Originally published December 31, 2018. Revised August 2, 2026

Most people I work with think their problem is that there’s something wrong with their ability to focus.

They have trouble sticking to things. They get distracted.

Essentially, they fear that they don’t have what it takes to finish their creative projects because they are weak.

I’d make the argument that their lives and careers make the opposite case. Artists, writers, and other creatives are the scrappiest, hardest-working people I know.

If you’re still doing this at midlife, boy you got grit. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

You just don’t feel gritty, because certain marquee Very Important Projects aren’t getting done on the timeline you envision, and that’s pretty much all that feels like it counts.

The problem comes down to our expectation that the way to make things happen is with pure grit, willpower. We should be able to force our way through when things get tough.

If you wonder why you feel that way, it’s no big mystery. You’re told so, constantly. A Time Magazine article puts not-following-through on resolutions to get fit down to one reason: “Simple: people are lazy.”

But if you’ve got that much grit (see: the rest of your life) and you still aren’t finishing the work that matters most, grit clearly isn’t the answer you’re looking for.

You know the old saying, “If your only tool is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail”? If the only tool you’ve got for finishing is grit, then you’re going to try to batter your way through your thoughtful, deep, self-generated projects.

And all they’ll get is bruised.

The problem comes down to our expectation that the way to make things happen is with pure grit. We should be able to force our way through when things get tough.

You don’t need a BHAG (aka Big Hairy Audacious Goal) and a will of iron. Instead, you need to set the bar LOW. Real low. Then vault over that bar with the wings of an angel.

The secret to hitting those big creative goals is not waiting for inspiration, and then heroically throwing yourself at the work for days or weeks at a time.

It’s taking much smaller steps, much more often.

A “resolution” is worse than a wish when you don’t create a plan

January is a great time to make big changes in your life. So is early September with the new-school-year energy. So is April.

You know when else is great?

Any day of any month when you’ve set up a solid, backstopped plan.

“Resolving” is just firmly telling yourself, “Next time will be different.”

Making a resolution makes you feel like you’re making a real change, when most likely you’re doing little more than wishing harder. That’s what leads to the self-flagellation party.

In her book, Grit, Angela Duckworth defines grit as passion + perseverance, which sounds great in theory (and of course, there are obvious upsides to having these two qualities). But relying on your grit, or on trying to become more “gritty” is exactly the wrong way to go about making change, for three reasons.

Problem 1: The spirit is willing. The willpower is weak

First of all, there’s the problem of willpower. It’s unreliable. You wake up full of vim some days. Others, you can barely make coffee.

The days when you’re running on 5 hours of sleep because things are so crazy are when you’re likely to need willpower most. But that’s when you have the least of it. When you lose sleep, your prefrontal cortex, in charge of impulse control, loses its grip. You start out the day with yoga and an açaí bowl, but after 3 hours of back-to-back meetings, fugettaboutit: it’s hoagies and chips for lunch.

And it’s hard. Forcing yourself to the desk takes effort, on top of the work you’re there for. If grit is your only way to get started, you pay that tax every time you sit down to work, before you’ve made a single mark on the page.

In fact, the people who look the most disciplined are the ones leaning least on discipline.

Here’s a fun irony: it’s Duckworth’s own research, with Brian Galla, that found the people with the strongest self-control aren’t using grit to resist temptation at all. Across six studies and more than two thousand participants, people with high self-control reported using less effort, not more. Instead of relying on willpower, they’d arranged their lives so they didn’t have to fight it.

The people who get things done aren’t tougher than you. They stopped relying on toughness and built a habit instead.

Problem 2: Mindlessly pursuing a goal opens you to following your tunnel vision straight into a ditch.

As I said in the intro: I see it all the time. People who’ve been working their asses off for years, who can’t get the things done that they are most excited about and see the most potential for.

Why? Because they’re too damn gritty.

When you’re too gritty, you stick to things you should drop. (Guilty! 🙋‍♀️)

You continue doing underpaid, exploitative jobs you should quit.

You try to finish projects that no longer have any relevance, just because you promised yourself you would.

You keep showing up for people and organizations who are not showing up for you.

In short, you use up all your available capacity for things you’ve committed to in the past that have NOTHING to do with the future you want.

Serious creatives fall into this all the time.

We are idea people. Also, we want to do it all and to help everybody. But when you stick to too much, you don’t get to do what really matters. And not getting to what really matters is what makes you feel like a flake. And then, because you feel shame, you try even harder to stick.

Catch-22.

I got a Grit Score of 5, and I have mixed feelings

Reading up on the idea of grit, I felt envy for journalists who report they got low scores on Duckworth’s Grit Scale. To me, a lower score shows an admirable ability to change gears when the situation calls for it, and to remain interested in things that fall outside a transactional relationship with work.

Falling into the Law of Holes

I was rewarded for my grit research when I read an Alfie Kohn article and learned of the awesome proverbial Law of Holes: When you’re in one, stop digging. That’s the problem with too much grit: knowing when to pull the plug (and being brave enough to do so) is as important as knowing when to power through.

I am a super-gritty person…and I’ve used that grit to dig myself deep into far too many holes.

Grit is not enough.

Problem 3: Grit puts blame in the wrong spot.

The core problem with grit is that, at a basic level, claiming that grit is what sets successful people apart disregards cultural and individual factors and throws blame on structurally-disadvantaged people (poor kids, people of color, women in science, etc.), telling them that it’s just their own mindset that stands in their way.

Not only do people start from very different points and face vastly different levels of challenge on the road to success, but science has shown that trauma causes toxic stress that damages the prefrontal executive functions (working memory, self-regulation, cognitive flexibility) that perseverance is built on. People may not have equal access to the cognitive tools needed to rely on pure grit.

The evidence that grit is the key to success is circular: Duckworth went looking for people who’d already succeeded, found they’d persevered, and concluded that perseverance is what produced the success.

There is no one in the book who tried really hard for a really long time and failed, while I can think of several examples of this among people I know off the top of my head. Failure is defined as a lack of grit, without acknowledgement of the effect of circumstances, trauma, privilege, or even, most tellingly, just plain luck.

On top of all that, grit may be worse than useless for creative work

In Grit, Duckworth’s set of examples and her evidence base are focused on narrow, single-skill endurance: Marine cadets grinding through Beast Barracks, spelling-bee champions, crossword constructors, a football team that already trains to exhaustion. Those are all examples of simplistic contests where mastering a very narrow set of skills through intense focus is how you win the game.

Creative work is arguably the exact opposite kind of activity. Yes, you need skills. And yes, mastering those skills takes focus and perseverance (there is a role for grit after all, and we’ve already established you’ve got plenty for this kind of effort). But when you’re applying those skills to making work, your whole aim is to stay open to possibility, to make something completely new to you and the world, and to be present with the work in the moment.

If you’re relying on grit to get you through, it’s likely to look like sticking to a strict plan. That doesn’t lend itself to openness and improvisation, to the eureka moments that make creative work great, and make this hard path worth walking.

Grit doesn’t lend itself to openness and improvisation, to the eureka moments that make creative work great, and make this hard path worth walking.

Most of us have had the experience of working ourselves to exhaustion on something and at some point wondering, wait, what the hell is this thing, anyway? Why am I doing this?

That’s a sign you’ve followed your grit straight into the Law of Holes.

The principle of the Flexible Container is all about creating the delicate balance between enough structure to keep self-generated work moving and enough space to think and create and move. To tack and react to new insights and opportunities, and to enjoy the process enough that we can keep on creating right up to the end. That flexibility and sense of connectedness with the work are the inverse of grit.

Grit is a tool for a game you aren’t playing, and it optimizes for the very thing your practice is trying to help you unlearn.

Is Grit just three Shoulds in a trenchcoat?

I truly believe agency is a good thing. My entire philosophy is based on helping you reclaim your agency over your creative life and make the self-generated work that you care about most (and yeah, get paid well for it, too). My company is literally called “Autonomous Creative.”

Discipline is also a good thing. It’s useful. So is grit. I want you to be able to tap into these things.

But as an answer to “how do I make sure I’m doing the things I care about most?” the intense pressure to be more disciplined, to have more willpower, to be more “agentic” is completely ass-backwards. It ignores your reality, your personality, your capacity. It gives you the message that your individual effort is the only thing that can possibly get it done, and if you’re not getting it done, it’s because you’re not trying hard enough. If you were better and stronger you’d be able to pull this thing off.

I mean, effort counts! But there are so many other ways to get things done that are so much easier, and more fitted to your life. So why do we acquiesce to this demand that we measure up in a system that not only doesn’t fit but we don’t even agree with?

This mismatch is a flashing red sign that the Should Monster is behind this.

We want one thing: the important work getting finished. But the toll society asks us to pay is to submit to a needless and impossible character test that inevitably turns into a shame spiral.

My approach to finishing projects is based on anti-self-coercive productivity. External and imposed forcing mechanisms like grit, discipline, goals, and deadlines can all work for a while, in certain circumstances, but they’re brittle and break down easily. And more importantly, they damage our relationship with our work, and with ourselves. They’re not worth it.

That’s why relying on a forgiving system built around your real life, leaning on habits and semi-automatic behavior, is so important if you want to make an end-run around the need for grit and all the psychic pain that comes with that approach.

Forgiving systems can feel like cheating, because they’re so gentle. Don’t get it twisted: your best work is always going to be challenging. When you make the getting-to-work part as easy as you can, that just saves more of your best energy for the good stuff.

Habit is stronger and does the same job better

Habit is the most powerful force in our lives.

You can override it by force of will now and then, but it comes roaring back the moment you stop struggling. And if you think you just need to pull up your socks and face the music, let me tell you: even I, gritty as I am, run my whole life on habit, not willpower.

Something like 65% of what we do is habitual. So if you want to change your life, change your habits.

Grit has one job: getting you over the threshold

Grit earns its keep in the starting, not in the finishing. It’s useful for a minute or two as you launch into a cognitively demanding task (like doing your fave creative work). And it’s very useful while you’re building a habit in the first place.

As an example, despite my Grit Score of 5, my gym habit didn’t solidify by forcing it. Background: I hate going to the gym. So getting this routine fully in place took a year, one small step at a time, with a few timely injections of grit.

1. Deciding it was time to put going to the gym into my week. That took grit.
2. Visiting a couple gyms. Also took grit. Because, yuck.

Then when I found a gym on my walk home (because I know that if it meant a detour I’d never go), things got easier. I put my classes on the calendar with a protected half-hour beforehand. I added an alarm, because otherwise I kept “forgetting” to leave.

The only place I needed real grit in an ongoing way was facing the embarrassment of being bad at something in public.

That’s grit’s one job: getting you over the threshold the first handful of times. After that the habit takes over, and grit can retire to the background.

You don’t need more grit. You’ve got plenty. You’ve just been reaching for it in the wrong places. Set the bar on the floor, spend your small ration of grit clearing it, and let the habit do the rest.

[Here’s how to build a creative habit that sticks →]