My wife likes to say "suck it up buttercup". You might have heard the expression "Cowboy Up". My SEAL bussies like to say "The Only Easy Day was Yesterday". These are all expressions of have GRIT. How does grit relate to leadership?
The business world today is one of the most challenging I have seen in 40 years since graduating from West Point. We survived COVID and then came interest rate hikes, threats of recession, bank scandals and the ever looming debt ceiling. If you want to survive as a leader today , you have better have a little grit. Grit is a trait whereby a person has the perseverance and passion to achieve long-term goals. Mond over matter. How do you improve? Find a way to suffer and grind that doesn't kill you. It will make you better. This Ranger likes to call it deliberate discomfort.
So if you think you can just fake it until you make it as long as you keep faking it through thick and thin, you will not be as successful as possible. Along with grit, a successful individual or leader also needs to develop skills. Successful leaders not only have grit to fuel them toward goal attainment, but they should have the ability to motivate and inspire others.
Let's take a little adventure trip back in time to April 1983 (one month before my West Point graduation) involving skis, running shoes, bicycles, and canoes in the Catskill Mountains about 2 hours north of NY city. The destination was Hunter Mountain in Hunter NY. This is when the snow begins to melt and the rivers are flowing fast and they are very cold.
My roomate, Jimmy Knight, and I entered a race called the Kaaterskill Spring Rush. It is a multileg competition where you run 1/2 mile up a mountain and ski down, run 18 miles, bike 47 miles, carry a canoe (portage) for 1 mile and then paddle down the Kaaterskill and Catskill creeks for 6 miles. When we set out do this I was going to do the running and canoe portage and Jimmy was going to ski and bike. We were both runners but Jim grew up an Army brat learning to ski in the mountains of Germany. I learned to ski on the bunny slope for my physical education elective at West Point. Edge to Jimmy on the skiing. So I knew how to snow plough. Neither of us knew much about biking at the time. Jim now runs a business sponsoring bike races all over the country and routinely rides 100 miles.
Why were we doing this? Because we thought we could. It was just another way to test our GRIT. So we chose to do this race. Hence the term deliberate discomfort. It was no accident. We thought it would be fun. It was deliberate and intentional discomfort.
Half way through our training we had a pretty major change. Jimmy was on the Marathon team and the coach would only consent to him participating if he ran the 18 miler. Well, we were still going to do this thing but now I was skiing and biking and Jim would run and carry the canoe and we would paddel the 6 miles together.
We were not allowed to have bikes at the academy unless you were on the cycling team. This meant training on the stationary bikes in the gym. I had arranged to borrow a bike from someone we knew on the cycling team.
On the afternoon before the race, I procured the road bike and got on it to take it for a test spin. I was coasting down a hill approaching the exit to the post exchange (mall on an Army base). A lady driving a big Ford Bronco pulled out in front of me and I squeezed the brakes. Nothing happened. I crashed head on into the front of the Ford Bronco and flew up on the hood with the window stopping my forward momentum. The lady started screaming and crying behind her cracked windshield as she thoiught she had just killed a cadet. I jumped up and insured her that I was OK and then looked at the bike. The frame was bent. How was I going to ride this thing in less than 18 hours?
I carried the bike back to my room and told Jim that I needed help bending the frame back so I could ride it. We headed to the local garage where you could work on your car and used a blow torch to heat the frame up and then bent it back in place. Was I thinking about the structural integrity at that very moment?Heck I was a mechaniocal engineer. I knew better. I had just finished strength of materials the previous semester. Hell no. All I cared about was getting the bike so it would go kind of straight when I rode it. Unfortunately, while we did get the frame to straighten, I had cut the derailer cable so the ten speed bike was now a 5 speed bike.
Not to be detered, we were still going for it. We had no plan B. So there I stood at the bottom of Hunter Mountain getting ready to ride the chair lift 1/2 mile up to the top where we would leave our skis and poles and return to the bottom where we would have to run up the hill to your skis. Everyone looked at me like I was weird when I took my ski boots off and sat down and put on a pair of soccer cleats that I had brought with me. There was nothing in the rules prohibiting it and since my skiing was so bad I had to innovate so I could get up and get part way down the mountain before crashing into someone.
As planned I was the first one to the top of the mountain. I started my very deliberate snow plowing down the mountain. It wasn't long before people were passing me. One guy fell in front and I just lifted that one leg so I did nto hit him. I came down the mountain faster than I had ever gone vefore an tagged Jimmy before unceremoniously falling and sliding in the mud under the club house.
Jim was off on the 18 miler. I boarded a bus with the busted up bike and got to teh run finish line and prepared for the 47 mile bike ride up and down the Catskill mountains. Oh so you have to picture the look one the other competitor's faces when I put an old leather bike helmet on my head and tied it off with a boot lace. The other guys had spare tires, fancy shoes and modern plastic lightweight biking helments. As I waited for Jimmy I had to wonder what the heck I had gotten myself into. At about mile 21 on the 47 mile bike ride I found out. My back tire had gone flat and I did not have a spare.
What to do - quit. Heck no! I rode the bike downhill on the rim and put it on my shoulder and ran uphill and then rode back down etc. for 26 miles. I rememebr hearing people comment as I ran up the hill withthe bike on my shoulder and the leather helmet tied to my head to tag Jim. Off he went to carry a canoe for a mile.
Once Jim got in from his jog with the heavy aluminum Grumman canoe we had, we were off for six miles of paddling. We woudl hit three sets of fairly mild white water from the mountain run off. Jim was not an experienced paddler so I told him to just listen to me as I would guide us from the back of the canoe and no matter what happens "Do Not Get Out of the Canoe". We portaged (carried) the canoe around the first two sets of turbulent water and when we approached the third Jim pleaded with me to give it a go. So we did. I reminded him not to get out of the canoe and just listen to me. We were approaching the exit with smooth paddline in front when our canoe bottomed out on a flat rock under the water. The water started fillign the canoe. It was really cold. I had a wet suit on as I was in the Scuba club. Jim was in running shorts. As the ware filled the front of the canoe Jim got out of the canoe and stood up on the rock. The canoe abruptly jack knifed and dumped me in and was off on it's own down river. I dove under and grabbed rocks and clawed my way yot the bank.
So much for don't get out of the canoe. Jim was in the middle of the river on a rock yellign at other paddlers to pick him up. As several blew him off his pleadign got more forceful with comments on what he would do to the other person if they did not stop. A team of paddlers in a fancy wooden racing canoe decided to take a run right at Jimmy. I am not sure what they were thinking but their canoe broke into several pieces and now we had three paddlers converted to swimmers. Jim finally made it to the bank and looked at me with a "What now Fuman?" kind of look. I said let's go and walk downt he bank. Maybe we will get lucky and find the canoe. A little ways down there were two fremale spectators in lawn chairs watching the spectacle. They had secured our canoe. After having a beer with them we got in the canoe and continued to the finish line.
We finished in a little over 8 hours. We didn't exactly place but ...we finished. Tim McDonald, one of my West Point class of 1983 classmates actually won the individual portion of the race in about the same time. He did it on his own. I thought Jimmy and I had shown some grit but Tim's finish just goes to show that everyone's version of difficult and hard is different. Mine is based on my experiences and I am sure you have had yours.
The best way to work on mental toughness is to practice just liek anything else. I have learned more in my life about what I could and could not do (yes we all have limits) with a little bit of deliberate discomfort.
Oh our prize for finishing was a brass belt buckle with a runner in a canoe with a bike on their shoulder and a ski on one foot. I still have that buckle in a drawer somewher in the house 40 years later. That type of GRIT has helped me weatehr many storms in my professional career in and out of uniform.