Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

by Angela Duckworth

In one of Ericsson’s studies, the very best violinists at a German music academy accumulated about ten thousand hours of practice over ten years before achieving elite levels of expertise.

If you’ve read Ericsson’s original research, you know that ten thousand hours of practice spread over ten years is just a rough average.

Unlike most of us, experts are logging thousands upon thousands of hours of what Ericsson calls deliberate practice.

Then he verified that I wasn’t keeping track of my runs in any systematic way.

You aren’t improving because you’re not doing deliberate practice.”

First, they set a stretch goal, zeroing in on just one narrow aspect of their overall performance.

Rather than focus on what they already do well, experts strive to improve specific weaknesses. They intentionally seek out challenges they can’t yet meet.

Virtuoso violist Roberto Díaz describes “working to find your Achilles’ heel—the specific aspect of the music that needs problem solving.”

Then, with undivided attention and great effort, experts strive to reach their stretch goal. Interestingly, many choose to do so while nobody’s watching.

Likewise, the amount of time musicians devote to practicing alone is a much better predictor of how quickly they develop than time spent practicing with other musicians.

As soon as possible, experts hungrily seek feedback on how they did. Necessarily, much of that feedback is negative.

This means that experts are more interested in what they did wrong—so they can fix it—than what they did right. The active processing of this fe...

And after feedback, then what? Then experts do it all over again, and again, and again. Until they have finally mastered what they set out to do. Until what was a struggle before is now fluent and flawless.

Until conscious incompetence becomes unconscious competence.

In the story of the doctor who finally took a moment to think about what he was doing, Christensen kept the practice going until the doctor was doing the procedure without any errors at all. After four consecutive, perfectly correct repetitions...

And . . . then what? What follows mastery of a stretch goal? Then experts start all over aga...

One by one, these subtle refinements add up to d...

to improve his ability to make logical arguments, Franklin would jumble his notes on essays and then attempt to put them in a sensible order: “This was to teach me method in the arrangement of the thoughts.”

There are no gains without pains.

Effective management “demands doing certain—and fairly simple—things. It consists of a small number of practices. . . .”

First, reading for pleasure and playing word games like Scrabble. Second, getting quizzed by another person or a computer program. Third, unassisted and solitary spelling practice, including memorizing new words from the dictionary, reviewing words in a spelling notebook, and committing to memory Latin, Greek, and other word origins.

grittier spellers practiced more than less gritty spellers.

Deliberate practice predicted advancing to further rounds in final competition far better than any other kind of preparation.

In a sense, quizzing may have been a necessary prelude to doing more targeted, more efficient, deliberate practice.

If you judge practice by how much it improves your skill, then deliberate practice has no rival.

On average, spellers rated deliberate practice as significantly more effortful, and significantly less enjoyable, than anything else they did to prepare for competition.

“Dancing appears glamorous, easy, delightful. But the path to the paradise of that achievement is not easier than any other. There is fatigue so great that the body cries even in its sleep. There are times of complete frustration. There are daily small deaths.”

even world-class performers at the peak of their careers can only handle a maximum of one hour of deliberate practice before needing a break, and in total, can only do about three to five hours of deliberate practice per day.

many athletes and musicians take naps after their most intensive training sessions.

Every scene might not work and so you’re concentrating—Is it working? Should I get an extra line for editing? What would I change if I had to, if I hated this in three months, why would I hate it?

And, finally, world-class performers who retire tend not to keep up nearly the same deliberate practice schedule. If practice was intrinsically pleasurable—enjoyable for its own sake—you’d expect them to keep doing it.

Because deliberate practice requires working where challenges exceed skill, and flow is most commonly experienced when challenge and skill are in balance.

And, most important, because deliberate practice is exceptionally effortful, and flow is, by definition, effortless.

to learn any complex skill well takes about 10,000 hours of practice. . . . And the practice can be very boring and unpleasant.

In other words, flow and grit go hand in hand.

Gritty people do more deliberate practice and experience more flow.

First, deliberate practice is a behavior, and flow is an experience.

You’re concentrating one hundred percent, and you’ve deliberately set the level of challenge to exceed your current level of skill.

You’re in “problem solving” mode, analyzing everything you do to bring it closer to the ideal—the goal you set at the beginning of the practice session.

You’re getting feedback, and a lot of that feedback is about what you’re doing wrong, and you’re using that feedback ...

In other words, deliberate practice is for preparation, and flow is for performance.

“Did you enjoy those miles?” I asked. “I mean, did you love practicing?” “I’m not going to lie,” he replied. “I never really enjoyed going to practice, and I certainly didn’t enjoy it while I was there. In fact, there were brief moments, walking to the pool at four or four-thirty in the morning, or sometimes when I couldn’t take the pain, when I’d think, ‘God, is this worth it?’ ”

“It’s very simple,” Rowdy said. “It’s because I loved swimming. . . . I had a passion for competing, for the result of training, for the feeling of being in shape, for winning, for traveling, for meeting friends. I hated practice, but I had an overall passion for swimming.”

“It’s about hard work. When it’s not fun, you do what you need to do anyway. Because when you achieve results, it’s incredibly fun. You get to enjoy the ‘Aha’ at the end, and that is what drags you along a lot of the way.”

The idea of years of challenge-exceeding-skill practice leading to moments of challenge-meeting-skill flow explains why elite performance can look so effortless: in a sense, it is.

“Breaking that record is testament to the work I have put in and the shape I am in right now.”

She’s developed a reputation for working fiercely hard at every single practice, sometimes training with male swimmers for added challenge.

“One thing in terms of swimming that people don’t really know,” she later said, “is that the work you put in [during] practice shows off in the meet.”

Nobody wants to show you the hours and hours of becoming. They’d rather show the highlight of what they’ve become.

attempting to do what you cannot yet do is frustrating, uncomfortable, and even painful.