourself even better.
Conclusion in this book. Passion, which means desire, is something wonderful that you must have. When new problems arise, your effort alone will not be able to help you overcome those problems. But Grit can help you. It will help push you to have patience, perseverance, and effort to overcome those problems without fail. Talent will help you speed up even more when you are ready to start the activity according to the set plan.
Set a goal with a specific deadline and focus your attention firmly to do it and seek various feedback from family and friends as much as possible. If you continue to apply the methods as described above, you will see your progress continue to increase step by step from one level to another without fail.
Even if you are not an amazing person, but if you have an amazing team, you can do many amazing things. And if you have the role of a leader of your team, you have to create this Grit culture in your team. According to a study by sociologist Dan Chambliss, joining an amazing team is an amazing way to strengthen your various skills. There are two ways you can cultivate this Grit culture.
One, the factor comes from within you first, inside out. You can find that there are many things you can do when you try to overcome yourself and try to leave your comfort zone and create new activities.
Two, the factor of people around you, outside in. People around you like family, friends, spouse, or colleagues. All these people can help you to develop your Grit by motivating you to do new things and do more than before.