Gritty

I'm adding this at the top after finishing the whole post.
Because the original experience was a bit unpleasant, this became a critical, almost rant-like diary. I'm writing about discomfort with a certain phrase — but basically, people can use words however they like. Someone might take offense, so I want to flag that first. I may delete this later myself.

I don't much like the word "gritty" (dorokusai). More precisely: I don't like "gritty" used when praising experience or effort — mine or anyone else's.
There's a triggering episode. After that, I stopped using the word.

When I was a student working somewhere, a manager who didn't deal with me directly said (not to me): something like
"The students here now are doing fancy-looking data analysis with Excel. When I was a student, I was fetching tea and doing odd jobs for the president at my part-time place — nothing hard, just purely gritty work. Still, seeing how the president worked up close and arguing with him was a great experience."
That was the gist.

Hearing that, I felt very uneasy. There were several student interns like me; his "students" probably meant us.
The summary above isn't exact — the original had a slight mocking tone toward the students' Excel analysis. (For the record, the Excel work was subcontract-like support for consultants: financial simulations, market research, processing client data into decks.)

If I frame that unease as anger, there were two points.
First: "Working near the president even on odd jobs is somehow more valuable than data analysis" — as if that were self-evident. Students who want a long internship (not just a short stint) almost never mainly want to get ahead on the same tasks they'll do after graduation. If they did, they could wait a few years and enter society without cutting into student life. What they want is to understand what business is, for future founding or career. So even high-level work, if it's endless routine, good students quit once they grasp the essence.
So that manager didn't need to belittle current students by comparing his past — from the students' side it's "No, that's exactly what we want!" At least it was for me. Across internships, the biggest learning wasn't the tasks themselves, but discussion with bosses and seeing how they worked — even when it wasn't "tea for the president."

Second: the experience labeled "gritty" wasn't gritty at all.
Point one is about that specific job, so less universal; point two I see often.
I think "gritty" is used way too casually as praise.
Don't misunderstand: in business, gritty methods matter. You can't succeed on smart approaches alone; chores and absurdly inefficient tasks happen. I do that work often too.
But looking back on your stack of experience and saying "I've done gritty things" often sanctifies that path and undervalues anything not labeled gritty as if it weren't hard work.
And here's another point: that manager was an elite from a major trading company. To me then it was: "Say what you want — you're just an elite too." I'm twisted, sure, but what counts as "gritty" is more muddily real than elites tend to admit. And "gritty" isn't only each task — it includes situations with no light ahead at all.

Not only him — I've seen articles where elite foreign-bank people say "Even on weekends I visited clients out in the regions. Even in investment banking, stacking gritty work matters!" — and I was startled: that's not it. Given the industry, one client can lever hugely; as a tactic it's within the ordinary range.
Bankers, consultants, trading-company people — elites sometimes advertise "even I do gritty things," and the holes to poke are endless. Some are so bad it's embarrassing to watch. (Without noticing, they write books like "Techniques for winning clients' hearts — from a foreign-bank salesperson!"...)

If I define "gritty," the debate becomes "does this count?" and falls apart, so I won't. Saying this much and not defining it feels irresponsible — sorry. But I think almost no one (including me) really does work you can call gritty. (Especially white-collar people.)
Honestly, using "gritty" to sanctify yourself or others and advertise it even strikes me as tasteless — and I never use it to rank one approach against another.