The Power of Passion and Perseverance
Angela Duckworth
Passion and perseverance outlast raw talent — here is how to build both.
After studying West Point cadets, Spelling Bee finalists, and elite athletes, Duckworth found the best predictor of success wasn't IQ or talent — it was grit. The math is striking: effort counts twice.
Everything Duckworth wants you to walk away with
Effort matters more than talent because it enters the equation twice. Without effort, talent is nothing more than unmet potential. Without effort, skill is nothing more than what you could have done but didn't.
No other commonly measured personality trait — including extroversion, emotional stability, and conscientiousness — was as effective as grit. Our potential is one thing. What we do with it is quite another.
They were the opposite of complacent, yet satisfied being unsatisfied. Each was chasing something of unparalleled interest, and the chase itself was gratifying. Even boring or painful parts didn't make them dream of giving up.
Low-level goals are written in pencil — flexible, erasable, replaceable. The top-level goal is written in ink. Buffett says to circle your five highest priorities from twenty-five and avoid the rest at all costs — they're what distract you.
There is nothing extraordinary in any single action — only that they are done consistently and correctly, and all together produce excellence. But mundanity is a hard sell. We'd rather believe in magical genius because it lets us off the hook.
Nietzsche saw that our self-love promotes the cult of genius. Darwin's secret wasn't brilliance — he simply kept all the questions alive at the back of his mind, ready to be retrieved when relevant data appeared, long after others moved on.
40% of people who buy home exercise equipment end up using it less than expected. How often people start and then permanently give up is the bigger impediment to progress. Grit means waking up the next day ready to keep going.
Interest keeps you engaged. Deliberate practice targets weaknesses with focused effort. Purpose connects your work to other people. Hope — not wishful thinking but the belief you can improve — sustains you through the inevitable plateaus.
Grit is not fixed. It changes as we figure out our life philosophy, learn to dust ourselves off, and learn to tell the difference between low-level goals to abandon quickly and higher-level goals that demand tenacity. Necessity is the mother of adaptation.
High but not the highest intelligence, combined with the greatest degree of persistence, achieves greater eminence than the highest intelligence with somewhat less persistence. It's not just falling in love with your work — it's staying in love.
These notes are inspired by direct excerpts and woven together into a readable guide you can follow from start to finish.
By Angela Duckworth
The highly accomplished are paragons of perseverance. They are the opposite of complacent—and yet, in a very real sense, they are satisfied being unsatisfied. Each is chasing something of unparalleled interest and importance, and it is the chase, as much as the capture, that is gratifying. Even when some of what they must do is boring, frustrating, or painful, they wouldn’t dream of giving up. Their passion is enduring.
What makes high achievers special comes down to two things. First, they are unusually resilient and hardworking. Second, they know in a very, very deep way what it is they want. They not only have determination—they have direction.
Grit is the combination of passion and perseverance. The Grit Scale measures this by asking two kinds of questions: half about perseverance (e.g., “I have overcome setbacks to conquer an important challenge” and “I finish whatever I begin”) and half about passion (e.g., whether your interests change from year to year or whether you’ve been obsessed with an idea briefly and then lost interest). Taken honestly, it measures the extent to which you approach life with grit.
The Grit Scale proved its predictive power across domains. At West Point, grit was an astoundingly reliable predictor of which cadets survived the grueling initial training period known as Beast—by the last day, seventy-one cadets had dropped out, and grit predicted who made it and who did not. In the sales profession, where daily rejection is par for the course, grit predicted who stayed on the job six months later and who left—outperforming every other commonly measured personality trait, including extroversion, emotional stability, and conscientiousness.
Other factors do matter alongside grit. In sales, for instance, prior experience helps—novices are less likely to keep their jobs than those with experience.
Our potential is one thing. What we do with it is quite another.
Francis Galton concluded that outliers are remarkable in three ways: they demonstrate unusual ability in combination with exceptional zeal and the capacity for hard labor. Charles Darwin exemplified this pattern. One biographer describes Darwin as someone who kept thinking about the same questions long after others would move on to easier problems. Where most people engage in a kind of semi-willful forgetting when they’re puzzled, Darwin deliberately kept all of his questions alive at the back of his mind, ready to be retrieved when a relevant bit of data presented itself.
William James acknowledged that there are, of course, limits—“the trees don’t grow into the sky.” But these outer boundaries of where you will eventually stop improving are simply irrelevant for the vast majority of us.
One way to interpret stories of people who were overlooked by talent-spotters is that talent is great, but tests of talent stink—there is certainly an argument that such tests are highly imperfect. But another conclusion is that the focus on talent distracts us from something that is at least as important, and that is effort.
| Concept | Definition | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
| Talent | How quickly skills improve with effort. | Sets learning rate, not destiny. |
| Skill | What you can do after investing effort. | Built over time through practice. |
| Achievement | Applying skill toward valuable output. | Effort appears twice in the model. |
| Equation | Talent × Effort = Skill; Skill × Effort = Achievement. | Consistency beats intensity over time. |
A study of competitive swimmers titled “The Mundanity of Excellence” encapsulates a core truth: the most dazzling human achievements are, in fact, the aggregate of countless individual elements, each of which is ordinary. Sociologist Dan Chambliss observed that superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then fitted together in a synthesized whole. There is nothing extraordinary in any one of those actions; only the fact that they are done consistently and correctly, and all together, produces excellence. But mundanity is a hard sell.
Nietzsche understood why. “Our self-love promotes the cult of the genius,” he said. “For if we think of genius as something magical, we are not obliged to compare ourselves and find ourselves lacking.” Mythologizing natural talent lets us all off the hook. It lets us relax into the status quo.
Talent is how quickly your skills improve when you invest effort. Achievement is what happens when you take your acquired skills and use them.
When you consider individuals in identical circumstances, what each achieves depends on just two things—talent and effort. But effort factors into the calculations twice, not once. Effort builds skill. At the very same time, effort makes skill productive.
Without effort, your talent is nothing more than your unmet potential. Without effort, your skill is nothing more than what you could have done but didn’t.
Staying on the treadmill is one thing, and it is related to staying true to your commitments even when you’re not comfortable. But getting back on the treadmill the next day, eager to try again, is even more reflective of grit. When you don’t come back the next day—when you permanently turn your back on a commitment—your effort plummets to zero. By some estimates, about 40 percent of people who buy home exercise equipment end up using it less than expected. How hard you push in a given workout matters, but the bigger impediment to progress is that sometimes you stop working out altogether. As any coach or athlete will tell you, consistency of effort over the long run is everything.
How many people start something new, full of excitement and good intentions, and then give up permanently when they encounter the first real obstacle or the first long plateau in progress? Many of us quit what we start far too early and far too often. Even more than the effort a gritty person puts in on a single day, what matters is that they wake up the next day, and the next, ready to keep going.
Developing real expertise and figuring out really hard problems takes time—longer than most people imagine. Then you’ve got to apply those skills and produce goods or services that are valuable to people. Grit is about working on something you care about so much that you’re willing to stay loyal to it. It’s doing what you love—but not just falling in love. It’s staying in love.
In interviews about what it takes to succeed, high achievers talk not about intensity but about consistency over time. When asked “Do you have a life philosophy?”—not what you want to get done today or this year, but what you’re trying to get out of life—some people find the question meaningless because they have a lot of goals and projects. But others answer with conviction: This is what I want. In grit terms, that conviction is your passion.
One way to understand this is to envision goals in a hierarchy. At the bottom are your most concrete and specific goals—short-term to-do items that exist merely as means to ends. The higher the goal in the hierarchy, the more abstract, general, and important it is. The higher the goal, the more it’s an end in itself, and the less it’s merely a means to something else.
The top-level goal is not a means to any other end. It is an end in itself. Some psychologists call this an “ultimate concern.” Think of it as a compass that gives direction and meaning to all the goals below it. You are, in a sense, pointing in the same direction, ever eager to take even the smallest step forward rather than a step to the side toward some other destination.
A lack of grit can come from having less coherent goal structures—a bunch of mid-level goals that don’t correspond to any unifying top-level goal, or competing goal hierarchies that aren’t connected to each other. The more unified, aligned, and coordinated your goal hierarchies, the better.
While one top-level professional goal is ideal, the idea that every waking moment should be guided by a single overarching aim is an idealized extreme. Still, you can pare down long lists of mid-level and low-level work goals according to how they serve a goal of supreme importance.
Think of it this way: the highest-level goal gets written in ink—once you’ve done enough living and reflecting to know what that goal is—and the lower-level goals get written in pencil, so you can revise them, erase them altogether, and figure out new ones to take their place.
Grit can be recognized through specific behavioral markers: working with distant objects in view rather than living from hand to mouth; active preparation for later life; working toward a definite goal; a tendency not to abandon tasks from mere changeability; not seeking something fresh because of novelty; not “looking for a change”; quiet determination to stick to a course once decided upon; and a tendency not to abandon tasks in the face of obstacles—perseverance, tenacity, doggedness.
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.
Is grit something you’re born with? A large twin study in the United Kingdom estimated the heritability of the perseverance subscale of grit at 37 percent and the passion subscale at 20 percent—on par with other personality traits. In the simplest terms, some of the variation in grit can be attributed to genetic factors, and the rest to experience. There is no single gene for grit, or indeed for any other psychological trait.
Data from a large sample of American adults shows that Grit Scale scores vary by age: the grittiest adults were in their late sixties or older, and the least gritty were in their twenties. Grit grows as you figure out your life philosophy, learn to dust yourself 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.
Why do people change? One reason is learning something you simply didn’t know before. Another is that circumstances change. As you grow older, you’re thrust into new situations—a first job, a marriage, caring for aging parents. These new situations call on you to act differently. Because no species is more adaptable than ours, you rise to the occasion. Necessity is the mother of adaptation.
Any of four thoughts might go through your head right before you quit what you’re doing: “I’m bored.” “The effort isn’t worth it.” “This isn’t important to me.” “I can’t do this, so I might as well give up.” Each of these maps to one of the four psychological assets that mature paragons of grit have in common.
These four assets are not fixed commodities. You can learn to discover, develop, and deepen your interests. You can acquire the habit of discipline. You can cultivate a sense of purpose and meaning. And you can teach yourself to hope. You can grow your grit from the inside out.
“Follow your passion” is a popular theme of commencement speeches. High achievers frequently say things like “I love what I do” and “I can’t wait to get into the studio” and “I can’t wait to get on with the next project.” They are doing things not because they have to or because it’s financially lucrative.
Research shows that people are enormously more satisfied with their jobs when they do something that fits their personal interests. A meta-analysis aggregating data from almost a hundred studies found that people whose jobs match their interests are, in general, happier with their lives as a whole. A second meta-analysis of sixty studies confirmed that employees whose intrinsic personal interests fit with their occupations do their jobs better, are more helpful to their coworkers, and stay at their jobs longer. College students whose interests align with their major earn higher grades and are less likely to drop out. The “casting vote” for how well you can expect to do in any endeavor is desire and passion—the strength of your interest.
But don’t assume that people who love their work started from a different place than you. Chances are, they took quite some time figuring out exactly what they wanted to do. A commencement speaker may say “I can’t imagine doing anything else,” but in fact, there was a time earlier in life when they could. What prevents a lot of young people from developing a serious career interest is unrealistic expectations—holding out for perfection the way a twenty-one-year-old holds out for a romantic partner who is absolutely the best in every way.
A first encounter with what might eventually lead to a lifelong passion is just the opening scene in a much longer, less dramatic narrative. Passion for your work is a little bit of discovery, followed by a lot of development, and then a lifetime of deepening.
Before hard work comes play. Before you’re ready to spend hours a day diligently honing skills, you must goof around, triggering and retriggering interest. At the earliest stage, novices aren’t obsessed with getting better. They don’t know what their top-level, life-orienting goal will be. More than anything else, they’re having fun. The best mentors at this stage are especially warm and supportive, making initial learning pleasant and rewarding—much of the introduction is like a game.
A degree of autonomy during the early years is also important. Longitudinal studies confirm that overbearing parents and teachers erode intrinsic motivation. Kids whose parents let them make their own choices about what they like are more likely to develop interests later identified as a passion. Shortcutting the stage of relaxed, playful interest discovery has dire consequences. And the grittier an individual is, the fewer career changes they’re likely to make.
The desire to learn new things, to explore the world, to seek novelty—it’s a basic human drive. But how do you explain the enduring interests of gritty people? The key is that novelty for the beginner comes in one form and novelty for the expert in another. For the beginner, novelty is anything that hasn’t been encountered before. For the expert, novelty is nuance.
The directive to follow your passion is not bad advice. But what may be even more useful is to understand how passions are fostered in the first place.
Given that gritty people typically stick with their commitments longer, it might seem like their major advantage is simply more time on task. But you probably know people who’ve racked up decades of experience yet stagnate at a middling level of competence. As one observer puts it: some people get twenty years of experience, while others get one year of experience twenty times in a row.
Kaizen is Japanese for “continuous improvement”—resisting the plateau of arrested development. After interviewing dozens of grit paragons, every single one exudes kaizen, with no exceptions. It’s a persistent desire to do better. 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 crucial insight of Anders Ericsson’s research is not that experts log more hours of practice, but that experts practice differently. Unlike most people, experts are logging thousands upon thousands of hours of what Ericsson calls deliberate practice.
Each requirement is unremarkable on its own, but together they define a rare kind of effort:
Even the most complex and creative human abilities can be broken down into component skills, each of which can be practiced.
A study of competitive spellers illustrates the distinction. Experienced spellers, parents, and coaches recommended three types of preparation: first, reading for pleasure and playing word games like Scrabble; second, getting quizzed by another person or computer program; third, unassisted, solitary spelling practice—memorizing words from the dictionary, reviewing a spelling notebook, and committing word origins to memory. Only this third category met the criteria for deliberate practice. And deliberate practice predicted advancing to further rounds in the final competition far better than any other kind of preparation. Quizzing, however, served as a necessary prelude—a way to diagnose weaknesses and identify words to target for focused practice.
If you judge practice by what it feels like, though, you might reach a different conclusion. On average, spellers rated deliberate practice as significantly more effortful and significantly less enjoyable than anything else they did to prepare. Reading for pleasure and playing Scrabble felt as enjoyable as eating your favorite food. And world-class performers who retire tend not to keep up their deliberate practice schedule—evidence that it is not intrinsically pleasurable in the way flow is.
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as a state of complete concentration “that leads to a feeling of spontaneity”—performing at high levels of challenge yet feeling effortless. Ericsson is skeptical that deliberate practice could ever feel as enjoyable as flow: deliberate practice is carefully planned, while flow is spontaneous; deliberate practice requires working where challenges exceed skill, while flow occurs when challenge and skill are in balance; deliberate practice is exceptionally effortful, while flow is, by definition, effortless. In other words, deliberate practice is for preparation, and flow is for performance. Deliberate practice can be deeply gratifying, but in a different way—the thrill of getting better is one kind of positive experience, and the ecstasy of performing at your best is another.
How many hours of practice do most people accomplish that checks all four boxes of deliberate practice? Many people are likely cruising through life doing precisely zero hours of daily deliberate practice. Even supermotivated people working to exhaustion may not be doing deliberate practice.
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. The desire to connect with and serve others is as basic a human need as the appetite for pleasure. In sharp contrast to less gritty people, grittier people are dramatically more motivated to seek a meaningful, other-centered life. This is not to say that all grit paragons are saints, but most gritty people see their ultimate aims as deeply connected to the world beyond themselves. Research suggests there are many more gritty heroes than gritty villains.
Three bricklayers are asked: “What are you doing?” The first says, “I am laying bricks.” The second says, “I am building a church.” The third says, “I am building the house of God.”
It’s not that some kinds of occupations are necessarily jobs and others are callings. What matters is whether you believe that laying down the next brick is just something that has to be done, something that will lead to further personal success, or work that connects you to something far greater than yourself. How you see your work is more important than your job title—and you can go from job to career to calling without changing your occupation.
There’s nothing wrong with having no professional ambition other than to make an honest living, but most of us yearn for much more. As Studs Terkel concluded, all of us are looking for daily meaning as well as daily bread. A lot of anxiety comes from the assumption that your calling is a magical entity waiting to be discovered—but just as with interests, you need to play an active role in developing and deepening it.
Writing this book helped Duckworth realize that she had an inkling about her interests in adolescence, some clarity about purpose in her twenties, and finally in her thirties the experience and expertise to articulate her top-level, life-organizing goal.
Grit depends on a specific kind of hope—not the expectation that luck will save you, but the expectation that your own efforts can improve your 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.
A seminal experiment by Martin Seligman and Steve Maier proved for the first time that it isn’t suffering that leads to hopelessness—it’s suffering you think you can’t control. In the decade that followed, additional experiments revealed that suffering without control reliably produces symptoms of clinical depression, including changes in appetite and physical activity, sleep problems, and poor concentration.
Compared to optimists, pessimists are more likely to suffer from depression and anxiety. Optimists also fare better in domains beyond mental health: optimistic undergraduates earn higher grades and are less likely to drop out; optimistic young adults stay healthier through middle age and live longer; optimists are more satisfied with their marriages. A one-year study of insurance agents found that optimists are twice as likely to stay in their jobs and sell about 25 percent more insurance. Studies across telecommunications, real estate, car sales, banking, and other industries show that optimists outsell pessimists by 20 to 40 percent.
When highly resilient people are asked about their greatest disappointment, they respond in a strikingly consistent way: “I don’t really think in terms of disappointment. I tend to think that everything that happens is something I can learn from.” Teachers who interpret adversity optimistically have more grit, are happier, and get their students to achieve more during the school year. When you keep searching for ways to change your situation for the better, you stand a chance of finding them. When you stop searching, you guarantee they won’t be found.
Carol Dweck discovered that people of all ages carry around private theories about how the world works. Her research identified “helpless” children whose core belief was that a lack of ability led to mistakes, rather than a lack of effort. It wasn’t just a long string of failures that made these children pessimistic—it was their beliefs about success and learning.
Students with a growth mindset are significantly grittier than students with a fixed mindset. Grittier students earn higher report card grades and, after graduation, are more likely to enroll in and persist through college. Growth mindset and grit go together across all ages.
Where do mindsets come from? Personal histories of success and failure, and how the people around you—particularly those in authority—responded to those outcomes. Consider what people said to you as a child when you did something well. Were you praised for your talent? Or for your effort?
Language is one way to cultivate hope. But modeling a growth mindset—demonstrating by your actions that you truly believe people can learn to learn—may be even more important. “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
Research on organizational culture found that in fixed-mindset companies, employees felt only a few star performers were valued and the company wasn’t invested in others’ development. They admitted to keeping secrets, cutting corners, and cheating to get ahead. In growth-mindset cultures, employees were 47 percent more likely to say colleagues were trustworthy, 49 percent more likely to say the company fosters innovation, and 65 percent more likely to say it supports risk taking. The reality is that most people have an inner fixed-mindset pessimist alongside their inner growth-mindset optimist—and it’s easy to change what you say without changing your body language, facial expressions, and behavior.
When does struggle lead to hope rather than hopelessness? The answer lies in the brain. Higher-order brain areas like the prefrontal cortex can regulate the limbic structures that produce distress. When you have a belief that says “I can do something about this” or “This really isn’t so bad,” these inhibitory circuits activate and cool down the stress response. There is plasticity in that circuitry: if you experience potent adversity that you overcome on your own during your youth, you develop a different way of dealing with adversity later on. Just telling somebody they can overcome adversity isn’t enough—for the rewiring to happen, you have to activate the control circuitry at the same time as those low-level stress areas. That happens when you experience mastery at the same time as adversity.
People who cruise through life friction-free for a long time before encountering their first real failure have so little practice falling and getting up again, and so many reasons to cling to a fixed mindset. Many invisibly vulnerable high-achievers stumble in young adulthood and struggle to get up again. They know how to succeed but not how to fail.
Children in poverty face a different risk: too many helplessness experiences and not enough mastery experiences. They aren’t learning “I can do this. I can succeed in that.” Those earlier experiences can have enduring effects. You need to learn that there is a contingency between your actions and what happens to you.
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 in our lives.
There is no either/or trade-off between supportive parenting and demanding parenting. It’s a common misunderstanding to think of “tough love” as a carefully struck balance between affection on one hand and firmly enforced expectations on the other. In actuality, there’s no reason you can’t do both. The best parents are “child-centered” in that they clearly put their children’s interests first, but they don’t believe children are always the better judge of what to do, how hard to work, or when to give up. They appreciate that children need love, limits, and latitude to reach their full potential. Their authority is based on knowledge and wisdom, rather than power.
A study of about ten thousand American teenagers confirmed the pattern: regardless of gender, ethnicity, social class, or parents’ marital status, teens with warm, respectful, and demanding parents earned higher grades in school, were more self-reliant, suffered from less anxiety and depression, and were less likely to engage in delinquent behavior. The same pattern replicates in nearly every nation that’s been studied and at every stage of child development. Longitudinal research indicates that the benefits are measurable across a decade or more.
One major discovery of parenting research is that what matters more than the messages parents aim to deliver are the messages their children receive. What may appear to be textbook authoritarian parenting—a no-television policy, for example—may or may not be coercive. What may seem permissive—say, letting a child drop out of high school—may simply reflect differences in the rules parents value as important. Don’t pass judgment on that parent lecturing their child in the cereal aisle. In most cases, you don’t have enough context to understand how the child interprets the exchange, and it’s the child’s experience that really matters.
The same dynamic applies to teachers. Teachers who are demanding—whose students say “My teacher accepts nothing less than our best effort”—produce measurable year-to-year gains in academic skills. Teachers who are supportive and respectful—whose students say “My teacher seems to know if something is bothering me” and “My teacher wants us to share our thoughts”—enhance students’ happiness, voluntary effort in class, and college aspirations.
The most powerful message a mentor can deliver combines high standards with belief in the other person’s ability to meet them: “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.”
Structured extracurricular activities possess two important features that are hard to replicate in any other setting. First, there’s an adult in charge—ideally, a supportive and demanding one—who is not the parent. Second, these pursuits are designed to cultivate interest, practice, purpose, and hope. The ballet studio, the recital hall, the dojo, the basketball court, the gridiron—these are the playing fields of grit. As soon as your child is old enough, find something they might enjoy doing outside of class and sign them up. Kids thrive when they spend at least some part of their week doing hard things that interest them. School is hard, but for many kids it’s not intrinsically interesting. Texting friends is interesting, but it’s not hard. Ballet can be both.
Countless research studies show that kids who are more involved in extracurriculars fare better on just about every conceivable metric—they earn better grades, have higher self-esteem, and are less likely to get in trouble. Longer-term longitudinal studies come to the same conclusion: more participation in activities predicts better outcomes.
Researchers at E.T.S. knew that high school grades and test scores did only a half-decent job of predicting success later in life—two kids with identical grades and scores will often end up faring very differently. When they asked what other personal qualities matter, one factor won by a long stretch: follow-through. The particular pursuits didn’t matter—whether tennis, student government, or debate team. The key was that students had signed up for something, signed up again the following year, and during that time had made some kind of progress. Harvard’s admissions process reflects this same conviction, paying the utmost attention to follow-through. Following through on hard things teaches powerful, transferable lessons: you’re learning from others, discovering your priorities through experience, and developing character.
The association between working hard and reward can be learned. Without directly experiencing the connection between effort and reward, animals—whether rats or people—default to laziness. Following through on commitments while growing up both requires grit and, at the same time, builds it.
When asked what it means to be a Seahawk, the answer begins with seeking great competitors—people 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, they’re not going to be deterred by challenges and hurdles.
If you want to be grittier, find a gritty culture and join it. If you’re a leader and you want the people in your organization to be grittier, create a gritty culture. “The real way to become a great swimmer is to join a great team.” When you go to a place where basically everybody you know is getting up at four in the morning to go to practice, that’s just what you do. It’s no big deal. It becomes a habit.
There’s a hard way to get grit and an easy way. The hard way is to do it by yourself. The easy way is to use conformity—the basic human drive to fit in—because if you’re around a lot of people who are gritty, you’re going to act grittier.
Often, the critical gritty-or-not decisions you make—to get up one more time, to stick it out through a miserable summer, to run five miles with your teammates when alone you might only run three—are a matter of identity more than anything else. Your passion and perseverance do not always spring from a cold, calculating analysis of costs and benefits. Instead, you ask yourself: Who am I? What is this situation? What does someone like me do in a situation like this?
Building a gritty culture requires more than slogans. Some teams make values tangible: each year that you play for a gritty program, you might be asked to memorize literary quotes handpicked to communicate core values—and be tested on them in front of the team. Core tenets might include: “Have a fierce resolve in everything you do.” “Demonstrate determination, resiliency, and tenacity.” “Do not let temporary setbacks become permanent excuses.” “Use mistakes and problems as opportunities to get better—not reasons to quit.” And the reminder that “talent is common; what you invest to develop that talent is the critical final measure of greatness.” But words, even those committed to memory, don’t sustain a culture when they diverge from actions.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; 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, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. — Theodore Roosevelt
The origin of great leadership begins with the respect of the commander for his subordinates. Leading from the front means doing the same hard work and facing the same challenges as the people you lead. When a cadet struggles with the physical fitness test, a leader sits down with them, puts together a training plan, and says “Let’s go run” or “Let’s go do intervals.” Very often, the person who was unable to do it alone becomes motivated once supported, and as they start to improve, their motivation increases further. At some point, they figure out how to do things on their own.
If you create a vision for yourself and stick with it, you can make amazing things happen. Once you’ve 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. And if each person’s grit enhances grit in others, over time you can expect a “social multiplier” effect.
You can grow your grit in two ways. From the inside out: 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. From the outside in: parents, coaches, teachers, bosses, mentors, and friends—developing your personal grit depends critically on other people.
Aristotle argued that too much or too little of a good thing is bad—too little courage is cowardice but too much courage is folly. By the same logic, you can be too kind, too generous, too honest, and too self-controlled. Psychologists Adam Grant and Barry Schwartz have revisited this argument, speculating that there’s an inverted-U function describing the benefits of any trait, with the optimal amount somewhere between the extremes. Finishing whatever you begin without exception, for instance, is a good way to miss opportunities to start different, possibly better, things.
Grit is far from the only—or even the most important—aspect of a person’s character. In studies of how people size up others, morality trumps all other aspects of character in importance.
The plurality of character operates against any one virtue being uniquely important. Greatness is wonderful, but goodness ever so much more so.
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.
Yes, grit involves a trade-off. The root of the word passion is pati, Latin for “to suffer.” And it’s not only you who pays the cost—it’s also your family and friends. Clarity won’t give you more hours in the week, but it will help you get more out of your hours.
No matter what you’ve fallen in love with doing, it’s possible to fall out of love, too. Burnout is not an illusion or a myth—it’s a psychological reality. Scientists who study burnout agree that its cardinal feature is exhaustion. In the workplace, exhaustion is usually accompanied by depersonalization—the sense that you’re unconnected to the people you’re serving—and helplessness—the sense that no matter what you do, you’re not making progress.
Whatever their parents’ education or income, all children need the same thing: appropriately demanding challenges in combination with consistently warm and respectful support. Some kids—especially those growing up in poverty—get too much challenge and not enough support. On the other hand, many kids—especially those with permissive parents—get a lot of “I love you, sweetie” without enough “I know you can do better. Let’s see what you can do tomorrow.”
High school and college dropouts have significantly higher divorce rates than the general population—a phenomenon dubbed “the Glick Effect.” The capacity to follow through appears to matter across life domains.
Effortless entertainment is the enemy of long-term passion and perseverance. If anything, the bells and whistles of the future will be louder than those of the present.
Contrary to popular wisdom, both professional and Olympic athletes don’t specialize early. Instead, they spend much of their youth sampling from a variety of sports before eventually committing to just one.
Not at all. A lot of factors determine success: emotional intelligence, physical talent, intelligence, conscientiousness, self-control, imagination—the list goes on. For everyday functioning, grit isn’t as important as self-control in the face of distractions and temptations. For making friends, emotional intelligence is probably more useful. And there is a long list of character strengths more consequential than grit in a moral sense. Greatness is wonderful but goodness ever so much more so. And, of course, there is luck and opportunity. Grit isn’t everything.