The Hard Thing Rule

In our family, we live by the Hard Thing Rule.
— Angela Duckworth, Grit

Last week, I wrote about Grit, the excellent book written by Angela Duckworth. In it, she makes a compelling case for why the most important personality trait to develop is not talent, it's grit

The most successful people in any domain, whether they are Olympic athletes or leading scientists, tend to have very high levels of grit. They don't quit things easily and have a long term goal that remains unchanged for very long periods of time.

Fortunately, the message of the book is that your level of grit can change over time. I wanted to revisit one more idea before moving on because it has been something I've been thinking about over the last few days. Duckworth calls it 'The Hard Thing Rule'.

The Hard Thing Rule

The Hard Thing rule is a rule that Duckworth's family has in place, and it's designed to help her family (and particularly her kids) to develop their level of grit. There are three main aspects:

  1. Everyone has to do a hard thing.
    The first part of the rule is that everyone has to do a hard thing. A hard thing is something that requires daily deliberate practice, such as playing the piano or playing a sport. As mentioned in my previous post, deliberate practice is a specific type of focused practice in which you deliberately stretch yourself and get out of your comfort zone. You focus on the areas you are weakest and develop strategies for improving them.

    Deliberate practice is not particularly fun, but it is an incredibly efficient way to improve. This is why you need a high level of grit to do it consistently. And also this is why it's called the "Hard Thing" rule.
  2. You can quit, but not any time.
    The second part of the Hard Thing rule is that you are allowed to quit, but not until a 'natural' stopping point arrives. That means you can't quit until the football season is over, or this term's music lessons are done. The goal is to finish whatever your begin and so you cannot quit just because you had a bad day, or someone shouted at you, or you feel disheartened about your progress.
  3. You get to pick your hard thing.
    The third part of the Hard Thing rule is that each person gets to pick the thing that they want to work on. An intrinsic part of being gritty is being passionate and interested in what you're doing, so it's important that you pick an activity you are interested in from the beginning. Being forced to play the piano when you always hated it will not lead to developing grit, it will lead to resentment and wasted time.

These are the three main aspects of the Hard Thing Rule, but Duckworth mentions that since her kids are getting a bit older they are introducing a fourth part:

4. Two year commitments. 
You must commit to at least one activity (whether new or continuing an old one) for at least two years. This ties back to the second aspect of the rule. The goal is to become the sort of person that finishes whatever he or she starts, and doesn't quit easily. Long term commitments like this will help develop grit more effectively.

Practice makes perfect

To some, the Hard Thing Rule may appear harsh or too strict, but it's hard to refute the reasoning behind it given that it's coming from the woman who literally wrote the book on this!

If you believe the research Duckworth talks about then developing grit is essential to going far in your domain of expertise. If your ambition is to be the very best that you can be in some area then you simply have to be (or become) a gritty person. Lucky for us, it is possible to build up your grit, but it takes practice. The Hard Thing Rule is a great example of how you can build in systems and rules that specifically target grit growth.

For me, my Hard Thing is to write for this blog every day. I don't manage to publish every day, but I make sure to at least write for a set period of time. It's not particularly easy and there are days when I struggle to bring myself to do it, but the Hard Thing Rule is my new favourite motivation.

Recommended Read: One Man's Quest To Change The Way We Die

A story was featured in the New York Times recently about B.J. Miller, a doctor specialising in end of life care, who also happens to be a triple amputee. It's about the hospice he set up in California that takes an unconventional approach to looking after the dying.

The majority of the piece is about Randy Sloan, a guy in his 20s with a rare form of cancer, and how his final days are spent. This quote in particular stood out to me:

“I think of it as: Randy [Sloan] got to play himself out.”

This is a favorite phrase of Miller’s. It means that Randy’s ability to be Randy was never unnecessarily constrained. What Sloan chose to do with that freedom at the Guest House was up to him.

Miller was suggesting that I’d misunderstood the mission of Zen Hospice. Yes, it’s about wresting death from the one-size-fits-all approach of hospitals, but it’s also about puncturing a competing impulse, the one I was scuffling with now: our need for death to be a hypertranscendent experience.

“Most people aren’t having these transformative deathbed moments,” Miller said. “And if you hold that out as a goal, they’re just going to feel like they’re failing.” The truth was, Zen Hospice had done something almost miraculous: It had allowed Sloan and those who loved him to live a succession of relatively ordinary, relatively satisfying present moments together, until Sloan’s share of present moments ran out.

It's an emotional read, but well worth the time. Check it out:

Great Teams Have Psychological Safety

I recently finished reading "Smarter, Faster, Better" by Charles Duhigg - a great read full of insights about how the most productive individuals and organisations work.

One of the best sections is about what makes a good team and it refers extensively to work done by Google during "Project Aristotle". Google spent several months studying all of their teams to try and determine what the highest performing teams have in common and whether traditionally accepted wisdom held up to scrutiny.

What they found was that it was surprisingly difficult to discover any features of a team that were always correlated with high performance. There were high performing teams that were very extroverted, but also those that were introverted. Some were best friends outside of work, while others never spoke outside of the office. They had hypothesised that teams who are physically located together would outperform teams who are distributed around the world - but even that turned out not to be the case.

The one thing that they found to be a reliable and consistent feature of high performing teams is what they called "psychological safety". The size, location, organisational structure, and every other feature you could think of turned out not to be essential for high performance. Only psychological safety is absolutely essential.

What is psychological safety? 

According Duhigg:

Psychological safety is a "shared belief, held by members of the team, that the group is a safe place for taking risks. "It is a "sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up... It describes a team climate characterised by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.

- Page 50, Smarter, Faster, Better.

A team that does not have psychological safety is one in which members of the team aren't comfortable being themselves and may worry about speaking their mind or taking risks once in a while. On the other hand, teams that do have psychological safety encourage innovative ideas and novel approach to be aired publicly. Of course, a team that has psychological safety is not guaranteed to be high performing, but, according to Google's research, those who don't have it will be very unlikely to reach their full potential.

How does one produce psychological safety within a team?

Again, Google has the answers. There are two behaviours that all good teams share and which contribute to an atmosphere of psychological safety: social sensitivity and equality of conversation turn-taking.

Social sensitivity is a short way of saying that members of great teams tend to be aware of how other people within the group are feeling. As Duhigg puts it, good teams "were skilled at intuiting how members felt based on their tone of voice, how people held themselves, and the expressions on their faces." (pg 60)

The other behaviour that leads to psychological safety is 'equality of conversation turn-taking'. This simply means that "all the members of the good teams spoke in roughly the same proportion... In some teams, for instance, everyone spoke during each task. In other groups, conversation ebbed from assignment to assignment but by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount." (Pg 60)

These two behaviours are perhaps not the two you would think essential for high performance, but once they are pointed out it's not hard to see some logic behind them. A team in which individuals are not socially sensitive are more likely to develop poor relationships over time. It's often said that a huge proportion of our communication is non-verbal i.e. There's more to understanding other people than just understanding the meaning of the words we say.

A team where individuals don't pick up social cues based on tone of voice, body language, etc is one where people will very often misunderstand one another. Best case scenario that means they will make mistakes because they're not all on the same page. Worst case scenario there will be hurt feelings, arguments and a sour mood.

As for speaking in equal amounts, it should also not be very surprising to discover that this how high performing teams operate. Assuming you have hired well in the first place, shouldn't you expect each member to have something valuable to offer when addressing a problem? The more voices that are heard, the more perspectives will be brought to bear and the more likely you are to find an innovative solution to a difficult problem.

What's more, it's almost certainly a universal law that people want a voice and they want to be heard. Giving each member of your team a voice doesn't mean that everyone gets a vote in the final decision, but it does mean that they feel valued, respected and meaningful. If you've ever been a part of a meeting where you can't get a word in you'll know how hopeless it feels. I wouldn't be surprised if that feeling spreads across all areas of your work over time.

The final comment on implementing a culture of psychological safety is that it's important that leaders set the tone and behave as they expect their team to behave.

"To create psychological safety, team leaders needed to model the right behaviours... Leaders should not interrupt team mates during conversations, because that will establish an interrupting norm. They should demonstrate they are listening by summarising what people say after they said it. They should admit what they don't know. They shouldn't end a meeting until all team members have spoken at least once.

... There are two general principles: teams succeed when everyone feels like they can speak up and when members show they are sensitive to how one another feels." (Pg 66)


I'd really recommend getting a copy of Harder, Faster, Better by Charles Duhigg. It's got a ton of really interesting stories and insights on motivation, setting goals, building a great team and more.


The Pressure to Appear Consistent: American POWs in Korea

Why did so many American Prisoners of War (POWs) collaborate with the Chinese during the Korean War? In 1950, with the Cold War in full swing, Korea's northern communist faction invaded their Southern compatriots with the support of China and the USSR. In response, the United Nations, led by the USA, came to the South's aid leading to the establishment of two countries - one that would become the 11th largest economy in the world, the other going on to become an oppressive dictatorship with third world levels of famine and poverty. I'll leave it to you to figure out which is which.

nk vs sk
nk vs sk

However, the most fascinating part of the Korean war is not what happened on the front lines, but what was going on at the Chinese-run prisoner of war camps. According to American investigators after the war, nearly every captured American soldier collaborated with their captors in some form, at some point during their imprisonment. How can this be? These were highly trained Americans who were surrounded by the Anti-Communist sentiments that dominated US politics so completely. The whole reason that they were even in Korea was because Communism is such a bad thing that it's worth going to war over! Some were so convinced by the Chinese that they decided to stay there after the war!

So, what did the Chinese do that led to such extraordinary results? The answer is that they had a sophisticated understanding of human psychology. In particular, they understood one of the most powerful driving forces behind human activity: the desire to appear consistent.

Below is a short passage from 'Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion' by Robert  B. Cialdini where he outlines the source of their success:

An examination of the Chinese prison camp programme shows that its personnel relied heavily on commitment and consistency pressures to gain the desired compliance from prisoners. Of course, the first problem facing the Chinese was how to get any collaboration at all from the Americans. These were men who were trained to provide nothing but name, rank, and serial number. Short of physical brutalization, how could the captors hope to get such men to give military information, turn-in fellow prisoners, or publicly denounce their country? The Chinese answer was elementary: start small and build.

For instance, prisoners were frequently asked to make statements so mildly anti-american or Pro communist as to seem inconsequential (“The United States is not perfect.” “In a communist country, unemployment is not a problem.”). But once these minor request were complied with, the men found themselves pushed to submit to related yet more substantive requests. A man who has just agreed with his Chinese interrogator that the United States is not perfect might then be asked to indicate some of the ways in which he thought this was the case. Once he had so explained himself, he might be asked to make a list of these “problems with America” and to sign his name to it. Later he might be asked to read his list in a discussion group with other prisoners. “After all, it's what you really believe, isn't it?” Still later he might be asked to write an essay expanding on his list and discussing these problems in greater detail.

The Chinese might then use his name and his essay in an anti American radio broadcast beamed not only to the entire camp, but to other p.o.w. camps in North Korea, as well as to American Forces in South Korea. Suddenly he would find himself a “collaborator” having given aid to the enemy. Aware that he had written the essay without any strong threats or coercion, many times a man would change his image of himself to be consistent with the deed and with the new “collaborator” label, often resulting in even more extensive acts of collaboration.

Pages 70-1

The Desire to Appear Consistent

The passage above highlights clearly how the pressure to appear consistent with your previous actions can lead to dramatic results. What makes this process so insidious is the fact that an individual's self image can change so rapidly and without them even being aware that they are being manipulated.

At no point did the Chinese torture their prisoners or threaten them with punishment if they refused to sign their name to an anti American letter. In fact that would have made it so much easier for the Americans to remain resistant. The genius of the Chinese approach is that each tiny step was one that you freely chose (or at least it felt free). If you chose to write that letter admitting that China is a pretty great place then you take inner responsibility for it, almost guaranteeing that your self image would change to become consistent with your actions. Here's Robert Cialdini again:

Our best evidence of what people truly feel and believe comes less from their words than from their deeds. Observers trying to decide what a man is like look closely at his actions. What the Chinese have discovered is that the man himself uses the same evidence to decide what he is like. His behaviour tells him about himself; [emphasis mine] It is a primary source of information about his beliefs and values and attitudes. Understanding fully this important principle of self perception, the Chinese set about arranging the prison camp experience so that their captives would consistently act in desired ways. Before long, the Chinese knew, these actions would begin to take their toll, causing the men to change their views of themselves to align with what they had done.

Page 75

What does that mean for me?

As fascinating as this story is, the implications are very significant!

The fact is that we all tell ourselves a story about what sort of person we are and what sort of things we believe in. While we like to believe that there is a consistent, immutable part of us that never changes - the truth is that our beliefs and our character are very malleable indeed. Most people think that they know who they are thanks to their ability to 'look inside themselves' and judge their innermost beliefs. In fact, we build our picture of our selves in much the same way that we build a picture of any one else - we look at the things we do and the words we say and draw a conclusion on the evidence.

The scary side of this realisation is that it's possible for other people to attempt to influence your character without you ever realising it. By getting you to make some small concession today, they can change the story that you tell yourself in a way that has very significant long term consequences.

The more optimistic view is that if there are beliefs you have or behaviours you exhibit which you're not happy about - it's quite possible to change those things about yourself! How to do that? Take a lesson from the Chinese Army:

  1. Small actions now can build up into radical changes of perspective - so DO worry about the small stuff and don't brush off seemingly inconsequential actions as harmless if they are not the sort of person you want to be.
  2. The story you tell to yourself about who you are and what you believe can lead to enormous behavioural changes, so protect your story and don't let other people have too much control over it.
  3. The drive to be consistent is understandably powerful and resisting it is uncomfortable, but sometimes it's okay to be inconsistent if you realise that you've started down a path you didn't choose.

Further Reading

If you enjoyed this post, I would seriously recommend buying a copy of 'Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion' by Robert  B. Cialdini. It's a really well written book that examines the most powerful ways that people are influenced, and ways to avoid being manipulated.

For a really great summary of why the Korean War happened and why North and South ended up so differently, check out this youtube video.

Buy the book