Part One — What Grit Is and Why It Matters
Chapter 1 — Showing Up
Look closely at the people at the top of their fields, and one thing stands out. They’re paragons of perseverance. They’re never complacent, and yet they’re satisfied being unsatisfied. Each one is chasing something of deep interest and importance, and the chase, as much as the capture, is what feels good. Even when the work is boring, frustrating, or painful, they wouldn’t dream of giving up.
Two things set these people apart. They’re unusually resilient and hardworking. And they know in a very, very deep way what it is they want. They don’t only have determination. They have direction. It’s this mix of passion and perseverance that makes high achievers special. In a word, they have grit.
To measure it, Angela Duckworth built a short test called the Grit Scale. Half the questions are about perseverance, like whether you agree that “I finish whatever I begin.” The other half are about passion, like whether your “interests change from year to year.”
The first real trial came at West Point, the U.S. Military Academy. Before their first year, new cadets go through a grueling summer of training called Beast, and every year some of them quit. By the last day of Beast one summer, 71 cadets had dropped out. Grit turned out to be an astoundingly reliable predictor of who made it through.
In sales, where you face rejection every day, it was the same. Six months after hundreds of salespeople took the Grit Scale, 55 percent of them were gone, and grit predicted who stayed better than any other trait. The same lesson kept showing up: your potential is one thing. What you do with it is quite another.
So if what you do with your potential matters that much, why do we spend so much time thinking about talent?
Chapter 2 — Distracted by Talent
People have wondered what makes high achievers different for a long time. In the 1800s, the English scientist Francis Galton studied the most accomplished people of his day. He found they had unusual “ability,” but also exceptional “zeal” and “the capacity for hard labor.”
Galton’s half cousin, Charles Darwin, fit the pattern. Most of us, when something puzzles us, say, “I’ll think about this later,” and then forget about it. Darwin didn’t. He kept his questions alive at the back of his mind for years, until a useful bit of data turned up.
The psychologist William James believed most people live far below their limits. “Of course there are limits,” he admitted. “The trees don’t grow into the sky.” But for almost all of us, those limits don’t matter. We’re nowhere near them.
Plenty of people who score poorly on talent tests go on to do great things anyway. You could conclude that talent tests just aren’t very good, and that’s true. But there’s a bigger lesson. Our focus on talent distracts us from something that’s at least as important, and that’s effort.
Chapter 3 — Effort Counts Twice
A study of competitive swimmers had a title that gave away its whole conclusion: “The Mundanity of Excellence.” Mundanity means ordinariness. The most dazzling achievements turn out to be a pile of small skills, each one ordinary, drilled into habit and fitted together. As the sociologist behind the study, Dan Chambliss, put it, “There is nothing extraordinary or superhuman in any one of those actions.”
But ordinary is a hard sell. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche explained why: “If we think of genius as something magical, we are not obliged to compare ourselves and find ourselves lacking.” Treating talent like magic lets all of us off the hook.
Here’s a better way to think about it. Talent is how quickly your skills improve when you put in effort. Achievement is what happens when you use those skills. So talent times effort gives you skill, and skill times effort gives you achievement. Talent matters. But effort counts twice. It builds skill, and at the same time, it makes skill productive.
That’s why showing up again matters so much. Staying on the treadmill when it gets hard says something about your grit. Getting back on the next day, eager to try again, says even more. When you walk away from a commitment for good, your effort drops to zero.
About 40 percent of people who buy home exercise equipment say they used it less than they expected. Think of all the treadmills gathering dust in basements right now, or the sweater that stopped at half a sleeve. Many of us start something full of excitement and quit for good at the first real obstacle. What matters most isn’t a gritty person’s effort on one day. It’s that they wake up the next day, and the next, and keep going.
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.
Chapter 4 — How Gritty Are You?
Grit takes time because the things worth doing take time. Building real expertise and solving hard problems take longer than most people imagine. So grit isn’t only about working hard. Grit is 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. When high achievers talk about success, they rarely mention intensity. What comes up again and again is consistency over time.
Pete Carroll, the longtime head coach of the Seattle Seahawks, likes to ask people, “Do you have a life philosophy?” Some people have no idea what he means. Others know right away. Carroll isn’t asking what you want to get done today. He’s asking what you’re trying to get out of life. In grit terms, he’s asking about your passion.
It helps to picture your goals as a pyramid. At the bottom are small tasks, like getting out the door by eight or calling a coworker back. These only matter because they get you something else. The higher you go, the bigger the goals get. At the very top sits one goal that matters for its own sake. It works like a compass, giving direction and meaning to every goal below it.
A lack of grit often comes from goals that don’t fit together, like a few separate pyramids pulling against each other. The more your goals line up, the better.
The investor Warren Buffett reportedly gave his personal pilot a three-step exercise. First, write down twenty-five career goals. Second, circle the five that matter most. Third, avoid the other twenty at all costs, because they’re what distract you. Duckworth adds a fourth step. Ask yourself how much these goals serve a common purpose. Your top goal gets written in ink. The lower goals get written in pencil, so you can change them or erase them.
This idea isn’t new. Nearly a century ago, the psychologist Catharine Cox studied about three hundred eminent people from history. She found that high but not the highest intelligence, paired with great persistence, beat the highest intelligence with a little less persistence.
Chapter 5 — Grit Grows
So are you born with grit? Researchers in London gave the Grit Scale to more than two thousand pairs of teenage twins. Genes explained about 37 percent of the differences in perseverance and 20 percent of the differences in passion. In simple terms, some of your grit comes from your genes, and the rest comes from experience.
Age tells more of the story. In a large sample of American adults, the grittiest people 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 learn which small goals to drop quickly and which big goals deserve more tenacity.
Why does grit grow with age? Mostly because your life changes. You get your first job. You may get married. Your parents get older, and you find yourself caring for them. These new situations ask you to act differently, and because no species adapts better than ours, you rise to the occasion. You change when you need to. Necessity is the mother of adaptation.
If grit can grow, it helps to know why people give up. Right before you quit, one of four thoughts tends to run through your head: “I’m bored.” “The effort isn’t worth it.” “This isn’t important to me.” Or, “I can’t do this, so I might as well give up.” Each of those thoughts has an answer. The grittiest people share four strengths, one for each.
First comes interest. Gritty people don’t enjoy every part of their work, but they’re captivated by the whole. Next comes practice, the daily discipline of trying to do better than yesterday. Third is purpose, the belief that your work matters to other people. And finally there’s hope, which isn’t really the last stage. It shows up at every stage, helping you keep going when things are hard.
None of these are things you either have or don’t. You can deepen your interests, build the habit of discipline, grow a sense of purpose, and teach yourself to hope. You can grow your grit from the inside out.
Part Two — Growing Grit from the Inside Out
Chapter 6 — Interest
Graduation speakers love to say you should follow your passion. The British journalist Hester Lacey has interviewed hundreds of high achievers, and she hears the same thing over and over: “I love what I do.” They get up every morning looking forward to work.
The research backs this up. People are far more satisfied at work when the job fits their interests. Someone who loves people isn’t happy alone at a computer all day. And people whose work fits their interests do their jobs better and stay longer.
But don’t assume people who love their work started in a different place than you. Chances are, it took them a long time to figure out what they wanted. A speaker may say, “I can’t imagine doing anything else,” but there was a time when they could. The psychologist Barry Schwartz thinks many young people get stuck because, just like with dating, they’re holding out for perfection.
A first spark of interest is only the opening scene of a much longer, slower story. One person on Reddit, somewhere in their thirties, wrote about having a “fleeting interest in everything” and “no career direction.” Here’s what science would tell them: passion for your work is a little bit of discovery, followed by a lot of development, and then a lifetime of deepening.
You don’t find interests by looking inward. They’re sparked by doing things out in the world, and the process is messy. You can’t force it, either. As Jeff Bezos has said, “One of the huge mistakes people make is that they try to force an interest on themselves.”
Before hard work comes play. Beginners aren’t obsessed with getting better. They’re having fun. When the researcher Benjamin Bloom studied world-class performers, he found their best early teachers made learning feel like a game. Kids also need some freedom to choose. Overbearing parents and teachers wear down a child’s own motivation, and most young people today would struggle to own a passion picked for them.
That leaves a puzzle. People are wired to seek out what’s new, so how do gritty people stay interested in one thing for decades? The psychologist Paul Silvia explains that novelty looks different for experts. For a beginner, novelty is anything they haven’t seen before. For an expert, novelty is nuance.
If you’re still looking, ask yourself where your mind wanders and what you really care about. Then go out and try things. You’ll learn more than if you don’t.
Chapter 7 — Practice
Interest gets you started, but getting good takes practice. Gritty people stick with things longer, so you might think their edge is simply more time on the job. But you probably know someone who’s done the same work for decades and is still only okay. As one of Duckworth’s colleagues likes to joke, some people get twenty years of experience, while others get one year of experience twenty times in a row.
The gritty don’t settle like that. They live by kaizen, a Japanese word that means “continuous improvement.” It isn’t looking back with regret. It’s looking forward and wanting to grow.
The psychologist Anders Ericsson found that experts don’t just practice more. They practice differently. He calls it deliberate practice. Experts pick one narrow weakness and set a stretch goal to fix it. They seek out challenges they can’t meet yet. The Olympic swimmer Rowdy Gaines said, “At every practice, I would try to beat myself.” They work with full focus, often when nobody’s watching. Then they get feedback, fix what’s wrong, and repeat.
The National Spelling Bee showed how this plays out. Spellers prepared three ways: playing word games, getting quizzed, and studying alone. Only the solo study counted as deliberate practice, and it predicted who went furthest far better than anything else.
But here’s the catch. Spellers rated deliberate practice as much harder and much less fun than anything else they did. And when world-class performers retire, most stop practicing hard. If it were fun, they’d keep going.
That seems to clash with flow, the state the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes, where you’re doing something very hard and it feels effortless. Deliberate practice is planned and takes great effort. Flow is spontaneous and feels easy. Both can be true. Deliberate practice is for preparation, and flow is for performance. The thrill of getting better is one kind of good feeling. The joy of performing at your best is another.
So how do you get more out of practice? First, learn how it works. You need a clear stretch goal, full focus, quick feedback, and repetition. Most people spend zero hours a day on practice that checks all four boxes.
Second, make it a habit. Practice at the same time and place every day, so you hardly have to think about starting. As William James observed, there’s “no more miserable human being” than the one who has to decide how to begin every bit of work fresh each day. While writing this book, the author’s plan was simple: “When it’s eight in the morning and I’m in my home office, I will reread yesterday’s draft.” It didn’t make writing easier. It made starting easier.
Third, change how the struggle feels. Notice what you’re doing without judging yourself, because judgment gets in the way of enjoying the challenge. Some educators even ask teachers to make mistakes in front of their students without getting upset, so kids learn that mistakes are nothing to fear.
Chapter 8 — Purpose
Interest is one source of passion. Purpose is the other. Here, purpose means wanting to help other people. The mature passions of gritty people depend on both. Grittier people are far more driven to live a meaningful life focused on others. That doesn’t make every gritty person a saint. But there are many more gritty heroes than gritty villains.
There’s an old story about three bricklayers. Someone asks them, “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.” The first has a job. The second has a career. The third has a calling.
There’s nothing wrong with just wanting to make an honest living. But most people want more. After interviewing workers across America, the writer Studs Terkel concluded that all of us are looking for “daily meaning as well as daily bread.”
The psychologist Amy Wrzesniewski found that no kind of work is automatically a job, a career, or a calling. What matters is how you see it. How you see your work matters more than your job title. So you can go from job to career to calling without changing what you do. “I think a lot of anxiety comes from the assumption that your calling is like a magical entity that exists in the world, waiting to be discovered,” she says. Like interests, a sense of calling is something you help grow.
The author’s own path went this way. She had a hint of her interests as a teenager, some clarity about purpose in her twenties, and in her thirties she could finally name her life’s top goal: “Use psychological science to help kids thrive.”
If you want more purpose in your work, start in one of three places. Think about how the work you already do helps other people. Look for small ways to change your work so it fits your core values. And find someone who lives with purpose, and learn from them.
Chapter 9 — Hope
There’s a big difference between saying “I have a feeling tomorrow will be better” and “I resolve to make tomorrow better.” Grit depends on the second kind of hope, the belief that your own effort can improve your future. The hope that gritty people have has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with getting up again.
In 1964, two young psychologists, Marty Seligman and Steve Maier, ran an experiment with dogs. One group got mild shocks but could stop them by pressing a panel. A second group got the same shocks with no way to stop them. Later, all the dogs were put in a box they could escape by hopping over a low wall. The dogs that had some control learned to jump. The dogs that had none just lay down and whimpered. It proved for the first time that it isn’t suffering that leads to hopelessness. It’s suffering you think you can’t control.
If helplessness can be learned, maybe hope can be too. Seligman went on to study optimism. Optimists are less prone to depression, stay healthier, and live longer. At the insurance company MetLife, optimistic agents sold about 25 percent more insurance than pessimists.
When Hester Lacey asks high achievers about their greatest disappointment, they nearly all say the same thing: “I tend to think that everything that happens is something I can learn from.” The good news is that you can learn to think this way. Cognitive behavioral therapy, a kind of talk therapy, teaches people to notice their negative self-talk and change it. You can practice explaining what happens to you the way an optimist would.
This matters for grit. Optimistic teachers turned out to be grittier, and their students learned more. When you keep looking for a way forward, you might find one. When you stop looking, you won’t.
The psychologist Carol Dweck wanted to know why some kids give up so fast after failing. She found it came down to their beliefs. They thought mistakes came from a lack of ability, not a lack of effort. Dweck calls these beliefs mindsets. With a fixed mindset, you believe your abilities can’t really change. With a growth mindset, you believe you can get better with effort. At every age studied, growth mindset and grit go together.
Your mindset often comes from how people responded to you as a kid. When you did something well, were you praised for your talent or for your effort? You probably talk to yourself the same way today. So choose your words with care, like “This is hard. Don’t feel bad if you can’t do it yet.” But actions matter even more. As the writer James Baldwin put it, “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
So when does struggle build hope, and when does it build hopelessness? Years after the dog experiments, Maier found an answer in the brain. When you face something hard and think, “I can do something about this,” the thinking part of your brain calms the alarm. But just telling someone they can handle hard things isn’t enough. The brain rewires, he says, “when you experience mastery at the same time as adversity.” You need to face something truly hard and get through it yourself.
Maier worries about kids in poverty, who get plenty of helpless experiences and too few wins. But people who breeze through life for years before their first real failure are at risk too. They’re the “fragile perfects.” They know how to succeed, but not how to fail.
To teach yourself hope, start with your beliefs. Remember that intelligence and talent can grow. Then practice talking to yourself like an optimist. If you’re a deep pessimist, find a cognitive behavioral therapist. And ask for a helping hand.
Part Three — Growing Grit from the Outside In
Chapter 10 — Parenting for Grit
You can grow grit on your own, but other people shape it too. Much of sticking with things is believing you can do it. That belief comes from feeling worthwhile, and that comes from how others have made you feel.
Take two very different families. When Steve Young, later a Hall of Fame quarterback, was homesick and struggling in college, his father wouldn’t let him quit. Francesca Martinez, a British comedian born with cerebral palsy, grew up with parents who believed in her fiercely. The Youngs were tough, but loving. The Martinezes were loving, but tough.
There’s no trade-off between supportive parenting and demanding parenting. You can do both. Wise parents know kids need love, limits, and room to grow. Their authority comes from knowledge and wisdom, not power. In a study of about ten thousand American teenagers, teens with warm, respectful, and demanding parents earned better grades and had less anxiety and depression.
What matters most isn’t the message a parent means to send. It’s the message the child receives. The same goes for teachers. Demanding teachers help students build skills, and supportive teachers make students happier and more willing to try. The best do both. In one study, students got feedback on their essays with a note that said, “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.” Students who got that note were far more likely to revise.
Chapter 11 — The Playing Fields of Grit
Activities like ballet, piano, or football have two things that are hard to find anywhere else. There’s an adult in charge who isn’t the parent. And the activity is built to grow interest, practice, purpose, and hope. The ballet studio, the recital hall, the basketball court: these are the playing fields of grit.
School is hard, but for many kids it isn’t interesting. Texting friends is interesting, but it isn’t hard. Ballet can be both. Kids who do more extracurriculars earn better grades, have higher self-esteem, and get into less trouble.
At the Educational Testing Service, the company behind the SAT, researcher Warren Willingham knew grades and test scores only half predict success. So he tracked students to see what else mattered. One quality won by a long stretch: follow-through. It didn’t matter which activity students chose, only that they signed up, signed up again the next year, and made progress. Following through while you’re growing up seems to both require grit and build it.
The psychologist Bob Eisenberger found that the link between hard work and reward can be learned. He called it learned industriousness. Without feeling that link firsthand, rats and people alike default to laziness.
Duckworth’s family lives by the Hard Thing Rule. First, everyone, parents included, does one hard thing that takes daily practice. Second, you can quit, but not until a natural stopping point, like the end of the season. You can’t quit on a bad day. And third, you get to pick your own hard thing, because it makes no sense to do something hard that doesn’t interest you.
Chapter 12 — A Culture of Grit
When Pete Carroll looks for players for the Seahawks, he says, “We’re looking for great competitors. That’s really where it starts. And that’s the guys that really have grit.” He wants people who are resilient and won’t let setbacks hold them back.
If you want to be grittier, find a gritty culture and join it. If you’re a leader and you want your people to be grittier, build a gritty culture.
Dan Chambliss, the sociologist who studied swimmers, put it simply: “The real way to become a great swimmer is to join a great team.” When everyone around you gets up at four in the morning to practice, that’s just what you do. “There’s a hard way to get grit and an easy way,” Chambliss says. “The hard way is to do it by yourself.” The easy way is to surround yourself with gritty people, because the drive to fit in will make you grittier too.
Over time, the group you belong to shapes who you are. Many gritty-or-not choices, like running five miles with your teammates when you’d only run three alone, come down to identity. The researcher James March points out that often we don’t weigh pros and cons at all. We ask, “Who am I? What does someone like me do in a situation like this?” Your strength comes from the person you know yourself to be.
Gritty cultures make their values clear. JPMorgan Chase, led by Jamie Dimon, lists principles like “Have a fierce resolve in everything you do” and “Use mistakes and problems as opportunities to get better, not reasons to quit.”
But words don’t hold a culture together if actions don’t match. At West Point, Lieutenant General Robert Caslen talks about leading from the front. If a cadet struggles with the two-mile run, he’ll build them a training plan and some afternoons run with them himself. “Once they start to improve, their motivation increases,” he says.
Grit spreads. If each person’s grit lifts the people around them, you get what the social scientist Jim Flynn calls a “social multiplier” effect, with everyone pushing everyone else higher.
Chapter 13 — Conclusion
You can grow your grit in two ways. From the inside out, you can cultivate your interests, practice past your current skill every day, connect your work to a purpose beyond yourself, and learn to hope when all seems lost. From the outside in, the people around you, like parents, coaches, teachers, and friends, play a big part.
Can you have too much grit? The philosopher Aristotle argued that too much or too little of a good thing is bad. Too little courage is cowardice, but too much is foolishness. The same goes for grit. Finishing everything you start, without exception, is a good way to miss chances to start something better.
Grit also isn’t the most important part of character. Duckworth wants her kids to be great, but if she had to choose, she’d put goodness first. When people size each other up, morality matters more than anything. We notice if a neighbor seems lazy, but we’re far more offended if they seem dishonest.
The writer David Brooks calls traits like grit and self-control “résumé virtues,” because they help you get hired and stay employed. Traits like gratitude and social intelligence he calls “eulogy virtues,” because in the end they may matter most to how people remember you. Grit best predicts achievement, but getting along with others best predicts how many friends you have. No single virtue does it all.
To be gritty is to keep putting one foot in front of the other. To be gritty is to hold on to a goal that’s interesting and meaningful. 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.
Afterword — Seven Questions About Grit
A few questions about grit come up again and again. The first is about balance. Doesn’t grit come at a cost? Yes. The root of the word passion is the Latin pati, which means “to suffer,” and your family and friends pay part of the cost too. Being clear on what matters most won’t give you more hours in the week, but it will help you get more out of them.
Can you lose your grit? Yes. You can fall out of love with your work, just as you fell into it. Burnout is real. It usually looks like exhaustion, feeling cut off from the people you work with, and feeling that no matter how hard you try, you’re not making progress.
Is it easier to grow up gritty in poverty or in wealth? All kids need the same thing: real challenges and steady, warm support. Kids in poverty often get too much challenge and not enough support. Kids with permissive parents often get lots of “I love you, sweetie” and not enough “I know you can do better.”
What about grit and marriage? Decades ago, a census researcher named Paul Glick noticed that people who dropped out of school had much higher divorce rates than everyone else. Quitting in one part of life may be linked to quitting in another.
Are phones making us less gritty? Effortless entertainment is the enemy of long-term passion and perseverance, and it will only get louder. When should a child show the focus of a world-class achiever? Not early. Most pro and Olympic athletes try lots of sports as kids before committing to one.
And is grit the only thing that decides success? Not at all. Intelligence, self-control, emotional intelligence, luck, and opportunity all matter. Grit isn’t everything. But it’s the part you can grow. Your potential is one thing. What you do with it, day after day, is up to you.