The "Grit" Myth: Why Internal Drive Predicts Zero Percent Of Founder Success - Dataconomy

Back in 2018, I watched the tech ecosystem break in real time. Over the course of twelve months, I lost

Two Brothers Built a Cooler Nobody Asked For. It Became a $2 Billion Status Symbol.

Guy Raz Newsletter – August 27, 2026

A Firefighter Family, 25 Years After 9/11

Kevin Dowdell, a lieutenant in an elite FDNY rescue unit, taught his sons to take action. When he disappeared on 9/11, they went to Ground Zero to search for him.

Face it: you're a crazy person

OR: why your brain needs a boxcutter

What It's Like to Be...a Custom Harvester - By Dan Heath - Behavioral Scientist

Harvesting five million bushels of wheat and corn from Texas to Montana, outrunning hailstorms that decimate a year's income in 20 minutes, and running a multimillion-dollar convoy of equipment down the highway with Josh Beckley, a third-generation custom harvester from Kansas.

How to walk through walls

On hacker mindset

Nobody Is Coming to Save Your Career

I waited years for someone to invest in my career. Nobody came.

What It's Like to Be...a Baker - By Dan Heath - Behavioral Scientist

Tinkering with the recipe for gingerbread cake until it's right, adjusting to the variability of local grains, and cherishing the quiet mornings when the sun fills the bakery windows with Sophie Williams, a baker in Bellingham, Washington.

Train Your Brain to Handle Hard Things Without Wanting to Quit

A Harvard doctor filmed an entire video without leaving plank position. The neuroscience behind it will change how you think about discomfort.

How To Manufacture Luck

Rules for Engineering Serendipity

I’ve been cut seven times in the NFL. Here is what those experiences taught me

Ben DiNucci's post went viral after he was cut for the seventh time. He explains lessons he learned about leadership and rejection.

How People Learn to Become Resilient

Maria Konnikova writes about resilience and the skills that researches say can be learned to acquire it.

Resilience is a practice

It’s easy to imagine that we should do our work and then, when it doesn’t work as we hope, improvise to fix it. But perhaps our work is to show up ready and willing to deal with a futur…

Roger Federer’s commencement speech wasn’t just a viral moment. It was masterful

Around the one-year anniversary of Roger Federer's viral commencement speech, The Athletic tried to find out why the speech was resonated.

I’ve trained Shai Gilgeous-Alexander for years. Here are 5 things you can learn from him

Dwayne Washington was a teacher at St. Thomas More Catholic Secondary School, where Gilgeous-Alexander attended, and also his club coach.

Things that arent progress

A few months ago, I wrote about things that look like work, but aren't. As I paid more attention to founders doing these things, I started thinking about why they were happening. I realized that...

Useful and Overlooked Skills

On his way to be sworn in as the most powerful man in the world, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to…

What Makes a Society More Resilient? Frequent Hardship.

Comparing 30,000 years of human history, researchers found that surviving famine, war or climate change helps groups recover more quickly from future shocks.

The Two Ways of Doing

Imagine two friends, Steve and Fred, chatting at a New Year’s party. Both of them resolve to abstain from alcohol for January, and attend the gym regularly. They shake on it. They don’t want to let each other down, and they both fulfill their commitments. Afterward, Steve keeps…

What I learned from 100 days of rejection | Jia Jiang | TED

Jia Jiang adventures boldly into a territory so many of us fear: rejection. By seeking out rejection for 100 days -- from asking a stranger to borrow $100 to requesting a "burger refill" at a restaurant -- Jiang desensitized himself to the pain and shame that rejection often…

How to be More Agentic

On a supposedly difficult thing

The World Is Full of Sleeping Beauties

Success in nature and culture depends just as much on timing as it does on brilliance.

Success 2.0: Taking the Leap | Hidden Brain Media

American culture celebrates those who persevere in the face of adversity. So how do we know when to walk away from something that’s not working? Today, we kick off our new “Success 2.0” series with economist John List. He says in every domain of our lives, it’s important to know…

Shoshikantetsu

Hacker News

If you want to get anything done, there are two basic ways to get yourself to do it. The first, more popular and devastatingly wrong option is to try to motivate yourself. The second, somewhat unpo…

Why Quitting Is Underrated

And grit is not always a virtue.

UserTesting Blog

Get the best insights into the latest trends and all things human insight, CX, UX , product, marketing and research on our blog.

A Navy SEAL Explains 8 Secrets To Grit And Resilience - Barking Up The Wrong Tree

Navy SEAL platoon leader James Waters explains what keeps elite operators going and how you can apply this type of grit to your own challenges.

Cavemen, Samurais and Fight Club on breaking through failure | Spikelab.org - Mentoring social entrepreneurs for impact

There's an increasing amount of talk around failure and the fear of it, but it's largely missing the point. Here's why

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big

Don't set goals. Passion is bullshit. Mediocre skills are valuable. These are just a few of the unexpected truths you'll discover in Scott Adams' new book. Here are 10 more takeaways.

How to do hard things

The Invention of Sliced Bread - Priceonomics

Sliced bread: the greatest thing since...sliced bread.

A Dozen Lessons about Business from Anthony Bourdain

“The absolute certainty that nobody was going to care about, read or buy Kitchen Confidential was what allowed me to write it. I didn’t have to think about what people expected. I didn’t car…

Your idea sucks, now go do it anyway

Constructive Pessimism - SKMurphy, Inc.

Many entrepreneurs are naturally optimistic and discouraging pessimistic thinking, but the clever use of constructive pessimism is key to success

How to Be Consistent

Five principles on consistency and sustainable progress, all backed by research and practice.

Failing well

Failure sucks. Nobody wants to fail. But in the start-up world, most people are doing just that. I'm not sure I've read much about "how" to fail, since failure is so depressing and negative. But I'm...

The Hustler’s MBA

How to Be a Stoic

Born nearly two thousand years before Darwin and Freud, Epictetus seems to have anticipated a way out of their prisons.

Fail Faster at Habits - zen habits

By Leo Babauta There are two extremely common obstacles that get in the way of people succeeding at habit change: Messing up on the habit and then quitting. Not starting because the habit change seems to hard or daunting. Have you faced these problems? The answer is almost…

The Dark Art of Pretending You Are Fine

I landed on a documentary about a guy who had a headache for years and never had a check-up. They found out later he had a brain tumor.

How to perform well under pressure | Psyche Guides

Ditch the tough talk, it won’t help. Instead cultivate your mental flexibility so you can handle whatever comes your way

The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday | Typesense

When I first started working on Typesense six years ago, I set myself a simple rule: I shall write some code everyday before or after work. That’s it. No deadlines, no quarterly goals, no milestones. I did not have a choice really — I was about to get married and was already…

On Hustles - The Paris Review

For all of its other moving parts, ‘White Men Can’t Jump’ relies on teasing out the part of a hustle that I am most fascinated by in real life.

The 6 Types of Grit (And How to Develop Them)

We all want to be better than we are today. And that often requires pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone, even when you don’t feel like it. It requires getting back up and trying again and again when you fail. It requires sticking with a path long enough to see it through…

Army Ranger School Is a Laboratory of Human Endurance

The military's toughest training challenges have a lot in common with outdoor sufferfests like the Barkley Marathons and the Leadville Trail 100: you have to be fit and motivated to make the starting line, but your mind and spirit are what carry you to the end. A Ranger graduate…

Tails, You Win · Collaborative Fund

Steamboat Willie put Walt Disney on the map as an animator.

How to Cultivate Mental Stamina - Scott H Young

Being able to sustain focus is a key to success in work and study. Here's how you can increase your mental stamina with these five strategies.

5 Things I Learned as a Door-to-Door Salesperson

The experience was surreal and taught me a lot about the world, in the way that only personal experience in a difficult task can.

Underrated | By Stephen Curry

You didn’t think this was one of those fairytales where the kid gets some pep talk, and everything changes right? It REALLY isn’t that.