10 Apr What if “giving up” was what you needed to do?
Today I’m sharing with you a very interesting article.
So often, happiness and success are associated with hard work, grit, resilience. And so often, happiness and success do come from perseverance and persistence.
But sometimes, there’s a good argument for giving up and letting go…sometimes, knowing when to quit might be what you need for more happiness!
via Quartz by Susan David
The English are famous for their stiff upper lips and for putting phrases like “Keep Calm and Carry On” on tourist T-shirts. It’s a refined way of saying “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” In America we tend to express the same sentiments through the frontier virtue of ‘grit.’ Even our favorite T-shirt-worthy phrase, “The American Dream,” implies that we can accomplish anything we set our minds to as long we keep our heads down, one eye on the prize, the other eye on the bottom line, our nose to the grindstone, our shoulder to the plow, and so on.
Grit embodies, but is not the same as, resilience, ambition, and self-control. University of Pennsylvania psychologist and researcher Angela Duckworth defines it as passion and sustained persistence in trying to achieve a goal over the very long haul, with no particular concern for rewards or recognition along the way. Resilience is about overcoming adversity; ambition, at some level suggests a desire for wealth, fame and/or power; self-control can help you resist temptations, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re persistently pursuing a long-term goal. Grit is a special case that, according to Duckworth’s research, is an important predictor of long-term success.
Teachers who are gritty stay in the profession for longer and are more effective than those who aren’t. Students who are gritty are more likely to graduate. Men who are gritty stay in marriages longer (a finding that, interestingly, doesn’t apply to women).
While the passion part of grit is important, it’s only healthy when you are managing the passion, rather than letting it manage you. Passion that becomes an obsession to the point of obscuring other important life activities is not going to help you thrive. You can persevere—working like a dog at a project or task, and possibly even deriving a sense of accomplishment from it—but if all that effort and determination is not in service of your life’s goals, then it’s just not serving you…
…keep reading the full & original article HERE