Resilience and Grit

The Daily Drip

You know that feeling when you have been writing at your computer or working on a spreadsheet and suddenly, everything disappears?

No saved file. No backup. No evidence you ever did any work at all.

You may as well have been doing nothing.

Man, that's frustrating.

It just happened to me. I wrote a whole Daily Drip with a great signoff and WHAM. Nada.

It's such a small, insignificant setback but we feel it so hard.

The size of it doesn't matter. It's how frustrating it feels that matters--because that's what influences our reaction.

The only thing that matters at that point is how fast we fire up the laptop again.

Practicing resilience on this small scale will help us be more resilient when larger setbacks occur.

Angela Duckworth calls this Grit and we'd be a much better society if we taught this in schools instead of falsely assuming that it's part of our DNA and predetermined destiny.

For those of us graduates, it's too late. We've got to practice on our own.

Will you practice resilience with the small things?