James Clear:

Research is starting to reveal that your mental toughness — or “grit” as they call it — plays a more important role than anything else for achieving your goals in health, business, and life. That’s good news because you can’t do much about the genes you were born with, but you can do a lot to develop mental toughness.

As a long distance mountain runner it’s awesome to see the number of “older” runners turning out amazing performances. I’m reminded of Bronco Billy’s (Jeff Browning) results that just keep him in the top of the whole field at 48 years of age. In our local races the most competitive category is often the 40 – 50 group with 7 of the top 10 being in that range.

It’s not that the younger people are slower, far from it. Many times over shorter distances they’ll blow the older runners away, but when things get hard over hours and days of movement that mental toughness and experience of slogging it out keep the older runners on track.

The same goes for running a business. 10 year into running my business there are “troubles” that don’t even phase me. I listen to people just starting their business and remember being stressed about the same issues, but now they barely register on my radar.

If there is one thing that will help you make it in your business, it’s developing mental toughness so that when things get tough, you dig just a bit deeper and keep on going.