Some fortunate people have loving and mature parents, go to great schools, and get initiated into the adult world with the support of amazing mentors.  Some – not all – of those lucky few make a terrific life for themselves and, hopefully, others.

The rest of us aren’t so fortunate. And yet, more of us end up succeeding in spite of the odds against us than anyone would expect.

But predictors of future success provide statistical odds only.  The real predictor is you: Yourcommitment to your own future, your self-regard, and your ability to see what’s real and possible.

Mostly though, it’s your conviction: your conviction that what you seek is possible for you to achieve, and worth staying with. In the end, it might not turn out the way you imagined, but it will happen.  That kind of stick-with-it-ness is sometimes called resilience, and sometimes called grit.

Angela Duckworth distinguishes resilience from grit (view the video below).  She’s discovered that a key predictor to future success is grit. Grit is consistent effort, combined with passion, for a particular goal, that is strong enough to overcome obstacles or challenges that are in the way to the realization of that goal.

In other words, the goal has to be worthy to the person trying to achieve it. And the person trying to achieve it has to feel worthy of achieving that goal

A person with grit is in it for the long-term and knows that to achieve her goal involves a marathon, not a sprint.

So the bottom line is to hang in there, sometimes putting one foot in front of the other, and keep faith in yourself and your abilities.

The Power of Passion and Preservation

Imagine this: you’ve leant your best friend your cherished slow cooker; she knows how much you value it. Even so, it eventually comes back broken.  When confronted with the obvious, she either denies anything happened at her end, or swears it was already broken. If she’s really in a bad way, she might deny borrowing it altogether and that she happened to find it at her place.

Sadly, my mother was notorious for doing this. Happily, not my friends. Mom would go one step further: next time she asked to borrow something, and I said no because of what happened the time before, she would deny denying she’d done anything the first time.

It drove me crazy. Especially because I’d be like Charlie Brown with Lucy: I’d fall for it as any insane person would, believing in my heart that this time would be different.

Seth Godin calls this Kettle logic. He suggests that the person using it is really reacting emotionally instead of logically.

I can’t be sure of that, but I do know that it’s useless to try and reason with them.  Instead, what I really need to do is understand why I keep falling for it and do something about that!

You see, it is emotional on my side. And once I can come to terms with what’s going on with me, then I can deal with what’s going on with my friend.

With my Mom, I wanted her to be accountable in a way she couldn’t be. It wasn’t until I understood who she was that I was able to stop putting us both into that particular dance. You see, it wasn’t just her. It was both of us, playing out a familiar song that had, long ago, run its course.

Declaring someone else insane