The Significance Of Grit In Out Of My Mind

Did you know that according to research, grit is a common trait in people that have achieved the most? Well, everyone wants to be successful, but what even is grit? Grit, as explained by Angela Duckworth, is “passion and perseverance for long term goals”, stated in a Ted Talk. To me, this means that grit is having the stamina to work for a long time to achieve something. It’s having the power to keep trying for a long time, even if you’re thrown back. Grit can be seen in many places, as it can be connected to your life, to the arts, and to the world around you.
To begin with, in many situations in my life, I had to be “gritty” in order to achieve certain goals, one of them being an experience that really helped me understand the true meaning
Out of My Mind, a novel by Sharon M. Draper, is a great example of grit. In this book, the main character, Melody is a eleven-year-old girl that cerebral palsy. Because of this condition, she can’t speak or talk. However, she has a photogenic memory, and therefore can remember each and everything she’s read, seen, felt, etc. She is really smart and even helps her public school compete in various trivias and competitions, always winning, through a communication device that allows her to talk to people. Although is seems that Melody probably has a great life, she has many obstacles to overcome. For example, she has to rely on people to feed her and other necessities, she can’t talk freely when she wants, and she can’t mature properly. On top of that, she has to deal with people treating he like she’s dumb, needs help, and even bullying for being a supposed “retard”. Sometimes, she has horrible days and she can’t take it anymore. However, Melody demonstrates great grit throughout her years. She knows that it isn’t going to easy for her, but she knows that if she can keep fighting against the wind, she will be able to make it. By the end of the story, Melody has used her “grittiness” make her way through various situations that have tried to bring her down.! To wrap it up, this novel, Out of My Mind by Sharon
For an example, we can look at the famous global empire Microsoft. The king of this empire, Bill Gates, actually did not expect this future when he was in college. For starters, he dropped out of Harvard. On top of that, before the beginning of Microsoft, he first started a business called Traf-O-Data along with Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. This business turned out to be a failure. After dropping out of an Ivy League, and having your first business fail, most people would’ve given up at this point. However, for people that have grit, this isn’t a struggle, just like Bill. He embraced his mistakes and learned from them, rather than altogether just give up. It was probably a long journey for him, having to get back up from failure and start anew. However, Bill Gates did it, and he eventually created the famous, humongous, information technology company, Microsoft. This company has shown grit all through its journey, too. You could see their grit through all of their successes. From this example, we can learn that grit is also useful when you’ve been kicked down, and need to start back up again to reach the top. To summarize, this world connection, along with other examples, has helped in trying to understand just exactly what grit is and how we can see it in many different