Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

by Angela Duckworth

We found the patience to sit in countless waiting rooms of powers-that-be. We waited and waited, sometimes hours on end, until these authority figures had time to see us. Then we found the stubbornness to keep asking and asking until we secured what we needed.

And so it went for everything we had to do—because we weren’t doing it for ourselves, we were doing it for a greater cause.

In other words, you can want to be a top dog and, at the same time, be driven to help others.

Adam’s research demonstrates that leaders and employees who keep both personal and prosocial interests in mind do better in the long run than those who are 100 percent selfishly motivated.

prosocial motives (“Because I want to help others through my work”) and intrinsic interest in their work (“Because I enjoy it”) averaged more than 50 percent more overtime per week than others.

Only the fund-raisers who expressed stronger prosocial motives and who found the work intrinsically engaging made more calls and, in turn, raised more money for the university.

Two years later, young people who’d mentioned both self- and other-oriented motives rated their schoolwork as more personally meaningful than classmates who’d named either motive alone.

“It’s not about the cleaning,” Aurora explained, her voice tightening with emotion. “It’s about building something. It’s about our clients and solving their problems. Most of all, it’s about the incredible people we employ—they have the biggest souls, and we feel a huge responsibility toward them.”

“In data set after data set,” he told me, “there’s a pattern. Everyone has a spark. And that’s the very beginning of purpose. That spark is something you’re interested in.”

“What matters,” Bill explained, “is that someone demonstrates that it’s possible to accomplish something on behalf of others.”

“Ideally,” he said, “the child really gets to see how difficult a life of purpose is—all the frustrations and the obstacles—but also how gratifying, ultimately, it can be.”

But seeing that someone needs our help isn’t enough, Bill hastened to add. Purpose requires a second revelation: “I personally can make a difference.”

“You have to believe that your efforts will not be in vain.”

In the course of six months, I’d worked every job in the building. Not only did I work those jobs, I became the trainer to help teach all those roles to other people.”

Nevertheless, that beyond-the-call-of-duty performance led to an invitation to help open international locations, which led to a corporate executive position, and so on.

“Gradually, I became more and more aware that I was very good at going into new environments and helping people realize they’re capable of more than they know.

You never know who will go on to do good or even great things or become the next great influencer in the world—so treat everyone like they are that person.”

David Yeager recommends reflecting on how the work you’re already doing can make a positive contribution to society.

Compared to a placebo control exercise, reflecting on purpose led students to double the amount of time they spent studying for an upcoming exam, work harder on tedious math problems when given the option to watch entertaining videos

Amy Wrzesniewski recommends thinking about how, in small but meaningful ways, you can change your current work to enhance its connection to your core values.

This is not a Pollyanna, every-job-can-be-nirvana idea. It is, simply, the notion that whatever your occupation, you can maneuver within your job description—adding, delegating, and customizing what you do to match your interests and values.

They came up with their own ideas for tweaking their daily routines, each employee making a personalized “map” for what would constitute more meaningful and enjoyable work. Six weeks later, managers and coworkers rated the employees who attended this workshop as significantly happier and more effective.

“Imagine yourself fifteen years from now. What do you think will be most important to you then?” and “Can you think of someone whose life inspires you to be a better person? Who? Why?”

Fall seven, rise eight.

One kind of hope is the expectation that tomorrow will be better than today.

Grit depends on a different kind of hope. It rests on the expectation that our own efforts can improve our future.

The hope that gritty people have has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with getting up again.

I began to panic, thinking over and over: I’m not going to finish! I have no idea what I’m doing! I’m going to fail! This, of course, was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more my mind was crowded by those heart-palpitating thoughts, the less I could concentrate.

For the rest of the semester, I not only tried harder, I tried things I hadn’t done before. I went to every teaching assistants’ office hours. I asked for extra work. I practiced doing the most difficult problems under time pressure—mimicking the conditions under which I needed to produce a flawless performance. I knew my nerves were going to be a problem at exam time, so I resolved to attain a level of mastery where nothing could surprise me. By the time the final exam came around, I felt like I could have written it myself. I aced the final.

This seminal experiment proved for the first time that it isn’t suffering that leads to hopelessness. It’s suffering you think you can’t control.

suffering without control reliably produces symptoms of clinical depression, including changes in appetite and physical activity, sleep problems, and poor concentration.

What followed was a vigorous exploration of the flip side of learned helplessness, which Marty later dubbed learned optimism.

optimists habitually search for temporary and specific causes of their suffering, whereas pessimists assume permanent and pervasive causes are to blame.

If, on the other hand, you’re an optimist, you might say, I mismanaged my time. Or: I didn’t work efficiently because of distractions. These explanations are all temporary and specific; their “fixability” motivates you to start clearing them away as problems.

Likewise, studies of salespeople in telecommunications, real estate, office products, car sales, banking, and other industries have shown that optimists outsell pessimists by 20 to 40 percent.

How do grit paragons think about setbacks? Overwhelmingly, I’ve found that they explain events optimistically.

“Well, I don’t really think in terms of disappointment. I tend to think that everything that happens is something I can learn from. I tend to think, ‘Well okay, that didn’t go so well, but I guess I will just carry on.’ ”

the same objective event—losing a job, getting into an argument with a coworker, forgetting to call a friend—can lead to very different subjective interpretations.

those interpretations—rather than the objective events themselves—that can give rise to our feelings and our behavior.

we can generally learn to observe our negative self-talk and change our maladaptive behaviors.

As with any other skill, we can practice interpreting what happens to us and responding as an optimist would.

“Relentless pursuit”

Teachers who have an optimistic way of interpreting adversity have more grit than their more pessimistic counterparts, and grit, in turn, predicts better teaching.

For instance, an optimistic teacher might keep looking for ways to help an uncooperative student, whereas a pessimist might assume there was nothing more to be done.

To the extent they thought of temporary and specific causes for bad events, and permanent and pervasive causes of good events, we coded their responses as optimistic.

For one thing, there was a small but growing body of scientific evidence that happiness wasn’t just the consequence of performing well at work, it might also be an important cause.

optimistic teachers were grittier and happier, and grit and happiness in turn explained why optimistic teachers got their students to achieve more during the school year.

When you keep searching for ways to change your situation for the better, you stand a chance of finding them. When you stop searching, assuming they can’t be found, you guarantee they won’t.

Or as Henry Ford is often quoted as saying, “Whether you think you can, or think you can’t—you’re right.”

For instance, if you have a growth mindset, you’re more likely to do well in school, enjoy better emotional and physical health, and have stronger, more positive social relationships with other people.