The Seventh Call
When she was 27, a researcher named Angela Duckworth was teaching seventh graders in New York City when she noticed something that would shape her now legendary career.
The students who succeeded were not always the ones with the highest IQs. They were the ones who kept showing up. The ones who treated each setback as information, not as a threat to their identity. The ones who stayed in the work long after the early spark of motivation had faded.
She later named that quality grit.
In her research, Duckworth found that grit added predictive power beyond measures like IQ in several real-world settings. Not because gritty people don’t fail. They fail constantly. But they don’t stop at failure. They make one more attempt.
That finding has been studied in settings including military academies, spelling bees, corporate sales teams, and surgical residencies. The pattern holds: the people who go furthest are not always the ones who start strongest. They are the ones who keep going when others quit.
I thought about that research this week. Not in a classroom or a boardroom. In an airport.
Manchester
Last week I took my son John to Manchester, England for his 12th birthday.
I am convinced he is the biggest Manchester City Football Club fan in the United States of America, and he has always wanted to see Manchester City play live at the Etihad Stadium. So (thanks to frequent flyer miles and hotel points) we went.
The trip was a 72 hour whirlwind of excitement and action – the stadium, the noise, the crowd chanting when Erling Haaland scored a goal, the players he has watched on screens for years suddenly real and fifteen rows away. It was one of those memories that I knew, even while it was happening, would stay with both of us for a long time.
And then our one direct flight home got canceled.
What followed was six hours of chaos. We got rerouted on multiple different airlines with itineraries that stretched across multiple days. Each was worse than the last, and our seat assignments wound up nowhere near each other.
John is a middle-schooler. I was not putting him on a nine-hour transatlantic flight alone.
So I started calling.
Call one did not fix it. Neither did call two. Or three. By call four I was tired. By call five I was frustrated. By call six I was angry, and I almost stopped.
But I made call seven.
The agent listened. She found another direct flight to another city from which we could drive home and at least still arrive on the same calendar day. Then she said, “It’s fixed. I guarantee you’re sitting together, but you have to get your ticket from the counter when you land in London.”
So we did.
She had not just seated us together. She had moved us to business class. She did not announce it. She did not ask for thanks. She just did it.
The day went from completely miserable to surprisingly wonderful in the span of one phone call. The call I almost did not make.
Playbook
This isn’t intended to be a fairy tale. I travel every week for a living – flights get cancelled and rerouted all the time, and this isn’t always the way it works out. But this time – the time it really mattered – it did.
It turned out that the first six calls were not wasted. They were the cost of the seventh… but I didn’t know that while I was making them. There was no progress bar. No signal that call seven would be different from call six. That is the part of perseverance that does not show up in the research summaries or the TED talks.
Dr. Duckworth can tell you that grit predicts success. She cannot tell you which attempt will be the one that breaks through. Neither can you. Neither can I.
You only get to find out by making the next attempt.
The math of persistence is exhausting, because you are spending resources on an outcome you cannot see. Most people just stop and accept a bad outcome. That is not a character flaw. It is human, and sometimes the right thing to do is just take the hit and move on.
But this time around, the difference between a miserable story and a wonderful one was one more try. One more call. One more moment of refusing to accept the current answer as the final answer.
That is not a travel hack. That is a life principle.
Your Turn
I do not know what your version of call seven (or for that matter Mile 17) is right now.
Maybe it is one more conversation with a team member who is not getting it yet.
Maybe it is one more application after a string of rejections.
Maybe it is one more attempt to hug a porcupine (also known as connecting with a teenager).
Maybe it is one more day of just showing up.
The temptation is to believe that if it were going to work it would have worked by now never goes away. But grit research says otherwise. As does my trip to Manchester.
You do not know which call is the one that changes everything.
You just have to keep dialing.
The Perseverance Playbook™ is a weekly newsletter about the middle miles, where purpose is forged and leadership is born. Written from airports, sidelines, and the spaces in between by Dr. Chris DeRienzo.
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