Develop grit, get things done, and achieve results for yourself and your team

Nine Things Successful People Do Differently - Heidi Grant Halvorson

Heidi Grant Halvorson has a good post this morning on traits of successful people -- specifically, what successful people do to achieve the goals they set for themselves. From Halvorson:

Grit is a willingness to commit to long-term goals, and to persist in the face of difficulty. Studies show that gritty people obtain more education in their lifetime, and earn higher college GPAs. Grit predicts which cadets will stick out their first grueling year at West Point. In fact, grit even predicts which round contestants will make it to at the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

The good news is, if you aren't particularly gritty now, there is something you can do about it. People who lack grit more often than not believe that they just don't have the innate abilities successful people have. If that describes your own thinking .... well, there's no way to put this nicely: you are wrong.

What's more? The same can be said of ineffective teams. Just as people have individual personalities and behaviors, so do teams and departments. Any group of people working together to achieve an objective can be changed, modeled, and driven in such a way that they develop grit -- they create in themselves a more single-minded passion for achieving results.

Halvorson's post is a great read this Friday -- a terrific reminder on how top performers achieve results as individuals, and as teams.