The Duality of Progress
The Duality of Progress
Balancing grit and precision to fuel worthwhile pursuits.
You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.
Albert Einstein
Pursuing something worthwhile is hard.
It requires overcoming the status quo to get started and grinding through the monotony of staying consistent for months or even years to see meaningful progress.
Developing grit is a requirement for doing anything worthwhile but just as important for high performance is developing precision.
Intuitively, we know we need to work hard and find ways to work smarter, but we don’t balance these strategies well. We typically choose one approach or the other as our sole strategy.
In some cases, this works beautifully, but a careful balance between grit and precision is required to make meaningful progress in most worthwhile pursuits.
Grit beats precision when precision doesn’t work hard
Grit alone can get us very far in life. Hard-working people frequently outlast and outwork their more talented peers.
However, grit is a blunt tool. Not all problems can be solved by doubling down and working harder.
In the same way gritty people can outwork someone more talented, folks who develop precision in their thinking can outwit their grittier peers.
Precision might mean working 30 hours per week, but getting the same or better results than someone working 60 hours per week.
Getting these results still requires grit and hard work, but learning to be precise means we’re more impactful.
Although alluring, we need to be careful with our focus on precision. Attempting to be precise without grit, is akin to arrogant laziness.
Trying to outsmart the system or find ways to cut corners without doing the hard work to learn the basics might yield the illusion of progress, but all the results are surface-level.
A Balanced Approach to Progress
The biggest mistake we can make in pursuing something worthwhile is focusing on precision before grit.
Although grit and precision are both important to making meaningful progress on the things we care about, the order in which we focus on them matters.
Grit without precision can still help us make significant progress, but precision without grit only fools us into thinking we’re making progress.
Much of the advice shared by successful people is about learning to say no, prioritize our time, and focus on the 20% of things that produce 80% of the results. While this is great advice for developing precision, these successful people typically forget to mention it took them 20 years of unbelievably hard work and saying yes to everything before they reached a point where they had the opportunity to be more precise.
When pursuing something worthwhile, we need to earn the right to focus on precision.
Grit and precision are both required when working on something truly worthwhile, but we’re better off taking a grit-first approach.
Prompts
Reflect on the worthwhile pursuits in your life today. Are you focused on grit or precision?
Have there been times when you focused too much on grit or precision? What led you to do so?
Where do you need to change your approach today?
Deep Dive
So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport
A guide to using grit to get into a position where focus and finesse are required.
Thanks for reading! I’ll see you again on Sunday.
Kevin