In honor of opening weekend for my favorite team and coach, I’m adopting their motto: grit.
Most people use the words passion and perseverance when defining grit. I think about it more in the physical realm – the abrasion, grinding, grating. I also think about sandpaper. Sandpaper has grit ranges. The lower the grit number, the coarser the sandpaper. The higher the grit number, the finer. Sandpaper with a low grit will remove the unwanted surface much quicker but the finish will be rougher. If you want a smoother, better finished product, you’ll need to use higher grit, and it’s going to take a lot longer.
When have you found this principle to apply to your life?
For me, it was 2012-2015, the three years I was in law school. Yes, a full three-year stretch of actively choosing high grit sandpaper to sand down the parts of me that weren’t how I wanted to end up. I wanted to be a lawyer at the end of law school, obviously, but I also had this idea of a fully adult, professional, put-together woman who would emerge at the end of those three years. So I took that time to slowly and painfully remove the parts of me that didn’t fit that Lawyer Liz persona I developed for myself.
I graduated with my undergraduate degree in 2012. When I graduated, I left behind my friends that I made during those years. I left the first place I ever lived outside of my childhood home so I could move out of the basement of a condo with two wonderful roommates and into a sunny two bedroom apartment down the road with my best friend. I left a job that had helped me gain confidence but didn’t have any room for growth for a better, more professional environment with accountability (I was actually fired from that job, but that’s a story for another day).
I had to leave these pillars of my life because somehow I knew, without being told, that in order to get to that future version of me, I would need to leave behind the past versions.
In 2013 I left my longest, most supportive relationship and I almost left law school. In 2014 I left my former best friend and our no longer sunny apartment for my own quiet one bedroom apartment. I also left one of my three jobs that had the best chance of offering me a job after law school. In 2015, with some panic, I realized I still had so much to lose to get to my future version. I had to pull out the low grit sandpaper and really get to work. It would be messy, but I could smooth out the edges later. In April I systematically dismantled all of my personal relationships that had hurt me, taken advantage of me, or made me a person that didn’t align with that future version I was now in a dead sprint running towards. In May I left my job in the service industry, I left (graduated) from law school, and distanced myself from those relationships. The only things that remained after I did all that messy low grit sanding was a half-hewn version of future me and my family. Everyone else I left.
I haven’t had to take out the low grit sandpaper in awhile. It’s been a lot of high grit sanding, the careful, deliberate work to smooth out the edges, move myself subtly towards a new direction. I think grit has always been a part of my fabric, that single-minded desire to work towards goals and eliminate distractions. It also has a lot of drawbacks. There were some relationships that I left and dismantled that ultimately were people that helped me get to my desired future version. I had to repair and rebuild those relationships, or accept if they no longer had a desire to know me.
Grit isn’t an easy thing to develop, you can’t just pick it up at your local hardware store. Sometimes life forces us into it and other times it can be a choice. But it’s the hardest choice, because it is so easy to give up, make excuses, look down at yourself and pretend you didn’t want that version of yourself, and you’re happy with your current version. It’s also easy to aspire to be a certain version of yourself, feel you deserve to be that version, but not be willing to do the work, remove the parts of yourself that don’t fit that version. It’s extremely uncomfortable and sometimes heartbreaking and devastating to leave those parts behind.
If someone asks me if law school was hard, I shrug and say, “of course it was.” If they ask me if you need to be smart to be a lawyer, I laugh and say, “no, you just have to want it and be willing to persevere until you get it.” Grit is what gets you to that future version, not anything else. You don’t need to be smart, you don’t need the degree, you don’t need the financial stability. It sure helps, but you don’t need it.
You need to want that future version more than your fear of leaving everything that makes you your current version.
Whether you use low grit to roughly chip away at everything you need to lose and you’ll deal with the clean up later, or whether you develop high grit so you can slowly and systematically dismantle the life around you to get to what’s left, grit is the biggest tool in your toolbox.
