That’s the funny thing about grit. While grit can get you to stick to hard things that are worthwhile, grit can also get you to stick to hard things that are no longer worthwhile.
Essentially, when you enter into an endeavor, you want to imagine what you could find out that would tell you it’s no longer worth pursuing. Ask yourself, “What are the signs that, if I see them in the future, will cause me to exit the road I’m on? What could I learn about the state of the world or the state of myself that would change my commitment to this decision?” That list offers you a set of kill criteria, literally criteria for killing a project or changing your mind or cutting your losses. It’s one of the best tools for helping you figure out when to quit closer to on time. Kill criteria could consist of information you learn that tells you the monkey isn’t trainable or that you’re not sufficiently likely to reach your goal, or signs that luck has gone against you.
The best quitting criteria combine two things: a state and a date. A state is just what it sounds like, an objective, measurable condition you or your project is in, a benchmark that you have hit or missed. A date is the when. Kill criteria, generally, include both states and dates, in the form of “If I am (or am not) in a particular state at a particular date or at a particular time, then I have to quit.” Or “If I haven’t done X by Y (time), I’ll quit.” Or “If I haven’t achieved X by the time I’ve spent Y (amount in money, effort, time, or other resources), I should quit.”
Admiral McRaven offered a unique, high-stakes application of this concept of states and dates when describing the planning for Operation Neptune Spear, the raid on Osama bin Laden. The operation was broken down into 162 phases. Each phase told you what state you would have to achieve to continue, and what state you might be in that would cause you to quit during that phase. Because this was all planned out in advance, it left McRaven, as he told me, with only about five command decisions he might have to make on the fly once the mission had commenced and they were already in it.
Teller realizes that when you’re building pedestals, you are also accumulating sunk costs that make it hard to quit even as you find out that you may not be able to train the monkey to juggle those torches. By focusing on the monkey first, you naturally reduce the debris you accumulate solving for something that’s, in reality, already solved.
Roman terms do not exactly match our own here, but there was still a significant contrast between otium – normally translated as ‘leisure’, but more accurately ‘what you did when you were in control of your own time’ – and its opposite ‘negotium’, ‘work’, or ‘what you had to do when you were not in control of it’.
Marcus Junius Brutus, who emerges as an honourable patriot from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, was probably one of the most self-interested of the lot. He had an appalling record of exploiting people in Rome’s empire. Notoriously, he lent money to a city in Cyprus at a 48 per cent rate of interest, four times the legal maximum, and he had his agents blockade the local council chamber to recover what was owed, starving five councillors to death in the process. And within a couple of years of Caesar’s assassination, despite his opposition to monarchy, he had his own head depicted on the coins that he minted to pay his troops.
The empire, in other words, gradually destroyed the distinctive structures of government that had brought it into existence in the first place, paving the way for one-man rule. The empire created the emperors, not the other way around.
“What I think you’ve taught me most is how important it is to state the obvious.” Yes, it felt like a backhanded compliment. But what I think she meant is that I strive to make implicit structures and beliefs explicit. Making those elements clear to everyone allows a group of people to become a true team and a company to scale.
Another practice to consider is having a team snippets document that every team member completes each week. This way, you don’t have to take up meeting time with updates, but everyone has information about what the rest of the team is up to and the status of important work. If you lead a larger team or division, consider a weekly or monthly cadence of updates that you share with everyone on the team. Use this time to reinforce goals and priorities, celebrate wins, discuss challenges, and ask for ideas. Above all, use it to keep the team connected to you as their leader. Don’t be afraid to share personal anecdotes or photos.
“You know why playing a game is fun? Because it has rules, and you have a way to win. Picture a bunch of people showing up at an athletic field with random equipment and no rules. Someone is going to get hurt. You don’t know how to play, you don’t know how to score, and you don’t know how to win.” It’s critical for companies and teams to establish the playing field on which everyone participates and marks progress.
“Managers who get caught in the trap of overwhelming demands become prisoners of routines,” wrote Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghoshal, in A Bias for Action. “They do not have time to notice opportunities. Their habituated work prevents them from taking the first necessary step toward harnessing willpower: developing the capacity to dream an idea into existence and transforming it into a concrete intention.”
Most companies should do more of it. But there is a basic fallacy in confusing a financial plan with thinking about the kind of company you want yours to become. It is like saying, “When I’m 40, I’m going to be rich.” It leaves too many basic questions unanswered. Rich in what way? Rich doing what?
you must confront the four basic questions you have already explored: What does my organization bring to the world? Does that difference matter? Is something about it scarce and difficult to imitate? Are we doing today what we need to do in order to matter tomorrow?
