Hello everyone!
Welcome to my blog post based on yesterday’s (7/17) seminar about grit! Hopefully I also manage to respond to the actual blog prompt at some point.
To start, let me give a brief history/timeline of my “passions” and interests over the past few years.
My first few passions were American Girl and Harry Potter, both of which began with loving the books. AG books made me stop hating reading finally, and many of my early memories involve those dolls. Harry Potter also makes up a good chunk of my memories, although reading the books themselves don’t as much, since I read them all so quickly. I do recall finishing the entire series by my seventh birthday, and then waiting forever for the seventh book to come out, and then having to let my mom keep pace with me so she could read each chapter before I did. It was excruciating. My Harry Potter obsession lasted through elementary school. During middle and high school, I had various passions such as the Cassandra Clare universe, John Green books, Sherlock (the original short stories and the BBC TV series), and more.
However, if it isn’t clear already, I never really had any passions I could theoretically do anything with in the “real world.” The closest I got was when I decided in sixth grade that I wanted to be a neonatologist for the following reasons (and these are indeed my 10-year-old self’s reasons for becoming a neonatologist): I really like babies (still do, in fact), I’m mildly interested in medicine, and the pay would be high enough to provide financial stability for me and my family. This career plan wasn’t really a passion, though; more of a response for when people asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, which had the bonus of impressing people, especially adults, that I had already thought up a career and had reasoning for “pursuing” it at such a young age. Later on in high school, I became more passionate about various social justice issues, however many of them were at least initiated by my mom’s interest in them.
I’m still not sure if I technically had a lot of “grit” in high school. I did my homework, participated in class, and did well on tests and assessments. I was praised for my success, and told I was smart. I was under the impression that my parents didn’t really care about my grades for a while, but at some point I discovered it was because they were good; not only did they care that they were good and bragged about them to my grandparents and their friends, but if I hadn’t had good grades, they (probably) wouldn’t have been very happy with me. Despite not knowing this, I did do well in school. Although some could argue that is an example of grit, if you look a little bit closer, it’s almost the opposite. I continued to push myself to excel because I wanted to maintain my image as the smart, successful student I had slowly developed for myself since elementary school, both because my own identity depended on it and to continue to impress the people around me.
Essentially, what I’ve found in my life is that, although the majority of my passion and perseverance does come from within me, it’s rooted in a need to impress other people and look good, which is a trait of a fixed mindset, and thus, from my understanding, negatively correlated with grit. As a result, even before the idea of “grit” and growth vs. fixed mindsets had been introduced to me so concretely, I felt kind of like I should be more intrinsically motivated rather than so motivated by the perception others had of me.
That being said, I think that starting college has both changed my mindset as well as reinforced it, but in ways that are for the most part beneficial. I have discovered some things I am truly “passionate” about – women’s health in general, childbirth, reproductive rights, and similar topics – which have given me a much clearer and more concrete idea of my future, so that I can set goals and follow through with them. I have had to work harder and smarter than before in order to continue to succeed academically, and, although a sizable part of me may be doing so in order to maintain that original, fixed-mindset self-image, I also feel that I am now more than ever working towards my goals for my own sake, which seems pretty gritty to me.