Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

by Angela Duckworth

growth mindset and grit go together.

Praising effort and learning over “natural talent” is an explicit target of teacher training in the KIPP schools.

life is about challenging yourself and learning to do what you couldn’t do before.

“You’re a learner! I love that.”

“That didn’t work. Let’s talk about how you approached it and what might work better.”

“Great job! What’s one thing that could have been even better?”

“This is hard. Don’t feel bad if you can’t do it yet.”

“I have high standards. I’m holding you to them because I know we can reach them together.”

“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”

One of Carol’s colleagues, Susan Mackie, works with CEOs and encourages them to give names to their inner fixed-mindset characters.

Ultimately, adopting a gritty perspective involves recognizing that people get better at things—they grow.

“The people who have continued to be successful here have stayed on a growth trajectory. They just keep surprising you with how much they’re growing.

“I really do think people develop theories about themselves and the world, and it determines what they do.”

‘Put your head down and go hard. Hard work really, really matters.’ ”

The lesson was that, when you have setbacks and failures, you can’t overreact to them. You need to step back, analyze them, and learn from them. But you also need to stay optimistic.”

‘Just keep working hard and learning, and it will all work out.’ ”

Consider, for example, the Outward Bound program, which sends adolescents or adults into the wilderness with experienced leaders, usually for a few weeks.

In fact, across dozens of studies, the program has been shown to increase independence, confidence, assertiveness, and the belief that what happens in life is largely under your control.

When does struggle lead to hope, and when does struggle lead to hopelessness?

In contrast, adolescent rats who experienced stress they could control grew up to be more adventurous and, most astounding, appeared to be inoculated against learned helplessness in adulthood.

In other words, what didn’t kill the young rats, when by their own efforts they could control what was happening, made them stronger for life.

You need to learn that there’s a contingency between your actions and what happens to you: ‘If I do something, then something will happen.’ ”

In contrast, a growth mindset leads to optimistic ways of explaining adversity, and that, in turn, leads to perseverance and seeking out new challenges that will ultimately make you even stronger.

Like a muscle that gets stronger with use, the brain changes itself when you struggle to master a new challenge.

Instead, all our lives, our neurons retain the potential to grow new connections with one another and to strengthen the ones we already have.

What’s more, throughout adulthood, we maintain the ability to grow myelin, a sort of insulating sheath that protects neurons and s...

My next suggestion is to practice optimis...

The point is that you can, in fact, modify your self-talk, and you can learn to not let it interfere with you moving toward your goals. With practice and guidance, you can change the way you think, feel, and, most important, act when the going gets rough.

‘Setbacks don’t discourage me for long. I get back on my feet.’ ”

Steve’s father, whom Steve describes as “the ultimate tough guy,” told him: “You can quit. . . . But you can’t come home because I’m not going to live with a quitter. You’ve known that since you were a kid. You’re not coming back here.” Steve stayed. All season, Steve was first to practice and last to leave.

By sophomore year, Steve moved up from number-eight quarterback to number two. By his junior year, he was BYU’s starting quarterback.

Each time, he wanted desperately to quit. Each time, he appealed to his father—who wouldn’t let him.

The lesson that persistence eventually delivers rewards was one on which Steve relied in the four years he sat on the bench with the San Francisco 49ers.

LeGrande prefers the childhood nickname that aptly captures his approach to life: “Grit.” “He’s all about hard work and being tough and not whining,” Steve’s brother Mike once said of his father. “The name really fits him.”

It was important to me to teach the kids to finish what you begin.”

In no uncertain terms, Steve and his siblings were made to understand that, whatever they signed up for, they had to see it through to the end.

“We told them, you’ve got to go to all the practices. You can’t say, ‘Oh, I’m tired of this.’ Once you commit, you discipline yourself to do it. There’s going to be time...

Sherry and Grit were also attuned to their children’s emotional needs. Steve, for example, was especially anxious. “We noticed there were things he wouldn’t do,” Grit said. “When he was in second grade, he refused to go to school.

He was petrified to be away from his own home. Grit was flabbergasted.

Grit did more questioning and listening than lecturing

“It was separation anxiety,” Sherry told me. “At the time, we didn’t know what to call it. But we could tell he was all tight inside, and we knew that he needed to work through all that.”

“The context was that my dad knew me. He knew all I wanted to do was sprint home, and he knew that if he let me do that, it would be letting me give into my fears.

So, like other aspiring comics, Francesca has endured four-hour drives (each way) to perform for ten minutes for no pay and made countless cold calls

“So much of sticking with things is believing you can do it.

“To finish things, you have to put the work in.

Tina agrees that as much as children need freedom, they also need limits.

“And there was no television,” she added. “I felt it was a hypnotic medium, and I didn’t want it to replace interactions with people.

To avoid such confusion, I’ll refer to authoritative parenting as wise parenting, because parents in this quadrant are accurate judges of the psychological needs of their children.