So I keep talking about grit, but what is it. There’s many ways to define it, but to me, it’s our ability to deal with tough situations and keep moving forward. It’s our ability to not quit when it looks hard or even impossible. In a word, it’s stubbornness.

Some people would say that how much grit we have is decided by the conditions we were raised in our even our genetics. But I fully believe that regardless of our parents or our past circumstances, we are fully capable of growing our grit and hardening ourselves to be able to endure anything.

But you’ve got to want it…

You’ve got to take a cold hard look at yourself and say that the easy path isn’t the right one for you. You’ve got to embrace the fact that if you want to grow, you’ve got to embrace and love the nasty challenges that life throws your way. In 2016 I had no grit, and was ready to give up on everything in my daily life.

I went to work each day, and I was just angry with my crew. Nothing they did was ever good enough, and I became a “I’ll do it myself” man. The job would get done, but I wasn’t helping my crew members grow, I was actually setting them up for failure. All I could see were people that weren’t doing anything for me. So I’d over caffeinate with soda all day long to get the job done myself.

Then I’d go home and keep that same mentality with my wife, Heather.  I’d let me frustrations with work out when I got home and I’d snap at her over the smallest things. I just wanted to be left alone so I could block out reality with video games and junk food. So she’d take the kids to my in-laws every night so they didn’t have to see hear me yell at her.

Of course they would hear me yell later those nights anyways, because I blamed her for our hardships at home as much as I blamed my crew for them at work. I couldn’t understand why nobody cared about me and what I wanted. I couldn’t understand why nobody would just give me what I wanted. That Christmas was hard. I remember sitting there on Christmas morning and opening presents and she and I tried to act like everything was great for them, but presents of love to each other just seemed to incite sadness.

There were also nights when I would go out to karaoke with friends as a way to feel “like I still could do fun things”. This would also make me angry because Heather never wanted to go with me, and I said it was just because she didn’t want to have fun. It didn’t matter that we didn’t have a sitter for the kids, I blamed her regardless. Then I would come home drunk because I found alcohol was an even better escape from reality than video games. I still remember, snippets of a conversation she had with my buddy as he dropped me off one night. Remember him telling her that he definitely thought I was trying to get away from something. Then I blacked out as she closed the bathroom door so the kids didn’t see me covered in vomit the next morning.

I had no grit. I didn’t care about life’s challenges. I wanted things to be easy. I wanted everyone to just do what I wanted and felt I didn’t owe them anything. I didn’t know what I know now, that if you really want to enrich your life, you had to enrich the lives of others and have the grit and strength to be better for them.