How determination really works (Beyond grit)

Picture a founder in 2012, grinding away on a startup that, on paper, should have died six months earlier. The product was clunky, users were sparse, and investors kept saying no. Most people would have called it quits. But this one kept going. Not with blind hustle, but with a specific mix of traits that turned small wins into something unstoppable. I’ve seen versions of this story play out repeatedly among builders, and it rarely matches the narrative of “pure grit.”

We romanticise determination as raw perseverance: waking up at 5 am, powering through burnout, never quitting. That’s part of it, but it’s incomplete. And often misleading. True determination, the kind that separates founders who build meaningful things from those who flame out, is a blend of discipline, ambition, and willfulness, sharpened by flexibility. Get these right, and your effects can generate superlinear returns. Miss the balance, and even a heroic effort leads nowhere. 

Discipline: The daily engine. 

Discipline is the boring, reliable part. It’s not about motivation or inspiration. It’s showing up and doing the work even when it feels pointless. Think of it as compound interest applied to actions. 

The best founders I’ve observed treat their days like code: Small, consistent inputs that accumulate. I met a tech founder about a year ago, and this actually is the truest example of it in my personal life observations, looking into the tech founders’ side of things. He ships features on schedule, talks to users weekly (Something I found DIABOLICAL just for a minute, and my stupid brain went “huh? Why would a software founder speak to his users?” My excuse was, “Slack, Notion, or Monday’s founder doesn't talk to me?” and ten minutes later, the crashed brain started working. I KNOW! SHOOT ME!) anyways. He ships features on schedule, talks to his users weekly, and debugs relentlessly. Not because they feel like it, but because they’ve decided what matters and built systems around it. Discipline without the other ingredients can become rigid drudgery (I sooo googled the synonym of hard work to sound cool.) You grind efficiently on the wrong problem. 

During the initial phase of starting my own business, I was networking heavily with like-minded people. I came across ones who were scaling, who had just started to build, who had an idea with systems and everything, and just needed to start, and people who had ambition and were finding the thing that would be a great product, great service, great idea to start a business in and much more. I met this 19 year old kid from Manchester, extremely passionate, extremely motivated, and he was doing the 75 hard challenge at the time. I watched him have incredible discipline. When I say incredible, I mean diabolical!. He worked and studied longer hours than anyone I had ever known. But his ambition was vague (“I wanna build something big”), so the discipline was scattered. It took him almost a year to figure out what the problem was, and now he has that idea/product that he exactly wants to build on, and it shows in his now more than ever heightened motivation and excitement. Discipline powers the vehicle; it doesn't choose the destination. 

Ambition: The direction and fuel

Ambition is what gives discipline purpose. It’s not mere greed or status seeking. It's a vivid sense of what’s possible and why it matters. Often rooted in solving a problem that feels personally urgent. 

Great ambition has a quality of inevitability. The builders who stand out don’t just want success; they see a future where their work changes something fundamental. When the path gets dark, ambition lights the way. 

I remember myself pivoting multiple times with my branding, sales strategy, offers, and niche when I started out. What kept me going wasn’t stubbornness (well, that too) but a clear picture: “This is exactly what I wanna do. I want to build a marketing firm by hook or crook. I will pivot, evolve, work on alternative sales strategies, offers, or change the whole thing up and start from scratch, but I wanna be the best in business in the niche, in the city, in the country, in the next 2 decades” I knew exactly what it was that I wanted to do. That ambition made me willing to kill offers, outreach scripts, and creative aspects of my business that I had spent so much time on; I was practically emotionally attached to them at that point. But you gotta do what you gotta do if it’s killing things you worked on for over 100 hours. Because it’s not the attachment to the work I created that matters, but what I want to become and where I want to go that matters (That’s ambition). Without ambition, discipline becomes motion without progress. 

Willfulness: The refusal to accept defaults

Willfulness is the spiky, sometimes uncomfortable part. It’s the stubborn refusal to accept “that’s just how things are.” It’s pushing back against gatekeepers, conventional wisdom, or your own self-doubt. 

Willful founders ask annoying questions. They negotiate terms that others accept. They ship ugly versions because a polished one would take too long. Paul Graham (The major inspiration behind these essays by so many founders around the world, including myself, obviously) has written about determination in similar terms, and this is where it shows up most clearly: the willingness to be disagreeable when it counts. 

But willfulness without discipline is chaos, and without ambition it’s pointless rebellion. The magic happens when all three align. A willful founder with discipline ships fast. With ambition, those ships aim at something worth hitting. 

The missing piece: Flexibility

Here’s where many accounts of grit fall short. Pure determination can harden into rigidity, the refusal to change course even when data screams otherwise. (I have been the biggest example of that when it comes to routines, and I’ll explain why and how it came back to bite me) The highest performing builders add flexibility: the ability to update their model of the world without losing core direction. I’m someone who is a practical, stubborn human when it comes to routines. I have been waking up at 5 am and performing a whole set of tasks around my morning routine, deep work at set specific times, yellow light, morning runs, gym, meal tracking to the last bit of fibre, protein and vitamins. It sounds amazing. It IS amazing. But,  butt! There are phases in your life where you have to alter, modify, adjust, adapt (hey Google! More synonyms please! Because THIS is IMPORTANT) according to the situations, time zones, timelines, and mental states you are gonna be in. “Rather than feeling guilty and like a straight-up failure for it, learning to accept and adapt and tell myself that productivity can start at 9 am/2 pm/7 am/ or even 9 pm. And it doesn't mean you are failing at life.” was the biggest personal growth thing I have learnt this year. And boy is it paying off! 

Flexibility isn’t flip-flopping. It’s running experiments, listening carefully to reality (Users, yourself, metrics, timing), and adjusting. I burned two and a half years on this mindset that “if not 5 am, you are failing” I grew up that way. I had a disciplined environment at home. It was encouraged to have routines and extreme discipline since I was a child. Sundays were not for fun; they were for organising, polishing your shoes, taking a nap to reset, and preparing for the week. Being a part of sports was a norm rather than a jarring activity. I went to day boarding, which meant school hours were 7 am to 5 pm Monday to Saturday and 7 am to 8:30 pm close to exam days. I was used to that environment for a very long time, but the 15 year old me’s days were about homework, assignments, sports, and being stupid and getting rightfully scolded for it (scraped my knee somewhere or the other, and I liked random books over my syllabus any given day). The 26 year old me has bigger fish to fry. Don’t get me wrong, having seen discipline and consistency as the norm in my childhood was possibly one of the best things to happen to me. At the same time, letting it drain you during moments where other things would work better and letting my rigidity get the best of me led to years of wasted time and multiple burnouts. The willful version of me would have doubled down and has in the past. The flexible version killed it, redirected it and chose acceptance over taking the guilt track and that pivot, revived and multiplied the productivity outcome dramatically. Am I waking up at 5 am these days? Nope! Am I never waking up at 5 am again? Not true. I am inherently a morning person. My core will never change. What changed is being flexible to my phases and needs. Applies for our businesses too. 

Why this matters now

In an era of AI tools, infinite distractions, thousands of options and fast feedback loops, this nuanced determination is more valuable than ever. Grit alone gets you exhausted on the wrong mountain. The full mix lets you climb the right one efficiently, and sometimes discover a better peak along the way. 

If you’re building something, audit yourself honestly: 

• Is your discipline aimed at high leverage activities?

• Is your ambition specific and energising, or vague?

• Are you willful enough to push through resistance, but flexible enough to incorporate new ways and information?

• Are you seeing compounding returns or just linear efforts?

Determination isn’t a character trait you’re born with or without. It’s a skill you can cultivate by paying attention to these components and practising them together. The builders who do this don’t just work harder. They work differently, and the results show it in ways that look almost inevitable in retrospect. 

Life is short. Spend your determination wisely. The difference between grinding and building something great often comes down to getting this mix right.