Grit to Great

I received this book as an ARC from a First Reads giveaway.

The message is nice. It celebrates perseverance and drive, or “grit” as the book calls it. My main problem is that it doesn't say anything that hasn't been said in a hundred books like it.

It's essentially a series of examples, successful people that failed and got back up. Mixed throughout are stories of how the authors succeeded against all odds. These examples have a self-congratulatory tone, all in the third person, and some of their advertising triumphs (the Wendy's story struck me as particularly egregious) have a strange feeling of shilling for the companies they represent. Which is their entire job, technically, but it's not the feeling I should get when the examples are meant to inspire me.

The book is perfectly competent otherwise, it's not bad at all. Just repetitive. It could be summed up as “Hard work is what separates the dreamers from the doers, and a lot of successful people faced a lot of failure and rejection.” This, while a good message, is repeated over and over with nothing new to add.

“Grit to Great” doesn't follow its own advice. If you want to set yourself apart from the hundreds of competitors, you have to put in the extra work to make yourself stand out. Unfortunately, this book doesn't do that.