Grit is overall a book about hard work and how you should never give up. It opens up about how the author Angela Ducksworth wins an award called the MacArthur award (p.29). She wins this award after her father always tells her how terrible and underachieving she was all of her life. This is the main takeaway from the book. Grit and resilience closely connect with the overall message.
Shortly after she mentions that she won the MacArthur award, she mentions how she went to West Point and how many people quit in the first 7 weeks of Beast training (p.41). She did not quit though and adjusted to keep on going. We have had to adjust in the Capstone Project a good amount. We had to completely change our product from a phone case to a sleeve which is a different concept. We also had to change the materials a lot because they would not meet our specifications.
Another message of this book is that when something isn’t going your way that you still have to keep on going and push through it till the end. She describes this in the book at being a soldier that has to keep going and push through till the end, especially for survival. This is especially true in business when something does not go your way. Whenever you encounter something tough in business you cannot give up and you just need to find the solution for the problem.
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This happened in the book when Angelena left her job to teach 7th graders. She did this to take a chance and get her PhD in the mean time. She used this PhD to found her company known as Character Lab (p.1435). This company helps improve character development. This shows that even though you may be in a low spot at the time, you can always work your way out of it and persevere to continue on with your passion and succeed while doing it. We have experienced this a little bit throughout our project as well.
We had to restart our project from the concept of a phone case to a phone bag and we had to choose separate materials to create it to do the things that we wanted to do with it. We originally wanted a phone case that would just be durable and adapt to the climate to not have the phone overheat or freeze in the wrong climate. Many people have experienced this problem whether it is on the beach or on the slopes. People have their phones either overheat or freeze and they end up powering off. This problem ruins peoples experience so we want to find the answer to this.
We know that in order to solve this problem we have to go through quite a bit of testing and find the solution. The next message of this book is that you should love the work you do because it should be paying dividends to other people and you should feel good about that. Your company should be for the common good so that you can be doing business in good spirit and value for the betterment of society. This will make you work harder because you should care about the customer who you are serving. Your service should be for the betterment of society which is essentially the customer.
So the overall tone of the book is how you should keep on going and have the motivation to do so. Your motivation should be helping society and doing something that you love. You can only have grit for something if you truly love doing it and if you don’t have grit for it then you should not be doing it. You should be able to put your whole heart, mind, and soul into what your company is.
I love our company because I have experienced the problems on the slopes and at the beach. You have to personally experience the problem to fully understand it and everyone in our group has experienced it. So not everyone can run a specific business and even the most successful business men would have great trouble running a business.
That’s why many businessmen have had previous failures. They have fallen into the trap of just having a good idea even though you might not love the idea yourself. This makes them fail and retry until they find their passion that they want to do. Angelena Ducksworth showed this throughout her book with quitting her job to follow her passion and that is why she succeeded.
