Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

by Angela Duckworth

I’m going to grow up to love my work as much as you love yours. I won’t just have a job; I’ll have a calling. I’ll challenge myself every day.

When I get knocked down, I’ll get back up. I may not be the smartest person in the room, but I’ll strive to be the grittiest.”

grit may matter more tha...

What’s more, I know that grit is mutable, not fixed, and I have insights from resea...

Who are the people at the very top of your field? What are they like? What do you think makes them special?

Apparently, it was critically important—and not at all easy—to keep going after failure: “Some people are great when things are going well, but they fall apart when things aren’t.”

High achievers described in these interviews really stuck it out:

The highly accomplished were paragons of perseverance.

Why were the highly accomplished so dogged in their pursuits? For most, there was no realistic expectation of ever catching up to their ambitions. In their own eyes, they were never good enough.

And yet, in a very real sense, they were satisfied b...

First, these exemplars were unusually resilient and hardworking. Second, they knew in a very, very deep way what it was they wanted. They not only had determination, they had direction.

It was this combination of passion and perseverance that made high achievers special. In a word, they had grit.

“I have overcome setbacks to conquer an important challenge”

“I finish whatever I begin.”

The other half of the questions were about passion. They asked whether your “interests...

What emerged was the Grit Scale—a test that, when taken honestly, measures the extent to which you approach life with grit.

In other words, how talented a cadet was said nothing about their grit, and vice versa.

So it’s surprising, really, that talent is no guarantee of grit.

Grit turned out to be an astoundingly reliable predictor of who made it through and who did not.

Moreover, no other commonly measured personality trait—including extroversion, emotional stability, and conscientiousness—was as effective as grit in predicting job retention.

Adults who’d earned an MBA, PhD, MD, JD, or another graduate degree were grittier than those who’d only graduated from four-year colleges, who were in turn grittier than those who’d accumulated some college credits but no degree.

Put simply, grittier kids went further in competition. How did they do it? By studying many more hours and, also, by competing in more spelling bees.

In contrast, several of the students who initially struggled were faring better than I’d expected. These “overachievers” would reliably come to class every day with everything they needed. Instead of playing around and looking out the window, they took notes and asked questions. When they didn’t get something the first time around, they tried again and again, sometimes coming for extra help during their lunch period or during afternoon electives. Their hard work showed in their grades.

Talent for math was different from excelling in math class.

Before jumping to the conclusion that talent was destiny, should I be considering the importance of effort? And, as a teacher, wasn’t it my responsibility to figure out how to sustain effort—both the students’ and my own—just a bit longer?

At the same time, I began to reflect on how smart even my weakest students sounded when they talked about things that genuinely interested them.

Still, when it came to learning seventh-grade math, could it be that if they and I mustered sufficient effort over time, they’d get to where they needed?

What I discovered was that Lowell students were distinguished more by their work ethic than by their intelligence.

On the other hand, some of my hardest workers were consistently my highest performers on tests and quizzes.

And, wow, he was just so hungry to learn. In class, his attention was rapt. After class, he’d stay and ask, politely, for harder assignments.

“I did feel bad—I did—but I didn’t dwell on it. I knew it was done. I knew I had to focus on what to do next. So I went to my teacher and asked for help.

During the next several years of teaching, I grew less and less convinced that talent was destiny and more and more intrigued by the returns generated by effort.

One biographer describes Darwin as someone who kept thinking about the same questions long after others would move on to different—and no doubt easier—problems:

He kept all the questions alive at the back of his mind, ready to be retrieved when a relevant bit of data presented itself.

Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.

There is a gap, James declared, between potential and its actualization.

James asserted that “the human individual lives usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum, and he behaves below his optimum.”

“The plain fact remains that men the world over possess amounts of resource, which only very exceptional individuals push to their extremes of use.”

Americans endorse “being hardworking” nearly five times as often as they endorse “intelligence.”

The other is described as a “striver” with early evidence of high motivation and perseverance.

Half of her research subjects read the profile of a “striver” entrepreneur, described as having achieved success through hard work, effort, and experience.

When I practiced piano, I pictured myself onstage in front of a crowded audience. I imagined them clapping.”

Since we were all vetted to be superfast learners, there was no question that we would successfully master a massive amount of information in a very short amount of time.

It was a culture that encouraged short-term performance but discouraged long-term learning and growth.

The ability to quickly climb the learning curve of any skill is obviously a very good thing, and, like it or not, some of us are better at it than others.

He did, and the summer that Scott first picked up the cello, he began practicing eight or nine hours a day. He was fiercely determined to improve, and not only because he enjoyed the cello: “I was so driven to just show someone, anyone, that I was intellectually capable of anything. At this point I didn’t even care what it was.”

“At what point,” Scott asked, “does achievement trump potential?”

as much as talent counts, effort counts twice.

For instance, the most accomplished swimmers almost invariably had parents who were interested in the sport and earned enough money to pay for coaching, travel to swim meets, and not the least important: access to a pool.

a high level of performance is, in fact, an accretion of mundane acts.