Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

by Angela Duckworth

Tobi Lütke

“This pattern kept on repeating itself,” Tobi said. “Jürgen somehow knew the extent of my comfort zone and manufactured situations which were slightly outside it. I overcame them through trial and error, through doing. . . . I succeeded.”

Ron Ferguson

It’s possible, Ron finds, to be a psychologically wise teacher, just as it’s possible to be permissive, authoritarian, or negligent. And it’s the wise teachers who seem to promote competence in addition to well-being, engagement, and high hopes for the future.

Most certainly, Post-it notes are no substitute for the daily gestures, comments, and actions that communicate warmth, respect, and high expectations. But these experiments do illuminate the powerful motivating effect that a simple message can have.

So, Cody Coleman did not have a psychologically wise mother, father, or grandparent. I wish he had. What he did have was a brother who said the right thing at the right time, an extraordinarily wise and wonderful high school math teacher, and an ecosystem of other teachers, mentors, and fellow students who collectively showed him what’s possible and helped him to get there.

Nevertheless, as a parent and as a social scientist, I would recommend that, as soon as your child is old enough, you find something they might enjoy doing outside of class and sign them up. In fact, if I could wave a magic wand, I’d have all the children in the world engage in at least one extracurricular activity of their choice, and as for those in high school, I’d require that they stick with at least one activity for more than a year.

The same research clearly indicates that overdosing on extracurriculars is pretty rare. These days, the average American teenager reports spending more than three hours a day watching television and playing video games. Additional time is drained away checking social media feeds, texting friends links to cat videos, and tracking the Kardashians as they figure out which outfit to wear—which makes it hard to argue that time can’t be spared for the chess club or the school play, or just about any other structured, skill-focused, adult-guided activity.

What about accomplishing something that takes years, as opposed to months, of work? If grit is about sticking with a goal for the long-term, and if extracurricular activities are a way of practicing grit, it stands to reason that they’re especially beneficial when we do them for more than a year.

Here’s what Margo found: kids who spend more than a year in extracurriculars are significantly more likely to graduate from college and, as young adults, to volunteer in their communities. The hours per week kids devote to extracurriculars also predict having a job (as opposed to being unemployed as a young adult) and earning more money, but only for kids who participate in activities for two years rather than one.

Warren Willingham.

follow-through.

This is how Willingham and his team put a number on it: “The follow-through rating involved evidence of purposeful, continuous commitment to certain types of activities (in high school) versus sporadic efforts in diverse areas.”

Likewise, follow-through was the single best predictor of holding an appointed or elected leadership position in young adulthood. And, finally, better than any of the more than one hundred personal characteristics Willingham had measured, follow-through predicted notable accomplishments for a young adult in all domains, from the arts and writing to entrepreneurism and community service.

Back in the days when he had a more direct role in hiring software programmers at Microsoft, for instance, he said he’d give applicants a programming task he knew would require hours and hours of tedious troubleshooting. This wasn’t an IQ test, or a test of programming skills. Rather, it was a test of a person’s ability to muscle through, press on, get to the finish line. Bill only hired programmers who finished what they began.

Just as we expected, the odds of staying in school depended heavily on Grit Grid scores: 69 percent of students who scored 6 out of 6 on the Grit Grid were still in college. In contrast, just 16 percent of students who scored 0 out 6 were still on track to get their college degrees.

My best guess is that following through on our commitments while we grow up both requires grit and, at the same time, builds it.

the situations to which people gravitate tend to enhance the very characteristics that brought us there in the first place.

corresponsive p...

Brent Ro...

The corresponsive principle suggests that the very traits that steer us toward certain life situations are the very same traits that those situations encourage, reinforce, and amplify.

Nobody in the admissions office wants or needs these students to pursue the same activities when they get to campus. “Let’s take athletics as an example,” Bill said. “Let’s say the person gets hurt, or decides not to play, or doesn’t make the team. What we have tended to find is that all that energy, drive, and commitment—all that grit—that was developed through athletics can almost always be transferred to something else.”

“My sense, from being in admissions for over forty years,” Bill concluded, “is that most people are born with tremendous potential. The real question is whether they’re encouraged to employ their good old-fashioned hard work and their grit, if you will, to its maximum. In the end, those are the people who seem to be the most successful.”

I pointed out that extracurricular follow-through might be a mere signal of grit, rather than something that would develop it. Bill agreed, but reaffirmed his judgment that activities aren’t just a signal. His intuition was that following through on hard things teaches a young person powerful, transferable lessons. “You’re learning from others, you’re finding out more and more through experience what your priorities are, you’re developing character.

“More and more high schools have diminished or eliminated arts and music and other activities,” Bill told me, and then explained that, of course, it was primarily schools serving poor kids who were making these cuts. “It’s the least level playing field one could possibly imagine.”

Geoffrey Canada

Harlem Children’s Zone.

scientists have done short-term experiments testing whether doing hard things teaches a person to do other hard things.

Robert Eisenberger

In experiment after experiment, he’s found the same results: Compared to rats in the “easy condition,” rats who were previously required to work hard for rewards subsequently demonstrate more vigor and endurance on the second task.

With practice, industriousness can be learned.

learned industriousness.

This brings me to the second part of the Hard Thing Rule: You can quit. But you can’t quit until the season is over, the tuition payment is up, or some other “natural” stopping point has arrived. You must, at least for the interval to which you’ve committed yourself, finish whatever you begin. In other words, you can’t quit on a day when your teacher yells at you, or you lose a race, or you have to miss a sleepover because of a recital the next morning. You can’t quit on a bad day.

Pete chuckled softly. “I’m not going to give it all to you, but . . .” “Come on, man. Give it to me, Pete.” “I will tell you that we’re looking for great competitors. That’s really where it starts. And that’s the guys that really have grit. The mindset that they’re always going to succeed, that they’ve got something to prove. They’re resilient, they’re not going to let setbacks hold them back. They’re not going to be deterred, you know, by challenges and hurdles and things. . . . It’s that attitude—we really refer to it as grit.”

Whether we realize it or not, the culture in which we live, and with which we identify, powerfully shapes just about every aspect of our being.

At its core, a culture is defined by the shared norms and values of a group of people. In other words, a distinct culture exists anytime a group of people are in consensus about how we do things around here and why. As for how the rest of the world operates, the sharper the contrast, the stronger the bonds among those in what psychologists call the “in-group.”

The bottom line on culture and grit is: If you want to be grittier, find a gritty culture and join it. If you’re a leader, and you want the people in your organization to be grittier, create a gritty culture.

Dan Chambliss,

Yes, yes, and yes. “But I left out the most important thing,” Dan said. “The real way to become a great swimmer is to join a great team.”

In effect, he’d witnessed the corresponsive principle of personality development: he’d seen that the very characteristics that are selected for certain situations are, in turn, enhanced by them.

“Look, when I started studying Olympians, I thought, ‘What kind of oddball gets up every day at four in the morning to go to swimming practice?’ I thought, ‘These must be extraordinary people to do that sort of thing.’ But the thing is, when you go to a place where basically everybody you know is getting up at four in the morning to go to practice, that’s just what you do. It’s no big deal. It becomes a habit.”

“Speaking for myself,” Dan added, “I don’t have that much self-discipline. But if I’m surrounded by people who are writing articles and giving lectures and working hard, I tend to fall in line. If I’m in a crowd of people doing things a certain way, I follow along.”

“So it seems to me,” Dan concluded, “that there’s a hard way to get grit and an easy way. The hard way is to do it by yourself. The easy way is to use conformity—the basic human drive to fit in—because if you’re around a lot of people who are gritty, you’re going to act grittier.”

The way we do things around here and why eventually becomes The way I do things and why.

Often, our passion and perseverance do not spring from a cold, calculating analysis of the costs and benefits of alternatives. Rather, the source of our strength is the person we know ourselves to be.

James March,

It sometimes feels like we have nothing left to give, and yet, in those dark and desperate moments, we find that if we just keep putting one foot in front of the other, there is a way to accomplish what all reason seems to argue against.

Jamie Dimon,

Jamie has been the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States, for more than a decade. In the 2008 financial crisis, Jamie steered his bank to safety, and while other banks collapsed entirely, JPMorgan Chase somehow turned a $5 billion profit.

“You have to learn to get over bumps in the road and mistakes and setbacks,” he told me when I called to talk about the culture he’s built at JPMorgan Chase. “Failures are going to happen, and how you deal with them may be the most important thing in whether you succeed. You need fierce resolve. You need to take responsibility. You call it grit. I call it fortitude.”