Grit

What grit is and why it matters

Angela Duckworth is a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Before research, she worked as a management consultant and then as a math teacher. In the classroom, she saw that some of her strongest students were not the most naturally gifted. They were the ones who kept working.

Her definition of grit has two parts: passion and perseverance for long-term goals. Passion here does not mean intense emotion. It means a lasting focus on one top goal over years. Perseverance means working hard and getting back up after setbacks.

The book opens at West Point, the United States Military Academy. Each summer, new cadets go through a grueling seven-week training program called Beast Barracks. Some drop out. West Point admits cadets using a careful measure called the Whole Candidate Score, which combines test scores, grades, leadership and fitness. Yet that score did not predict well who would survive Beast. Duckworth gave cadets a short questionnaire she had developed, the Grit Scale. Grit predicted who made it through better than the Whole Candidate Score did.

She found similar patterns in other settings: among salespeople who kept their jobs, among students who graduated from Chicago public high schools, among soldiers trying out for the Army Special Forces, and among children at the National Spelling Bee. In each case, grit was a useful predictor, and it was often unrelated to measures of talent.

Distracted by talent

Duckworth argues that our culture overvalues natural talent. When we see an expert at work, we prefer to believe they were born that way. She cites a study by Chia-Jung Tsay in which music experts said they valued hard work, yet they rated a performer described as a "natural" above one described as a "striver" when the performances were in fact similar.

This naturalness bias has costs. Duckworth points to the business consultancy idea of a "war for talent" and to Enron, which hired for raw brilliance and rewarded people who looked smart. When we focus on talent, we pay less attention to effort, and we write off people too early.

Her alternative is a simple pair of equations:

• talent x effort = skill
• skill x effort = achievement

Talent is how fast your skill grows when you invest effort. Achievement is what you produce when you apply that skill with effort. Effort appears in both, so effort counts twice.

She draws on the sociologist Dan Chambliss, who studied competitive swimmers. He concluded that top performance is the sum of many small, ordinary skills, each practiced until it becomes habit. He called this "the mundanity of excellence." Duckworth also cites Nietzsche, who argued that we call people geniuses partly so we do not have to compare ourselves with them.

Measuring grit and building a goal hierarchy

Duckworth includes the Grit Scale in the book so readers can score themselves. Its items measure both passion (do your interests shift from year to year?) and perseverance (do setbacks discourage you?). She notes that many people score higher on perseverance than on passion.

To explain what consistent passion looks like, she uses a goal hierarchy:

• Low-level goals are tasks on your to-do list.
• Mid-level goals serve a larger purpose.
• A top-level goal sits at the peak. It acts as a compass that gives meaning to everything below it.

Gritty people have a clear top-level goal and many lower goals aligned with it. When a low-level goal fails, they swap it for another that serves the same end. Duckworth quotes the pitcher Tom Seaver, who organized his life around pitching, and the football coach Pete Carroll, whose philosophy centers on doing things better than they have ever been done.

She also retells a story about Warren Buffett. He advised his pilot to list 25 career goals, circle the top five and avoid the other 20 at all costs. Duckworth adds a step: ask how each remaining goal serves a common purpose, and drop the ones that do not.

Grit can change. Twin studies suggest grit is partly heritable, but far from fully. In her data, older people tend to be grittier than younger ones. Duckworth links this to the maturity principle: people develop traits as life demands them.

Growing grit from the inside: interest and practice

Part two describes four psychological assets that gritty people develop: interest, practice, purpose and hope.

Interest. Passion does not come from sitting and thinking about what you love. It is discovered by trying things and then developed over time. Duckworth draws on the educational researcher Benjamin Bloom, who studied world-class performers. In the early years, learning was playful and encouraged by warm teachers. Only later came structured, demanding practice. Interest first needs to be triggered, then nurtured and deepened. Experts keep finding new layers in their field, which keeps them interested.

Practice. Gritty people practice more and practice better. Duckworth relies on Anders Ericsson's research on deliberate practice, which has four parts:

• A clearly defined stretch goal, focused on one weakness.
• Full concentration and effort.
• Immediate and informative feedback.
• Repetition with reflection and refinement.

In her study of National Spelling Bee contestants, deliberate practice (solitary study of hard words) predicted advancing in the competition better than being quizzed or reading for pleasure. Grittier children did more of it. Deliberate practice is effortful and not much fun in the moment.

Duckworth reconciles this with flow, the state of effortless absorption described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Deliberate practice is for preparation. Flow is for performance. Experts tend to experience both. To make deliberate practice easier, she recommends turning it into a habit: same time, same place, every day.

Purpose and hope

Purpose. Mature passion depends on the belief that your work matters to other people. Duckworth tells the parable of three bricklayers. Asked what they are doing, the first says he is laying bricks. The second says he is building a church. The third says he is building the house of God. The first has a job, the second a career and the third a calling.

She draws on the work of Amy Wrzesniewski, who found that people in almost any occupation can see their work as a job, a career or a calling. The difference depends less on the title than on how they see it. Wrzesniewski also describes job crafting, small changes to tasks and relationships that make work more meaningful. Purpose often grows over time, as people see the effect of their work on others.

Hope. Grit depends on the belief that your own efforts can improve your future. Duckworth recounts the learned helplessness experiments of Martin Seligman and Steven Maier. Dogs that could not control electric shocks later failed to escape shocks they could have avoided. They had learned that nothing they did mattered.

The cure is an optimistic explanatory style. Optimists explain setbacks with causes that are temporary and specific ("I did not prepare well for this test"). Pessimists explain them with causes that are permanent and pervasive ("I am stupid"). Duckworth ties this to Carol Dweck's growth mindset: believing that ability can grow leads to optimistic self-talk, which leads to perseverance. She cites the Japanese saying "fall seven, rise eight."

Growing grit from the outside in

Part three turns to the role of other people.

Parenting. Duckworth argues for wise parenting: being both supportive and demanding. She draws on research by Laurence Steinberg and others on parenting styles. Permissive parents are warm but not demanding. Authoritarian parents are demanding but not warm. Neglectful parents are neither. Children of parents who combine warmth with high standards tend to do better. She tells the story of the quarterback Steve Young, whose parents would not let him quit when he was homesick at college.

The playing fields of grit. Extracurricular activities are a training ground. They give children an adult (not a parent) who is supportive and demanding, and they require practice toward goals the children care about. Duckworth cites research showing that young people who stick with activities for more than one year, and make progress in them, tend to do better later.

In her own family, she uses the Hard Thing Rule:

• Everyone, including the parents, must do a hard thing that requires deliberate practice.
• You can quit, but not until a natural stopping point, such as the end of a season.
• You pick your own hard thing.
• In high school, each child must commit to one activity for at least two years.

A culture of grit. People take on the identity of the groups they belong to. Duckworth describes the Seattle Seahawks under Pete Carroll and the culture of West Point. She also discusses the Finnish idea of sisu, a kind of inner strength in the face of adversity. If you want to be grittier, join a gritty culture. If you lead one, build it.

What the critics say

Research since the book has qualified its claims. A large 2017 meta-analysis led by Marcus Credé found that grit overlaps heavily with conscientiousness, a well-known personality trait. It also found that grit predicts performance only modestly, and that the perseverance part predicts better than the passion part. Duckworth has warned against using grit scores to grade students or schools. Some critics also worry that a focus on grit can shift attention away from poverty and other structural barriers.

Who should read it

Read it if you are a parent, coach, teacher or manager who wants to help people stick with hard goals. It is also useful if you start many projects and finish few, because its tools on goals and practice are concrete.