It's been a couple of years since I read Angela Duckworth's Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. One of my takeaways from the book was that grit was every thing needed to be successful. Honestly, the book hadn't impacted as I initially expected it, but her concept of grit had stayed in my mind.
A few months back, I read another book, Hear's the Thing: Lessons on Listening, Life, and Love by Alan Cody. While it did not specifically mention grit, it did have similar concepts of passion and perseverance. If I recall correctly, Alan had a passion for country music, and he made himself the success story he is today from the ground-up. Another book, 48 Days to the Work and Life You Love: Find It -- Or Create It, has similar concepts lightly discussed. It explained that some people lacked contentment in their work because their work did not align with their vocation. (Again, that is if I recalled it correctly.) Vocation, as the book described it, I interpreted as something very similar to passion.
Those were good books, and the self-help business contribute good to society, I like to believe. Although they reach a wide audience worldwide, their applicability still depends on the user. I don't think I wasted my time reading them, but I wonder about their use case. At this point, I'd like to point out that the latter two books don't specifically sell the idea of grit, passion, or perseverance.
Does your passion have to be your job? Recently, I have received advice, as well as read online, that a job is just a job. People talk about jobs as if they go to work as soulless robots with the aim to make big money. That mindset works for them. But does it work for me? This is where I agree with 48 Days. Doing work that you dislike is taxing. I've already done that. On the other hand, why would I need to make my passion into my career? And why do I get the message from literature and social media that I'm a failure if I wouldn't? (That last sentence was hyperbole; the range of opinions and literature is sure to be wider than Earth.)
To answer my first question, I need to ask another question. What is success? If I hinge my answer on my personal philosophy, then I say that success is when I become a rational being, contributing to society by performing my role. So, I don't need to have my passion as my job, work, or career.
I won't discredit the work of the authors. I can definitely apply the concepts they wrote. Yet, a warning: a probable misinterpretation one could read from self-help books is that there are no other definitions of success. We could also end up with the same conclusion from social media, where people curate their stories and the algorithm highlights only the traffic-generating posts. There's a lot more to the nuances of success, self-help business, and social media, but these are just my thoughts.
My next question: How big of a factor of success is perseverance? Common sense tells me that continued effort would contribute to overall progress at least. But intuition says that there are more factors than I can think of now. A certain author, whose name I cannot recall, appeared on the podcast, Something You Should Know. As she described, she had started multiple projects, including businesses, though she only finished a fraction of them. Another guest on the same podcast wrote another book on giving up and its benefits. On one side, perseverance is a key to success. On the other is a question: do I need that success? (Admittedly, I might not be representing the authors and their ideas well. In this case, I recommend you read them yourself.)
What's the big takeaway? Speaking solely about myself, I require a great understanding of my own circumstances and have my own definition of success. Whatever I decide to do, there is a plethora of methods from either side to carve my own. After all, if I keep my rational mind, don't I already win?
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