Sandpaper and Struggle

We toss around the word “grit” quite a bit these days. You can find no shortage of articles, speeches, and entire masterclasses on honing the skill. Teachers attend professional development seminars on “developing grit” in their students, and you’ll hear people described as either having it or lacking it. It’s become something of a buzzword, but what exactly is it and how do you cultivate it?

The Language of Grit

One of the things I love about language, especially the English language, is how the same word can inhabit completely different contexts. Grit is usually associated with things like sandpaper. I learned more about literal grit than I ever expected to during my ongoing Mid-Century Modern dresser refinishing project (which, for the record, still sits unfinished in the garage—much to my roommate’s dismay).

The number of sandpaper grit, like 120, measures the number of holes per square inch on the sheet during the manufacturing process. Since lower grits are coarser and used for rougher surfaces, beginning the sanding process with the right starting grit is critical to the final outcome. Start with a grit that’s too high and you risk not getting a smooth enough finish. Begin too low, and you risk irreparably damaging the wood.

Beyond the starting grit, you also have to sequence the sanding process and you can’t skip any steps—no matter how badly you want to because your thumb is raw from holding sandpaper. If you want the ultra polished finish of a 320 grit, a silky smooth look that removes even the most subtle imperfections, you have to work your way up. You have to sand the entire piece with 80, then again with 120, then 180, 220, 280, and finally 320. Skip from 80 to 320 and you’re looking at a mangled mess.

You have to sand the same surface over and over again before you can achieve the desired result.

Sandpaper and Psychology

Grit as a personality trait only popped up a few years ago and was popularized by a 2007 research paper by Angela Duckworth. Grit describes the marriage of passion and perseverance in pursuit of long-term goals and is considered by psychologists to be the strongest predictor of success. Being able to push through failure, setbacks, and hardship in pursuit of long-term goals (ie grit) is the only way to achievement.

But grit is the combination of passion and perseverance. Perseverance without passion leads to burnout, and passion without perseverance leads to…well nowhere.

If I’m honest, I’ve never considered perseverance to be one of my strongest traits. I’m full of passion, sure. I can ideate endlessly…but I also bounce around from project to project, as evidenced by that half-finished dresser and the paint-by-numbers that’s been living on my kitchen table for two months.

I’ve said repeatedly that entrepreneurship is a continual practice in self-exploration, and it has a way of exposing your patterns. It’s a real-time, sometimes painful, education in who you are and how you work, and right now I’m deep in “the grit phase.”

The Grit Phase

I’m currently building my app (you can follow weekly progress and early previews of my upcoming book Techquilibrium on Substack), and let me tell you: this stage is a grind. I spend 4–6 hours a day on the app alone, in addition to coaching and writing. I’m learning an entirely new skill set, complete with new terminology, unfamiliar systems, and a humbling level of patience.

Just last week, I spent two full working days trying to “solve” an issue myself that, after elevating the issue to their support team, turned out to be a bug in the platform. That did make me feel better, but still, there went 12 frustrating hours of my life I can’t get back.

One of the hardest parts of the grit phase is that you can see what the finish line looks like, but you can’t see where it is in your timeline. This is where perseverance comes into play. You have to keep moving anyway, trusting that effort accumulates even when progress feels invisible.

We tend to associate happiness with completed goals: “When I finish, then I’ll be happy.” We think, mistakenly, that the acquisition of whatever it is we’re looking for is the key to our happiness, when in reality it is the pursuit that we find our joy.

You Can’t Outsource Grit

When the idea for this app first came to me in an almost electric vision, my first thought was How do I get this built as quickly as possible? I even sourced a creative agency and prepared to pay upwards of $15,000 to hand the project off.

And that didn’t really work out. Can you guess why?

There was a mismatch of passion and perseverance.

It wasn’t because the app idea was bad or because my passion for building a tool to help people live happier, healthier lives was false. Outsourcing would have required no perseverance from me at all, and some deeper part of me knew that wasn’t the right path.

Almost everything meaningful in my life has required grit and nothing has ever been handed to me. Music taught me this long before entrepreneurship did, even if I didn’t realize it right away. You don’t learn to play piano or conduct complex music overnight. It takes painstaking work and repeating the same passage over and over and over again until it is so engrained within you that your body can’t help but do it. You start with the equivalent of 80 grit—awkward, clunky, imperfect—and polish your way toward mastery. Only through the process of dedicated repetition, taking care to sand every inch and leave no corner untouched, can you achieve musical excellence.

Grit is the long, sometimes tedious, sometimes thrilling path toward excellence. Genius is found in tolerance for the tedium, as they say.

Perseverance Needs Rest

But grit isn’t about running yourself into the ground. Even admirable qualities like hard work can turn counterproductive without rest. Overwork erodes passion and drains your capacity for perseverance until there is nothing left of either to fuel you forward, and motivation and will are the first to evaporate.

So how do you know when it’s time to step back?

It’s really not as complicated as you’d think:
When you feel like you need a break.

When I practice piano and notice my playing gets worse the longer I play, I know it’s time to stop. When I’m working and find myself staring blankly at the screen with dry, frustrated eyes, I step away. In the gym, a little muscle discomfort is productive, but training to the point where you can barely walk is not.

Perseverance is a mental muscle. That’s why grit is also called mental toughness. Muscles strengthen through cycles of stress and recovery. Very few people can do 30 consecutive reps at their max working weight, but 3 sets of 10 reps with a 90-120 second rest in between? Manageable. Effective. And better for your body.

The same is true for grit.

Building Your Grit Muscles

There’s a persistent myth in the workforce that glorifies hard work for its own sake. But hard work isn’t the point. Effective work is. Grit is not merely pushing harder.

It’s applying focused attention, resilience, dedication, and sustainable effort toward a long-term vision.

You don’t need to punish yourself to grow. You need structure, consistency, rest, and self-awareness.

Here are a few practical ways to cultivate grit in your own life:

1. Become an entrepreneur.

Okay, kidding (but also not). Here’s a real list:

1. Define what grit means to you.

This is more than just defining success, though it falls under the same umbrella. What does mental toughness look like in your life? Maybe grit means adding one more rep in the gym or turning in a project two days early. Maybe it’s resisting distractions to honor a commitment to yourself. Grit also doesn’t look the same in every domain of your life—nor should it. Your efforts in the gym may take more grit than a side project at home.

2. Practice being gritty in your everyday life.

Big obstacles aren’t overcome in a single leap. Grit grows through small, repeated acts that reaffirm who you are. Making eggs and oatmeal and drinking coffee at home instead of buying or skipping breakfast, going to bed at 9:00 every night so that you can wake up refreshed the next morning, showing up for even the most mundane routines are small wins that compound over time. This micro-gritting not only lets you build the skill but also prove to yourself over and over again, in as many ways as possible, that you’ve got “the stuff.”

3. Build grit systems.

As James Clear says, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
Good systems create consistency. They help you overcome friction, reduce decision fatigue, and recover when things get hard. Progress is made when you do the things you know you’re supposed to do, over and over again, even when it’s hard and when you don’t feel like it.

And just as you need systems for work, you need systems for rest. As much as we’d like to think of our bodies as machines, they simply aren’t. Humans get about four hours of truly focused cognitive work each day before productivity drops sharply. Honor that limit.

A simple structure: for every three hours of deep work, give yourself one hour of something undemanding or restorative that allows your mind to be completely separated from the previous task.

4. Keep a learning log.

A core ingredient of grit is a growth mindset, transforming failures and setbacks into insights and stepping stones. Each day offers a lesson if you’re quiet enough to notice. Track what you learn. If you tried something and it didn’t work, catalog it. Ask yourself why it didn’t work. When faced with adversity, the first thing you should ask yourself is “How can I turn this into a lesson learned?”

The Beauty of the Grit Phase

Anything worthwhile takes time. It takes deliberate attention, repeated effort, rest, and more patience than most of us enjoy giving. Yes, getting through the grit phase is hard. Practicing a new piece of music with hands separately at half speed is grueling. Sanding the same piece of furniture over and over again rubs more than a few layers of skin off your fingers. Keeping your head down and charging on through seemingly endless days that meld into nights that are both equally endless and pass too quickly leaves you dazed and confused sometimes. This admittedly impatient author is learning to cultivate perseverance, one unfinished dresser and one bug-filled app feature at a time.

Grit is not glorious. It’s not glamorous. But it is transformative.

And the pursuit—the sanding, the practicing, the building, the learning—is where the joy lives.

If you’re curious about your “grittiness” you can take Angela Duckworth’s Grit Scale. You can also watch her 6-minute TED Talk here.

I scored a 2.4, which tells me exactly what I already know: I’ve got some grit work to do.

Until next time, live uninterrupted.

~Coleman