Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

by Angela Duckworth

I can’t imagine anything that would change my ultimate aim, my life philosophy, as Pete might say. My compass, once I found all the parts and put it together, keeps pointing me in the same direction, week after month after year.

While poring over thousands of pages of biographical data, Cox and her assistant also evaluated sixty-seven different personality traits for a subset of one hundred geniuses.

Grit Scale. Degree to which he works with distant objects in view (as opposed to living from hand to mouth). Active preparation for later life. Working toward a definite goal. Tendency not to abandon tasks from mere changeability. Not seeking something fresh because of novelty. Not “looking for a change.” And the other two could easily be rewritten as perseverance items for the Grit Scale. Degree of strength of will or perseverance. Quiet determination to stick to a course once decided upon. Tendency not to abandon tasks in the face of obstacles. Perseverance, tenacity, doggedness.

grit grows as we figure out our life philosophy, learn to dust ourselves off after rejection and disappointment, and learn to tell the difference between low-level goals that should be abandoned quickly and higher-level goals that demand more tenacity. The maturation story is that we develop the capacity for long-term passion and perseverance as we get older.

Exactly how do life experiences change personality? One reason we change is that we learn something we simply didn’t know before. 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. I also learned that years of hard work are often mistaken for innate talent, and that passion is as necessary as perseverance to world-class excellence.

What the maturity principle comes down to, I think, is this. Over time, we learn life lessons we don’t forget, and we adapt in response to the growing demands of our circumstances. Eventually, new ways of thinking and acting become habitual. There comes a day when we can hardly remember our immature former selves. We’ve adapted, those adaptations have become durable, and, finally, our identity—the sort of person we see ourselves to be—has evolved. We’ve matured.

the research reveals the psychological assets that mature paragons of grit have in common. There are four.

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 heighten...

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

developing an interest requires time and energy, and yes, some discipline and sacrifice. But at this earliest stage, novices aren’t obsessed with getting better. They’re not thinking years and years into the future. They don’t know what their top-level, life-orienting goal will be. More than anything else, they’re having fun. In other words, even the most accomplished of experts start out as unserious beginners.

Encouragement during the early years is crucial because beginners are still figuring out whether they want to commit or cut bait.

For now, what I hope to convey is that experts and beginners have different motivational needs. At the start of an endeavor, we need encouragement and freedom to figure out what we enjoy. We need small wins. We need applause. Yes, we can handle a tincture of criticism and corrective feedback. Yes, we need to practice. But not too much and not too soon. Rush a beginner and you’ll bludgeon their budding interest. It’s very, very hard to get that back once you do.

All human beings, even from infancy, tend to look away from things they’ve already seen and, instead, turn their gaze to things that are new and surprising. In fact, the word interest comes from the Latin interesse, which means “to differ.” To be interesting is, literally, to be different. We are, by our natures, neophiles.

Jane used a painter’s analogy: “I’m like an artist who looks at the sky every morning and sees a variety of really brilliant colors where other people would just see blue or gray. I’m seeing in the course of a single day this tremendous complexity and nuance. I see something that is ever evolving and rich.”

interest—the desire to learn new things, to explore the world, to seek novelty, to be on the lookout for change and variety—it’s a basic drive.”

For the expert, novelty is nuance. “Take modern art,” Paul said. “A lot of pieces could seem very similar to a novice that seem very different to an expert. Novices don’t have the necessary background knowledge. They just see colors and shapes. They’re not sure what it’s all about.” But the art expert has comparatively enormous understanding. He or she has developed a sensitivity to details that the rest of us can’t even see.

Kaizen is Japanese for resisting the plateau of arrested development. Its literal translation is: “continuous improvement.” A while back, the idea got some traction in American business culture when it was touted as the core principle behind Japan’s spectacularly efficient manufacturing economy. After interviewing dozens and dozens of grit paragons, I can tell you that they all exude kaizen. There are no exceptions. Likewise, in her interviews with “mega successful” people, journalist Hester Lacey has noticed that all of them demonstrate a striking desire to excel beyond their already remarkable level of expertise: “An actor might say, ‘I may never play a role perfectly, but I want to do it as well as I possibly can. And in every role, I want to bring something new. I want to develop.’ A writer might say, ‘I want every book I do to be better than the last.’ “It’s a persistent desire to do better,” Hester explained. “It’s the opposite of being complacent. But it’s a positive state of mind, not a negative one. It’s not looking backward with dissatisfaction. It’s looking forward and wanting to grow.”

the dancer Martha Graham declared, “It takes about ten years to make a mature dancer.” More than a century ago, psychologists studying telegraph operators observed that reaching complete fluency in Morse code was rare because of the “many years of hard apprenticeship” required. How many years? “Our evidence,” the researchers concluded, “is that it requires ten years to make a thoroughly seasoned press dispatcher.” If you’ve read Ericsson’s original research, you know that ten thousand hours of practice spread over ten years is just a rough average. Some of the musicians he studied reached the high-water mark of expertise before that, and some after. But there’s a good reason why “the ten-thousand-hour rule” and “the ten-year-rule” have gone viral. They give you a visceral sense of the scale of the required investment. Not a few hours, not dozens, not scores, not hundreds. Thousands and thousands of hours of practice over years and years and years.

This is how experts practice: First, they set a stretch goal, zeroing in on just one narrow aspect of their overall performance. Rather than focus on what they already do well, experts strive to improve specific weaknesses. They intentionally seek out challenges they can’t yet meet.

Then, with undivided attention and great effort, experts strive to reach their stretch goal. Interestingly, many choose to do so while nobody’s watching.

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.

after feedback, then what? Then experts do it all over again, and again, and again. Until they have finally mastered what they set out to do. Until what was a struggle before is now fluent and flawless. Until conscious incompetence becomes unconscious competence.

And . . . then what? What follows mastery of a stretch goal? Then experts start all over again with a new stretch goal.

Nobody wants to show you the hours and hours of becoming. They’d rather show the highlight of what they’ve become.

I looked to see how grittier competitors experienced deliberate practice. Compared to their less passionate, less persevering competitors, grittier spellers not only logged more hours of deliberate practice, they rated it as both more enjoyable and more effortful. That’s right. Grittier kids reported working harder than other kids when doing deliberate practice but, at the same time, said they enjoyed it more than other kids, too.

he asks, ‘Tell me about your first race. How was it?’ She goes, ‘Great!’ A few seconds later, she adds, ‘That was hard!’ And she’s beaming—a smile from ear to ear. That says it all right there. She has that attitude with everything we do.” In the same conversation, Bruce told me that Katie willingly does more deliberate practice than anyone he’s ever met. “We’ll try a drill that she’s horrible at—something where she’ll start off in the poorest third of the group doing it. Then I’ll catch her sneaking practice time to get better at it, so within some period of time, she’s one of the best in the group. Some other swimmers, well, they try and they fail at it, and I have to cajole and beg them to try it again.” If deliberate practice can be “awesome,” can it ever feel like effortless flow?

the only time I could say that I was in flow was when I wasn’t being challenged.” At the same time, she described deliberate practice as gratifying in its own way: “Some of my most rewarding studying,” she told me, “was on my own, forcing myself to break down a big task into multiple parts and getting it done.”

deliberate practice can be deeply gratifying, but in a different way than flow. In other words, there are different kinds of positive experience: the thrill of getting better is one, and the ecstasy of performing at your best is another.

Each of the basic requirements of deliberate practice is unremarkable: • A clearly defined stretch goal • Full concentration and effort • Immediate and informative feedback • Repetition with reflection and refinement

my second suggestion for getting the most out of deliberate practice: Make it a habit. By this I mean, figure out when and where you’re most comfortable doing deliberate practice. Once you’ve made your selection, do deliberate practice then and there every day. Why? Because routines are a godsend when it comes to doing something hard. A mountain of research studies, including a few of my own, show that when you have a habit of practicing at the same time and in the same place every day, you hardly have to think about getting started. You just do.

“What do these creators have in common?” you’ll find the answer right in the title: daily rituals. In their own particular way, all the experts in this book consistently put in hours and hours of solitary deliberate practice. They follow routines. They’re creatures of habit.

Eventually, if you keep practicing in the same time and place, what once took conscious thought to initiate becomes automatic. “There is no more miserable human being,” observed William James, than the one for whom “the beginning of every bit of work” must be decided anew each day.

My third suggestion for getting the most out of deliberate practice is to change the way you experience it.

“Deliberate practice can feel wonderful,” Terry told me. “If you try, you can learn to embrace challenge rather than fear it. You can do all the things you’re supposed to do during deliberate practice—a clear goal, feedback, all of it—and still feel great while you’re doing it. “It’s all about in-the-moment self-awareness without judgment,” he continued. “It’s about relieving yourself of the judgment that gets in the way of enjoying the challenge.”

model emotion-free mistake making. They actually instruct teachers to commit an error on purpose and then let students see them say, with a smile, “Oh, gosh, I thought there were five blocks in this pile! Let me count again! One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five . . . six! There are six blocks! Great! I learned I need to touch each block as I count!” Whether you can make deliberate practice as ecstatic as flow, I don’t know, but I do think you can try saying to yourself, and to others, “That was hard! It was great!”

Interest is one source of passion. Purpose—the intention to contribute to the well-being of others—is another. The mature passions of gritty people depend on both. For some, purpose comes first.

most people first become attracted to things they enjoy and only later appreciate how these personal interests might also benefit others. In other words, the more common sequence is to start out with a relatively self-oriented interest, then learn self-disciplined practice, and, finally, integrate that work with an other-centered purpose. The psychologist Benjamin Bloom was among the first to notice this three-phase progression. Thirty years ago, when Bloom set out to interview world-class athletes, artists, mathematicians, and scientists, he knew he’d learn something about how people reach the top of their fields. What he didn’t foresee was that he’d discover a general model of learning that applied to all the fields he studied.

When I talk to grit paragons, and they tell me that what they’re pursuing has purpose, they mean something much deeper than mere intention. They’re not just goal-oriented; the nature of their goals is special.

Aristotle was among the first to recognize that there are at least two ways to pursue happiness. He called one “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. Aristotle clearly took a side on the issue, deeming the hedonic life primitive and vulgar, and upholding the eudaimonic life as noble and pure. But, in fact, both of these two approaches to happiness have very deep evolutionary roots. On one hand, human beings seek pleasure because, by and large, the things that bring us pleasure are those that increase our chances of survival. If our ancestors hadn’t craved food and sex, for example, they wouldn’t have lived very long or had many offspring. To some extent, all of us are, as Freud put it, driven by the “pleasure principle.” On the other hand, human beings have evolved to seek meaning and purpose. In the most profound way, we’re social creatures. Why? Because the drive to connect with and serve others also promotes survival. How? Because people who cooperate are more likely to survive than loners. Society depends on stable interpersonal relationships, and society in so many ways keeps us fed, shelters us from the elements, and protects us from enemies. The desire to connect is as basic a human need as our appetite for pleasure. To some extent, we’re all hardwired to pursue both hedonic and eudaimonic happiness. But the relative weight we give these two ki...

Three bricklayers are asked: “What are you doing?” The first says, “I am laying bricks.” The second says, “I am building a church.” And the third says, “I am building the house of God.” The first bricklayer has a job. The second has a career. The third has a calling.

Those fortunate people who do see their work as a calling—as opposed to a job or a career—reliably say “my work makes the world a better place.” And it’s these people who seem most satisfied with their jobs and their lives overall. In one study, adults who felt their work was a calling missed at least a third fewer days of work than those with a job or a career.

feels like my calling in life”) also expressed a deep sense of purpose (“The work that I do makes the world a better place”).

was zookeepers with a calling who expressed a sense of moral duty (“I have a moral obligation to give my animals the best possible care”).

continually look at what you do and ask how it connects to other people, how it connects to the bigger picture, how it can be an expression of your deepest values.” In other words, a bricklayer who one day says, “I am laying bricks” might at some point become the bricklayer who recognizes “I am building the house of God.”

“I began to feel like I was making a contribution to society,” he told me. “I understood I was responsible for moving people every single day. And when I became a project manager, I would walk away from these big installation jobs—you know, a hundred panels or a whole interlocking [of signals]—and I knew that what we’d done was going to last for thirty years. That was when I felt I had a vocation, or I would say, a calling.”

There’s an old Japanese saying: Fall seven, rise eight. If I were ever to get a tattoo, I’d get these four simple words indelibly inked. What is hope? One kind of hope is the expectation that tomorrow will be better than today. It’s the kind of hope that has us yearning for sunnier weather, or a smoother path ahead. It comes without the burden of responsibility. The onus is on the universe to make things better. Grit depends on a different kind of hope. It rests on the expectation that our own efforts can improve our future. I have a feeling tomorrow will be better is different from I resolve to make tomorrow better. The hope that gritty people have has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with getting up again.

Optimists, Marty soon discovered, are just as likely to encounter bad events as pessimists. Where they diverge is in their explanations: optimists habitually search for temporary and specific causes of their suffering, whereas pessimists assume permanent and pervasive causes are to blame.

How do grit paragons think about setbacks? Overwhelmingly, I’ve found that they explain events optimistically. Journalist Hester Lacey finds the same striking pattern in her interviews with remarkably creative people. “What has been your greatest disappointment?” she asks each of them. Whether they’re artists or entrepreneurs or community activists, their response is nearly identical. “Well, I don’t really think in terms of disappointment. I tend to think that everything that happens is something I can learn from. I tend to think, ‘Well okay, that didn’t go so well, but I guess I will just carry on.’ ”

think of a growth mindset this way: Some of us believe, deep down, that people really can change. These growth-oriented people assume that it’s possible, for example, to get smarter if you’re given the right opportunities and support and if you try hard enough and if you believe you can do it.

‘Setbacks don’t discourage me for long. I get back on my feet.’ ”