I was tricked into thinking I had “grit”

> The reason I’ve stuck with the things I have isn’t because of grit, as I might have once believed. It’s because I enjoy doing them.

“Enjoyment” is only one way of achieving the focus required to succeed. Frustration and ego (e.g. proving yourself) are just as common and useful. The trick is priority ranking what we focus on given our comparative advantage and the opportunity for improvement. What drives our relative ranking algorithm differs between people in any given situation.

Grit is the ability to overcome what Paul Graham calls “schlep blindness”. Grit applied to low impact problems is what the cool kids call “bike shedding “.

I lack grit in exactly the same way. I love working on things I'm passionate about, I'm fortunate that programming is one of them (or more accurately: some aspects of programming), but there are plenty of things on which I struggle to motivate myself to do them.

I tend to call it discipline or willpower rather than 'grit', but I guess it's the same thing.

I did notice that my wife and I have and lack this willpower in exactly opposite ways. I'm good at doing the right thing when it involves not doing something, like avoiding unhealthy food, or staying at home (which is suddenly very relevant). She has better willpower when it comes to doing things, like handling taxes and other paperwork on time.

It seems that it's more a problem with your inability to optimize correctly than anything else. But you are on the right way.

You are trying to do a multiple-objective optimization one objective at a time, and cycling through them.

You have already noticed that you can't totally forget the other objectives when working on one, otherwise you lose more over a cycle.

In fact what you seem to be aiming for is a single objective which is a combination of being good at work, soccer and relationship. At first order (i.e. when you don't aim for reaping the non-linear effects of being "the best" and ignore the non-linear effects in human physiology), the optimal optimization shouldn't exhibit such oscillations.

Quantify it, put it into a solver and do what's told. But the rule of thumb of good optimization (something something Jensen inequality) is that all your objectives must be growing all the time so you just have to be sure you are not letting something regress. It's called striking a balance. Then all objectives will grow following a S-curve simultaneously.

To avoid local minima (i.e. plateaus) which often plague single optimization problems, just increase the number of degree of freedoms in your internal representation and add some variability. Play various styles, try another way of working, spice up your relationships, do this simultaneously, memorize and imagine, and of course don't forget to try to improve (i.e. "pick the right move", as it's easy to just enjoy the fun of variability).

That's when the jack of all trade begin to reap benefit over the master of one. Some activities do synergize and help you progress deeper and faster.

Closely related is the eternal debate between satisficer vs maximizer which is just the primal-dual representation of the optimization problem.

A "thing" is just such a vague and general concept that is useless. If either your job or your relationships can be reduced to only mastering 1 thing I really envy you. If you say I am being unfair and of course it involves many sub-tasks , so why dont just choose to be good at life? So you can concentrate in just one thing and still have 2 other "things" to spare.

Now, less snarky and more serious, in any activity or discipline you choose, there are people who are dedicating their whole life to it, so you have 3 options.1) Hope your natural talent will compensate the less hours you dedicate to it (this is almost always false). 2) Accept you will never be as good as the crazies who spend all of their time on it.3)Join the fray and invest all your time on it.

Almost all great creations in humanity, things like Einstein's theory of relativity, Dante's Divine Comedy, Egypt's pyramids are the result of incredible and exclusive dedication for many many years.