One Simple Yet Unconventional Shift to "Increase" Your Grit 100x

Hey amorteurs,

Happy Monday. I hope your holidays were happy, or that you at least crashed hard enough to reset well into 2023, wine and reflection journal in hand.

In today's issue, we'll be writing from a Macbook. We'll also be talking about what to do if you are stuck in a position/job/role that you want to quit.

Let's get started.

The Problem: You Want to Quit Something, but You Can't

In my last newsletter issue, I discussed how 'choosing your pond' is your ticket to doing your best, actualized work.

By playing to your strengths and maximizing them, you are multiplying as opposed to incrementally improving.

But what if you can't choose your pond? What if you're forced to compete with other fishies in a lake too strange to call home?

You want to choose a different pond - aka quit -- but you can't.

What are our options?

What Most People Are Doing: The Endless Grind of Doom

This is what I used to do.

A long time ago, I was in a nursing program in high school. The thing was, I sucked at it.

Bad.

I constantly felt insecure and incompetent, and I didn't enjoy the hands-on tasks.

A similar situation is occurring as we speak.

True, this very moment, with these very worlds, I am undergoing a mildly interesting shift of atypical proportions.

I've written about it before: I'm failing at online business.

Or, at least, I'm not taking the fast-lane. I don't have that 'knack' that other Twitter creators have for digital writing or online business.

I haven't remained consistent, or grown, or etc. In many ways, I feel stuck.

I've experienced the same thing with different skills, competitive games, etc.

I liked to experiment a lot, but I was no scientist. I was not mixing chemicals - no, none of that.

I was grinding it out until the inevitable doom. And I feel this is what most of us are doing too.

We write, compete, study, and work on things that we know we should've left long ago. But we don't.

Back then, I had my parent's expectations to compete with you. For you, it might be your dog.

No matter what the reason, most of us continue on the endless grind of doom, whittling our time and energy away until we can finally close the door. 

It suffices to distract us. But there's a glaring problem:

Why It Isn't Working: You Don't Escape the Matrix

You're still playing the game.

Not only that, you're still sucking and you're doing nobody a favor.

We need a solution, a way to either

1. Quit the game and play another game entirely.

2. Change the rules of the game we're playing.

After 4 years, I finally found the secret code:

The Solution: Dominate A Sub-Pond.

Let's return to 2018. I'm still sucking in my nursing job.

Yet the opportunity came to participate in this little thing called "SkillsUSA" and compete in the very unintimidating "national competition" for a basic test called "Medical Math".

In order words, it was a nothing much. You know, a highly competitive, technical test for a gold prize and trip across the states.

I was a little hesitant, but relented to my supervisor's recommendations. I studied a bit over a few months, and, surprisingly, won it all.

Now let's fast forward to the future. In the year 20XX, everything is chrome...

Okay, too far.

The year is 2022, and I've been writing for 7 months now. I've made modest growth thanks to bursts of consistency, but have in general been stagnating.

Instead of committing for the nth time to a variation of habits or a consistency strategy that has reportedly been falling short, I decided to do something different.

I consulted my girlfriend and another Twitter friend by the glorious name of Abdulsalam (@salmakwrites). My girlfriend said she liked my newsletter and threads. Abdulsalam said, in the kindest way possible, that my only redeeming quality was my ability to build genuine relationships (though I'm not consistent).

So, instead of fixing all the chinks in my armor, I'm focusing exclusively on that.

• Writing newsletters

• Building relationships (through Quote Retweets and DMs)

As Rex from Orange County said: "So far, so good (/Television)".

We'll see the efforts of that experiment, but so far, so good.

I mean, so far, I'm enjoying the journey at least 1.1x more.

Here's the takeaway: Dominate a sub-pond.

What does that mean? When you can't choose an entirely different pond, you can find a section of your current pond that aligns with your strengths and dominate that.

How do you do that? Again, the answer is always: Feedback.

• For nursing, my supervisors noticed I was an excellent test-taker and brilliant at Math. By playing the medical math sub-pond, I was able to take home gold for Maryland.

• For creating, I consulted my peers about my strengths as a creator. They identified 2-3 aspects, and I'm doubling down exclusively on those.

By asking an objective but knowledgable-enough third party what your strengths are in a given field, you can find out what sub-pond you can dominate.

Remember: if you can't quit, you can at least find a corner where you can rule.

Until next time,

See you soon, internauts! Keep frogging.

Heya. Thanks for reading this little piece.

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