Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

by Angela Duckworth

“But let me tell you something. I’m going to grow up to love my work as much as you love yours. I won’t just have a job; I’ll have a calling. I’ll challenge myself every day. When I get knocked down, I’ll get back up. I may not be the smartest person in the room, but I’ll strive to be the grittiest.”

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

How do you measure something so intangible? Something that decades of military psychologists hadn’t been able to quantify? Something those very successful people I’d interviewed said they could recognize on sight, but couldn’t think of how to directly test for?

Half of the questions were about perseverance. They asked how much you agree with statements like “I have overcome setbacks to conquer an important challenge” and “I finish whatever I begin.”

The other half of the questions were about passion. They asked whether your “interests change from year to year” and the extent to which you “have been obsessed with a certain idea or project for a short time but later lost interest.” What emerged was the Grit Scale—a test that, when taken honestly, measures the extent to which you approach life with grit.

Grit turned out to be an astoundingly reliable predictor of who made it through and who did not.

So, what matters for making it through Beast? Not your SAT scores, not your high school rank, not your leadership experience, not your athletic ability. Not your Whole Candidate Score. What matters is grit.