Living the focused life is not about trying to feel happy all the time…rather, it’s about treating your mind as you would a private garden and being as careful as possible about what you introduce and allow to grow there.

This quote, tucked innocuously at the end of the third chapter of Rapt,  Winifred Gallagher’s 2009 ode to focus, is life-changing.

Gallagher’s book begins with a cancer diagnosis (“not just cancer, but a particularly nasty, fairly advanced kind”). She realizes that this disease wants to claim her attention, and that this was no way to live what may be the last moments of her life. So she launches an experiment to reclaim her attention, relentlessly redirecting it towards the things that matter most: “big ones like family and friends, spiritual life and work, and smaller ones like movies, walks, and a 6:30 pm martini.”

Gallagher comes away from the experiment with a good prognosis for her disease and a visceral appreciation of a surprising fact: “life is the sum total of what you focus on,” yet most people expend little effort cultivating this focus.

This lack of cultivation comes through clearly in the student e-mails I receive. A recent request for advice, for example, noted:

“I feel overwhelmed and worried about these exams…as I see all this work [accumulate] I have doubts whether I can do it and get the grades or if it’s already too late.”

The student goes on to detail a doomsday scenario ending in his expulsion from college. A similar e-mail I received earlier this week begins:

“I am a rising senior and EXTREMELY stressed out and anxious about graduation, because I don’t have a set plan.”

In addition, I receive, on average, three or four e-mails per week from students obsessing over their qualifications for graduate, medical, or law school. Earning a “B” on a single test in a single class can spark an epic rumination on the student’s imminent failure in life.

These examples underscore an important reality: no amount of planning, productivity, or accomplishment will provide you an interesting and happy life if you allow your mind to run amok — ruminating on what has or could go wrong; fixating on slights and fantasy dialogues with invented nemeses; leaping perpetually to day dreams of some quixotic future where everything finally works out.

This is why Gallagher’s quote proves arresting. She both diagnoses the problem and describes the remedy:  Training your mind is crucial in building a good life.

For some reason, however, us in the advice-dispensing business tend to sidestep this reality. It’s uncomfortable, I suppose, to transgress the boundary into the private space of our mental lives. Sure, we’ll occasionally stick a toe over the line, and tell our readers to overcome their fear of failure or to shake off society’s pressure to conform, but the messier mental gunk that coats so much of our inner world remains out of scope.

I want to put an end to this taboo…

I’ll start with an admission: I spend time, every day, tending to my mind. For example, I practice walking meditation each morning, and I use a shutdown routine, backed by extensive organization systems, to free my thoughts from work-related rumination during the evenings. These are just two examples from a large and aggressive collection of strategies I dedicate to cultivating my focus — a collection I review and polish once a week.

This is hard work and the results take time to manifest. But it’s work that I think all but the most naturally optimistic must include in their strategies for self-improvement, and this is why I want to start talking openly about the subject.

If you find yourself in a state of constant, draining, distracting thought, don’t confine your efforts to the outward causes. It’s important, of course, to fix the inefficient study habits that keep your grades erratic, or to reassess your understanding of passion when grappling with job satisfaction, but you should also dedicate effort inward, to weeding your mental garden, preventing the next batch of concerns — and there will always be a next batch — from leeching so many nutrients from your soul matter.

Perhaps the best motivation for this effort can be found in the words of Gallagher, who concludes: “I’ll live the focused life, because it’s the best kind there is.”

(Photo by Joel Bedford)

“I’ve always been a good student and I know that I’m smart and capable, but lately I’ve been having such a hard time,” she began.

“I’m having trouble completing assignments, even though I have sufficient time.  I avoid seeking out help, preferring instead to just freak out alone in my room.”

This student recognized her trouble as deep procrastination — the exceedingly common student affliction of losing the will to work.

While responding to her message, I had an interesting realization: deep procrastination, though scary, represents something important and perhaps even exciting. It marks that key transition where the momentum of “this is what you need to do” — the momentum that carried you through high school and into college — begins to wane, leaving you to discover a new source of propulsion — not just new, but also more durable and more personal.

It’s important to side step the self-help cliches in this situation. It’s unlikely that you’ll unearth a burning life’s mission hidden conveniently just below the surface of your psyche. What you seek is more fundamental: an acceptance that doing things well is hard, and always will be, and that you need to spend more time than you thought was necessary deciding which such hard things gain rights to your attention.

None of this is easy. All of it is exciting.

With all of this in mind, I had no magical solution to offer this worried sophomore. I could only suggest that she take a step back and reduce the frantic Yale pace, maybe for just one semester, leaving space for her new propulsion to build a head of steam.

I recently began taking bluegrass guitar lessons.

It hasn’t been easy.

The style is precise, which means that it requires an abundance of repetitious practicing.  A typical session might proceed as follows:

1. Listen to the same 10 – 30 second stretch of a song again and again, deconstructing the lead painfully, note by note, using your ear and a lot of trial and error.
2. Play this section of the lead again and again for another 30 minutes to an hour — rarely getting through more than a few phrases without a mistake that forces you to start over.

Repeat this enough times, with an increasingly complicated progression of songs, and a weekly check-in with a teacher to correct subtle mistakes in your technique, and you’ll eventually be able to make your way through some basic bluegrass tunes without embarrassing yourself. In other words, the path to becoming even a passable amateur is long and demanding.

I’m sharing these observations because I think they provide an interesting metaphor for the task of building a remarkable life...

Grit vs. Frenzy

As I described above, learning to play bluegrass guitar is not a lot of fun. This being said, however, it’s also not that demanding on your life: its daily time requirements are reasonable and it generates no stress. Furthermore, the effort will eventually provide big rewards, such as the experience of passing around the lead with a group of talented bluegrass musicians.

Compare this goal with the related pursuit of running the music club where such musicians play. Unlike learning the guitar, running a club is infamously demanding: It requires long, exhausting hours, and injects unhealthy amounts of stress into your life.  Furthermore, the rewards don’t compare to those experienced by the admired musicians entrancing the crowd.

Here’s the important point: most people are more comfortable becoming a club owner, even though the guitar player enjoys less stress and more rewards.

I don’t mean this in the literal sense that most people want to start music clubs. Instead, I’m referring to the idea that most people are more comfortable with the club owner-style work frenzies than they are with the guitar player-style grit.

For example, to draw an analogy to college…

Most students are more comfortable trying to survive lots of classes and activities than they are investing the deep concentration — spent with a pint in a quiet bar or a notebook under a tree — required to become an A* student in a single subject.

This holds true even though the latter path is less stressful, more engaging, and opens up more exciting post-grad opportunities.

And, in the workplace…

Most employees are more comfortable getting ahead by taking on more work than their peers and reducing their e-mail response time to the single digits than they are mastering, bit by bit, a skill that’s incredibly valuable in their field.

This holds true even though the latter is the key to an enjoyable career, and the former can provide only standard-paced promotions (and ulcers).

The Guitar Player Paradox

I’m intrigued by this observation that we prefer stress over hard focus. My current hypothesis proposes two explanations:

First, the club owner strategy is more predictable — you can’t go wrong working harder, even if its rewards are distilled.

Second, and perhaps more important, hard focus, at first, can be incredibly uncomfortable  — so much so that we’d rather accept 12 hour days of regular work than spend 2 hours on intense concentration. The good news is that, as Haruki Murakami taught us, hard focus is a practiced skill. If you improve this ability enough, the guitar player path might eventually seem less onerous.

I plan on exploring this paradox in more detail in the near future, as I wonder if it might hold the key to jump-starting a remarkable life. In the mean time, you should ask yourself a simple question:

Who are you trying to become, the guitar player or the club owner?

(Photo by Bill Gracey)

Problems with Passion

My friend Scott Young recently published a blog post with an intriguing title: “What if you have more than one passion?” He reports that several readers admitted that they have “a hard time focusing” because they have “too many passions.”

My readers report their own problems with passion. Here are some excerpts from recent e-mails:

• “I’m currently feeling great antipathy for physics…I’ve found myself questioning my passion for the subject. “
• “My only true passion is biology, but it’s a damn big field in which I have no focus other than my general spiritual love for green things.”
• “Yes, this particular major isn’t my passion. However, my studies are funded by my disciplinarian father…”

My point here is that “passion” seems to be a common source of problems. For some, they have too many passions and don’t know where to focus their energies. For others, it’s the lack of a passion, or maybe a belief that their particular passion won’t bring them somewhere worth going.

In this short post, I want to share a new way of looking at this troublesome concept…

What is Passion

Common to most peoples’ thoughts about passion are the following three foundational beliefs:

1. To feel passionate about something is to be engaged and fulfilled by working on it, and to feel a desire to return to it whenever possible.
2. In the course of your regular life you will develop passions for various pursuits.
3. You will live a much happier life if you can align your studies as a student or career as a graduate with one of your passions.

Here’s the hypothesis I’ve been developing recently: (1) and (3) are true, but (2) is false. And it’s this common misperception that allows “passion” to wreak so much havoc.

Redefining Passion

Based on my own anecdotal experiences working with students and young graduates, I would offer the following alternative definition of passion and where it comes from:

Passion: The feeling that arises from have mastered a skill that earns you recognition and rewards.

Belief (2) from above posits that passions exist a priori of any serious engagement with a pursuit; they’re some mysterious Platonic form waiting for you to discover. This is a dangerous fiction.

My alternative definition claims instead that passion is the feeling generated by mastery. It doesn’t exist outside of serious hard work.

When Scott’s readers say “I have too many passions,” what they really mean is “I have lots of superficial interests.” When my readers complain that their major is not their passion, what they really mean to say is “I don’t have a level of mastery in this field that is earning me recognition.”

I submit that this concept is liberating. It frees you from obsession over whether you are doing the “right” thing with your life. A mastery-centric view of passion says that aligning your life with passions is a good thing, but almost any superficial interest can be transformed into a passion with hard work, so there’s no reason to sweat choices such as an academic major or you first post-college career.

Your real focus should be on the long road of becoming so good they can’t ignore you.

Here are a couple short case studies to highlight the concept in practice...

Short Case Study #1: The Disillusioned Pre-Med

The most common student e-mails I receive are from pre-meds who are struggling through tough organic chemistry courses, are not having fun with it, and are worrying that perhaps becoming a doctor is not “their true passion.”

The mastery-centric approach to passion has a simple solution to this issue: focus your effort on mastering the art of being a pre-med student. Clear your schedule of junk so you have abundant time to become an A* student in the topic. Become obsessive about the effectiveness of your technical study habits.

The feeling of “passion” you seek will be generated once you start kicking ass in your courses in a way that outpaces your peers and earns you the respect of the professors. Until then, of course you’re not going to feel warm and fuzzy — at this early point in your student career, becoming a doctor is just a superficial interest. You have to build a recognized skill to transform it into something more.

Short Case Study #2: The Bored Programmer

Let’s tackle a non-academic example. Imagine a young man working in web development firm. His days are spent hacking CSS and doing some mild javascript programming. The pay is fine and the projects are interesting enough, but a feeling of dread is starting to tinge his daily commute.

“I’m not passionate about this,” our fictional programmer thinks. “Do I really want to spend the rest of my life doing the first random job I stumbled into, even if I don’t love it?”

The traditional view of passion recommends that this programmer immediately summon the courage to quit his job and find something that fits his passion. (Tim Ferriss tells the canonical story of this form: an overworked LA lawyer who dropped everything to open a surf shop in Brazil.)

The mastery-centric view, however, denies that such a priori passions exist. There’s probably no new job that would immediately grant him the feeling of passion he seeks. That can only come from mastery.

Assuming that the programmer doesn’t hate his job and the people he works with, he should instead consider generating a passion for his work by finding something he can master.

For example, over the next couple of years, he might put in serious time to become a Ruby on Rails expert — allowing his company to branch off into more complicated projects, and earning him more respect, pay, and flexibility in the process. Gaining this mastery could transform his view of his job as something he tolerates to something he loves. And it will accomplish this feat with more certainty than a sudden move to Brazil.

A Hypothesis Develops

I present these ideas with the caveat of hypothesis. I’ve recently begun an extensive effort to dive into the research literature surronding these issues. (I encountered some relevant studies when researching my upcoming book and vowed to return.) Expect to here more on these topics as I continue my exploration.

Ancient Wisdom

When I began writing this article I was sitting on the balcony of a hotel room in Rio, looking over the beach pictured to the right. To my ear, the waves in Brazil are absurdly loud, which had the effect of miring me in a haze of tropic contemplation. It was in this state that I happened onto a thought that I couldn’t shake: perhaps the students who are feeling the most run down and worn out by college should take a moment to ask themselves a simple question…

Am I living well now or preparing to live well later?

This question is not new. In tribute to the death of a good friend, Tim Ferriss posted a full length translation of Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life. I read this translation around the same time that I was thinking about this post, and one passage in particular caught my attention:

It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested…

But one man is possessed by greed that is insatiable, another by a toilsome devotion to tasks that are useless…one man is exhausted by an ambition that always hangs upon the decision of others.

There’s no need to annotate Seneca — like most stoics, his words have an eerie resonance with our current moment. I’ll instead give you my own simple observation. As far as I can tell, the happiest students are those who try to shape their life into something that’s meaningful, quality, and enjoyable right now; the type who get excited about the philosophy seminar they got into, and then spend an early Fall day outside getting acquainted with the reading. These students aren’t afraid of hard work, but they keep it carefully contained, because they know there’s a lifetime more where that came from, and if they can’t handle it well now, when will they ever?

The morning after I started this post, these ideas still rattling around my mind, I met up with a friend who was taking some time off from Stanford for a South American wander-about. We found a nearby bar. It was early, but my friend had taught himself some Portuguese over the past few months, and he sweet-talked the bar tender into some free espressos, which we sipped while talking about nothing in particular — raising our voices slightly to be heard over the nearby waves.

If you’re not trying to live well now, what are you waiting for?

The (Over) Committed Student

Last week, I received an e-mail from a student who I’ve advised in the past. His new semester was about to start and he was worried about his schedule.

“I think I’m overcommitting myself,” he told me. “I considered dropping some activities, but it’s hard because I want to do them all.”

He then asked me to review the following “time budget” that he created for his schedule:

• 5 courses — 24 hours/week in class
• Lab volunteering — 15 hours/week
• Peer educator and mentor — 10 hours/week
• Exercise — 6 hours/week
• Hospital volunteering — 3 hours/week
• Executive of a club — 5 hours/week
• Public speaking club — 8 hours/week

After reading his e-mail, I realized it’s time for me to revist one of the main themes preached here on Study Hacks: simplicity is beautiful.

The idea that doing less can actually make you more impressive is, of course, the cornerstone of my Zen Valedictorian Philosophy. I’ve also argued that doing lots of extracurricular activities is meaningless for your job hunt, and that overloaded course schedules are like a devestating virus that can destroy your life.

In this post, I want to add a new strategy to your minimilast arsenal.

The Rule of One

My response to the student from above is that, in my opinion, he’s overcommitted. His schedule will inevitably cause stress and yield little tangible advantages in terms of his perceived impressiveness. He’s following a diligence strategy instead of an ability strategy, and he’ll eventually pay a price for it.

My advice for this student is to follow what I call the rule of one. This rule includes the following three requirements:

• One Major: I don’t want to hear about your nonsense plan to combine a bio major with a music major so you’ll be perfectly positioned for a lucrative job studying the effects of Mozart on bacteria. Choose one major, then use your extra time to become an A* student.
• One Extracurricular: Having a laundry-list of activities has become so outdated as a strategy that it’s almost embarassing at this point. Choose one pursuit and then spend four years pushing it somewhere exceptional. If it helps, you can ease into this lifestyle with an activity vacation.
• One Hour of Focused Relaxation Per Day: When constructing your autopilot schedule, block off one hour each day for what I call focused relaxation. This involves going somewhere quiet where you’re completely disconnected — no phone, no e-mail, no iPod — and doing something you enjoy. Read a book. Walk through the woods. Take notes on big ideas. If you do this every day, not only will your stress decrease, but you’ll also gain a sense of control over your life which will pay huge dividends as the demands you face increase.

It’s impossible to follow the rule of one and still feel overwhelmed or stressed. Even better, if you couple this minimalist approach with a dedication to focusing hard and doing exceptionally well at your small number of pursuits, you’ll actually increase your impressiveness.

The beginning of a new semester is a perfect time to make new resolutions about your student lifestyle. I implore you to give this approach a try. If you do, let me know — I want to hear your story.

Writing a doctoral dissertation is a peculiar endeavor. There’s a general understanding, suspended out there in the stress-fraught ether of graduate student life, that this is supposed to be a brutal process. Consider, for example, the popular blog Dissertation Hell. Its tagline reads:

A place to rant publicly but anonymously on the many tortures of writing a dissertation.

In a recent post, titled A Last Day in Hell, an anonymous graduate student notes:

Many asked how I balance [my dissertation] with my life. The truth is I never did! … I did this for three or so months, 8 to 14 hours a day, every day of the week.

In a particularly dark twist, the student adds:

My aunt died of leukemia during that time, but I had promised her I would finish, so the night I found out I doubled my efforts and kept on going. EVERYTHING got put on hold.

Fortunately, during my own dissertation process, I was able to observe most of these frantic conventions with some semblance of objectivity. Having already written two books, and published over 20 peer-reviewed papers in my field, the task, while demanding, seemed far from “hellish.” But it did get me thinking about the conventions of student life and how we handle work.

In this post, I want to share some thoughts on why these big student projects cause so much stress and a strategy for alleviating this suffering.

“Hard” vs. “Hard to Do”

I found writing my thesis to be similar to writing my books. It’s an exercise in grit: You have to apply hard focus, almost every day, over a long period time.

To me, this is the definition of what I call hard work. The important point, however, is that the regular blocks of hard focus that comprise hard work do not have to be excessively long. That is, there’s nothing painful or unsustainable about hard work. With only a few exceptions, for example, I was easily able to maintain my fixed 9 to 5:30 schedule while writing my thesis.

By contrast, the work schedule described by the anonymous grad student from above meets the definition of what I call hard to do work. Working 14 hours a day, with no break, for months on end, is very hard to do! It exhausts you. It’s painful. It’s impossible to sustain.

I’m increasingly convinced that a lot of student stress is caused by a failure to recognize the difference between these two work types. Students feel that big projects should be hard, so hard to do work habits seem a natural fit.

I am hoping that by explicitly describing the alternative of doing plain hard work, I can help convince you that the hard to do strategy is a terrible way to tackle large academic challenges. I urge you to take blogs like Dissertation Hell off your reading list, and instead remember the following hard work mantra:

Focus hard. In reasonable bursts. One day at a time.

Putting this simple formula into practice isn’t trivial at first, but it gets easier with practice. (It is, for example, how almost every professional writer works). Most importantly, it’s sustainable and compatible with a happy life.

How do you tackle big projects? How do you wish you tackled them?

I’m proud to announce that as of this afternoon, I’m officially caught up with the reader e-mail I received during my recent vacation. While working through the final batch of these messages today, I came across a student, from the University of Melbourne, who mentioned the following in the middle of a longer question:

Yes, this particular major isn’t my passion. However, my studies are funded by my disciplinarian father who insists…

What caught my attention was his use of “passion.” I hear this term often from students in reference to their selections of college majors. (They’ll apologize or lament that they aren’t following their true passions, before moving on to enumerate the specific issues that trouble them.)

In an earlier post, I tackled passion in the context of job hunting, noting:

Passion is generated by extended exposure to something that [eventually] becomes an important part of your life. It’s not some magic score assigned to each job that describes, with great accuracy, how happy you’ll immediately become if you follow that path

Today, I want to argue that this same idea applies to your path through college. As just mentioned, many students are crippled by their fear that they haven’t discovered a major they feel passionately about.

My retort: forget passion!

In the context of college, passion is really just the feeling of having mastered something that you don’t hate. Recall, students come to hate subjects only if they feel like they were pressured into them. Therefore, your challenge is reduced to choosing a course of study for intrinsic reasons. Here’s the important thing: They don’t have to be deep intrinsic reasons — simply deciding after a freshman seminar, for example, that a certain subjects seems “kind of interesting,” is enough. What matters is that it was you who thought it was kind of interesting, not your dad, or some flawed idea about how the job market will later evaluate your record.

And when it comes to the “mastering” part of this equation, of course, look no further than the A* strategy. By giving yourself the time needed to really conquer this (intrinsically motivated) major, you’ll eventually develop a deep sense of connection and satisfaction with your studies.

There’s no magic perfect choice for you — just the right effort invested for the right reasons.

###

Update from 7/14/09: I have a box of galley copies of the red book that feature the little known, original non-red cover that was replaced by the publication date. I need to get rid of these before I move next month. Let me know if you have a cool idea for how I might do this.

Earlier this week, I stumbled across the following letter to the editor, published in the New York Times. It was written in response to an editorial, printed on June 30th, about tackling the binge drinking problem on college campuses.

To the Editor:

The solution to binge drinking problems on campuses is simple: college curriculums need to be more rigorous. If college programs required their students to put in a significant number of hours per week doing work related to their classes, campus drinking would soon find itself limited to one or two nights a week.

Furthermore, those few nights a week would be more moderate, since the students would drink knowing that they needed to get up in the morning and keep hacking away at that thermodynamics problem set.

I suspect that one of the main reasons students who aren’t in college drink less than college students is that they have to get up in the morning and go to work at a real job, where they are accountable for their behavior.

Caroline Figgatt
Munich, July 1, 2009

The writer is a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

What caught my attention, of course, was the biographical sentence at the end of the letter. Only an MIT student would think that the answer to a social problem is to work people too hard to have time to develop the problem.

At first, I found this note amusing, but this soon gave away to a darker thought: why do schools like MIT allow this type of mindset to not only exist, but become the norm? If a large percentage of the student population here were becoming physically injured in unsafe campus buildings, or falling ill due to a disease outbreak, the administration would rush to stamp out the problem. But the issues of the mind that are common here — unhappiness, detachment, chronic stress — are viewed with a tinge of nostalgia, or, secretly, approved as part of what makes MIT unique.

Based on the daily e-mails I receive from students across the country, it seems like this indifference is endemic. Campuses might invest in mental health programs to catch the worst of the sufferers when they make their fall, but there’s little effort to prevent these falls in the first place, or, more importantly, impede the slide into tolerable unhappiness that many students silently accept.

I’m curious about your thoughts. What’s your experience with stress on your college campus, and how your school handles the issue?

In Praise of Grittiness

While on vacation, I read two books. The first was Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, which has been causing an idealistic stir among the usually cynical intelligentsia. The second was Winifred Gallagher’s Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. Both intrigued me, though I’ll admit that I’m still processing the ideas. You’ll probably hear more about them from me at some point in the future.

Today, however, I want to briefly mention one piece of social psychology research, described by Gallagher in Rapt, that resonates well with our conversation here at Study Hacks.

Gallagher cites the research of Angela Duckworth, a psychologist from Penn. Since 2005, Duckworth has been studying a trait called “grit,” which she describes as follows:

Grit entails working strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress. The gritty individual approaches achievement as a marathon…

She maintains that grit is “essential to high achievement.”

Quoted by Gallagher, Duckworth also notes: “We don’t give enough attention to the ‘effort’ and ‘duration’ pieces of accomplishment…Life is relatively short, so don’t labor under the delusion that you can keep switching your focus from goal to goal and get anywhere.”

But what if you’re not sure what goal is right for you?

“[Eventually] perhaps you should settle down with the best thing you’ve found, and focus on it,” she concludes.

As usual, there’s also a nice selection of peer-reviewed research to back up these ideas. In a 2007 paper, for example, titled Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals, Duckworth, along with collaborators from the University of Michigan and West Point, demonstrate that grit plays an important role in achievements spanning from becoming spelling bee champion, to Ivy League GPA, to overall educational attainment in life.

Grit vs. Grind

The idea of grit is not new to Study Hacks readers. With sufficient squinting of the eyes, it can be found at the core of the Steve Martin Method, my pleas for more boredom tolerance, the A* strategy, and, most recently, my coronation of hard focus, just to name the most obvious examples. In short, I’ve informally observed this trait to be important for achievement for quite a while. It’s only now, however, that I’ve learned that (at least some) researchers agree.

That being said, I must admit that reading Duckworth’s articles, with their straightforward praise of gutting it out (“his or her advantage is stamina,” she said, describing a gritty personality), inspired a tinge of doubt: What separates the lauding of grit from the lauding of the grind lifestyle? This question is crucial to our mission here, as, of course, being happy and low-stressed is one of the key pillars of my philosophy.

After some thought, I arrived at an answer:

• The grind lifestyle involves filling most days with an unhealthily large amount of work. It treats the overwork itself as the goal, not its results. This chronic overwork, in turn, generates stress and deep procrastination.
• Grit, on the other hand, is about persistently accomplishing a reasonable amount of hard work. For example, consider my book writing. I spend 1 – 3 hours a day, most days, on this task. I’ve been doing this off and on for six years now. These are hard hours, requiring real hard focus. But they’re not many hours — so they’re not a source of overwork or stress in my life.

A Familiar Mantra

This distinction highlights the central message of the grit philosophy: maintain a small number of things that you return to, and do hard work on, again and again, over a long period of time. Choose things that actually interest you, but don’t obsess over choosing the perfect things — as perfect goals, like perfect majors, probably don’t exist. Keep this hard work quarantined to a reasonable number of focused hours each day, and harness the rest of the time to recharge, relax, and, in general, enjoy life. Or, to put it in a more familar wording: Do Less. Do Better. Know Why.

Sounds about right to me…