Squiggly Skill Sprint Day 18: Grit

It’s day 18 of the Squiggly Careers sprint, and today’s topic is grit https://www.amazingif.com/listen/skills-sprint-grit/

It can be incredibly difficult to keep your eye on a final goal. As Helen and Sarah say, it can be very easy to be distracted by the current very important priority. If you have an end goal in mind, something which they describe as “Hard and important”, then finding time & energy for that is a challenge.

Having led a support organisation, and worked with peers in other similar roles, I can completely empathise with that. Support is a function that has to be very responsive by nature, and balancing the competing needs & asks of many different customers & internal stakeholders can be a very frantic job.

The day job can easily eat up a lot of your time & resources, leaving you with little capacity to do the things that will truly move the needle. Equally, if your “Hard & important” is something that you are doing on your own time, you may simply not have the energy for it once you sign off for the day.

The advice on the podcast was to be very deliberate about what you are doing. For example, have an accountability partner to keep you honest. Or have a framework such as the 4 Ps of Purpose, Positivity, People & Progress to monitor how you are doing. I did quite like the fifth P of “Party”...

Myself, I advise a few things. Pick a timeframe, a week or a day, and no matter what, do something towards your goal. As Edmund Burke said, “Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little”.

The other thing is to foster different interests,which calls back to the earlier topic of curiosity. Perhaps have a few different strands to the same project that you can switch between when you aren’t in the headspace for a specific task, or have an entirely different project on the go.

In my case, my first draft of this post was terrible, and not something I would share. I have another project on the go to learn some adobe products, so I did 20 minutes on that instead. By the end of that, I had learned some tips & tricks on layers, and also emerged with the inspiration for this post, which I am far happier with.

As it happens, learning Adobe & writing these posts all fit into my own big goal, but that’s another topic.