According to Gale Lucas, sometimes people with high grit might not do the logical, rational thing because their grit compels them to keep going. These individuals stick to difficult problems for so long they end up hurting themselves. This does not mean that being gritty is inherently bad. However, it is important to teach people to make strategic choices and teach them about how to recognize when it’s time to step away from something.
Part of the reason for this phenomenon of grit backfiring is that our society looks down on quitting. We can end up applying grittiness and averseness to quitting to things that are not the same type of problems, like relationships.
We can say that there are two kinds of grit. The good kind of grit helps us overcome obstacles and fight through distractions, benefitting us in tough situations. The bad kind of grit is obstinate. It causes us to ignore all of the signs telling us to stop and that failure is imminent. Rather than quitting, this bad grit causes us to dig in deeper and make our situation worse. This obstinate grit is really just stubbornness. Unfortunately, its often tough to tell if someone is being the good kind of gritty or the obstinate, stubborn kind of gritty until we know the outcome. Some people would claim they are the same and we just adjust the label based on the outcome.