Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

by Angela Duckworth

“The ultimate thing is that we need to grow over time.”

Anson Dorrance

“If you want to create a great culture,” he told me, “you have to have a collection of core values that everyone lives.”

The origin of great leadership begins with the respect of the commander for his subordinates.

Indeed, forty years ago, 170 of the cadets who started Beast Barracks quit before it was over. That’s 12 percent, double the proportion who dropped out of Beast by the time I came to West Point to study grit a decade ago. Last year, attrition was down to less than 2 percent.

attrition model,”

developmental model.

“If you want to measure West Point by how much yelling and screaming goes on around here, then I’m just going to let you complain. Young men and women today just don’t respond to yelling and screaming.”

Finally, cadet slang is still spoken fluently by West Pointers and includes such improbably defined terms as firsties for “fourth-year cadets,” spoony for “neat in physical appearance,” and huah for everything from “I understand you” to “gung ho” to “agreed” to “great job.”

Personally, I have learned that if you create a vision for yourself and stick with it, you can make amazing things happen in your life. My experience is that once you have done the work to create the clear vision, it is the discipline and effort to maintain that vision that can make it all come true. The two go hand in hand. The moment you’ve created that vision, you’re on your way, but it’s the diligence with which you stick to that vision that allows you to get there. Getting that across to players is a constant occupation.

Anson Dorrance,

“If you thought of it as who was winning and who was losing, you’d miss the whole point. . . . It’s really the guy across from us that makes us who we are.” Our opponent, Pete explained, creates challenges that help us become our best selves.

On a daily basis, Earl “demonstrates in so many different ways what he’s all about.” If each person’s grit enhances grit in others, then, over time, you might expect what social scientist Jim Flynn calls a “social multiplier” effect.

one person’s grit enhances the grit of the others, which in turn inspires more grit in that person, and so on, without end.

“My teammates have been pushing me since day one. They’re helping me to get better, and vice versa. You have to have a genuine appreciation for teammates who are willing to put in hard work, buy into the system, and never be satisfied with anything but continuing to evolve. It’s incredible to see the heights we’re reaching from that humble attitude.”

“Success is never final; failure is never fatal. It’s courage that counts.”

“No synonyms.” Why not? “If you want to communicate effectively, you need to be clear with the words you use.”

dictums

excellence. “Compete comes from the Latin,” explains Mike Gervais, the competitive-surfer-turned-sports-psychologist who is one of Pete’s partners in culture building. “Quite literally, it means strive together. It doesn’t have anything in its origins about another person losing.”

Finishing strong means consistently focusing and doing your absolute best at every moment, from start to finish.

this confession gets one of the guys talking about why it’s important to be early: “It’s about respect. It’s about the details. It’s about excellence.”

“Every time I make a decision or say something to a player, I think, ‘How would I treat my own kid?’ You know what I do best? I’m a great dad. And in a way, that’s the way I coach.”

I realize I haven’t asked him directly how he and the Seahawks found the courage to continue after he’d made “the worst call ever.” Pete later told Sports Illustrated that it wasn’t the worst decision, it was the “worst possible outcome.” He explained that like every other negative experience, and every positive one, “it becomes part of you. I’m not going to ignore it. I’m going to face it. And when it bubbles up, I’m going to think about it and get on with it. And use it. Use it!”

The graph below shows how grit relates to life satisfaction, measured on a scale that ranged from 7 to 35 and included items such as, “If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing.” In the same study, I measured positive emotions such as excitement and negative emotions such as shame. I found that the grittier a person is, the more likely they’ll enjoy a healthy emotional life. Even at the top of the Grit Scale, grit went hand in hand with well-being, no matter how I measured it.

So, grit isn’t everything. There are many other things a person needs in order to grow and flourish. Character is plural.

Intrapersonal character includes grit. This cluster of virtues also includes self-control, particularly as it relates to resisting temptations like texting and video games. What this means is that gritty people tend to be self-controlled and vice versa. Collectively, virtues that make possible the accomplishment of personally valued goals have also been called “performance character” or “self-management skills.” Social commentator and journalist David Brooks calls these “resume virtues” because they’re the sorts of things that get us hired and keep us employed.

In the end, the plurality of character operates against any one virtue being uniquely important.

We all face limits—not just in talent, but in opportunity. But more often than we think, our limits are self-imposed. We try, fail, and conclude we’ve bumped our heads against the ceiling of possibility.

To be gritty is to keep putting one foot in front of the other. To be gritty is to hold fast to an interesting and purposeful goal. To be gritty is to invest, day after week after year, in challenging practice. To be gritty is to fall down seven times, and rise eight.

In his three-minute video posted on the MacArthur website, the first thing Coates says is: “Failure is probably the most important factor in all of my work. Writing is failure. Over and over and over again.”

The challenge of writing Is to see your horribleness on page. To see your terribleness And then to go to bed. And wake up the next day, And take that horribleness and that terribleness, And refine it, And make it not so terrible and not so horrible. And then to go to bed again. And come the next day, And refine it a little bit more, And make it not so bad. And then to go to bed the next day. And do it again, And make it maybe average. And then one more time, If you’re lucky, Maybe you get to good. And if you’ve done that, That’s a success.

plaudits

As some coaches like to say, when advising others, we focus less on the many things we can’t fix on our own and instead concentrate on “controlling the controllables.”

Paul Glick,

“the Glick Effect.”

ennui,

cacophony,

But if an interest is that which spontaneously draws our attention, then it’s clear that Lucy is much more interested in baking than music. Or, I should say, it’s now clear to Lucy. At first, when I pointed out what I thought was obvious, she said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Budding interests, you’ll recall from chapter 6, are sometimes more apparent to observers than the interested parties themselves.

apogee,