Part One — What Grit Is and Why It Matters
Chapter 1 — Showing Up
The highly accomplished are paragons of perseverance — the opposite of complacent, yet satisfied being unsatisfied. Each is chasing something of unparalleled interest, and it is the chase, as much as the capture, that is gratifying. Even when the work is boring or painful, they wouldn’t dream of giving up. Their passion is enduring.
Two qualities stand out in people at the top of any field. They are unusually resilient and hardworking, and they know in a very deep way what they want — they have not only determination but direction. It is this combination of passion and perseverance that makes high achievers special. In a word, they have grit.
The Grit Scale measures both halves: perseverance (“I finish whatever I begin”) and passion (whether your “interests change from year to year”). Tested at West Point’s brutal summer training, known as Beast, it predicted who made it through better than anything else. Among salespeople, 55 percent of whom were gone within six months, no other trait — extroversion, emotional stability, conscientiousness — predicted who stayed as well as grit. One fundamental insight has guided the work ever since: our potential is one thing, and what we do with it is quite another.
Chapter 2 — Distracted by Talent
Outliers, Francis Galton concluded, combine unusual “ability” with exceptional “zeal” and “the capacity for hard labor.” Charles Darwin embodied it, thinking about the same questions long after others moved on to easier problems. The normal response to being puzzled is to say, “I’ll think about this later,” and then forget it; Darwin deliberately did not, keeping every question alive at the back of his mind until a relevant bit of data appeared.
William James acknowledged limits — “the trees don’t grow into the sky” — but those outer boundaries are irrelevant for the vast majority of us. The lesson is that tests of talent are highly imperfect, and that our focus on talent distracts us from something at least as important: effort.
Chapter 3 — Effort Counts Twice
A study of competitive swimmers titled “The Mundanity of Excellence” gave away its conclusion in the title. The most dazzling achievements are the aggregate of countless ordinary elements. As sociologist Dan Chambliss put it, “Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, drilled into habit and then fitted together. There is nothing extraordinary or superhuman in any one of those actions; only the fact that they are done consistently and correctly, and all together, produce excellence.” But mundanity is a hard sell.
Nietzsche understood why: “Our self-love promotes the cult of the genius. For if we think of genius as something magical, we are not obliged to compare ourselves and find ourselves lacking.” Mythologizing talent lets us all off the hook.
The way out is a simple equation. Talent is how quickly your skills improve when you invest effort; achievement is what happens when you take those skills and use them. Talent sets the pace at which we improve, but effort counts twice: it builds skill, and at the very same time makes skill productive. Getting back on the treadmill the next day, eager to try again, is what grit looks like — because when you don’t come back, your effort plummets to zero. About 40 percent of people who buy home exercise equipment use it less than they expected; many of us quit what we start far too early and too often. Without effort, your talent is only unmet potential, and your skill is only what you could have done but didn’t.
Chapter 4 — How Gritty Are You?
Developing real expertise takes time, longer than most people imagine. Grit is staying loyal to something you care about — doing what you love, but not just falling in love. It is staying in love.
High achievers rarely talk about intensity; what comes up again and again is consistency over time. Coach Pete Carroll asks, “Do you have a life philosophy?” — not what you want to get done today, but what you’re trying to get out of life. In grit terms, he is asking about your passion.
Picture your goals as a hierarchy. At the bottom are concrete tasks, which exist merely as means to ends. The higher the goal, the more abstract and important it is, and the more it is an end in itself. The top-level goal — what some call an “ultimate concern” — is a compass that gives direction and meaning to everything below. A lack of grit comes from less coherent structures: mid-level goals serving no unifying aim, or competing hierarchies. One top-level professional goal is ideal.
Warren Buffett’s method is to list twenty-five career goals, circle the five highest priorities, and then avoid the other twenty at all costs, because they are what distract you from the goals that matter more. To which add a fourth step: do these goals serve a common purpose? The highest-level goal gets written in ink; the lower ones in pencil, to be revised or erased.
Long before any modern Grit Scale, in 1926, psychologist Catherine Cox studied 301 eminent historical figures and found that what separated the most accomplished was not raw intelligence but persistence — working toward distant goals, strength of will, and a quiet determination to stick to a course once decided. Her conclusion was unequivocal:
High, but not the highest, intelligence, combined with the greatest degree of persistence, will achieve greater eminence than the highest degree of intelligence with somewhat less persistence.
Catherine Cox, The Early Mental Traits of Three Hundred Geniuses (1926)
Chapter 5 — Grit Grows
Is grit something you are born with? Among more than two thousand pairs of teenage twins, heritability was estimated at 37 percent for perseverance and 20 percent for passion — on par with other personality traits. Some of the variation is genetic, and the rest is experience; there is no single gene for grit.
Plot Grit Scale scores against age and the grittiest adults are in their late sixties, the least gritty in their twenties. Grit grows as we figure out our life philosophy, learn to dust ourselves off after disappointment, and learn which low-level goals to abandon and which higher-level goals demand tenacity. We change because we learn things we didn’t know and because our circumstances change — a first job, a marriage, aging parents to care for — and no species is more adaptable than ours. Necessity is the mother of adaptation.
Right before you quit anything, one of four thoughts is likely going through your head: “I’m bored.” “The effort isn’t worth it.” “This isn’t important to me.” “I can’t do this.” Each maps onto one of four psychological assets that mature paragons of grit share. First, interest: intrinsically enjoying what you do. Second, practice: the daily discipline of doing things better than yesterday, zeroing in on your weaknesses for years. Third, purpose: the conviction that your work matters to others, since interest without purpose is nearly impossible to sustain for a lifetime. And fourth, hope: a perseverance that keeps you going even when things are difficult, at every stage. None is a “you have it or you don’t” commodity — you can grow all four from the inside out.
Part Two — Growing Grit from the Inside Out
Chapter 6 — Interest
“Follow your passion” is a staple of commencement speeches. Speakers say things like, “I get up every morning looking forward to work, I can’t wait to get on with the next project” — doing it not because they have to, and not because it is lucrative.
The research backs them up. A meta-analysis of nearly a hundred studies shows people are far more satisfied with their jobs, and with their lives as a whole, when the work fits their personal interests. A second, spanning six decades, adds that such employees do their jobs better, are more helpful to coworkers, and stay longer; students whose interests align with their major earn higher grades and are less likely to drop out. The strength of our interest is the “casting vote” for how well we do.
But those who love their work didn’t start from a different place; most took quite some time figuring out what they wanted. Barry Schwartz blames unrealistic expectations: “It’s really the same problem young people have finding a romantic partner. They want somebody who’s really attractive and smart and kind and empathetic and funny… They’re holding out for perfection.” A first encounter with a passion is just the opening scene; passion is a little discovery, a lot of development, and a lifetime of deepening.
Interests are not discovered through introspection — they are triggered by interactions with the outside world, and you can’t simply will yourself to like things. As Jeff Bezos observed, “One of the huge mistakes people make is that they try to force an interest on themselves.” Without experimenting, you can’t figure out which interests will stick.
Interests also thrive when there is a crew of encouraging supporters, because early interests are fragile. And before hard work comes play: before novices can spend hours honing skills, they must goof around, triggering interest and having fun before they obsess over getting better. The best early mentors are warm and supportive, and autonomy matters — overbearing parents and teachers erode intrinsic motivation, while kids allowed to make their own choices are likelier to develop a lasting passion.
Novelty for the beginner is anything not encountered before; for the expert, novelty is nuance — “the old with a slightly new turn,” as William James put it. So ask yourself: What do I like to think about? Where does my mind wander? What do I really care about? As soon as you have a general direction, trigger your nascent interests by going out and doing something — you’ll learn more than if you don’t. Following your passion is not bad advice, but it helps even more to understand how passions are fostered in the first place.
Chapter 7 — Practice
It might seem grit’s major advantage is simply more time on task. But some people get twenty years of experience, as the joke goes, while others get one year of experience, twenty times in a row.
Kaizen — Japanese for “continuous improvement” — is something every grit paragon exudes: a positive, forward-looking desire to grow, not a backward-looking dissatisfaction. Anders Ericsson’s crucial insight is not that experts log more hours, but that they practice differently, through what he calls deliberate practice.
Here is how. They set a stretch goal on one narrow weakness, not on what they already do well. Olympic swimmer Rowdy Gaines said, “At every practice, I would try to beat myself.” Then, with undivided attention and great effort — often while nobody is watching — they push until conscious incompetence becomes unconscious competence. Even the most complex abilities can be broken into component skills that are practiced and refined.
A study of competitive spellers makes it concrete. Of their three activities — reading and word games, being quizzed, and solitary memorization of words and word origins — only solitary practice met the criteria for deliberate practice, and it predicted success in the final competition far better than anything else. Quizzing helped champion Kerry Close diagnose the words she kept missing, but mainly as a prelude to targeted practice. Yet spellers rated deliberate practice as significantly more effortful and less enjoyable than anything else; performers who retire tend to stop it, which they wouldn’t if it were intrinsically pleasurable.
The signature experience of experts is what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow — effortless, complete concentration, where “you’re just doing it.” Ericsson doubts deliberate practice can feel like flow: practice is planned, flow spontaneous; practice demands challenge beyond skill, flow a balance of the two; practice is effortful, flow effortless. Deliberate practice is for preparation; flow is for performance.
Each requirement of deliberate practice is ordinary on its own — a clearly defined stretch goal, full concentration, immediate feedback, and repetition with reflection — yet many people do precisely zero hours of it, even some who work to exhaustion. Once you discover this science, your progress can skyrocket. Make it a habit at the same time and place each day; as James warned, “There is no more miserable human being than the one for whom the beginning of every bit of work must be decided anew each day.” And change how you experience it: in-the-moment self-awareness without judgment.
Chapter 8 — Purpose
Interest is one source of passion; purpose — the intention to contribute to the well-being of others — is another, and mature passions depend on both. Grittier people are dramatically more motivated to seek a meaningful, other-centered life; there may be gritty villains, but the research suggests far more gritty heroes.
Three bricklayers are asked what they are doing. The first says, “I am laying bricks”; the second, “I am building a church”; the third, “I am building the house of God.” The first has a job, the second a career, the third a calling — and we each tend to locate our own work in one of those three. What matters, Amy Wrzesniewski found, isn’t the occupation but how you see it: you can move from job to career to calling without changing what you do.
Anxiety often comes, she says, from assuming “your calling is a magical entity that exists in the world, waiting to be discovered” — the same mistake people make about interests, not realizing they must play an active role in developing both. For most people, purpose develops gradually. Three moves help: reflect on how the work you already do contributes to society; change it in small ways to connect with your core values; and find inspiration in a purposeful role model.
Chapter 9 — Hope
Grit depends on a particular kind of hope: 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.” This hope has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with getting up again.
In a 1964 experiment, psychologists Marty Seligman and Steve Maier proved that it isn’t suffering that leads to hopelessness — it is suffering you think you can’t control. Suffering without control reliably produces the symptoms of clinical depression.
Compared to pessimists, optimists suffer less depression and anxiety, earn higher grades, drop out less, stay healthier, live longer, and report happier marriages. MetLife agents who were optimists were twice as likely to stay in their jobs and sold about 25 percent more; across many industries, optimists outsell pessimists by 20 to 40 percent. Ask resilient people about their greatest disappointment and the answer is nearly identical: “I tend to think that everything that happens is something I can learn from.”
Cognitive behavioral therapy shows we can learn to observe our negative self-talk and respond as an optimist would — and its effects outlast antidepressant medication. The pattern holds for teachers: an optimistic teacher keeps looking for ways to help an uncooperative student, while a pessimist assumes nothing can be done. Optimistic teachers proved grittier and happier, and that explained why their students achieved more. As Henry Ford put it, “Whether you think you can, or think you can’t — you’re right.”
In Carol Dweck’s early work, children judged especially “helpless” believed mistakes came from a lack of ability rather than effort; their core beliefs, not any string of failures, made them pessimistic. Students with a growth mindset are grittier, earn higher grades, and are likelier to persist through college. Mindsets come from our history of success and failure and how authorities responded — were you praised for your talent, or for your effort? A few phrases help: “That didn’t work. Let’s talk about how you approached it and what might work better.” “This is hard. Don’t feel bad if you can’t do it yet.” But modeling matters more than language. As James Baldwin wrote, “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.” In growth-mindset cultures, employees are far likelier to call colleagues trustworthy and to say the company supports risk-taking.
When does struggle lead to hope rather than hopelessness? Partly it is biological: an appraisal that says, “I can do something about this,” activates inhibitory circuits over the brain’s distress structures, and that circuitry is plastic. But you can’t just talk someone into believing they can master challenges — the rewiring happens only when you experience mastery at the same time as adversity. Hence two failure modes: poverty, where children get helplessness experiences without enough mastery; and the friction-free life, which produces “fragile perfects” who know how to succeed but not how to fail. To teach yourself hope: update your beliefs about talent, practice optimistic self-talk, see a cognitive behavioral therapist if you are an extreme pessimist, and ask for a helping hand.
Part Three — Growing Grit from the Outside In
Chapter 10 — Parenting for Grit
Much of sticking with things is believing you can do it. That belief comes from self-worth, and self-worth comes from how others have made us feel.
There is no either/or trade-off between supportive and demanding parenting; there is no reason you can’t do both. NFL quarterback Steve Young’s parents were tough but loving; comedian Francesca Martinez’s were loving but tough. Both put their children’s interests first without believing children are always the better judge of how hard to work and when to give up. Children need love, limits, and latitude, and their parents’ authority rests on wisdom rather than power.
When about ten thousand American teenagers reported on their parents, those with warm, respectful, and demanding parents — regardless of gender, ethnicity, or class — earned higher grades, were more self-reliant, and suffered less anxiety, depression, and delinquency. The pattern replicates across nations and across a decade or more. What matters more than the message parents intend is the message children receive, so don’t judge the parent lecturing in the supermarket aisle — it is the child’s experience that counts. The same holds in classrooms: demanding teachers produce year-to-year gains in skills, while supportive ones enhance happiness, effort, and aspirations. The most powerful message a mentor can deliver combines both: I have very high expectations, and I know that you can reach them.
Chapter 11 — The Playing Fields of Grit
Grit is enhanced by structured extracurricular activities, which have two features hard to replicate elsewhere: an adult in charge who is not the parent — ideally a supportive and demanding one — and a design that cultivates interest, practice, purpose, and hope. The studio, the dojo, the court, the gridiron — these are the playing fields of grit.
So find something your child might enjoy and sign them up. Kids thrive doing hard things that interest them: school is hard but often not interesting, and texting is interesting but not hard — ballet can be both. Kids more involved in extracurriculars fare better on just about every conceivable metric.
Researchers at Educational Testing Service found that grades and test scores together only half-predict later success. Asking what other qualities matter, Warren Willingham found one winner by a long stretch: follow-through. The particular pursuit — tennis, student government, debate — didn’t matter; what counted was signing up, signing up again the next year, and making progress. Following through both requires grit and builds it, and Harvard’s admissions dean confirmed they pay it the utmost attention. Bob Eisenberger called this learned industriousness: without directly experiencing the link between effort and reward, people default to laziness. Hence the Hard Thing Rule: everyone in the family does a hard thing; you can quit, but only at a natural stopping point, never on a bad day; and you get to pick your own hard thing.
Chapter 12 — A Culture of Grit
Asked what it means to be a Seahawk, coach Pete Carroll’s answer begins with grit. “We’re looking for great competitors. Guys who 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.”
The bottom line on culture and grit is this: if you want to be grittier, find a gritty culture and join it; if you lead one, create it. As one swimmer put it, “The real way to become a great swimmer is to join a great team. When basically everybody you know is getting up at four in the morning to go to practice, that’s just what you do. It becomes a habit.” The drive to fit in is powerful, so the easy way to get grit is to surround yourself with gritty people.
The critical gritty-or-not decisions — to get up one more time, to run five miles with teammates when on our own we might only run three — are a matter of identity more than calculation. As political scientist James March observed, sometimes we think through the costs and benefits, but other times we simply ask: Who am I, and what does someone like me do in a situation like this? Theodore Roosevelt wrote the most famous expression of that posture:
It is not the critic who counts… The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.
Some teams put their values into words and require them to be lived — “Use mistakes and problems as opportunities to get better, not reasons to quit” — and Anson Dorrance’s soccer players must even memorize handpicked literary quotes and be tested on them. But West Point’s superintendent, Lieutenant General Robert Caslen, warns that words don’t sustain a culture when they diverge from actions. Leadership means leading from the front: when a cadet struggles with the two-mile run, Caslen builds a training program and runs the intervals alongside them, and the cadet who couldn’t do it alone gains confidence and eventually does it on their own. Because each person’s grit enhances grit in others, over time you get what social scientist Jim Flynn calls a “social multiplier” effect.
Chapter 13 — Conclusion
You can grow your grit. From the inside out, you can cultivate your interests, develop a habit of daily challenge-exceeding-skill practice, connect your work to a purpose beyond yourself, and learn to hope when all seems lost. And you can grow it from the outside in, because developing your grit depends critically on parents, coaches, teachers, mentors, and friends.
Aristotle argued that too much, or too little, of a good thing is bad — too little courage is cowardice, but too much is folly. Adam Grant and Barry Schwartz suggest an inverted-U describes the benefits of any trait, with the optimum between the extremes: finishing whatever you begin without exception, for instance, is a good way to miss opportunities to start different, possibly better, things.
Greatness and goodness are different, and if forced to choose, Duckworth would put goodness first — in studies of how people size up others, morality trumps everything else. David Brooks calls grit a “resume virtue,” distinct from “eulogy virtues” like gratitude and social intelligence and from intellectual virtues like curiosity; the three clusters best predict academic achievement, social functioning, and a love of learning, respectively. No single virtue is uniquely important. To be gritty is to fall down seven times, and rise eight.
Afterword — Seven Questions About Grit
Doesn’t grit come at a cost? Yes — the root of the word passion is pati, Latin for “to suffer,” and the cost is paid not only by you but by your family and friends. Clarity won’t give you more hours in the week, but it will help you get more out of the ones you have.
Can you lose your grit? Yes; no matter what you have fallen in love with doing, it is possible to fall out of love. Burnout is a psychological reality whose cardinal feature is exhaustion, usually accompanied by depersonalization and helplessness.
Is there a relationship between grit and socioeconomic opportunity? All children need the same thing: appropriately demanding challenges combined with consistently warm and respectful support. Some, especially those growing up in poverty, get too much challenge and not enough support; others get a lot of “I love you, sweetie” without enough “I know you can do better.”
What about grit and romantic relationships? Sociologist Paul Glick noticed that high school and college dropouts had significantly higher divorce rates — a phenomenon later dubbed “the Glick Effect.”
Do cell phones and social media make this an especially “ungritty” era? Effortless entertainment is the enemy of long-term passion and perseverance, and the bells and whistles of the future will only be louder.
When should I expect my kid to have the single-minded focus of world-class achievers? Contrary to popular wisdom, both professional and Olympic athletes don’t specialize early; they sample a variety of sports before committing to one.
Is grit the only psychological factor that determines success? Not at all. Intelligence, talent, conscientiousness, self-control, emotional intelligence, imagination — the list goes on, and so do luck and opportunity. For everyday functioning, grit isn’t as important as self-control in the face of temptation, and many character strengths matter more in a moral sense. Greatness is wonderful, but goodness ever so much more so. Grit isn’t everything.