Is founder 'grit' a product of hardship or deliberate practice?

A popular startup narrative glorifies severe adversity as a key founder advantage. A recent essay argues this misrepresents the cognitive science of "desirable difficulties," which is about learning, not trauma.

Where it happened

A long-form essay published on the software development community site Dev.to in early July 2026 serves as a direct challenge to a pervasive, if often unstated, belief in founder culture. The piece, "The Engineering of Resilience," by Khali Sollis, deconstructs the popular narrative that extreme hardship forges superior entrepreneurs by examining the scientific concepts often used to support it.

Side A: Severe adversity forges elite founders

This position holds that founders who have overcome significant, uncontrollable adversity—such as poverty, a chaotic upbringing, or early career failures—possess a unique form of resilience that cannot be taught. The argument is that this crucible burns away frivolity and builds a tolerance for the extreme stress of company-building. In this view, a lack of a safety net is not a disadvantage but a focusing agent, creating a determination that more privileged founders inherently lack. This idea has been popularized in various forms, including by authors like Malcolm Gladwell, whose book David and Goliath is cited in the source text as having stretched the underlying scientific concepts to cover broad life disadvantages. The core belief is that the psychological armor built surviving hardship is a startup's most valuable, unassailable asset.

Side B: Resilience is a skill built through manageable, structured challenges

This side, articulated by Sollis, argues the popular narrative is based on a category error. It conflates traumatic, chronic stress with the specific, evidence-based concept of "desirable difficulties." The term, coined by psychologist Robert Bjork, describes challenges in the learning process that feel difficult but lead to better long-term retention. As Sollis writes, "Bjork's research was about deliberate, structured learning tasks, not about surviving hardship." Examples include spacing out study sessions instead of cramming or testing yourself instead of just rereading material. These are desirable because they are manageable and directly related to skill acquisition. Proponents of this view argue that while surviving hardship can sometimes lead to resilience, research on chronic stress shows it is more often debilitating. True, repeatable resilience comes from the same kind of deliberate practice that builds any other skill, not from enduring uncontrollable trauma.

What's underneath

This isn't a debate about whether resilience is valuable. Both sides agree it is essential for founders. The disagreement is over how it's produced. The core issue is the conflation of two different kinds of difficulty: the structured, manageable challenges of deliberate practice versus the unstructured, often overwhelming stress of life-altering adversity. The popular narrative romanticizes the latter, treating all forms of hardship as a uniform, character-building input. The scientific clarification insists on a distinction, suggesting that the specific, targeted struggles of learning are what reliably build capacity, while severe, uncontrollable stress is an unreliable and often damaging teacher.

The investor read

This debate signals a maturing conversation around founder psychology. The romantic 'hardship backstory' may be losing ground to a more evidence-based view of founder effectiveness. Investors might begin to weigh a founder's demonstrated capacity for deliberate practice and structured skill acquisition more heavily than a narrative of overcoming trauma. This could influence diligence questions and the design of accelerator programs, shifting focus from storytelling to assessing a founder's actual learning processes and mental resilience strategies.

Pull quote: “Bjork's research was about deliberate, structured learning tasks, not about surviving hardship.”