What is Reddit's opinion of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

First of all, you didn’t bomb it. You got an average score, and not average as in an average person out of the 7 billion people on earth. Average as in students who have for the most part already obtained undergraduate degrees and who are interested in pursuing further study. Second of all, take it again. Power of grit.

Power of Grit

Two wrong presuppositions there:

1. we need motivation
2. things come easy

The truth is: no motivation needed (it's an excuse), and things are hard AF.

I don't know the solution to your particular problem here but I do have some thoughts, assuming you're not procrastinating out of some sort of fear of failure - but if it is some sort of fear (it might be, especially the part about putting off assignments in school), read this. In a nutshell, I don't think you need to change jobs, hobbies, or anything, but you might need to adjust your perspective.

Putting forth effort in stuff you don't really care about is ... hard. It's hard! Realizing you have shifted from caring about something to not really caring about something is sort of tricky because your actions will start reflecting your state before you even understand what your state is. For example, you'll start procrastinating more and more and might attribute that to your self instead of to your state. This will make you feel bad about you and when you feel bad about you, it's easy to spiral down into all sorts of other problems. But once you don't care, a primary driver of your actions for the stuff you don't care about will be avoiding a negative consequence (getting fired).

So to understand the rest of my thoughts on this, I'd like you to consider goals and commitments as items in a hierarchy that reach towards your top goal. [At this point, for better understanding, please refer to the quote below from the book named Grit. I made it a reply cuz it was sort of long.]

From here it sounds like you don't have an updated top level goal to put purpose and drive into your middle (good at your job) and low level (waking up) stuff. And maybe you've never even had a top goal. Maybe you're in middle-goal flux; that can cause all sorts of split attention problems.

You mentioned that you have reached your previous goal of becoming a web dev, but usually after you reach what you perceived to be a top-goal (as mentioned, might be a middle goal in the long-run though) you'd have to set another goal, or else you'll stagnate and fade out because there's now the day-to-day low-level stuff has nothing driving it.

You also mentioned that you're not a "hard worker". But if you're spending hours on side-projects, I find it hard to believe that's the case. Seems like your energies just go in some other spots instead of the spot you think they should be going in. You seem like a hard worker but a hard worker with split directions.

If you could identify a new top-goal, then you'll have a new "why" for all the little things to fall under. But to keep yourself from splitting, you'll have to drop the lower-level goals that you can't tie to that top-goal -that's basically warren buffets advice.

Once you've got your why, you'll have to practice employing it in your day-to-day. For example: when you don't feel like getting up, remind yourself why you will get up anyway.

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Quote from the book named Grit:

> One way to understand [...] is to envision goals in a hierarchy.

> At the bottom of this hierarchy are our most concrete and specefic goals - the tasks we have on our short-term to-do list: I want to get out the door today by eight a.m. I want to call my business partner back. I want to finish writing the email I started yesterday. These low-level goals exist merely as means to ends. We want to accomplish them only because they get us something else we want. In contrast, the higher the goal in this hierarchy, the more abstract, general, and important it is. The higher the goal, the more it's an end in itself, and the less it's merely a means to an end.

> [...] Between the lowest and highest level might be several layers of mid-level goals. For instance, getting out the door by eight a.m. is a low-level goal. It only matters because of a mid-level goals: arriving at work on time. Why do you care about that? Because you want to be punctual. Why do you care about that? Because being punctual shows respect for the people with whom you work. Why is that important? Because you strive to be a good leader.

> If in the course of asking yoursef these "Why?" questions your answer is simply "Just because!" then you know you've gotten to the top of a goal hierarchy. [...] Some psychologists like to call this an "ultimate concern." Myself, I think of this top-level goal as a compass that gives direction and meaning to all the goals below it.

> [Several paragraphs pass by]

> I've met many young people who can articulate a dream - for example, to be a doctor or to play basketball in the NBA - and can vividly imagine how wonderful that would be, but they can't point to the mid-level and lower-level goals that will get them there. Their goal hierarchy has a top-level goal but no supporting mid-level or low-level goals [...]

> This is [...] "positive fantasizing."

> Even more common, I think, is having a bunch of mid-level goals that don't correspond to any unifying, top-level goal

> Or having a few competing goal hierarchies that aren't in any way connected with each other

> [Several paragraphs explaining warren buffets advice on goals, culminating in a point that you need to stop splitting your attention between the goals that do matter and the goals that don't. Basically, you have to drop some goals or suffer the consequence of split attention - stuff like what you're describing in your post, I think.]