Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

by Angela Duckworth

Warren Buffett—the

Any successful person has to decide what to do in part by deciding what not to do.

Roz Chast,

She told us her rejection rate is, at this stage in her career, about 90 percent. She claimed that it used to be much, much higher.

At his magazine, “contract cartoonists,” who have dramatically better odds of getting published than anyone else, collectively submit about five hundred cartoons every week. In a given issue, there is only room, on average, for about seventeen of them. I did the math: that’s a rejection rate of more than 96 percent.

It’s as 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.

“Being exposed to real drawing talent,” Bob recalls, “made mine wither. I didn’t touch a pen, pencil, or paintbrush for three years after graduating.”

Syd Hoff,

The one thing all the cartoons had in common was this: they made the reader think.

And here was another common thread: every cartoonist had a personal style that was distinctively their own. There was no single “best” style.

“I thought, ‘I can do this, I can do this.’ I had complete confidence.” He knew he could draw cartoons that would make people think, and he knew he could develop his own style: “I worked through various styles. Eventually I did my dot style.” The now-famous dot style of Bob’s cartoons is called stippling, and Bob had originally tried it out back in high school,

Georges Seurat.

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.”

Indeed, giving up on lower-level goals is not only forgivable, it’s sometimes absolutely necessary. You should give up when one lower-level goal can be swapped for another that is more feasible. It also makes sense to switch your path when a different lower-level goal—a different means to the same end—is just more efficient, or more fun, or for whatever reason makes more sense than your original plan.

On any long journey, detours are to...

My compass, once I found all the parts and put it together, keeps pointing me in the same direction, week after month after year.

Catharine Cox

precocity—and

“persistence of motive.”

“high but not the highest intelligence, combined with the greatest degree of persistence, will achieve greater eminence than the highest degree of intelligence with somewhat less persistence.”

I can tell you with complete conviction that every human trait is influenced by both genes and experience.

But against intuition, talents are not entirely genetic: the rate at which we develop any skill is also, crucially, a function of experience.

Dan Chambliss

Identical twins have all the same DNA, while fraternal twins, on average, only share about half.

On the contrary, dozens of research studies have shown that almost all human traits are polygenic, meaning that traits are influenced by more than one gene.

the Flynn effect.

Jim Flynn,

the New Zealand social scientist who discovered it, the Flynn effect refers to startling gains in IQ ...

the social multiplier effect,

More and more, over the past century, our jobs and daily lives ask us to think analytically, logically. We go to school for longer, and in school, we’re asked, more and more, to reason rather than rely on rote memorization.

The maturation story is that we develop the capacity for long-term passion and perseverance as we get older.

Most of us become more conscientious, confident, caring, and calm with life experience. A lot of that change happens between the ages of twenty and forty, but, in fact, there’s no epoch in the human life span where personality stops evolving.

“the maturity principle.”

For instance, we might learn through trial and error that repeatedly swapping out one career ambition for another is unfulfilling. That’s certainly what happened to me in my twenties. After running a nonprofit, then pursuing neuroscience research, then management consulting, then teaching, I learned that being a “promising beginner” is fun, but being an actual expert is infinitely more gratifying.

“to do anything really well, you have to overextend yourself,” to appreciate that, “in doing something over and over again, something that was never natural becomes almost second nature,” and finally, that the capacity to do work that diligently “doesn’t come overnight.”

cajole,

Lectures don’t have half the effect of consequences.

Taken together, the data I’ve collected on grit and age are consistent with two different stories. One story says that our grit changes as a function of the cultural era in which we grow up. The other story says that we get grittier as we get older. Both could be true, and I have a suspicion that both are, at least to an extent. Either way, this snapshot reveals that grit is not entirely fixed. Like every aspect of your psychological character, grit is more plastic than you might think.

First comes interest. Passion begins with intrinsically enjoying what you do. Every gritty person I’ve studied can point to aspects of their work they enjoy less than others, and most have to put up with at least one or two chores they don’t enjoy at all. Nevertheless, they’re captivated by the endeavor as a whole. With enduring fascination and childlike curiosity, they practically shout out, “I love what I do!”

Next comes the capacity to practice. One form of perseverance is the daily discipline of trying to do things better than we did yesterday. So, after you’ve discovered and developed interest in a particular area, you must devote yourself to the sort of focused, full-hearted, challenge-exceeding-skill practice that leads to mastery. You must zero in on your weaknesses, and you must do so over and over again, for hours a day, week after month after year. To be gritty is to resist complacency. “Whatever it takes, I want to improve!” is a refrain of all paragons of grit, no matter their particular interest, and no matter how excellent they already are.

Third is purpose. What ripens passion is the conviction that your work matters. For most people, interest without purpose is nearly impossible to sustain for a lifetime. It is therefore imperative that you identify your work as both personally interesting and, at the same time, integrally connected to the well-being of others. For a few, a sense of purpose dawns early, but for many, the motivation to serve others heightens after the development of interest and years of discipli...

And, finally, hope. Hope is a rising-to-the-occasion kind of perseverance. In this book, I discuss it after interest, practice, and purpose—but hope does not define the last stage of grit. It defines every stage. From the very beginning to the very end, it is inestimably important to learn to keep going even when things are difficult, even when we have doubts. At various points, i...

Will Shortz,

Hester Lacey.

proffering

reverie

minutiae

William James foretold a century ago, these new scientific findings affirm commencement speech wisdom: the “casting vote” for how well we can expect to do in any endeavor is “desire and passion, the strength of [our] interest. . . .”

Nobody is interested in everything, and everyone is interested in something. So matching your job to what captures your attention and imagination is a good idea. It may not guarantee happiness and success, but it sure helps the odds.

imagine it must be like to discover your life’s passion. One moment, you have no idea what to do with your time on earth. And the next, it’s all clear—you know exactly who you were meant to be.