Courage, Grit, Agility, and Success
I’m Andy Temte and welcome to the Saturday Morning Muse! Start to your weekend with musings that are designed to support your journey of personal and professional continuous improvement. Today is January 25, 2025.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been talking about how to define success. In those Muses, I’ve talked about the preconditions for defining success because its definition is one-size-fits-you. I’ve stressed the trouble we can get ourselves in when we adopt someone else’s ideals and that we all have personal blockers and biases that can unduly influence how we think about success.
We ended last week’s Muse with an introduction to the ingredients for achieving success. In my opinion, the most important ingredient is courage. Courage to stand up for your values, courage to define your red lines, courage to set expectations that work for you and your immediate family, courage to leave a dead-end job or career path, courage to say goodbye to toxic work/personal relationships, courage to surround yourself with people who will support and challenge you, courage to commit to a path of lifelong learning and curiosity, courage to challenge your personal biases, courage to listen, courage to take the path less traveled, and courage to say ‘no.’ It is incredibly easy to be consumed by the rat race of life, and be suppressed by the expectations of others.
On this note (pun intended) my dear son and business partner, Nick Temte, wrote the song Consumed, which is the first song on The Remainders new album, Feel Something New. The lyrics to that song are applicable to our conversation about courage.
Consumed - The Remainders (2024)
The end of the day and you’ve satisfied, everyone but you
The world’s insatiable appetite, keep taking bites out of you
And now you’re consumed…
You always say that you’re paralyzed, no one can make you move
Paving the way to your paradise, but you have to push through
And now you’re consumed, so much to lose… Yeah!
Do you really want to stay here?
Do you really want to go there?
Do you really understand what’s behind, your eyes?
Could you stop the people pleasin’
Show them how you’re really feeling?
It doesn’t make it easy, to hide, in disguise!
Just break away from the paradigm, I believe in you
Push them away and reclaim your time, make the world work for you
And now you’re consumed, nothing to lose
Keep driving through, focus on you…
I think we’ve appropriately stressed the importance of courage as a key ingredient to achieving success. However, I don’t want you to get the impression that building the skill of courage means that you become selfish or self-centered. Yes, it’s important to create an authentic definition of success that works for you, but that must be balanced with the need to add value to others and your community.
To recap, you’ve determined that you want to be successful, you’ve done the work on yourself to create an authentic definition of success that aligns with your personal purpose and values, you’ve identified your personal blockers to success and have developed the courage to challenge your internal itty-bitty-shitty-committee and the expectations of society and your network. So what’s the next ingredient to achieving success?
Grit, Determination, Persistence, Perseverance, Drive, and Resilience
Okay, so the next ingredient is a set of ingredients, but they all go together and are tightly interrelated. It is a near certainty that on your journey to achieving success, you will face hardship, setbacks, criticism, challenges, pushback, apathy, environmental disaster, and a host of unknown factors that will conspire to derail you. You may lose a job, the economy might go haywire, a pandemic could sweep the globe, critics may pan your work, a family member might get sick—the list goes on and on.
You might be saying to yourself, “Andy, these are the characteristics of hard-charging business people who’s definition of success is to get rich or be industry titans. My definition of success is to be a great dad.” First, congrats. That’s a fantastic definition of success, but being a great dad takes grit, determination, persistence, perseverance, drive, and resilience. After all, great dads must navigate the trials and tribulations of newborns, the terrible twos, and moody, unpredictable teenagers. I have yet to meet another human who considers themselves successful by whatever definition of success they’ve adopted that does not possess these qualities.
The first lesson here is that life is hard. It’s full of joy and pain. The rewards are great and the challenges are many. To imagine otherwise is the fast pass to disappointment and disillusionment.
The second lesson to take away when you contemplate these ingredients to success is to recognize what they don’t imply. Grit, determination, persistence, perseverance, drive, and resilience don’t imply that you adopt a fixed, unyielding mindset and never change in your quest for success. It’s quite the opposite. Exhibiting these qualities requires that you’re continually growing, learning, navigating change, pivoting, and adjusting. Mental agility is an essential counter-balance to grit, determination, etc., because an unyielding, unbending mindset will not accommodate the flexibility that’s necessary as the world throws its barbs and punches your way.
So let’s leave it here for today. Next week, we’ll conclude our discussion of the ingredients to success.
Grace. Dignity. Compassion.
