Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

by Angela Duckworth

I won’t just have a job; I’ll have a calling.

grit may matter more than talent.”

The admissions process for West Point is at least as rigorous as for the most selective universities.

more than 14,000 applicants begin the admissions process. This pool is winnowed to just 4,000 who succeed in getting the required nomination.

1,200 are admitted and enrolled.

The stories the cadets told were colorful and fun to listen to, but they had absolutely nothing to do with decisions the cadets made in their actual lives.

financial risks:

the most successful people were lucky and talented.

tales of rising stars who, to everyone’s surprise, dropped out or lost interest before they could realize their potential.

they were satisfied being unsatisfied.

the highly successful had a kind of ferocious determination that played out in two ways.

It was this combination of passion and perseverance that made high achievers special. In a word, they had grit.

Logically, the talented should stick around and try hard, because when they do, they do phenomenally well.

no other commonly measured personality trait—including extroversion, emotional stability, and conscientiousness—was as effective as grit in predicting job retention.

Our potential is one thing. What we do with it is quite another.

was surprised to find that some of these very able students weren’t doing as well as I’d expected. Some did very well, of course. But more than a few of my most talented students were earning lackluster grades or worse.

In

Could it be that I needed to find a different way to explain what I was trying to get across?

who ended up proving that aptitude tests can get a lot of things wrong.

Outliers, Galton concluded, are remarkable in three ways: they demonstrate unusual “ability” in combination with exceptional “zeal” and “the capacity for hard labor.”

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.

First, research shows that people are enormously more satisfied with their jobs when they do something that fits their personal interests.

It’s certainly true that you can’t get a job just doing anything you enjoy.

foster a passion.

life-changing import. In the opening scene of Julie & Julia, a younger Julia Child than any of us watched on television is dining in a fancy French restaurant with her husband, Paul. Julia takes one bite of her sole meunière—beautifully seared and perfectly deboned by the waiter moments before and now napped in a sauce of Normandy butter, lemon, and parsley. She swoons. She’s never experienced anything like this before. She always liked to eat, but she never knew food could be this good. “The whole experience was an opening up of the soul and spirit

Barry thinks that what prevents a lot of young people from developing a serious career interest is unrealistic expectations.

passion for your work is a little bit of discovery, followed by a lot of development, and then a lifetime of deepening.

interests thrive when there is a crew of encouraging supporters, including parents, teachers, coaches, and peers.

this stage of relaxed, playful interest, discovery, and development has dire consequences.

we need encouragement and freedom to figure out what we enjoy. We need small wins. We need applause.

Do this by going out into the world and doing something.

It’s looking forward and wanting to grow.”

grit is not just about quantity of time devoted to interests, but also quality

of time. Not just more time on task, but also better time on task.

strive to improve specific weaknesses.

hungrily seek feedback on how they did. Necessarily, much of that feedback is negative. This means that experts are more interested in what they did wrong—so they can fix it—than what they did right.

The active processing of this feedback is as essential as its immediacy.

reflected

Then experts start all over again with a new stretch goal.

Even the most complex and creative of human abilities can be broken down into its component skills, each of which can be practiced, practiced, practiced.

Flow is performing at high levels of challenge and yet feeling “effortless,” like “you don’t have to think about it, you’re just doing it.”

deliberate practice is a behavior, and flow is an experience.

Because when you achieve results, it’s incredibly fun. You get to enjoy the ‘Aha’ at the end, and that is what drags you along a lot of the way.”

Make it a habit.

change the way you experience it.

the idea of purpose is the idea that what we do matters to people other than ourselves.

purpose means “the intention to contribute to the

well-being of others.”

focus on a top-level goal is, in fact, typically more selfish than selfless.

“eudaimonic”—in harmony with one’s good (eu) inner spirit (daemon)—and the other “hedonic”—aimed at positive, in-the-moment, inherently self-centered experiences.