Do Online Women Really Need Grit?

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success grit

My curiosity went into overdrive when I read how grit is considered one of the obvious but overlooked element that can help women get ahead.

 

Why has no one told us until now we’ve been missing out on the value of grit?

 

Why Grit?

 

University of Pennsylvania psychologist, Angela Duckworth, conducted research across different age groups and professionals looking for what more accurately predicts success.

 

What she found is that qualities of I.Q., talent, financial resources, popularity or good looks are not the best success predictors.

 

Instead, Duckworth identifies a key predictor she calls “grit” as having a kind of growth mindset  for long-term and meaningful accomplishment.

 

What’s Really Grit?

 

Grit can be understood as the following:

 

Acronym: guts, resilience, initiative, tenacity

 

Psychological definition:

  • “… a positive, non-cognitive trait based on an individual’s passion for a particular long-term goal or end state, coupled with a powerful motivation to achieve their respective objective.
  • This perseverance of effort promotes the overcoming of obstacles or challenges that lie within a gritty individual’s path to accomplishment, and serves as a driving force in achievement realization.
  • Commonly associated concepts within the field of psychology include “perseverance”, “hardiness”, “resilience”, “ambition”, “need for achievement” and “conscientiousness”. (Wikipedia)

 

Duckworth’s predictor of success:
A facet of conscientiousness where there’s a growth mindset for passion and purpose, stamina and the ability to deal with failure and rejection “to start over with lessons learned.”

 

The Advantages of Grit for Women

 

According to author, Robin Koval, who includes grit as one of the Most Obvious But Overlooked Qualities That Help Women Get Ahead, the advantage is its non-gender specific quality. The value for women is in using it to meet the challenges and obstacles in male-dominated professions and dealing with competitors.

 

What does Grit Mean to Predicting Success for Online Women?

 

The more I read about grit, the faster I came to the conclusion that this isn’t a skill we need to acquire. We already have it and our success is inevitable.

 

  • When you consider it, we’re a conscientious group.
  • We’re out there every day taking the initiative to create new content.
  • We have the guts to stick it through until we find something valuable to say.
  • We have the resilience to put out another blog post or offer when the last one didn’t get much response.
  • We have the tenacity to keep going because we’re got a passion for what we do and want to share it with others.
  • We’re already in a growth mindset by continuing to explore our areas of interests.
  • We have the stamina because we can index what we’re already published to know how far we’ve already come. 
  • We know failure and rejection well when the computer crashes and there are no backup files, when readers get sent to a 404 error page, or the PayPal account is showing no sales.

 

While professional women are being told, they need to develop grit skills, I think it’s safe to predict that we online women already have grit and are well on our way to being successful.

 

 

What’s your grit quality that you see as the key to your success?

 

 

Sources:
The Most Obvious But Overlooked Qualities That Help Women Get Ahead
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2016/05/12/why-angela-duckworth-thinks-gritty-leaders-are-people-to-emulate/
https://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/conscientiousness
Image: Pixabay 1848695