Grit and Quit

For the past two decades I've had a part time job with a former Navy SEAL to help him lead PT every morning from 0530 to 0630, outside in a park near downtown Houston for civilians who want a military style workout. Every other month or so this SEAL PT Course hosted a "bootcamp" for twenty new "lifer" candidates. This bootcamp was a two week course from 0500 to 0700 every weekday morning. Hundreds of buddy carries, burpeees, pushups, situps, mountain climbers, and miles and miles of running. If a candidate graduated they got to go onto our maintenance program. The bootcamp had a 50% failure or drop out rate.

One thing that never failed to surprise me was trying to determine who would and who would not make it through the two week bootcamp course at the beginning of each bootcamp. I was reminded of this when reading about Grit and watching the TedTalk by Angela Lee Duckworth on Grit (here). Duckworth states that "grit is passion and perseverance for very long term goals. Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future vision not just for a week or months but for years." In relation to the two-week bootcamp, Grit was the desire to hang in there and suck up the punishment dished out by former Spec Ops warriors every morning for two weeks.

I always found it remarkable how impossible it was to determine who would and who would not make it through the full two weeks on that first day formation. Who could have guessed that that young man in his 20's who looked to be in such good shape would not come on Wednesday after we sprayed the class with a hose and had them roll in the sand for 30 minutes. Or who would have predicted that the 50 year old diminutive grandmother who on day one couldn't do a single proper pushup would still be there chugging along with the rest of the group at the end of the two weeks. There was no rhyme or reason that I could tell from the outside, or just by looking at people about how they might perform.

One of the other instructors, Harris, was a former 3rd Battalion Army Ranger, Captain. Whenever he and I worked together in a bootcamp I was surprised by his eagerness to provide guidance and homework to the bootcamp class. Where I was a "if they can't hang let'em quit" instructor, he was a "give them the opportunity to succeed" instructor. Two of his favorite pieces of homework to assign the class was to watch the movies "Touching the Void" about stranded mountain climbers and "The Endurance" about Shackleton's expedition.

What I didn't realize then, but do now is that Harris was creating a learning environment with a growth mindset. In an article I read on Fixed and Growth Mindset in Education and How Grit Helps Students Persist in the Face of Adversity (here), Hochanadel and Finamore write of Duckworth et al saying "Faculty can help students develop grit and a growth mindset to increase their chances of reaching long-term goals, by internalizing the motivation to persist." In her Ted Talk Duckworth quotes Dweck on a growth mindset as "When kids learn and read about the brain they're much more likely to persevere when they fail, because they don't believe that failure is a permanent condition." By having the bootcampers watch these stories about overcoming incredible odds and persevering despite the difficulty and challenges, Harris was not only helping the bootcampers put things into perspective, but he was also helping to instill a growth mindset and provide fertile soil for the growth of grit among the trainees.

It would have been nice to have a "Grit Scale" but in the absence of that it was nice to see that after two weeks the graduates who were left after the bootcamp all went on to our maintenance program and there we had the trust in knowing all of them had the grit needed to keep up and persevere.