Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

by Angela Duckworth

“No one can see in the work of the artist how it has become,” Nietzsche said.

We prefer mystery to mundanity.

In other words, mythologizing natural talent lets us all off the hook. It lets us relax into the status quo.

Great things are accomplished by those “people whose thinking is active in one direction, who employ everything as material, who always zealously observe their own inner life and that of others, who perceive everywhere models and incentives,

“Do not talk about giftedness, inborn talents! One can name great men of all kinds who were very little gifted. They acquired greatness, became ‘geniuses’ (as we put it). . . . They all possessed that seriousness of the efficient workman which first learns to construct the parts properly before it ventures to fashion a great whole; they allowed themselves time for it, because they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole.”

“Stop reading so much and go think.”

A theory takes a blizzard of facts and observations and explains, in the most basic terms, what the heck is going on.

By necessity, a theory is incomplete. It oversimplifies. But in doing so, it helps us understand.

Talent is how quickly your skills improve when you invest effort. Achievement is what happens when you take your acquired skills and use them.

But effort factors into the calculations twice, not once. Effort builds skill.

It soon became clear that doing one thing better and better might be more satisfying than staying an amateur at many different things:

“The first 10,000 pots are difficult,” he has said, “and then it gets a little bit easier.”

“Most of all, I rewrote everything . . . I began to take my lack of talent seriously.”

“to do anything really well, you have to overextend yourself.

I came to appreciate that in doing something over and over again, something that was never natural becomes almost second nature.

You learn that you have the capacity for that, and that it does...

“One reason I have confidence in writing the kind of novels I write,” Irving said, “is that I have confidence in my stamina to go over something again and again no matter how difficult it is.”

“Rewriting is what I do best as a writer. I spend more time revising a novel or screenplay than I take to write the first draft.”

“Where I excel is ridiculous, sickening work ethic.”

Accomplishment, in Will’s eyes, is very much about going the distance.

running hard was not just a function of aerobic capacity and muscle strength but also the extent to which “a subject is willing to push himself or has a tendency to quit before the punishment becomes too severe.”

It turns out that run time in the Treadmill Test at age twenty was a surprisingly reliable predictor of psychological adjustment throughout adulthood.

When it comes to how we fare in the marathon of life, effort counts tremendously.

“Eighty percent of success in life is showing up.”

they were in complete consensus on the importance of following through on what one has started.

Then I would create a grit score based on how many times men voluntarily returned to see if they could improve.

Because when you don’t come back the next day—when you permanently turn your back on a commitment—your effort plummets to zero.

As a consequence, your skills stop improving, and at the same time, you stop producing anything with whatever skills you have.

As any coach or athlete will tell you, consistency of effort over the long run is everything.

Even more than the effort a gritty person puts in on a single day, what matters is that they wake up the next day, and the next, ready to get on that treadmill and keep going.

Without effort, your talent is nothing more than your unmet potential.

Without effort, your skill is nothing more than what you could have done but didn’t.

With effort, talent becomes skill and, at the very same time, effort m...

grit is more about stamina than intensity.

“So, if you’re working on that project with the same energy in a year or two, email me. I can say more about your grit then.”

But if you’re not working in the same industry, if you’re on to some totally unrelated pursuit, then I’m not sure your story illustrates grit.”

But skipping around from one kind of pursuit to another—from one skill set to an entirely different one—that’s not what gritty people do.”

“Grit isn’t just working incredibly hard. That’s only part of it.”

there are no shortcuts to excellence.

Developing real expertise, figuring out really hard problems, it all takes time—longer than most people imagine.

Grit is about working on something you care about so much that you’re willing to stay loyal to it.”

“Right, it’s doing what you love, but not just falling in love—staying in love.”

New ideas and projects sometimes distract me from previous ones.

Setbacks don’t discourage me. I don’t give up easily.

I often set a goal but later choose to pursue a different one.

I am a hard worker.

I have difficulty maintaining my focus on projects that take more than a few months to complete.

I finish whatever I begin.

My interests change from year to year.

I am diligent. I never give up.