Parliament | Grit Is Fit: Why Loving Your Work Isn't Optional
We've been sold a lie about grit.
The narrative goes: successful people power through. They grind when others quit. They have superhuman discipline that persists when work gets hard, boring, or soul-crushing.
But James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, shares an insight that reframes everything: "Grit is fit."
The people who appear gritty aren't more disciplined than you. They're working on things they're genuinely interested in, engaged with, and having fun doing. The perseverance we admire isn't superhuman willpower—it's natural momentum created by good fit.
As Clear puts it: "It's very hard to beat the person who's having fun because they're going to want to keep working longer than the person who's suffering."
The Joy Question
At Hoot, we create culture-driven brands—work that requires genuine investment, deep thinking, and the ability to hold space for our clients' biggest questions about identity and purpose. You can't fake your way through that. And you definitely can't sustain it if it feels like a grind.
Which is why Joy is one of our three core values. Not manufactured happiness, but joy—that full-body response to living your purpose. When our team loves what they're doing, that shows up in every strategy session, every brand workshop, every deliverable we produce.
The inverse is also true. When people are grinding through work they don't love, you can feel it. The ideas lack spark. The energy shifts from generative to transactional.
You Can't Hire for Fit Without Knowing Who You Are
Here's where most companies get it wrong: they hire for skills and hope for cultural fit. But you can't identify the right fit if you haven't done the foundational work to understand who you actually are as a company.
This is the work of Brand Being—defining your vision, articulating your values, and getting crystal clear on your purpose. Not the aspirational version you put on the careers page, but the truth of what you believe, how you work, and what you're actually building.
When you skip this work, you end up hiring people who look good on paper but drain energy from your team. You can't articulate what makes someone right for you because you haven't articulated what makes you you.
But when you've done the Brand Being work—when you can clearly name your values and what they mean in practice, when you understand your purpose beyond revenue goals, when you know your vision for the future—hiring becomes dramatically easier.
You're not trying to find "culture fit" in some vague, gut-feeling way. You're identifying people who are genuinely fascinated by the same questions you are.
People who are energized by your purpose. People who naturally embody your values because those values resonate with who they already are.
At Hoot, we're looking for people who are compelled by the idea that brands can move culture forward. Who light up when we talk about turning intuition into language. Who believe that your employees are your first brand advocates. When someone fits, they don't need convincing—they're already bought in.
Fit First, Grit Follows
Research on grit shows that persistence matters more than raw talent in predicting success. West Point cadets who scored higher on Angela Duckworth's Grit Scale were 60% more likely to complete brutal training than their peers—regardless of SAT scores or fitness levels.
But here's what the research doesn't always highlight: the cadets who made it weren't just tougher. Many had found genuine meaning in the path they'd chosen. The fit was right.
When you build a team around true fit—people genuinely engaged with the work—you don't have to manufacture grit through motivational speeches. The grit emerges naturally because people want to keep working, keep improving, keep pushing.
What This Means for You
If you're building a team, the most important question isn't "Can this person power through hard things?" It's "Does this work genuinely interest them?"
But you can't answer that second question until you've answered the first one about yourself: What is your work, really? What do you believe? What are you building?
Do the Brand Being work first. Get clear on who you are. Then hire for fit.
Because when the fit is right, the grit takes care of itself.