Grit Was Never the Whole Story. Neither Is the Room.

In The Atlantic, Gal Beckerman reviews two new books from two of the best known names in popular psychology. In Forget Grit, he looks at Angela Duckworth's Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best and Adam Grant's Vibe: The Secrets of Strong Connections in a Lonely World. A decade ago, Duckworth's Grit argued that success comes largely from passion and perseverance. Now, Beckerman notes, both authors are turning their attention outward, to the situations we are in and the connections we form with other people.

Beckerman welcomes the turn but doesn't think it goes far enough. In his reading, the new books still promise more control than most people have, and their idea of culture is mostly the tidy, top-down kind found on sports teams and in consulting firms. He ends by asking whether what we need is not more personal or situational agency, but something deeper. "Maybe what we really need is moral agency," he writes.

The Person and the Room Were Never Separate

For years, the advice industry has swung between two poles. One says everything depends on you: your mindset, your habits, your will. The other says everything depends on your environment: your boss, your culture, your circumstances. Each holds part of the truth. Neither holds all of it.

In my work with leaders, I have always treated the individual and the environment as two halves of the same question. A person can't fully become who they are in a room that keeps asking them to be someone else. And a great room can't help someone who hasn't done the work of knowing what they stand for. The individual shapes the environment, and the environment shapes the individual, in both directions, every day.

That is why the swing from grit to situation feels incomplete to me. Moving from trying harder to finding a better room still treats the person and the room as separate levers to pull. In real life they are tangled together. The real question is how well the two fit, and who is paying attention to that fit.

Why Willpower Alone Burns Out

Beckerman makes a point I would underline for every leader. Much of the performance advice of the last decade was built on elite examples: Olympic athletes, top cadets, star companies. Those stories inspire, but they quietly teach people that if they aren't thriving, they simply didn't want it enough.

I have watched what that does to capable people. They push harder in environments that don't fit them, edit out the parts of themselves the room doesn't reward and then blame themselves when the exhaustion sets in. Grit without self-knowledge becomes endurance for the wrong thing. People can persevere for years on a path that was never theirs.

Leaders feel this too. Many organizations still treat engagement as an individual problem to fix with resilience training, when the real issue is a culture that no longer sees its people. I wrote about how agency grows only in environments that make room for it in Agency Isn't Born. It's Earned in the Rooms We Create.

Conviction Is What Holds When Control Runs Out

Beckerman's closing question about moral agency is the most interesting idea in the piece. He is right that much of life sits beyond our control: the economy, other people, the luck of timing.

But I don't think the answer is to accept that we are powerless. The answer is conviction, which I describe as the earned capacity to act on what you believe before the outcome is certain. Conviction doesn't require control. It requires knowing what you stand for and being willing to act on it when the situation is messy and the result is unknown. Grit is about how long you can push. Conviction is about knowing why you are pushing at all.

Conviction also isn't built alone. It is earned in relationships, through honest conversations with people who know you well enough to tell you the truth. That is why the turn toward connection in these new books matters, even if the methods feel engineered. We become ourselves in the company of others. I explored what we lose when we stop making room for each other in We Stopped Hosting Each Other. We Lost More Than Dinner Parties.

Questions Worth Asking This Week

For professionals: name one place where you have been relying on willpower to survive a situation that doesn't fit you. Then ask whether the fix is more effort, a different room or a clearer sense of what you are working toward.

For leaders: look at the people on your team who are working hardest. Are they thriving, or enduring? If you can't tell, that is the conversation to have first.

For organizations: before launching another resilience program, ask what your culture asks people to edit out. Standards and shared expectations are valuable, and every team needs them. The opportunity is to keep them while making room for people to bring what is distinctly theirs.

The self-help genre is rediscovering that people don't succeed in isolation. The next step is recognizing that they don't succeed by circumstance alone either.

Grit can carry you a long way, but only conviction tells you whether you are headed somewhere worth going.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.