The US-based psychology professor and researcher first noticed grit was important while teaching grade-seven maths students: persistence helped even less cognitively gifted students succeed. Just deciding to ‘get through it’, in the pandemic or otherwise, may be much easier for some than others – and judging our own grit on short-to-medium responses to difficult circumstances can actually be misleading, and even dangerous.Īngela Lee Duckworth’s work has been pivotal in establishing the popularity of grit. That’s an idea backed up by research, which shows that our grit reserves are intertwined with multiple external factors, some of which we can't control. If not, be prepared to go back home.īut is our worship of grit misguided? Another view could be that in Khan’s case, a complex combination of socio-economic factors came into play, impeding his ability to tough it out. If you have grit, congratulations: the world is your oyster – and even a pandemic cannot derail you too badly. This get-tough quality – grit – is usually presented as a silver bullet a widely praised quality that is seen as a marker for future success. Often, we’re taught to believe that if we can only become the kind of person who sticks it out, we will succeed. Six months into the pandemic, Khan returned to Karachi. When he experienced a racist encounter while delivering food – a lone incident, but one which exacerbated feelings of displacement – his mental wellbeing took a turn for the worse.

Despite his ingenuity and persistence, the combination of dwindling income and lockdown loneliness took its toll. “I’d listen to the radio and get a feel for which restaurants had promotions, to anticipate where orders would come from,” he says, and even added Post-it notes with cheesy puns to the delivery bags (“Have a spec-taco-lar day” for Mexican orders “Donut worry” for sweets) to bring in more generous tips.īut as Khan struggled to support himself, his goals of funding his Master’s in Business Analytics and ultimately using those skills to improve education management in Pakistan felt less and less achievable – and his grit reserves started to deplete. He also held down a driving job with UberEats, hustling cleverly for business.

At the retail group, he rose quickly from a role as a Christmas ‘casual’ to supervising the tech team. When he went to Melbourne, he was confident his work ethic would help him succeed – and at first, it did. “There was no-one to train me because things were so bad.” His weekly working hours were cut from 36 to three, and his income plummeted.īefore the pandemic, Khan, who is from one of Karachi’s less affluent suburbs, had been a tenacious high achiever, securing a place at an exclusive school and later working there as a programme manager.

“I wasn’t getting enough hours,” says Khan. As an employee at a major departmental store retail chain, he shifted into a role at the group’s supermarkets – which were still open – but a lack of organisational support made that nearly impossible to sustain. When Melbourne imposed a strict lockdown last year, Daniyal Khan found himself in a predicament.

Grit book