Habit 1: Tolerating Boredom Without Abandoning The Task

Ask most people what separates high achievers from everyone else, and they will say things like passion, drive or talent. Ask a psychologist, and the answer is often less inspiring: the ability to keep going through tedium.

A landmark series of six studies published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2007 introduced the construct of grit, defined as perseverance and passion for long-term goals.

Across a wide range of populations — including Ivy League undergraduates, West Point Military Academy cadets and participants in the National Spelling Bee — grit consistently predicted achievement above and beyond IQ and talent. The finding that drew the most attention was not that gritty people were more talented. It was that they were more likely to keep showing up, especially after it stopped being exciting.

This connects to a body of research on what psychologists call distress tolerance, which is the capacity to sit with uncomfortable psychological states, including boredom, without reflexively escaping them. A 2022 study published in Mind, Brain, and Education has found that distress tolerance functions as a critical academic skill because developing real expertise almost always involves long stretches of work that feel neither rewarding nor stimulating. The students who learn to tolerate those stretches outperform those who cannot, even when raw ability is comparable.

The implication is counterintuitive: the most productive people are not necessarily the most motivated. They are simply better at being bored.

This is not a minor distinction. Our current media environment is engineered for distraction, which means the gap between people who can sustain attention on tedious work and those who cannot is growing wider, not narrower. Every time someone abandons a project because it has stopped feeling interesting, they are conceding ground to anyone willing to stay. The habit of tolerating boredom and refusing to treat it as a signal to quit turns out to be a competitive advantage hiding in plain sight.

The writers who finish their manuscripts. The researchers who go deep on a single question for years. The engineers who debug the unglamorous code no one will ever see. They are not more passionate than their peers. They have simply built a higher threshold for staying when staying is hard.

Habit 2: Consistently Choosing The Harder Option When The Easier One Is Available

The second habit is closely related, but it operates in a different register. Where the first is about endurance, this one is about choice architecture — specifically, the repeated, deliberate decision to delay a reward that is available right now in favor of something more meaningful later.

Most people encounter this concept through Walter Mischel's famous marshmallow experiments at Stanford University, which began in the late 1960s. Preschool children were offered a simple choice: eat one treat immediately, or wait a few minutes and receive two.

What Mischel's longitudinal follow-up work suggested was that the children who were able to wait tended to have better outcomes years later, across markers ranging from academic performance to social competence. The finding sparked decades of research into self-regulation and its role in achievement.

More recently, a large-scale 2019 study published in PLOS ONE examined over 2,200 employed adults and found that effortful persistence (what they measured as grit's perseverance dimension) was significantly associated with career success, including income, job satisfaction, job prestige, as well as career engagement behaviors like participation in continuing professional development and positive attitudes toward lifelong learning.

Critically, these associations held even after controlling for cognitive ability and standard personality traits. In other words, the habit of choosing the harder, longer path was predicting outcomes that intelligence alone could not explain.

What this research collectively reveals is that the capacity to delay gratification is not simply a trait you either have or do not have. It functions more like a practiced orientation: a value hierarchy that has been decided and then repeatedly acted upon until it becomes the default.

The entrepreneur who passes on social events for three years to build a company is not suffering through deprivation. They have simply decided what matters, and each consistent choice reinforces that decision until the difficult option stops feeling difficult.

This is the mechanism that makes the habit stubborn: repetition changes the calculus. What begins as an effortful act of self-denial gradually becomes an expression of identity. The person who consistently chooses the harder option is not white-knuckling their way through every decision. They have, over time, reoriented what feels natural.

What Connects These Two Habits

Both habits share a common foundation. They require a person to tolerate a form of short-term discomfort — whether that is the friction of sustained effort or the ache of a deferred reward — in service of a goal that will not pay off for a long time.

The original grit research published in 2007 found that this quality predicted success above and beyond IQ, which tells us something important: the returns on sustained effort are not fully captured by conventional measures of ability. There is a compounding effect to showing up, tolerating the tedium and choosing the harder path repeatedly. It accrues slowly and often invisibly, which is precisely why so few people maintain these habits long enough to see the results.

The stubborn part, it turns out, is the whole point. These are habits that are easy to drop, and most people do. Boredom arrives, and they switch tabs. A better option appears, and they take it. There is nothing wrong with any individual decision to do so. The problem is the pattern.

Long-term success, the research suggests, tends to accumulate in exactly those moments — the ones where most people have already moved on.

Do you have the habit of pushing through unsavory moments? Take the Patience Questionnaire to know how well you tolerate hardship and boredom.