Grit: the lonely push
Every week I drive back to Chapel Hill from the New River Gorge for two days of class. For these 48 hours I attempt to fall back into the identity that is supposed to be my foremost concern for these four years of my life; I become a student again. Most of my classmates do not know how I spend the other five days of the week, so I don’t have anyone to update on how my climbing endeavors are turning out. Except for one person.
On Monday nights one of my roommates always seems to be lingering in the hallway outside our bedrooms, waiting for me to arrive back home so he can ask me the fateful question:
Did you send anything this weekend?
He’s been climbing a handful of times, and he knows more than the average person about the pursuits of hard rock climbing. The question is incredibly fair for an observer of his roommate spending five days a week living at the crag, especially an observer with any minimal knowledge about the supposed ultimate goal of rock climbing: to send.
In the fall, when I was trying Proper Soul, he asked me every Sunday for eight weeks straight:
Did you send yet?
Finally, on the eighth weekend when I showed up at the house with a newfound exuberance in my eyes, I had spent the four-hour drive practicing how I would tell him that I had, in fact, sent the route. The eighth time was the charm, but the first seven times he posed the question weren’t any less enjoyable. I appreciated the chance to debrief my weekend with someone a step removed from the process.
Now, almost six months into my siege of Canadian Route, the new question is starting to sting a little bit more each time. I’m working on a random 40’ one-star route that’s two grades easier than Proper, and I’ve put in a handful more sessions with wavering progress and regression. This is the objective state of the affair. This is what the situation looks like to an outside, impartial observer. However, for me, this is just my life. I’m trying a route I love—and one that felt impossible just a week after doing Proper. The grade is quite meaningless, especially given that I’ve formed my own understanding of the (perceived) difficulty of the route. And the quality has provided top-tier enjoyment. However, even if I explained these factors to my roommate, I imagine I would still feel misunderstood. And so instead of replying each week with an update on my project, I choose to simply smile and say “nope” as a I crawl into bed.
I’m not trying to run a sub-6 mile. I’m not climbing Everest. I’m not trying to dunk a basketball. I’m not attempting any sort of commonly understood feat of persistence. I’m not even trying to climb my hardest grade—and the route doesn’t even go to the top of the cliff. In some sense, the pursuit is meaningless. In another sense, it is entirely selfish.
And in my own sense of the project, it is an undertaking of sustained commitment to a goal which derives its entire value from the way it makes me feel. The feeling of doing something hard. Something which previously felt improbable.
A perseverance against the evidence of unlikely success.
An “’epistemic resilience’ in the face of setbacks suggesting that success is not forthcoming” (Morton and Paul, 1).
An act of grit.
But what is grit?
According to Jennifer Morton and Sarah Paul’s conception of grit, someone undergoing a gritty course of action (me, the climber) must believe, despite knowledge of difficulty and experience of constant failure, that continued effort will result in success. I must manage my belief in achieving my goal with the overwhelming evidence that I will not. This alone is a mental feat—but a feat only experienced by the agent herself undergoing the difficult action.
Surprisingly, grit also has an unusual social regard. To an uninvested impartial observer (such as an unsuspecting hiker who has come across the cliff and stays for a few hours to watch my session), evidence against success weighs much higher in the prediction of the eventual outcome. And thus, my continued commitment to a climb which I have extensively tried and have not sent appears significantly less rational, and perhaps even confusing. This dichotomy closely follows the insights made by Berislav Marusic on difficult action; we should use practical (decision-based) reasoning to evaluate our own future actions, as opposed to theoretical (predictive) reasoning to evaluate the future actions of others—no matter how much we believe in them.
In some cases of difficult action, the impartial observer can at least grasp the common value of the result, such as summiting a mountain. However, in the case of the Canadian Route, the perceived result is that I haven’t even climbed my hardest route after six months of effort. To any rational observer, the evidence certainly should’ve concluded after the first ten sessions of falling on the same move that it was time to quit. And yet I didn’t. And now I’m as close to sending as I can possibly be.
How do I, as the agent (and us as climbers) reconcile my privileged perspective of belief in my own improbable undertakings with the outside perspective of observers who have nothing on which to judge the likelihood of success other than evidence of difficulty? The answer lies partly in the resilience which grit affords me—a power, such as confidence or strength, which is difficult for someone else to understand from an outside perspective. Think of the times you’ve watched endurance sports in the Olympics or even your friendly neighborhood runner and wondered how on earth they’re still going, even if they have no doubts that they can, and will keep going.
Grit, as opposed to willpower, involves the ability to believe, despite setbacks, that we will accomplish a difficult goal. In this dimension, quitting is caused by a “loss of confidence that continued effort will result in success” (Morton and Paul, 1). However, the evidence doesn’t always display that continued effort will result in success. So, how does grit equip us with the epistemic resilience to overlook this evidence and remain confident in our endeavors?
Morton and Paul answer this question with their Evidential Threshold Model. The central question: “how compelling must the evidence be before the thinker comes to a conclusion about what to believe or he revises his current beliefs?” (Morton and Paul, 17). This point is the evidential threshold for belief change. At face value, this explains why you’ll see two climbers of similar abilities fall on the same move, both initially believing they can do it, and one will give up and the other will try again. This is a much looser conception of evidential thresholds, but, in essence, we all respond differently to the same evidence.
Our evidential thresholds are determined by our evidential policies, which are implicit attitudes and guidelines that govern how we respond to evidence. Our evidential policies and thresholds are unique to us. Further, the way we respond to evidence is unique to us. Morton and Paul adapt “permissivism,” meaning that “there is more than one rationally permissible doxastic response to a body of evidence” (Morton and Paul, 17).
Evidential policies are formed by concerns such as prioritization of information we expect to have a large impact on our attitudes, degree of accuracy of the information we allow to impact our attitudes, and how high the stakes are for our success. Evidential policies, as determinants of how we allow our beliefs to be changed, can be more or less grit-friendly depending on how valuable grit is as a practical skill in our lives. For example, “a grit-friendly evidential policy will result in some degree of inertia in the agent’s belief about whether she will ultimately succeed, relative to the way in which an impartial observer would tend to update on new evidence” (Morton and Paul, 20). In other words, a grit-friendly evidential policy will cause me to keep going even when the evidence doesn’t look promising. Failures that would otherwise cause me to change my beliefs will instead only cause me to change my course of action or my preparation.
As an example of the functioning of evidential thresholds and policies, consider my process with the Canadian Route. I tried it for the first time in October and did about half of the moves. By the end of December, I had done all the moves except a four-move sequence at the bottom of the route. After probably ten sessions, I still hadn’t done all the moves. However, I kept trying because it felt possible, and I believed I could do it eventually. At the time I had an extremely high evidential threshold; after ten sessions I hadn’t done all the moves and yet I still believed I could do it. However, to anyone other than me, this would be overwhelming evidence against my success. My evidential threshold at the time was likely governed by policies that considered first-person restricted knowledge, such as the feeling of microscopic progress and the intuition that there was better, smarter beta I could be using. Rather than updating my belief after receiving new evidence every session (evidence that I still hadn’t done the moves), my grit-friendly policies accepted the inertia of my continued motivation to try the route as a sign that success was still possible. An impartial observer would have a much lower evidential threshold and thus would update their belief every time new evidence became available; after ten sessions of not doing moves, they would be 10x less confident about success.
It is important to point out that this theory does not permit delusional optimism. Because I still believed success was possible, this means that my evidential policies were rationally permissible on some level. Somehow, I just knew. If an agent’s evidential policies are rationally permissible, they “will not license the refusal to update one’s doxastic commitments in the face of compelling evidence that success is impossible or highly unlikely” (Morton and Paul, 22). If I didn’t still believe success was possible, matters would be different. Of course, there are times when people are presented with evidence of the impossibility of an action that is so strong that no evidential threshold would rationally allow it, and yet they still choose to attempt that course of action. Sometimes these people are even successful, but this is not the typical case of grit, which requires rational belief that continued effort will result in success.
So, if my continued belief in success—after the tenth session of failure—was not simply delusional optimism, what enabled me to have an evidential threshold high enough not to be dissuaded by the evidence at hand? Berislav Marusic proposes that this question is perhaps overlooked in importance by Morton and Paul. Marusic highlights that freedom is what enables us to maintain high evidential thresholds, allowing the kind of epistemic resilience required for grit.
When the agent and the impartial observer have contrasting views of the odds of success, which always seems true in the case of gritty actions, the difference is “because their relation to the achievement of that goal is fundamentally different: whether the goal is achieved depends essentially on the agent’s efforts—on her exercise of her freedom. In contrast, whether the goal is achieved does not depend on the efforts of the impartial observer…” (Marusic, 5). Marusic holds a similar view in the context of difficult action, that when an action is entirely up to us, we will do it if we do not cease to try. In this case, the action being entirely up to us is not what determines whether we will do it, but whether we should be resilient against evidence that we may not do it.
Marusic also importantly adds to Morton and Paul’s definition of grit that it is not only resilience but also a creative response to failure; “the gritty agent sees setbacks as particular ways in which difficulty manifests itself and responds creatively to them, without toggling back into prediction mode” (Marusic, 6). The observer, however, sees setbacks and adjusts their predictions of the eventual success of the agent rather than responding to the setbacks with solutions. In my process with Canadian, it was only after so many failed attempts at the crux section that I found a new beta that I wouldn’t have ever seen if the route had felt easier to me. This beta-finding was an exercise of my creative freedom in response to a setback; but to an impartial observer who was not responsible for such beta-finding, they would’ve seen all the sessions up to that point as evidence of failure, not the process of working through a solvable puzzle.
Perhaps it is also because of my freedom that I have found myself feeling particularly isolated in the process of this project. Marusic points out that for the agent:
ultimately, however, to bring her interlocutor to see things in her way, she will have to dislodge his impartiality. The other can share her assessment of her future only as someone who comes to participate in her pursuit of a goal, not necessarily as a joint agent, but at least as a person of trust. This suggests that it may be easier to be gritty in a supportive community—a community that share’s one’s outlook—rather than have to bear one’s freedom alone (Marusic, 7).
The loneliness of projecting in climbing (and I imagine of other difficult athletic endeavors) seems at least somewhat due to this observation. I also want to emphasize Marusic’s note that the community must share our outlook to be supportive, as this explains why projecting the same route as a climbing partner is often much more fulfilling than trading belays on different climbs, even at the same crag or right next to each other. The Canadian Route specifically has felt this way for me. When I first tried the route in October, someone told me I should’ve gotten on “any route at The Cirque except for that one.” Since then, I’ve received mixed judgment about devoting so much time to such a random route, especially given its poor quality-rating in the guidebook. Thus, the climbing community as a whole is not always the right community to take the role of the “person of trust” in the project process.
Really it wasn’t until I tried the route with someone else for a few sessions that I felt the most joy in the entire process so far. That was the first time I was able to share my experience with someone who could also share my outlook; they not only understood the difficulty I was confronting but also equally found the climb worthwhile to do. I didn’t have to explain how hard the moves felt or how fun the climb was or how it seemed much higher quality than it was given credit for, and because I didn’t need to justify my commitment to it, I felt much more willing to be open about the challenge. I also finally felt like there was no judgment towards the amount of time or effort I had put into the endeavor; someone else was able to corroborate what it was like to “feel close” on a specific move and even just the desire to do the route in the first place.
So, when this climbing partner texted me asking if I had sent yet a few days after we tried it together, I felt an overwhelming lack of defensiveness in my reaction to the question. I answered honestly and shared how my progress was coming along. And then I returned home and found myself yet again frustrated at my roommate’s inquiry, even though he asked me the same exact question:
Have you sent yet?
I didn’t owe him the work it would take to “dislodge” his impartiality on the process, and so I found it easier to neglect all the details of my experience instead. And while this reaction is somewhat motivated by fear of judgment, perhaps it also comes from a place of confidence in my goal. I still believe I will do the route, and I would rather invite him to celebrate with me when that happens than to invite him as a person of trust to participate in the pursuit of the send. I’d prefer to save my words for when the only answer I have to his question is “yes.”
Until then, on the two days a week that I play “student” in Chapel Hill, I will bear my freedom alone, thinking of the inevitable day that it will enable me to send the route. I will continue to exercise my resilience, which according to Marusic is licensed by the fact that the action is up to me, and that, taking into account its difficulty, it is worthwhile to pursue. And as long as it is worthwhile to pursue, I will accept that loneliness is sometimes the price I must pay for a reward that is solely, internally valuable to me and me alone.