Caroline Adams Miller

Good question. And I think your book is great, by the way. So Angela was doing this research while I was at Penn, and that's where I met her. And then we became friends later, and I decided to write not just about the quality of grit, because she found that passion, perseverance, and pursuit of long-term goals was this X factor in success. And she gave a wonderful TED talk about it.

And then she wrote this bestseller, Grit, bestseller all over the world, really. What I wanted to write about was the quality, how to get it, not just that it's great and that it's important, but how to get it. And so for me, intentionality is intrinsic motivation. And it's the decision to actually do whatever it takes to accomplish that goal, because it is something that you want to accomplish.

It's something that's so important to you. And this is the passion. that you will persist through dark nights of the soul. And what's baked into grit and big goals is that will happen. That will happen. The Stoics talked about premeditatio malorum, premeditate the evils that are coming in the path before you, because it's going to be hard to do hard things. So they knew it thousands of years ago.

So you have to have this passion along with this realistic optimism. I'm going to do it. It's hard. I'm going to have to unleash passion. And that passion is what's going to keep me going. Even when I'm alone, even when I'm doing hard things and nobody's doing flashcards or giving me a trophy or whatever. And so that to me is what intentionality is all about.

And the last thing I'll say about my book, getting grit, as I wrote it about how to cultivate it, how do you break this down? What are the qualities? It's humility. It's persistence. It's the ability to set goals correctly. It's about self-regulation. But I realized and wrote about a definition that I felt was a little bit different from Angela's because I believe

That grit is good grit when the display of that good grit, the pursuit of hard things that are important to you and you do it with dignity and self-respect and you do it without a cheerleading squad and you do it because it's important to you and you do it for all the right reasons.

I call that authentic grit because I believe good grit awes and inspires other people to ask themselves, what if I acted like that? What could I do? What would my life be like? What if I went out of my comfort zone and did hard things too? And so for me, good grit isn't just about a person doing hard things. It's about the quality of uplifting the people who see you, the people who are awestruck

by seeing what you do and how you do it. And there's so many examples of that. So for me, grit is all about not just doing hard things, but it's how you do those hard things. And what is the impact? Because this is systems theory. I believe it has to impact other people in order for it to make a big difference. During COVID, I came up with a term that

was too late because the book was out already. Compassionate grit. What I saw were people doing hard things so that other people could live. If you didn't want to wear a mask for two years, but it meant grandmom and granddad and the neighbor next door who you went and knocked on her door and asked if she needed her walkways shoveled or leaves raked. There was so much compassion

for other people by many to do hard things that they didn't want to do. They didn't want to stay home from their jobs. They didn't want to wear masks. They didn't want to cancel their kids' graduations, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I saw a new kind of grit that I think Mother Nature brings about every hundred years, maybe because of a black swan event.

When we get to see what we're made of, and I think grit comes from how we deal with those black swan events, those unusual hundred year events.

So Best Possible Future Self is a well-known exercise in positive psychology. I don't know if Laura King wrote it or Sonia Lubomirsky.

I don't know who to give credit to, but it's been studied that when you write about your future as if it's gone as well as possible, five years, 10 years into the future, and you do this three, four days in a row in tremendous detail, 15, 20 minutes of writing, it's been found that people are more in touch with their goals

They have more empathy or sympathy for who they're going to be in those 10 years. They begin to imagine an older version of themselves. They clarify something called goals and conflict, which is not talked about enough. Many of us have really good goals. They're both good goals, well-formed goals, but the pursuit of one means the other one cannot be accomplished, at least not at that time.

This exercise makes you forcibly move one up and one down, clarifies goals and conflict. If you do the via character strength test, again, via character.org, and you look at in this set of writings, journaling that you do, Who am I going to be in the future if everything works out as well as possible? And I write about in detail who's around me. How did I do these things, et cetera, et cetera?

And how did I use my top character strengths to make it happen? You're more likely to be happier, more optimistic, more zestful. It's a phenomenal intervention into people's well-being. In the book, I include more recent research, though, that I want to add to this. So...

Sometimes we're encouraged to write a letter to our future self, maybe a year from now, we do a time capsule kind of things like where am I going to be at the end of 2025. And we stop right there. Well, some Canadian researchers found that it's even more powerful to write that letter to your future self.

And talk about what are you doing it's December 31 and look at these things you did and here's how you did them and here's why you're proud of yourself. And these things were hard but you overcame them by doing these strategies etc and you change your circle and you practice more gratitude but that future self needs to also write a letter back to present self. about how they're going to do it.

So it's the reciprocity future self, and then future self back to present self with kind of this air of wisdom and lessons learned. And this mirrors Gabriel auditions work, which many people are familiar with about mental contrasting. It's not enough to just say, here I am today. And that's where I want to be in a year. So let's goal set. I'm going to do this too many people just rush into it.

skip all these steps. But Gabriel Otigen, a lot like the ancient stoic said, it's not enough. You start to have these fantasies that you've done these hard things and you fool yourself into thinking you've done more work than you have. No. And I think vision boards are really big culprits in this. And people spend too much time with these positive fantasies.