Merriam-Webster has two definitions for the word grit.

The first: small, loose particles of stone or sand. An irritant. The thing we shake out of our shoes, rub from our eyes, try to avoid.

The second: firmness of mind or spirit; unyielding courage in the face of hardship.

This month we're exploring three skills nobody formally teaches us but everyone eventually needs. Three muscles we can build. Three capacities that, once developed, genuinely change our ability to move through everything life brings.

We start with grit.

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What Grit Actually Is

Psychologist Angela Duckworth spent years studying a deceptively simple question: why do some people accomplish more than others of equal intelligence?

Not talent. Not IQ. Not privilege or circumstance. Given the same starting point — the same raw material — what separates the people who keep going from the people who stop?

Her answer: grit. Which she defines as perseverance and passion for long-term goals. And her research is striking — in study after study, across wildly different populations, grit outperformed intelligence as a predictor of who would make it. Her research held across wildly different populations — West Point cadets, Ivy League undergraduates, National Spelling Bee competitors — and the pattern was consistent everywhere.

And here's the piece that matters most: grit is not an inborn attribute. It comes from learning basic principles and gaining hands-on experience during trials and challenges.

Grit is not something we either have or don't. It's something we build.

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Grit vs. Grinding

Before we go further, a distinction worth making.

Grit is not grinding. These two things look similar from the outside — both involve showing up when it's hard — but they feel completely different from the inside.

This is why Duckworth pairs perseverance with passion — not passion as constant excitement, but passion as a deep, sustained caring. A commitment that holds even when the excitement fades and the hard parts arrive.

Grit is choosing to keep going — not because it's easy, but because it's worth it.

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The Ingredients

Research points to several qualities that live inside genuine grit. None are traits we're born with. All are buildable:

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A Story About Grit

A dear friend of mine — one of the most incredible examples of grit and grace I know — recently closed on a house she had been working toward for a long time. She's a single mom, running her own business, and this home represented something real: a place of their own, a great investment, and a dream come true.

Within days of closing, they discovered black mold. Everywhere. She's severely allergic, so the house had to be completely remediated before they could move in. What was supposed to be a joyful new chapter became a season of contractors and decisions and delays — kitchen, bathrooms, flooring, carpeting — all of it at once. She and her daughter, now 11 years old, are currently living in a hotel, managing a summer of disruption while she works remotely, keeps her daughter happy, makes selections at Home Depot in the summer heat, and wades through the endless paperwork of loans and timelines and decisions that feels like they also want to see your third grade report card.

This is NOT what she imagined.

And yet — what I hear when I talk to her is not a woman being crushed by her circumstances. What I hear is a woman who has made a decision about how she's going to live in this season.

The truth is, this would be happening whether she had a good attitude or a bad one. The mold didn't care. The timeline didn't care. The summer heat didn't care.

What she gets to choose is how she carries it. Life isn't happening to her. It's happening for her. And she has the tenacity, the skills, and the spiritual grounding to meet it.

That's grit. Not the absence of hard things. The decision about who we'll be while we're in them.

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What Grit Feels Like From the Inside

It can feel like pressure and overwhelm. Like a nervous system that has been activated for too long and is quietly asking for relief.

Two mantras hold me in gritty seasons:

These aren't bypasses. They're true. Every season ends — every hard chapter becomes the chapter before something better.

For me, grit in the body looks like zeroing in on simple, specific gratitude. Not the grand sweeping kind — the immediate kind. I have a bed to sleep in. My daughters are safe and healthy. We have enough food. I have work that matters to me. The nervous system can't hold enormous anxiety and specific gratitude at the same time. Gratitude wins when we're specific enough.

Don Miguel Ruiz understood this. The fourth agreement — always do your best — comes with a crucial qualifier: your best looks different on different days. On a hard day, your best might be smaller, slower, quieter than usual. That's not failure — that's real life. 

And what a gift — when we are not in a gritty season — to be the person who shows up for someone who is.

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Teaching Grit to Our Children

This is the piece I think about most as a mom.

Our children don't need to see us unaffected by hard things. They need to see us move through hard things.

When Liliana watches me take a breath before I respond instead of react — that's grit. When she sees me simplify a hard day instead of catastrophize it — that's grit. When she hears Nick and me say this is hard, and we're going to be okay — that's grit.

We celebrate effort in our house, not just outcomes. We talk about what things feel like in the body. We name seasons: we're in a gritty season right now — that means we simplify, we show up, and we trust it will get better. Because it always does.