Grit Isn’t Enough: Change the Situation

There is something you have been trying to do for a while now. Eating better, maybe. Writing the thing you keep meaning to write. Leading your team differently. Staying on top of your money instead of checking the balance once a quarter and wincing.

Every time it stalls, you reach the same conclusion: you need to try harder.

I want to offer a different explanation, and it comes from someone whose entire career has been built on trying harder.

Grit, and then the situation

Angela Duckworth wrote Grit. Her argument there was that what separates people who accomplish hard things is not talent. It is passion and perseverance, held over the long term. That book was an enormous success, deservedly, and I enjoyed it.

Her new book is Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best, and its argument is that grit is often not enough.

To reach a long-term goal, you often have to change your situation, because the situation is doing more of the work than we tend to credit. Our coaches and mentors. Our colleagues. The people we are measured against. The resources within reach.

Then comes the part I find genuinely hopeful. Those situations are not fixed. We have real agency over them. Changing one can be difficult and it can cost something, but we are not prisoners of wherever we happen to find ourselves.

That last sentence is my summary rather than hers. The full case, with the research and the case studies behind it, is in the book.

Hear the balance, because it matters. Duckworth is not saying effort is irrelevant, and neither am I. A situation on its own will not carry you to a long-term goal. You need both. What she is saying, and what I have found true, is that most of us stare at one half of the equation.

The half we ignore

Effort is expensive, and it is variable. Nobody brings the same energy to every week, and the weeks when you most need to perform are often the weeks when you have the least to spend. A plan that depends on you being at your best is a plan that works on your best weeks.

A situation, once arranged, keeps working while you are tired:

• the gym bag already in the car
• the running partner waiting at the stop sign at six in the morning
• the meeting that already exists on the calendar
• the money that moves into savings before you ever see it

None of that requires you to be impressive on a Tuesday.

An example from my own work

For years I ran WordPress sites: this one, and the sites for the nonprofit I lead. Keeping WordPress healthy means a steady stream of updates, plugins, and small maintenance decisions. Every few months I would tell myself to be more organized and more disciplined, and to grit through it. That never lasted.

What finally worked was changing the situation. I have been moving my sites onto a simpler setup that I can work on directly with an assistant, one that fits the life I am actually living. The work got easier because I removed roadblocks and friction, not because I found more resolve.

That is the pattern. When something keeps failing, the question is not “how do I want this more?” The question is “what around this is making it hard?”

Four features of a situation

In my experience these four are more changeable than they look.

People

Who you are around. Who expects something of you. Who you are measured against. Duckworth’s coaches, mentors, and colleagues all live here. If you want to become a different sort of person, it helps enormously to spend time among people who already are. We tend to average out toward the handful of people we spend the most time with.

Proximity

What is within reach, and what takes effort to reach. Most of what you do in a day is decided by whatever is closest. The book on the nightstand gets read; the one in a box in the basement does not. I keep a guitar hanging on the wall of my office, and it gets played, because it is right there.

The rule runs in the other direction too. Leave cookies on the counter and you will walk past them all day, and some of those trips will end with a cookie. Your waistline is partly a matter of what sits within arm’s reach.

Schedule

What already exists on the calendar, whether or not you feel like it that morning. An appointment you made a month ago asks nothing of your motivation today. Plan the workout down to the exercises, the sets, and the reps, and the only thing left is doing it.

Defaults

What happens when you do nothing at all. The automatic transfer. The standing order. My retirement contributions come out of my paycheck each month into a low-cost index fund, so investing is not a decision I make when I happen to feel disciplined. It is simply what happens.

People, proximity, schedule, defaults.

The honest cost

This is where advice like this usually gets cheap, so let me be plain. Changing your situation is not free, and it is not easy. Sometimes it means leaving something. Sometimes it means spending money you would rather keep, or having a conversation you would rather avoid, or telling someone no.

But a cost you pay once beats a cost you pay every morning.

Where this leaves us

Squared Away Life is a tactical approach to stewardship. Stewardship means handling well what has been entrusted to you, and your situation is part of what you have been given. Not all of it is within your control. More of it is than you assume.

So the work here covers six areas: your knowledge, your time, your money, your health, your work, and what you leave behind. In each one the job is the same. Arrange the situation first, then bring the effort, and let it go further than it would have gone on its own.

The practice that keeps all of it aimed is the daily review: a few minutes each morning resurfacing what you wrote a week, a month, and a year ago, so what you said mattered stays in front of you. A situation you never look at drifts back toward whatever is easiest.

Square it away

Name one thing you have been trying to force with willpower. Just one.

Then change one feature of the situation around it this week. Pick one of the four: who you are around, what is within reach, what is on the calendar, or what happens by default. Not all four. One.

Then watch whether the thing gets easier.