Three quotes from the article
In every area of life — from your education to your work to your health — it is your amount of grit, mental toughness, and perseverance predicts your level of success more than any other factor we can find.
Mental toughness is built through small wins. It’s the individual choices that we make on a daily basis that build our “mental toughness muscle.”
Mentally tough people don’t have to be more courageous, more talented, or more intelligent — just more consistent.
Some people might think that putting phone down during meals is something relatively easier than huge challenges like military exercises. It is true, but for some people, especially teenagers, this could also be really hard. Before we start our challenge, I had thought that I won’t be able to keep the rule for five days even though I try. But as I started to view this challenge optimistically as a good chance to talk to people more, it wasn’t that hard to follow the rules. We are having a end of year test in a few month. Since we have to revise what we did for a year, it will be really tough and stressful. Also, we are gonna start our first year of IB in a few month. In Korea, I have seen many friends who were not considered to be genius but got grades by constant effort. Once again by reading this article, I realised that mental toughness and consistency have a decisive influence on one’s success. So when studying for exam or doing works that challenges me, I will keep reminding myself of those two words and put myself out of my comfort zone.
I think we didn’t have any issues in terms of collaboration. We had talked about our personality test result for a long time and since we got the same time, it was easier for us to understand each other. We divided work equally and asked questions to each other about things that we were unsure of. We also reminded each other to record reflection on how each day’s challenge went. From working with different people, I think something I need most from a partner is meticulousness because I often forget details.
I could take a closer look at myself during this project. Our challenge was having screen free meals for five days. I had to stop myself from using phone during meals and by doing so, I could often find myself looking at screen even when I didn’t have anything important to do with it. And I will have to cut out distractions in the future. People next to me on their phones during meals made me want to use phone and I managed not to use it but it was really hard sometimes.