Why Grit Matters!

“The most intimate thing we can do is to allow people we love most to see us at our worst. At our lowest. At our weakest. True intimacy happens when nothing is perfect.” - Amy Harmon

Anyone can see you at your best and be attracted to your charm and strength. When you are in your prime, success and power is magnetic. It attracts everything around you paying no attention to diversity nor disposition. You land an interview for your dream job. You meet a romantic partner. You get offers for funding. Your euphoric self welcomes all this much-deserved attention and celebrates. It stops thinking. This fleeting taste of success is why you put in all that work, right? Just remember, this is not where you grow.

I’m a strong believer of hardships. This is because I’ve personally witnessed the strongest bonds of friendship, affection and success being forged not from joy or kindness but difficulty, adversity and tragedy. This doesn’t take away from the mindfulness and sensitivity we gain from practicing empathy every day. But there are certain facets of strength and character that are revealed only through stress, disagreement, conflict and other negative emotions.

It’s only when you are having a lousy day or week which then turns into a terrible month or year that your friendship, relationship, marriage, job or company is put to the test. It’s in these difficult moments when you lose your grace and no one else seems to believe in you that you either put your head down, fade out the noise and do whatever it takes or you raise the flag and break apart. This resilience is very rare and what I affectionately call grit. If you or the people you surround yourself with possess it, then you can be unstoppable. However, when the moment of revelation arrives please be prepared because human strength is most fragile when coupled with doubt. And the people who you rely on to stay the course with you may walk away. Their failure never lies blameless but in the end, you’ll just have to find the ones with grit.