e.g. to determine whether the monkey or the fish has more 'grit', ask the monkey how deep it can dive into the ocean depths, and ask the fish how high a tree can it climb.
Except that those things also measure biological variables like lung capacity and grip strength.
Some of the best tech workers I've known have been... pretty out of shape.
I personally think that's a lot like saying anyone who studies hard enough can become a great programmer. I mean, sure, in both cases, someone who doesn't try hard isn't going to make it, but most of us aren't going to become SEALs or Donald Knuth no matter how hard we train.
Really "someone who doesn't try hard enough isn't going to make it" is true of both and pretty important. From that perspective, if you know some of it is effort and some of it is innate, but you cant properly measure the innate part, you are best off telling everyone whatever it is that makes them try hardest.
(this, of course, is only true if you don't have to pay the cost of failure. Both businesses and sports coaches are really only concerned about picking out the very best. the washouts are on their own. An externality)
I think that’s orthogonal. The SAS aren’t looking for Olympic level athletes in any given sport. They’re looking for people who will keep going in the face of exhaustion beyond anything any athlete will ever experience. That’s a test of will and character more then anything physical.
Like, Usain Bolt and Meb Keflezighi are amazing athletes, but neither of them do anything like Test Week or Hell Week in training.
You should talk to some ultramarathon runners. A woman I know did a 100K and slept for seven minutes en route. She didn’t win. The people who do go faster and sleep less.
The 100 milers are the ones that tend to be 24 hour+ endeavors for non-winning runners (even though some of the elites run it much, much faster).
However, ultra runners are insane and now they're launching 200+ mile races where the winers only sleep a few hours.
Source: am an ultra runner.
I know and train with plenty of ultra-endurance athletes in our MilFit group, and they’ll tell you the same thing - not least because several are ex-SF ;-)
I’ve done the Fan Dance (with weight) and the last thing I’d want to do is a similar event the next day and the next and the next, culminating in the Long Drag. I almost certainly physically could do one more - but I can’t face it. The mind breaks before the body. That’s what separates endurance dilettantes like me from those what have what it takes to just keep going, which is what they are filtering for. Fitness per se is necessary but not sufficient.
Imagine what a BUD/S training might look like for programming. It would make struggling with SICP or the Dragon book look like a walk in a park.
SEALs represent about 1% of active duty Navy. That's elite but not singular level. Think about the vast swaths of terrible workers you find in any field, including ours. Whether they're poorly trained, lazy, just going through the motions, doing just enough to not get fired, I think you'll find it's easy to beat the bottom half of any cohort with a tiny amount of talent and modest amount of dedication.
I believe that when we come across the 1 in a million outlier (Knuth, Carmack, Gosling, Ritchie, et al) that those people combined a lot of raw talent with a lot of hard work.
But just getting to the 1 in 100 level? Hard work will take you a long, long way down that road, because most people simply aren't willing to put in that work.
nearly anyone of average intelligence or better and a
sincere drive to become great can become an excellent
programmer.
1. Having the interest to, on average, enjoy putting in the hours needed to achieve the goal.
2. Having the grit/dedication to push through the non-enjoyable hours and downsides.
3. Getting the results that make a rational person with an accurate view of their progress believe their goal can realistically be achieved.
Tell me, do you have a 1 in 100 income? if it's all effort, why not?
which kinda blows my point up; I know a bunch of married couples who do better than that in software, (I think it's a per-capita number) and even a few single earners (though in my circle, that's pretty rare) It's just not that much money compared to here and now.
Of course, I also think that you can't be a software developer at that level without an IQ approaching two standard deviations above average, but I recognize that's a pretty controversial view and I don't have supporting evidence.
This is a problem with Navy SEAL training. They've had a substantial number of people injured for life in BUD/S training because they wouldn't quit.[1] This may be worth it for the elite military, but it's not appropriate for people who are just going to be working in ordinary businesses.
Students at MIT who are like that are called "tools". Comments from MIT people would be appreciated. (Stanford was not as hard-core.)
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/1-dead-4-nearly-drown-d...
Grit isn’t in doing a workout well, grit is in getting through a workout at all. Grit is pushing through when it’s all going to hell and you think you’re gonna just keel over and die.
(I’m about 5 minutes from leaving for my 6am class, can you tell?)
I’d argue that fit people have grit, because they can tough it through unpleasant workouts repeatedly. But un-fit people may or may not have grit, you just don’t know. It’s entirely possible for someone with a lot of grit to not value athleticism or health and be out of shape, while showing extreme resiliency in other aspects of their lives.
Are you young? this is all very different when you are young. I know I didn't have any trouble staying fit when I was college aged. For most people, there comes a point in your late 20s or early 30s where being not fat suddenly requires a lot of effort. (I am only now applying that effort in an effective way, a bit more than a decade after I should have.)
That, and excess fat is a problem, even if the rest of you is strong Over the last six months, I went from about 100kg to 90kg; (now I'm about as far as you are from my ideal weight, at least with the muscle mass that is historically realistic and a fat content goal that isn't.) We will see if I can keep up my calorie counting and make it to the goal or not.
Oddly, I can lift a lot more and run a lot less than you can. Running seems to be a lot harder on my knees than squats are. I could run forever and squat very little when I was young and skinny. I still bicycle, but running, if I really push myself, pretty reliably ends in minor injury, and I always attributed this to the extra weight I wasn't carrying around as a youngster.
my problem before calorie counting was that it didn't matter how much I worked out, working out makes me hungry, and I'd put on more fat to go with the new muscle, and... that gets to be a problem. I mean, I wasn't weak, sure, but I was also 30% body fat. That's... a lot more fat than is healthy for a guy. I started developing the medical problems you'd expect from someone who was on the low end of obese. After losing enough weight to put me reliably in the 'just overweight' classification, some of those problems seem to be receding.
I mean, I'm losing muscle, too, which is bad; I can't lift what I could three months ago; partly just 'cause I'm eating less and partly 'cause I switched to a new office and there's a lot more contention for the barbells than there was at the old office, so while I'm not doing a lot less cardio, I am doing a lot less lifting.
But I have a whole lot of confidence in my ability to build muscle; if I can prove that I can actually lose fat... well, that would be a new thing for me. That, and in spite of my neglect of the gym, I am feeling better, and like I said, objective measures like blood pressure are looking better, so that seems like a datapoint, for me at least, to say that excess fat matters and is a real problem that needs to be dealt with.
(on the other hand, those health metrics might be improving because I've treated the obesity-associated problems. Sleep apnea messes you up good, but is fairly straightforward to treat. So maybe that's why I'm doing better rather than the reduced excess fat. But, sleep apnea is very strongly correlated with excess fat. Still, it's possible that just treating the sleep apnea and then working out while continuing to be fat would result in the same sorts of improvement in overall health. If I'm being truthful, vanity is a big driver of me wanting to lose weight. I mean, the health benefits are also really important, but there's vanity in there too.)
Congratulations on your weight loss. If you’re around 1.83m our physique is very similar. I find intermittent fasting helpful, not eating at all, just drinking water or tea one day a week.
I started off trying to run and just gave myself shin splints over and over and hurting my knees. Squats fixed that for me and after a year of weightlifting I started running in the treadmill, 2k and gradually building up to 10k, all on the treadmill. Then one day I ran a half marathon distance and felt fine, calves a bit sore the next day is all. For me all I needed was to take it very slow increasing distance.
Keep up the sleep apnea treatment. It sounds awful. As for reducing body fat enough to look good on the beach those fork put downs are the hardest. My cursory reading of the medical literature suggests that the recommended BMI is too low for health benefits as measured by longevity. Mildly overweight people live longer than people in the healthy body weight range. But definitely look after your sleep. That’s almost certainly the best health investment you can make with your time.
Regardless, being overweight and out of shape was the result of choices I made, not my personality traits. It turns out I have plenty of grit, I just wasn’t valuing my health highly enough.
It's not really about grit, BUD/S measures the ability to be an Olympic athlete who doesn't know how to quit and can problem solve effectively and efficiently underwater and out of air.
It's really a very niche skillset.