09/13/2026
Psychologist Angela Duckworth called grit one of the strongest predictors of long-term success. A few months ago a friend I met at church former Navy officer turned high-security prison therapist told me I had an unusually high amount of it.
Truthfully, I don’t know if what I have is grit or not. But what I do know is that being triply blessed with having to learn everything the hard way, being too stubborn to quit, and making the dean list of the School of Hard Knocks, I frequently find myself over my head, but I also always manage to work my way through it.
Mid 2014, after a very painful 6 months of deaths and crises, and armed with a high school diploma given to me out of pity, this homeschooled country boy from backwoods nowhere Tennessee decided to start my first business. The only possessions I owned at the time was a car held together with spit and prayers, a bag of hand tools, an air mattress, and a German Shepherd puppy named Samson,
I then spent the next decade plus running several companies through a pandemic, sleepless nights, being screwed over, payroll scares, late payments, overlapping crises, and more projects than any one person should be holding at once. So I consider this decade my “formal education”.
I’m not big on celebrating milestones. When this company hit 10 years old last month I was oddly stunned and unsurprised. The stats are unforgiving, but quitting was never an option. It is/was inevitable that we would endure. In the words of Lightning McQueen, “I just never thought I couldn’t.”
But the disappointment I feel at how much more I should have done by now also eats at me. I suppose we are all on our own path, and as the resident black sheet of the family I tend to learn everything the hard way.
The ability to work hard and suffer is only half the battle. Knowing what to work on to get toward your goals and prioritize work that actually moves the needle instead of what you are comfortable with is a skill to be learned, discipline to be enforced, and focus on the end goal.
Continued in comments.
