Mental Toughness

Image Courtesy: Nick Shuliahin, Unsplash.com

Andre Agassi lost his first three Grand Slam Finals.

Elvis Presley failed his music class and was told he, “couldn’t sing” when he tried to join a vocal quartet.

Stephen King submitted “Carrie” 30 times. King was rejected 30 times.

During his first screen test, Fred Astaire was told, “Can’t sing. Can’t act. Balding. Can dance a little.”

Three major studios – Disney, United Artists, and Universal, rejected George Lucas’s Star Wars.

Oprah Winfrey was publicly fired from her first job as a TV news anchor for being too “emotionally invested” in the stories that she reported on.

Rudyard Kipling was fired from his role as contributor to a newspaper for not knowing how to use the English language.

All these examples have one common theme: setback, failure and futility before the comeback. Its not about the setback, its always about the comeback.

You have probably seen evidence of this in your own life. Remember that person on your team who squeezed the most out of their potential? How about that person you know who was set on accomplishing a goal, no matter how long it took? How they did it could be a function of education, intelligence and hard work. Yet, they faced failure and rejection, but they were relentless in their pursuit of success. What then sets them apart?

GRIT - Research is starting to reveal that mental toughness – or “grit” plays a more important role than anything else for achieving your goals in health, business, and life.

It’s not just education or intelligence that determines success. It is your amount of grit, mental toughness, and perseverance that predicts your level of success more than any other factor. That’s good news because you can’t do much about the genes you were born with, but you can do a lot to develop mental toughness.

To understand mental toughness, I found this excerpt from Louis Chew’s article on “You Need Mental Toughness To Stay Bulletproof In Life. Here’s How To Build It.”

“Admiral Jim Stockdale was taken prisoner during the Vietnam War. Tortured over twenty times during his eight-year imprisonment from 1965 to 1973, Stockdale lived out the war without any certainty of seeing his family ever again and no set release date. And yet, he never lost hope. In his own words, “I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”

Was it just sheer positive thinking? The paradox comes when Stockdale also notes that it was always the most optimistic of his prison mates who failed to make it out of here alive. He recounts:

“They were the ones who said, “We’re going to be out by Christmas.” And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, “We’re going to be out by Easter.” And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”

This duality of philosophy delivers the message that positive thinking may help you overcome short-term discomfort or embarrassment, but will ultimately come back to haunt you. We all know the famous Frodo Baggins-the most important Ring bearer in “The Lord of the Rings”. The sole reason that Sauron didn’t come to power again. Except, not really. Frodo is basically a useless “po-tay-toe” that needs to be saved constantly and almost gave up the Ring countless times. He is unable to follow a simple instruction, given to him several times, of not putting the Ring on. Putting the lives of many in danger for his recklessness. I am convinced that he is basically useless without his BFF Sam. Without Sam, Frodo would have lost the Ring in five minutes and ruined everything. So Sam, to me, is an analogical representation of positive thinking with good measure of realism that makes him an invaluable companion to Frodo’s stupidities and superfluous heroism. Like Frodo couldn’t have gone far without Sam, similarly, we can’t go far with only positive thinking. Jim Stockdale’s quote captures this characteristic so accurately.

“You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end

- which you can never afford to lose -

with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

There are numerous examples around us, hoping for a complete remission of a life-threatening disease, a cure for a condition, a deal that would change your fortune, a job offer that would propel your career exponentially, an opportunity to relocate and so on and so forth. These desires, wishes and aspirations keep us going and when they are unmet we feel disappointed and sometimes shattered. But what we do after being beaten is determined by our mental toughness.

I hope you are substantially convinced about the significance of grit, to achieve your goals, and not just displaying oodles of positive thinking but rather a fine balance between optimism and realism. So while I would hope (optimism) to arouse your curiosity on how to develop grit, it's entirely possible that you may lose interest in what I have to say in my next post (realism). But that is not going to discourage me from sharing Seun Adebiyi's advice on how to develop grit.