One Foot in Front of the Other

Finding Your Grit

There is a famous interview with Will Smith that I have always found fascinating. He talks about his work ethic and uses the analogy of two people getting onto treadmills next to each other. His mentality was simple: if you got on the treadmill next to him, you were getting off first. He was not prepared to be outworked.

It sounds extreme, and of course the message isn’t that we should literally push ourselves until we collapse. For me, the power in what he was saying is about determination. It is about that part of us that has to take over when motivation disappears. The bit that says, I might be tired, I might be doubting myself and I might not be able to see the result yet, but I am going to put one foot in front of the other and keep moving. That is grit and I think we need to talk about it more.

We talk a lot about motivation, confidence and believing in ourselves. All of those things matter, but the problem is that they can come and go. You can feel completely unstoppable on Monday and ready to throw the whole thing in by Thursday. If achieving the things that mattered to us relied entirely on waking up feeling motivated every morning, very few of us would ever get particularly far. At some point, motivation has to hand over to determination.

When we look at somebody like Will Smith, it is easy to see the success. His career has stretched across decades and across completely different industries. He found success in music, moved into television with The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, became one of Hollywood’s biggest film stars and continued to take on different roles and challenges as his career evolved. We see the films, the awards, the recognition and the finished product, but what interests me far more is the length of time he has continued to work, evolve, learn and put himself back out there.

Nobody gets through decades of anything without difficult periods. Careers change. Industries change. People criticise you. Things don’t work. You make mistakes. Life happens. There will be moments when you question yourself and moments when the easiest option would be to retreat into what feels safe. Yet the people we often look at and describe as successful tend to have something else sitting behind the talent: staying power. They keep turning up. Not always brilliantly, not always confidently and certainly not always getting it right, but they keep going. I think sometimes we massively underestimate the importance of that.

Think about something you really want for yourself. Perhaps you want to build a business, change your career, get stronger, run a marathon, improve a relationship, go back to education, become more financially secure or finally change something about your life that you have known for a long time needs to change. At the beginning, it can feel exciting. You have a plan, you can picture the result and suddenly there is momentum behind you.

Eventually, though, almost all of us hit resistance. The business doesn’t grow as quickly as you hoped. The job application gets rejected. Your body hurts. Someone else seems miles ahead of you. You have a terrible week. Something happens at home. Your confidence takes a knock. You realise the thing you thought would take six months might actually take two years. Suddenly, the treadmill feels harder and you start wondering whether you want to get off.

I think that is the moment that matters. Not when you are excited, when everyone is cheering you on or when progress is obvious, but when something becomes harder than you thought it would be and you have to decide what happens next. That is where we start to discover how much something really matters to us.

We often imagine determination as this huge, powerful feeling. We picture somebody gritting their teeth, giving an inspirational speech and charging forward against all odds. In reality, grit can be incredibly ordinary. It is setting the alarm again. Sending another email. Doing another training session. Having another conversation. Trying something differently. Turning up to work when yesterday didn’t go well. Doing the rehab exercises. Making another phone call. Starting again after a setback. It is doing the small things that nobody applauds because you know they are taking you towards something that matters to you.

There is another story Will Smith has told about being asked by his father to build a brick wall as a child. The lesson he took from it was not to focus on building the entire wall, because when you stand back and look at the whole thing it can feel impossible. Instead, you focus on laying one brick as well as you possibly can. Then you lay another, and another and eventually you have built the wall.

I love that idea because I think we make life unnecessarily overwhelming when we constantly stare at the whole wall. We look at the business we want to build, the marathon we want to run, the qualification we want to achieve, the career we want to create or the huge change we want to make, and the distance between where we are and where we want to be can feel enormous. Sometimes we need to stop looking at the whole wall and ask ourselves a much simpler question: What is today’s brick? What is the one thing I can do today that moves me slightly closer? Do that, and tomorrow you can lay another one.

There are periods in life where we really do have to dig deep. I don’t mean pretending everything is fine, being relentlessly positive or destroying ourselves in pursuit of a goal. I mean those moments where you know, deep down, that you still want something, but achieving it has become uncomfortable. Those are the moments when we have to remember why we started. We have to tolerate not knowing exactly how things are going to turn out. We have to accept that progress isn’t always linear and that sometimes the person we are becoming is actually being built during the very period we wish we could skip.

Grit isn’t developed when everything is going our way. It is developed when it isn’t. It is built when you get knocked and come back, when you hear no and try again, when something doesn’t work and you change your approach, when you lose confidence and keep moving anyway. It is continuing when the outcome isn’t guaranteed because you have decided that what you are working towards matters enough to keep trying.

There is, however, an important distinction to make here, and it is one that matters hugely to me and to the way we coach at MOCO. There is a version of determination that tells us to push harder, work longer, sleep less and never stop. I don’t believe in that. Sometimes grit is knowing when to rest so that you can continue. Sometimes it is admitting that you cannot do everything alone. Sometimes it is getting a coach, asking for support, changing the plan, moving the deadline or finding a completely different route towards the same destination. Sometimes taking the next step forward requires taking a day off first.

That isn’t weakness. The goal isn’t to exhaust yourself. The goal is to stay in the game.

I also think we need to become better at not confusing a hard day with a bad decision. A hard day does not necessarily mean you have chosen the wrong path. A difficult week doesn’t mean your plan isn’t working. One rejection doesn’t mean you aren’t good enough. One bad run doesn’t mean you’ll never be fit. One quiet month doesn’t mean your business is failing, and one moment of doubt doesn’t mean you should give up on something you have wanted for years. Sometimes it is simply a hard day, and when we are standing right in the middle of it, we have to be careful not to make permanent decisions based on temporary feelings.

Go back to the question underneath all of it: Do I still want this? If the answer has genuinely changed, listen to that. There is no prize for relentlessly pursuing a life you no longer want. But if underneath the tiredness, frustration, disappointment and doubt the answer is still a very definite yes, perhaps you don’t need a new dream. Perhaps you just need to find your grit.

You are not going to feel motivated every day. There will be mornings when you feel ready to take on the world and others when you would quite happily ask the world to come back tomorrow. Successful people aren’t magically immune to that. The difference is that motivation doesn’t always get the final vote. Sometimes you do the thing because you said you would. Sometimes you turn up when nobody is watching. Sometimes you keep putting one foot in front of the other without any evidence yet that you are getting closer.

Perhaps that is where real confidence comes from. Not repeatedly telling ourselves that we could do something, but slowly collecting evidence that we are somebody who keeps showing up. Every time you do the difficult thing, every time you come back after a setback and every time you take another step when it would have been easier not to, you are proving something to yourself. You are building trust in your own ability to cope with hard things.

Maybe you are on your own treadmill at the moment. Maybe you are tired. Maybe something isn’t happening quickly enough. Maybe you have watched somebody else seemingly fly past you and wondered what they have that you don’t. Maybe you have quietly started questioning whether you are actually capable of doing the thing you said you were going to do.

You don’t need to know how you are going to complete the whole journey today. You don’t need to feel wildly motivated and you certainly don’t need everything to go perfectly. You just need to work out what the next step is and take it. Then take another. There will be days when you run and days when you walk. There may even be days when you have to stop, catch your breath and work out how you are going to continue. But stopping for breath is very different from giving up.

Somewhere between where you are now and where you want to be, there will almost certainly be a point where it gets really bloody hard. Perhaps that isn’t always a sign that you should stop. Perhaps sometimes it is the exact point where you discover what you are made of.

So find the grit. Lay the next brick. Put one foot in front of the other.

And keep going.