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You Can Grit Through Anything For A Bit, But You Shouldn’t Do It Forever

Last Updated on April 17, 2023March 30, 2021 15 Comments
This post may contain affiliate links. Affiliate Disclosure.This post may contain affiliate links. Financial Panther has partnered with AwardWallet and CardRatings for our coverage of credit card products. Financial Panther, AwardWallet, and CardRatings may receive a commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on the website are from advertisers. Compensation may impact on how and where card products appear on the site. The site does not include all card companies, or all available card offers. Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, endorsed or approved by any of these entities.

My first year of law school was probably the craziest and most stressful year of my life. That’s because, in the legal world, a lot of your future career prospects are based on the grades you get in your first year. To make things even more stressful, almost every class I had that year calculated my entire grade based on a single essay exam at the end of the semester. The grades were curved too, which means, in a real sense, I was competing against my classmates for my grades. 

Up until that point, I’d never really been a hard worker, at least when it came to school. In college, I didn’t do much work and would basically pull all-nighters and cram the day before final exams. It wasn’t the healthiest or smartest thing to do, but it worked out for me. When I started law school, however, I approached it very differently, determined to do the best that I could.

A lot of what drove me was fear. I took out student loans to go to law school and was terrified of graduating with no job and tons of debt. As a result, I approached my first year of law school with a seriousness I’d never had before (if you’re interested in a breakdown of my student loans, you can read more about it here).

Here’s what my schedule was like most days:

  • 7 am – Wake up
  • 8 am to 5 pm – Classes and studying at school
  • 5 pm – Take the bus home 
  • 6 pm – Eat dinner 
  • 7 pm to 12 am – Continue studying 
  • 1 am – Sleep

For the most part, I spent about 14 hours every weekday going to class and studying. During weekends, I probably spent another 4-8 hours studying. It was a crazy and completely ridiculous schedule, but it paid off for me – I finished my first year ranked 13th out of about 250 students. And it put me in a position where I was able to get a lot of interviews and was essentially guaranteed to land some sort of prestigious summer associate position.  

Looking back at it, it was nuts. I was basically doing investment banker-type hours, but for school. I probably didn’t need to study that much either, but as I said, I was terrified. I’d read way too many horror stories of young lawyers graduating with no job and tons of debt. 

But there’s an interesting lesson here. You can do anything tough and crazy like this for at least a little bit. But it’s not something you should do forever. Too often though, a lot of us end up doing things like this for most of our lives.

You Can Grit Through Anything For A Little Bit

When I look back at it, I know exactly how I was able to work 14 hour days for weeks on end. Every semester was 15 weeks long, with my fall semester stretching from September to mid-December and my spring semester stretching from mid-January to mid-May. This gave me a set time limit for how long I’d have to put in these crazy hours. 

I was stressed out and working hard. But I also knew that I didn’t have to do it forever. All I had to do was make it through a few months. I had it marked on my calendar exactly when I would fly home for the holidays and be off for four weeks before I’d have to do it again. Then when the summer came, I was off for 3 months before I had to go back for what would hopefully be an easier and less stressful second year of law school (the second year was still busy, but I definitely didn’t work as hard and I definitely wasn’t as stressed out). 

The lesson to take away from this is that I think most of us can grit through tough work that we don’t want to do and consumes most of our waking hours, so long as we have a set time limit on how long we have to do it. And ideally, our time limit isn’t years. It’s hopefully weeks or months at most.

But You Can’t (Or Shouldn’t) Do It Forever 

You can grit through anything for a short, defined period of time. But many of us end up gritting and grinding through our work for long, indeterminate periods. We tell ourselves we’ll stick it out for one more year, which turns into many more years. Or we tell ourselves we have no choice and just have to tough it out (it’s how my parents approached their jobs for their entire lives). 

Or the thing that I think we really trick ourselves with – we break up our jobs into periods of time, gritting through our jobs for a while, then taking a two-week vacation, then going right back into it again. Our lives become periods of quasi-rest mixed with periods of dispassionate, life-consuming work.

At first glance, that’s sort of what it looks like I did with my first year of law school – gritting through my days for a set period of time before taking a period of rest. But that’s not exactly what it was. With school, I knew that once I was done with that semester, I was done with it forever. There wasn’t any catching up I had to do or worrying about what the state of my work would be like when I got back. Instead, once I finished my semester, I never had to look back at it again. And I knew that once I got through these two crazy 15-week periods of my life, I’d be able to move on.

It’s Why I Went On My Own Path

I spent 5 years of my life trying to figure out how to make things work with my legal career. I wasn’t happy with my first job, but I tried gritting and grinding through it. Then I found my way to another job, again gritting and grinding my way through it, hoping that I could make it work for me. 

This dissatisfaction with how my working life was going is what led me to find the financial independence movement. I figured that was my way out. All I had to do was grit my way through life for a set period of time, save enough money, and then I could relax and do what I wanted. 

But the problem with traditional financial independence is that it asks you to sacrifice a lot of your life. Even a 50% savings rate would have meant that I’d need to grit my way through the majority of my waking hours for almost two decades. That’s simply not sustainable in my view. 

Could I do it if I had no choice? Absolutely I could – and a lot of us aren’t privileged enough to have a choice. Most of the generations before me didn’t have a choice when it came to their work – they just did what they had to do and gritted their way through their lives because they needed to pay the bills. 

I’m fortunate though. I was born in the right time period. With the right technology. And with the right privileges in life. There are a lot of you reading this that might be in the same position as me.

I think most of us aren’t looking to stop working. We just want to do something that we can handle and that we enjoy – not grit our way through most of the waking hours of our lives. 

That’s why I opted to go my own way, doing work that I find enjoyable (in this case, writing, blogging, and side hustling). For years, I used to dread Sunday evenings. Now, I don’t think about it.

I’m still working hard. I’m definitely not the richest I could ever be. And I have no idea if this whole self-employment thing will work for the long term. But life is long. And I’d rather live my life, rather than grit and grind through most of it.

This post may contain affiliate links. Financial Panther has partnered with AwardWallet and CardRatings for our coverage of credit card products. Financial Panther, AwardWallet, and CardRatings may receive a commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on the website are from advertisers. Compensation may impact on how and where card products appear on the site. The site does not include all card companies, or all available card offers. Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, endorsed or approved by any of these entities.

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financial panther

Kevin is an attorney and the blogger behind Financial Panther, a blog about personal finance, travel hacking, and side hustling using the gig economy. He paid off $87,000 worth of student loans in just 2.5 years by choosing not to live like a big shot lawyer.

Kevin is passionate about earning money using the gig economy and you can see all the ways he makes extra income every month in his side hustle reports.

Kevin is also big on using the latest fintech apps to improve his finances. Some of Kevin's favorite fintech apps include:

  • SoFi Money. A really good checking account with absolutely no fees. You'll get a $25 referral bonus if you open a SoFi Money account with a referral link, and an additional $300 if you complete a direct deposit.
  • 5% Savings Accounts. I'm currently getting 5.24% interest on my savings through a company called Raisin. Opening a Raisin account takes minutes to complete, it's free, and all of your funds are FDIC-insured. I explain how it works, why I'm now using it to store my emergency fund and any other cash savings I have, and why I recommend everyone check it out in this review.
  • US Bank Business. US Bank is currently offering new business customers a $900 signup bonus after opening a new account and meeting certain requirements.
  • M1 Finance. This is a great robo-advisor that has no fees and allows you to create a customized portfolio based on your risk tolerance. You also get $100 for opening an account.
  • Empower. One of best free apps you can use to monitor your portfolio and track your net worth. This is one of the apps I use to track my financial accounts.

Feel free to send Kevin a message here.

Filed Under: Career, My Story

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Mrs. FCB says

    March 31, 2021 at 6:26 pm

    Great point. I’ve never been one to grind like for extended periods, but I sometimes forget that I’ve definitely done plenty of it for short periods, just like you did! And it pays off. But definitely not ideal in the long term.

    Reply
    • Financial Panther says

      March 31, 2021 at 8:17 pm

      Yep, we can all definitely do it in bursts when we have to or if we have no choice. But it’s also easy to fall into the grinding through our days, weeks, months, and years without even realizing it.

      Reply
  2. Matthew says

    March 31, 2021 at 5:23 pm

    I really enjoyed this post. So many people grind, grind, grind for a bigger and better promotion, and then once they have that it’s grind, grind, grind, and grind some more. I am in my early 20’s but luckily I have seen and heard enough to understand how quickly life can pass by. My two life goals are to 1) not die doing something stupid and 2) not reach a point where when I am 40, 50, 60, or any other age after that where I sit back and think “man, life really flew by and I don’t have a lot of good memories.” So I think that this is another post I will save in case I ever get caught up in the rat race.

    Reply
    • Financial Panther says

      March 31, 2021 at 8:16 pm

      Glad you found this post helpful. Luckily for you, you have a long time left. Don’t be afraid to try different things out!

      Reply
  3. Financial Samurai says

    March 30, 2021 at 3:59 pm

    13 out of 250 students is great! I forget, but did you land a big law job after graduation?

    I grind it out in banking for 13 years and then negotiated a severance. I just wanted to last five years. But moving to San Francisco really extended my longevity because the balance of work and life was better here.

    I think if you can do anything for 10 years in a row, generally really good things can happen.

    Life feels long and short at the same time.

    Sam

    Reply
    • Financial Panther says

      March 31, 2021 at 8:14 pm

      Hey Sam, Yes I did land biglaw after graduation, which was good for me financially as it helped me save up money and pay off my student loans before I tried my hand at other things. I like to think I gave it a good shot – I practiced for 5 years before I ultimately realized it wasn’t working out for me.

      On the other hand, I’ve been blogging for 5 years now. If I can stick it out another 5 years, I agree that really good things can happen!

      Reply
  4. Steveark says

    March 30, 2021 at 3:03 pm

    I wonder though, is it maybe a better path to find a career you enjoy that requires little grit, pays extremely well and provides fulfillment? I mean nobody is forced to be a lawyer, or an engineer. You get to research the field ahead of time and with a little self awareness decide if it sounds like a blast or a grind. I researched my engineering field in middle school and I knew I would enjoy it and be very good at it. I realized I was extremely gifted in math and science and problem solving, and maybe that made it easier for me to find a dream job. Maybe a lot of people haven’t figured out who they are at 16? Maybe it is generational, most of the other boomer engineers I worked with enjoyed their jobs. There was so much laughter and real affection between coworkers, we shared family events like weddings and funerals. We played cards or tennis or went fishing together on weekends. We helped even our toughest competition succeed. Work kind of felt like an extended family. And that’s not the way most millennials or Xr’s feel now it appears. Maybe as the children of great depression parents we just had low expectations and defined mundane jobs as fun? It is inspirational that you did not stay grinding away and found your unique path to happiness. I have known many people who stayed for decades in jobs that did not contribute to their happiness.

    Reply
    • Financial Panther says

      March 31, 2021 at 8:12 pm

      I think the trouble is – how can a 16-year-old (or 18-year old or 22-year old) really know what they want? Do they even have that self-awareness? Our brains don’t even stop developing until our mid-20s and often we’re telling children to make these really big decisions at these ages when we’re not even fully developed. For me, law was just a mistake on my part – I didn’t know what else to do and naturally gravitated towards there because it was something that was easy to fall into.

      Reply
      • steveark says

        April 1, 2021 at 1:08 pm

        Yeah, I guess that’s the rub. I like to think I was smart but I was probably just lucky to pick something that fit me. I certainly couldn’t have really known adult me as a kid. Survivorship bias on my part, certainly you are extremely smart but just didn’t have a way to know at that age what an older you would thrive at. I bet in truth I could have just as easily found myself in something I didn’t enjoy. I hate it when someone points out I’m not really being logical, especially when they are correct!

        Reply
  5. Accidentally Retired says

    March 30, 2021 at 2:26 pm

    Spot on. I second the *slow clap* comment.

    Also why I left my high paying job. I was done gritting it out. If I stayed longer, I may never have been able to get out.

    Reply
    • Financial Panther says

      March 31, 2021 at 6:47 pm

      Glad you made the decision that was right for you! And who knows what the future holds!

      Reply
  6. Sidharth Kumar says

    March 30, 2021 at 2:04 pm

    was a good one kevin. can relate to it.

    Reply
    • Financial Panther says

      March 31, 2021 at 6:46 pm

      Awesome. Glad you enjoyed it!

      Reply
  7. Henry says

    March 30, 2021 at 1:30 pm

    * Slow clap*

    Reply
    • Financial Panther says

      March 31, 2021 at 6:45 pm

      🙂 Thanks!

      Reply

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