Grit – or Why effort matters

This week, I spoke to the girls in assembly about work. Here’s a precis of what I told them:

If our friends or colleagues ask us what we are doing this weekend and we say ‘work’, what tends to be the reaction? ‘Oh, you poor thing.’ ‘Oh bad luck.’  Or, worst of all: ‘What kind of person are you?’

People talk about work/life balance as if somehow work were not an intrinsic part of our lives. One of the wisest things anybody has ever said to me on this subject was that work/life balance was not about having a perfect ratio of work and life, but about finding the balance that was right for us. He said, if you really enjoy your work, don’t let anyone make you feel guilty about it. We all need down time, we all benefit from interests outside our work to make our lives richer and more diverse. I spoke last half-term about the importance of having interests, hobbies, passions. These are feelings I stand by, but there is also real passion to be found in work.

Over half term I read a recently published book by a psychologist called Angela Duckworth. The book is called Grit and it is an interesting examination of what contributes to success. Duckworth puts it down to a combination of four things:

1. Passion for what you do – a really good reason for choosing subjects you love at GCSE, A Level and university and then again a career you love.
2. A sense of Purpose – valuing what you do, believing that there is a real point to it. One of the things two members of support staff have told me in the past 48 hours alone is that they love working at South Hampstead because they really care about doing a good job for all of you. You may not know their names as they work quietly in their offices, but what they do they do for all of you.
3. Hope – the belief that in the end, no matter how high the mountain, your efforts will pay off. Next time someone tells you that phrase You Can Do it, listen to them. We have a natural tendency as human beings to focus on negative feedback and to drown out the positive. By all means take constructive criticism as a challenge to be even better, but if someone tells you that you have done something well, take time to bask in the glory.
4. Perseverance – the ability to focus on your key goals, not to get distracted or bored and move on to something else. To recover from setbacks: ‘bounce-back-ability’. James Dyson, the man who made his millions from designing bagless hoovers, had to make 5,127 different prototypes before he found one that worked. Dyson embodies the very spirit of grit – he is motivated not by a desire to make money but by a deep passion for improving the design of everyday objects. He absolutely loves household chores because, as he loads and empties the dishwasher or runs the hoover around, he is busy thinking about how he could improve the process further. Even though Dyson has made around £800 million from his business, he is not to be found sunning himself on foreign beaches in luxury villas. He spends his days at his factory in Wiltshire day in day out completely absorbed in how to solve problems such as dust mites in carpets. His passion for vacuum cleaners is perhaps a little eccentric but it is a cornerstone of his success and a great lesson for all of us. Find something you find really interesting and stick at it.

People who are really successful in life aren’t just lucky or supremely talented. They work really hard at something they are passionate about. Images of Usain Bolt winning his 200m heat in the Rio Olympics suggests that his race victories come easily to him. He does of course have significant natural advantages. But Bolt’s smiles, showmanship and love of chicken nuggets (he allegedly ate 100 a day during the 2008 Beijing Olympics) distract us from a much more fundamental truth. That what we regard as his almost superhuman talent is the product of years of hard training, commitment, graft and setbacks after injury. But other famous runners have started off life with considerably less talent than Usain Bolt.

In the 1950s one of the greatest runners of the day was a Czech man called Emil Zatopek. Zatopek did not have the ideal physical build for long distance running greatness and his running style was notoriously awkward. But what set him apart was his bloody-minded ability to withstand pain and his relentless training programme. Even if you have absolutely no interest in running you have to admire his commitment to training. In a typical session at an athletics track, runners might run 10 laps of 400 metres, maybe 15 if they are pushing it. Zatopek would run 100 x 400m – but on a forest trail, in the snow in Czechoslovakia, on his own, in army boots rather than running shoes. Or, for a bit of variety, he would run in a bathtub full of wet laundry on a sort of strange makeshift treadmill.  I love running, as you know, but Zatopek’s commitment in my mind borders on the insane. But nonetheless I cannot help but be utterly dumbstruck by his sheer and utter determination. He went on to win five Olympic gold medals in the 1940s and 50s. His achievements in the 1952 Helsinki Olympics are the stuff of pure athletic legend. He won the 5000m, 10000m and Marathon events making him arguably an even greater runner than Sir Mo Farah.

People such as James Dyson and Emil Zatopek are exceptional human beings. They clearly have some sort of natural predisposition to greatness. James Dyson rebelled at school by disregarding his studies of Latin and Greek and playing around with model aeroplanes instead. Emil Zatopek came second in his first ever amateur local race with no training. But what singles them out is not their natural ability but their total absorption in pursuing a single goal. I am not suggesting that we should all be as single minded as them. That is a choice we all have to make for ourselves. But the thing I would like you to take away is the idea that success lies in the ability to keep calm and carry on failing. Remember that next time you make a mistake in class. As someone once said, “the difference between try and triumph is a little umph.”

Blog post by Vicky Bingham, Headmistress from 2017 to 2023.