Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

by Angela Duckworth

the grittier a person is, the more likely they’ll enjoy a healthy emotional life.

grit went hand in hand with well-being,

too little courage is cowardice but too much courage is folly.

It isn’t hard to think of situations in which giving up is the best course of action. You may recall times you stuck with an idea, sport, job, or romantic partner longer than you should have.

In my own experience, giving up on piano when it became clear I had neither interest in it nor obvious talent was a great decision.

Less time spent on piano and French freed up time for pursuits I found more gratifying.

So, finishing whatever you begin without exception is a good way to miss opportunities to start different, possibly better, things.

Ideally, even if you’re discontinuing one activity and choosing different lower-order goals, you’re still holdin...

I’m certain most of us would be better off with more grit, not less.

Intrapersonal character includes grit. This cluster of virtues also includes self-control, particularly as it relates to resisting temptations like texting and video games.

Social commentator and journalist David Brooks calls these “resume virtues” because they’re the sorts of things that get us hired and keep us employed.

Interpersonal character includes gratitude, social intelligence, and self-control over emotions like anger. These virtues help you get along with—and provide assistance to—other people. Sometimes, these virtues are referred to as “moral character.”

And, finally, intellectual character includes virtues like curiosity and zest. These encourage active and open engagement with the world of ideas.

For academic achievement, including stellar report card grades, the cluster containing grit is the most predictive.

But for positive social functioning, including how many friends you have, interpersonal character is more important.

And for a positive, independent posture toward learning, intellectual vir...

But more often than we think, our limits are self-imposed.

To be gritty is to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

To be gritty is to hold fast to an interesting and purposeful goal.

To be gritty is to invest, day after week after year, in ch...

To be gritty is to fall down seven times, ...

It’s amazing to me how many people I know who’re well into their forties and haven’t really committed to anything. They don’t know what they’re missing.”

“Failure is probably the most important factor in all of my work. Writing is failure. Over and over and over again.”

But if, instead, you define genius as working toward excellence, ceaselessly, with every element of your being—then, in fact, my dad is a genius, and so am I, and so is Coates, and, if you’re willing, so are you.

seventy hours in an average week. Many of the high achievers I’ve studied put in close to that number.

The root of the word passion is pati, Latin for “to suffer.”

Must you work seventy hours per week to be gritty? No. But when you really love what you do, you might find that you want to.

You might feel, as I do, that nearly everything you see, hear, read, or experience is in some way relevant to your work.

You might find that you don’t want to take a vacation ...

consider curating your many, many low-level professional goals such that they align with a single top-level professional goal.

A good start would be to write down your “ultimate concern” on a piece of paper. Give yourself a max of ten words. But the shorter, the better.

Mine is seven words long: “Use psychological science to help children thrive.” For Pete Carroll there are just two: “Always compete.” And Will Smith ...

“Having a clear sense of oneself,” the researchers concluded, “galvanizes subsequent perseverance for one’s goal engagements.”

Clarity won’t give you more hours in the week, but it will help you get more out of your hours.

In surveys of burnout in the workplace, what usually accompanies exhaustion is depersonalization—the sense that you’re unconnected to the people you’re serving or working with—and also helplessness—the sense that no matter what you do or how hard you try, you’re not making progress.

As we learned in chapter 9, feelings are downstream from thoughts. So, the feeling of exhaustion, in my view, is what happens when you think, “I’m trying my best to be useful, but no matter what I do, I’m not really making a difference.”

As some coaches like to say, when advising others, we focus less on the many things we can’t fix on our own and instead concentrate on “controlling the controllables.”

My favorite explanation is that providing counsel may satisfy a deep human motivation to be useful.

developing passion and perseverance is possible for anyone and everyone.

Super Champions surveyed by the researchers tend to have parents who are supportive in the least intrusive way. Said one: “They were supportive, but they didn’t drive me, they didn’t push me at all . .

Whatever their parents’ education or income, all children really need the same thing: appropriately demanding challenges in combination with consistently warm and respectful support.

In fact, cutting your losses may be exactly the way you should think about a relationship where you don’t share the same values, interests, or life goals.

As a couple, there are weaknesses that each of you, and both of you together, must work on.

In romance, as in school and at work, it seems that the best outcomes require a willingness to persevere and the capacity to sustain passion for years and years.

Glick noticed that high school and college dropouts had significantly higher divorce rates than the general population—a phenomenon later dubbed “the Glick Effect.”

men and women who score higher on conscientiousness also have marriages that last longer.

“Soul mate isn’t a preexisting condition. It’s an earned title. They’re made over time.”

This is exactly why every major religious tradition has a version of “Lead us not into temptation.”

An esteemed mathematician once told me that when he was a young boy he’d spend hours just staring at the wood beams in his bedroom, thinking.

it is this continuity of focus that he thinks has enabled him to make a contribution in mathematics.