Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

by Angela Duckworth

I have been obsessed with a certain idea or project for a short time but later lost interest.

I have overcome setbacks to conquer an important challenge.

As this book will continue to show, there is every reason to believe that grit can change.

Grit has two components: passion and perseverance.

Strange as it sounds, staying focused on consistent goals over time is more of a struggle for me than working hard and bouncing back from setbacks.

none of the passion questions asked how intensely you’re committed to your goals.

Rather than intensity, what comes up again and again in their remarks is the idea of consistency over time.

And that’s why the questions that generate your passion score ask you to reflect on how steadily you hold to goals over time.

Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare.

Jeff’s passion emerged over a period of years. And it wasn’t just a process of passive discovery—of unearthing a little gem hidden inside his psyche—but rather of active construction. Jeff didn’t just go looking for his passion—he helped create it.

I set out a very deliberate path that was possible, because the journalism industry was very hierarchical, and it was clear how to get from A to B to C to D, et cetera.”

Step A was writing for Oxford’s student newspaper, Cherwell. Step B was a summer internship at a small paper in Wisconsin. Step C was the St. Petersburg Times in Florida on the Metro beat. Step D was the Los Angeles Times. Step E was the New York Times as a national correspondent in Atlanta. Step F was being sent overseas to cover war stories, and in 2006—just over a decade since he’d set himself the goal—he finally reached step G: becoming the New York Times’ East Africa bureau chief.

“It was a really winding road that took me to all kinds of places. And it was difficult, and discouraging, and demoralizing, and scary, and all the rest. But eventually, I...

What Jeff’s journey suggests instead is passion as a compass—that thing that takes you some time to build, tinker with, and finally get right, and that then guides you on your long and winding road to where, ultimately, you want to be.

“Do you have a life philosophy?”

He’s asking what you’re trying to get out of life. In grit terms, he’s asking about your passion.

Pete’s philosophy is: Do things better than they have ever been done before.

“If I was ever going to get the chance to run an organization again, I would have to be prepared with a philosophy that would drive all my actions.”

And the most important thing Wooden said was that, though a team has to do a million things well, figuring out the overarching vision is of utmost importance.

“A clear, well-defined philosophy gives you the guidelines and boundaries that keep you on track,” he said.

At the bottom of this hierarchy are our most concrete and specific goals—the tasks we have on our short-term to-do list: I want to get out the door today by eight a.m.

These low-level goals exist merely as means to ends. We want to accomplish them only because they get us something else we want.

The higher the goal, the more it’s an end in itself, and the less it’s merely a means to an end.

The top-level goal is not a means to any other end. It is, instead, an end in itself.

Myself, I think of this top-level goal as a compass that gives direction and meaning to all the goals below it.

What I mean is that you care about that same ultimate goal in an abiding, loyal, steady way. You are not capricious. Each day, you wake up thinking of the questions you fell asleep thinking about.

You are, in a sense, pointing in the same direction, ever eager to take even the smallest step forward than to take a step to the side, toward some other destination. At the extreme, one might call your focus obsessive.

Most of your actions derive their significance from their allegiance to your ultimate con...

Grit is about holding the same top-level goal for a very long time.

In very gritty people, most mid-level and low-level goals are, in some way or another, related to that ultimate goal.

Here are a few ways a lack of grit can show itself. I’ve met many young people who can articulate a dream—for example, to be a doctor or to play basketball in the NBA—and can vividly imagine how wonderful that would be, but they can’t point to the mid-level and lower-level goals that will get them there.

Gabriele’s research suggests that indulging in visions of a positive future without figuring out how to get there, chiefly by considering what obstacles stand in the way, has short-term payoffs but long-term costs.

Even more common, I think, is having a bunch of mid-level goals that don’t correspond to any unifying, top-level goal:

Or having a few competing goal hierarchies that aren’t in any way connected with each other:

To some extent, goal conflict is a necessary feature of human existence.

And I think one top-level professional goal, rather than any other number, is ideal.

In sum, the more unified, aligned, and coordinated our goal hierarchies, the better.

First, you write down a list of twenty-five career goals.

Second, you do some soul-searching and circle the five highest-priority goals. Just five.

Third, you take a good hard look at the twenty goals you didn’t circle. These...

the point of this exercise is to face the fact that time and energy are limited.

You need one internal compass—not two, three, four, or five.

Ask yourself, To what extent do these goals serve a common purpose?

Bob’s story reveals a lot about how dogged perseverance toward a top-level goal requires, paradoxically perhaps, some flexibility at lower levels in the goal hierarchy.

if the highest-level goal gets written in ink, once you’ve done enough living and reflecting to know what that goal is, and the lower-level goals get written in pencil, so you can revise them and sometimes erase them altogether, and then figure out new ones to take their place.

The low-level goal with the angry-looking X through it has been blocked. It’s a rejection slip, a setback, a dead end, a failure.

“Improvise, adapt, overcome.”

He decided to do something different. “I went to the New York Public Library and I looked up all the cartoons back to 1925 that had ever been printed in the New Yorker.”

After getting rejected from the New Yorker about two thousand times between 1974 and 1977, Bob sent in the cartoon, below.

In his role as editor and mentor, Bob advises aspiring cartoonists to submit their drawings in batches of ten, “because in cartooning, as in life, nine out of ten things never work out.”