There is exactly one difference between the winners and the losers of the world, and that is persistance.

Losers give up. Winners keep going. It’s really that simple.

Winners, when faced with a challenge or adversity, get mad and that anger doubles their determination to overcome the obstacle. They fight back.

Losers, on the other hand, give up at the first sign of real difficulty. It is, in fact, their default reaction to stress. Give up and GTFO, regardless of the cost.

But why? What is happening at the point of failure? What gives with us losers?

What losing gets us is escape. We exit the stressful situation because that brings instant relief from the stress. Sure, it might be a terrible thing to do in the long run, but it sure feels good in the short run.

To resist this urge to flee requires what I will call grit. It is the vital ingredient in this equation. It is a combination of emotional stability, self-esteem, confidence, and access to the kind of primal rage that powers the whole thing.

One can see, therefore, why us intellectuals have a reputation for lacking in it. Our very nature gives us plenty of access to complex logical reasoning but very little access to things like rage.

To be honest, rage freaks us the fuck out. We center our identities on our rational minds, and things like rage disable or decrease our ability to think rationally. and make us feel, God forbid. ‘out of control’.

To the neurotic intellectual (but I repeat myself), being “out of control” is one of the worst things possible because without rational control, how can you make the “right” decisions? How can you possibly cope with the world when the very thing you consider to be ‘you’ – your rational mind – has left the building?

We literally do not know who we are without it. But every instinct tells us that said person, who is not us, will do terrible things straight from our id.

Witness the famous tale of Doctor Jeckyl and Mister Hyde.

Back to grit. Without it, there is nothing to resist the urge to flee the situation. Collapse and retreat becomes the default reponse.

And it’s a terrible one.

All things in life will require some degree of grit. Nobody in the world, not even rich people or movie stars, gets to lead a life where everything is always easy, friendly, non-scary, and fun.

At some point and on some level, you have to be able to face your challenges head on and actually deal with them instead of constantly copping out.

That’s an unpopular message, to put it mildly. There are a lot of people wasting many, many years in the wasteland of denial about this basic truth and they have built up very elaborate and strong counter-responses to the very idea that success in life requires doing hard things that you don’t enjoy and are not fun.

I’m there myself. But I am fighting me way out of it.

The deadly dream is that either everything in the world can be easy and fun to get if some distant goal is achieved (becoming famous, getting a job in your field, whatever) or that it should be and the fact that it is not is damning evidence of the world being a harsh, cruel, unfair place of which you are the ultimate victim.

Yeah, that’s way better than actually getting ahead in life.

It is that kind of attitude that makes someone a loser. On a deep, fundamental level, they believe that they should never have to try really hard at something or keep going when it would be way easier (not better, just easier) to just quit.

I know this because I have discovered this attitude within myself, and I have also found it in other “failure to launch” types as well.

It is rarely spoken aloud because, as you can see, when articulated it is obvious how flimsy and pathetic it is. Most people suffering under this delusion have no idea it exists and would vehemently deny it existed in them at all if questioned.

In fact, they will likely become very, very angry. Which tells you something.

But if you analyze the pattern of their lives with this observation in mind, you will find dozens of instances of them giving up at even the thought of serious adversity. They may have a lot of highly inventive justifications for each and every one of them, all of which paint them as a helpless victim of cruel fate, but those rapidly crumble into dust when you challenge their idea that they ‘could not’ have done otherwise.

Sure you could have. All you would have had to do was hang in there. And the fact that this seems “impossible” to you really cuts to the heart of the problem.

Because it wasn’t impossible. It just would have taken grit.

And grit us, on some level, a choice. In thoses moments of strife, you choose whether you keep going or run away with your tail tucked beneath your legs.

It might not seem like a choice because you are so used to always giving up and giving in that it happens more or less automatically as your default response.

But it really is a choice. It must be, because other people choose differently. You choose to flee, and you can choose not to as well.

And if these words of mine have made you very, very angry – if you are now aflame with a rage that demands you utterly destroy everything I have said – and maybe me too – sit back and ask yourself why.

Why is the suggestion that you have to do hard things to get ahead so offensive to you?

Why do you feel like this whole thing has been a personal attack?

Why does the idea that you have been making choices hurt so bad?

Because I did not write this with the intention of hurting anybody. I don’t know you, so you know it’s not a personal attack. All I want to do is free people from the delusions that are holding them hostage and making them miserable.

Unfortunately, as the saying goes, the truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.

As somewhat of a soothsayer,. I know that better than most.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.