I was recently streaming a documentary, thanks to BEC Fiber, about Judit Polgar.
Judit Polgar was a Hungarian chess player and is considered one of the greatest chess players of all time. She started playing chess at age 5 and was winning tournaments by the age of 11. Many considered her a genius and a prodigy, which may be true, but she also had grit. At a time when women were not allowed to play against men in the chess world, she fought to change the rules. Only after becoming the number #1 ranked female chess player in the world was the chess community willing to accept her talent. She beat many of her male grandmaster counterparts and famously competed against Garry Kasparov, who at the time was considered the best chess player in the world. She played and lost to Kasparov 11 times in a row but never gave up and had the grit to keep playing against him. Finally in 2002 she beat Kasparov. She retired in 2014 and held the number #1 female Chess ranking for 26 years.
The term “grit” has become synonymous with resilience and determination and is often associated with overachievers like Judit Polgar, but I think the term could also apply to those who design, install, operate, and restore the electric grid. The electric grid is a complex network consisting of literally millions of pieces of material and equipment that are integrated together to provide a critical service: the delivery of electricity. Critical aspects are incorporated for safety, affordability and resilience. When you talk about the quality of an electric system, one of the terms that is used is resiliency. Resilience is synonymous with reliability. The key is to integrate resilience into the design and operation of the network so that when something fails it causes minimum disruption. But the most critical piece of grid resiliency is to have people with grit.
Inevitably when a power disruption occurs, a team of people working together display characteristics that when combined define “grit”. First is passion. You must truly love what you do to have grit. Along with the passion comes training, which is a commitment to the craft. Training and practice are aspects that allow us to safely and efficiently restore electricity. Third is purpose. The folks who design, operate, maintain and restore power take pride in the work that they do in providing an essential service. And lastly, perseverance, because power outages rarely happen when it is 75 degrees and sunny. Regardless of the weather or time of day or night when outages occur, our team responds to ensure that power is restored to all. No matter how long it takes, they will stay on the job until the restoration is complete. To me, the men and women of BEC have grit which benefits us all.