Part One — What Grit Is and Why It Matters
Chapter 1 — Showing Up
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 have to do is boring, or frustrating, or even painful, they wouldn’t dream of giving up. Their passion is enduring.
Look closely at the people at the top of any field, and two qualities stand out. 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. It is this combination of passion and perseverance that makes high achievers special. In a word, they have grit.
To measure that combination, the Grit Scale was built around two halves. Half of the questions ask about perseverance: how much you agree with statements like “I have overcome setbacks to conquer an important challenge” and “I finish whatever I begin.” The other half ask about passion: whether your “interests change from year to year,” and the extent to which you “have been obsessed with a certain idea or project for a short time but later lost interest.” Taken honestly, the test measures the extent to which you approach life with grit.
The first arena where the Grit Scale was tested was West Point’s brutal summer training, known as Beast. By the last day of Beast, seventy-one cadets had dropped out — and grit turned out to be an astoundingly reliable predictor of who made it through and who did not. The next arena was sales, a profession in which daily, if not hourly, rejection is par for the course. Hundreds of men and women at the same vacation time-share company filled out a battery of personality questionnaires, including the Grit Scale. Six months later, 55 percent of the salespeople were gone. Grit predicted who stayed and who left. Moreover, no other commonly measured personality trait — including extroversion, emotional stability, and conscientiousness — was as effective as grit in predicting job retention.
Other things matter, of course. In sales, prior experience helps; novices are less likely to keep their jobs than those with experience. But putting that finding together with everything else, one fundamental insight emerges that has guided the work ever since:
Our potential is one thing. What we do with it is quite another.
Chapter 2 — Distracted by Talent
Outliers, Francis Galton concluded, are remarkable in three ways: they demonstrate unusual “ability” in combination with exceptional “zeal” and “the capacity for hard labor.” Charles Darwin embodied that combination. One biographer describes him as someone who kept thinking about the same questions long after others would move on to different, and no doubt easier, problems. The normal response to being puzzled about something is to say, “I’ll think about this later,” and then, in effect, forget about it. With Darwin, one feels that he deliberately did not engage in this kind of semi-willful forgetting. He kept all the 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,” he said. But these outer boundaries of where we will eventually stop improving are simply irrelevant for the vast majority of us.
One way to interpret stories of people whom the talent-spotters overlooked is that talent is great, but tests of talent stink. There is certainly an argument to be made that tests of talent — and tests of anything else psychologists study, including grit — are highly imperfect. But another conclusion is that the focus on talent distracts us from something that is at least as important, and that something is effort.
Chapter 3 — Effort Counts Twice
A few years ago, a study of competitive swimmers titled “The Mundanity of Excellence” arrived with a title that gave away its conclusion. The most dazzling human achievements are, in fact, the aggregate of countless individual elements, each of which is, in a sense, ordinary. Sociologist Dan Chambliss put it this way: “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 are fitted together in a synthesized whole. 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,” he said. “For if we think of genius as something magical, we are not obliged to compare ourselves and find ourselves lacking. To call someone ‘divine’ means: ‘here there is no need to compete.’” In other words, mythologizing natural talent lets us all off the hook. It lets us relax into the status quo.
The way out of the myth is a simple equation. 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. Talent absolutely matters; it sets the pace at which we improve in skill. But effort factors into the calculation twice, not once. Effort builds skill. At the very same time, effort makes skill productive.
Imagine the treadmill. Staying on it is one thing, and that is related to staying true to your commitments even when you are not comfortable. But getting back on the treadmill the next day, eager to try again, is even more reflective of grit. Because 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 later say they ended up using it less than they had expected. How hard you push yourself in a given workout matters, of course, 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 treadmills, exercise bikes, and weight sets are at this very moment gathering dust in basements across the country? How many kids go out for a sport and then quit before the season is over? How many of us vow to knit sweaters for all of our friends but only manage half a sleeve before putting down the needles? Ditto for home vegetable gardens, compost bins, and diets. How many of us start something new, full of excitement and good intentions, and then give up — permanently — when we encounter the first real obstacle, the first long plateau in progress? Many of us, it seems, 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 get on that treadmill and keep going.
Skill is not the same thing as achievement, either. 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?
Developing real expertise, figuring out really hard problems — it all takes time, longer than most people imagine. And 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 is doing what you love — but not just falling in love. It is staying in love.
In interviews about what it takes to succeed, high achievers rarely talk about intensity. What comes up again and again is the idea of consistency over time. Coach Pete Carroll likes to ask, “Do you have a life philosophy?” For some of us, the question doesn’t quite compute. We answer: Well, I have a lot of things I’m pursuing — a lot of goals, a lot of projects. Which do you mean? But others answer with conviction: This is what I want. Carroll isn’t asking what you want to get done today, specifically, or even this year. He is asking what you’re trying to get out of life. In grit terms, he is asking about your passion.
One way to understand the question is to envision goals in a hierarchy. At the bottom are the most concrete and specific goals — the tasks on your short-term to-do list: get out the door by eight a.m., call your business partner back, finish writing the email you started yesterday. These low-level goals exist merely as means to ends. We want to accomplish them only because they get us something else we want. The higher the goal in the hierarchy, the more abstract, general, and important it is. The higher the goal, the more it is an end in itself, and the less it is merely a means to an end.
The top-level goal is not a means to any other end. It is, instead, an end in itself. Some psychologists like to call this an “ultimate concern.” Think of it as a compass that gives direction and meaning to all the goals below — you are 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, by contrast, can come from less coherent goal structures: a bunch of mid-level goals that don’t correspond to any unifying, top-level goal, or a few competing goal hierarchies that aren’t in any way connected with each other.
The idea that every waking moment of our lives should be guided by one top-level goal is an idealized extreme that may not be desirable even for the grittiest of us. Still, it is possible to pare down long lists of mid-level and low-level work goals according to how they serve a goal of supreme importance — and one top-level professional goal, rather than any other number, is ideal. The more unified, aligned, and coordinated our goal hierarchies, the better.
Warren Buffett tells the story this way. He turns to his faithful pilot and says the pilot must have dreams greater than flying him around to where he needs to go. The pilot confesses that, yes, he does. Then Buffett walks him through three steps. First, write down a list of twenty-five career goals. Second, do some soul-searching and circle the five highest-priority goals. Just five. Third, take a good hard look at the twenty goals you didn’t circle. Those you avoid at all costs. They are what distract you; they eat away time and energy, taking your eye from the goals that matter more. To Buffett’s three steps, add a fourth: To what extent do these goals serve a common purpose?
It is as if the highest-level goal gets written in ink — once you have 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, sometimes erase them altogether, and figure out new ones to take their place.
Long before any modern Grit Scale, the indicators were already being mapped out: the degree to which someone works with distant objects in view, as opposed to living from hand to mouth; active preparation for later life; working toward a definite goal; the tendency not to abandon tasks from mere changeability; not seeking something fresh because of novelty; not looking for a change; strength of will and perseverance; 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.
Chapter 5 — Grit Grows
Is grit something you are born with? Researchers in London administered the Grit Scale to more than two thousand pairs of teenage twins, and the results estimated the heritability of the perseverance subscale at 37 percent and of the passion subscale at 20 percent. These figures are on par with heritability estimates for other personality traits. In the simplest terms, some of the variation in grit can be attributed to genetic factors, and the rest to experience. Grit, talent, and every other psychological trait relevant to success in life are influenced by genes and also by experience. There is no single gene for grit, or indeed for any other psychological trait.
Plot Grit Scale scores against age in a large sample of American adults and a striking pattern appears: the grittiest adults are in their late sixties or older, and the least gritty are in their twenties. Grit, in other words, grows as we figure out our life philosophy, learn to dust ourselves off after rejection and disappointment, and learn to tell the difference between low-level goals that should be abandoned quickly and higher-level goals that demand more tenacity.
Why do we change? One reason is that we learn something we simply didn’t know before. Another is that our circumstances change. As we grow older, we are thrust into new situations. We get our first job. We may get married. Our parents get older, and we find ourselves their caretakers. Often, these new situations call on us to act differently than we used to. Because there is no species on the planet more adaptable than ours, we change. We rise to the occasion. We change when we need to. 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, so I might as well give up.” Each of those thoughts maps onto one of four psychological assets that mature paragons of grit have in common. Stories of grit collected through interviews and the systematic, quantitative studies done in places like West Point and the National Spelling Bee converge on the same four.
First comes interest. Passion begins with intrinsically enjoying what you do. Every gritty person can point to aspects of their work they enjoy less than others, and most have to put up with at least one or two chores they don’t enjoy at all. Nevertheless, they are captivated by the endeavor as a whole. With enduring fascination and childlike curiosity, they practically shout, “I love what I do!”
Next comes the capacity to practice. One form of perseverance is the daily discipline of trying to do things better than you did yesterday. After you have discovered and developed an interest, you must devote yourself to the sort of focused, full-hearted, challenge-exceeding-skill practice that leads to mastery. You must zero in on your weaknesses, and you must do so over and over again, for hours a day, week after month after year. To be gritty is to resist complacency. “Whatever it takes, I want to improve!” is a refrain of all paragons of grit, no matter their particular interest, and no matter how excellent they already are.
Third is purpose. What ripens passion is the conviction that your work matters. For most people, interest without purpose is nearly impossible to sustain for a lifetime. It is therefore imperative that you identify your work as both personally interesting and integrally connected to the well-being of others. For a few, a sense of purpose dawns early; for many, the motivation to serve others heightens after the development of interest and years of disciplined practice. Regardless, fully mature exemplars of grit invariably say, “My work is important — both to me and to others.”
And, finally, hope. Hope is a rising-to-the-occasion kind of perseverance. Though it comes last in the sequence after interest, practice, and purpose, hope does not define only the last stage of grit. It defines every stage. From the very beginning to the very end, it is inestimably important to learn to keep going even when things are difficult, even when we have doubts.
The four psychological assets of interest, practice, purpose, and hope are not “you have it or you don’t” 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.
Part Two — Growing Grit from the Inside Out
Chapter 6 — Interest
”Follow your passion” is a popular theme of commencement speeches. At least half of all such speakers, maybe more, underscore the importance of doing something you love. Quite often they say just that: “I love what I do.” But they also say things like, “I’m so lucky, I get up every morning looking forward to work, I can’t wait to get into the studio, I can’t wait to get on with the next project.” These people are doing things not because they have to or because the work is financially lucrative.
The research backs them up. 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, covering working adults across nearly every conceivable profession, makes the point clear: people who enjoy thinking about abstract ideas are not happy managing the minutiae of logistically complicated projects; they would rather be solving math problems. People who really enjoy interacting with others are not happy when their job is to work alone at a computer all day; they fare much better in jobs like sales or teaching. People whose jobs match their personal interests are, in general, happier with their lives as a whole. A second meta-analysis, of sixty studies conducted over six decades, adds the performance side: employees whose intrinsic interests fit 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 we can expect to do in any endeavor is desire and passion — the strength of our interest.
But while we may envy those who love what they do for a living, we shouldn’t assume they started from a different place than the rest of us. Chances are, they took quite some time figuring out exactly what they wanted to do with their lives. 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. Barry Schwartz thinks what prevents a lot of young people from developing a serious career interest is unrealistic expectations. “It’s really the same problem a lot of young people have finding a romantic partner,” he said. “They want somebody who’s really attractive and smart and kind and empathetic and thoughtful and funny. Try telling a twenty-one-year-old that you can’t find a person who is absolutely the best in every way. They don’t listen. They’re holding out for perfection.”
A first encounter with what might eventually lead to a lifelong passion is exactly that — 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.
Interests are not discovered through introspection. They are triggered by interactions with the outside world. The process can be messy, serendipitous, and inefficient, because you can’t really predict with certainty what will capture your attention and what won’t. You can’t simply will yourself to like things, either. As Jeff Bezos has 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 and which won’t.
Interests also thrive when there is a crew of encouraging supporters — parents, teachers, coaches, and peers. They provide the ongoing stimulation and information that is essential to actually liking something more and more, and positive feedback makes us feel happy, competent, and secure. Is it a drag that passions don’t come to us all at once, as epiphanies, without the need to actively develop them? Maybe. But our early interests are fragile, vaguely defined, and in need of energetic, years-long cultivation and refinement.
Before hard work comes play. Before those who have yet to fix on a passion are ready to spend hours a day diligently honing skills, they must goof around, triggering and retriggering interest. Developing an interest requires time and energy, and yes, some discipline and sacrifice. But at this earliest stage, novices aren’t obsessed with getting better. They aren’t thinking years into the future. They don’t know what their top-level, life-orienting goal will be. More than anything else, they are having fun.
Encouragement during the early years is crucial, because beginners are still figuring out whether to commit or cut bait. Benjamin Bloom’s research team found that the best mentors at this stage were especially warm and supportive — much of the introduction to the field came as playful activity, and the learning at the beginning of this stage was much like a game. A degree of autonomy 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. Sports psychologist Jean Côté finds that shortcutting this stage of relaxed, playful interest discovery has dire consequences. And in one large-scale study after another, the grittier an individual is, the fewer career changes they are likely to make.
Unlike other animals, which have strong instincts to act in certain ways, babies need to learn almost everything from experience. If babies didn’t have a strong drive for novelty, they wouldn’t learn as much, and that would make it less likely they’d survive. Interest — the desire to learn new things, to explore the world, to seek novelty, to be on the lookout for change and variety — is a basic drive. How, then, do we explain the enduring interests of grit paragons? Experts often say things like, “The more I know, the less I understand.” 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.
So ask yourself a few simple questions. What do I like to think about? Where does my mind wander? What do I really care about? What matters most to me? How do I enjoy spending my time? And, in contrast, what do I find absolutely unbearable? As soon as you have even a general direction in mind, trigger your nascent interests by going out into the world and doing something. To young graduates wringing their hands over what to do, the message is simple: experiment, try, you’ll certainly learn more than if you don’t. And if you want to stay engaged for more than a few years in any endeavor, you’ll need to find a way to enjoy the nuances that only a true aficionado can appreciate. As William James put it, “The old in the new is what claims the attention — the old with a slightly new turn.” 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.
Chapter 7 — Practice
Given that gritty people typically stick with their commitments longer than others, it might seem like the major advantage of grit is, simply, more time on task. At the same time, you can probably think of a lot of people who have racked up decades of experience in their jobs but nevertheless stagnate at a middling level of competence. Some people get twenty years of experience, as the joke goes, while others get one year of experience, twenty times in a row.
Kaizen is Japanese for resisting the plateau of arrested development. Its literal translation is “continuous improvement,” and the idea got traction in American business culture as the core principle behind Japan’s spectacularly efficient manufacturing economy. After interviewing dozens and dozens of grit paragons, every one exudes kaizen. There are no exceptions. It is a persistent desire to do better — but a positive state of mind, not a negative one. It is not looking backward with dissatisfaction. It is looking forward and wanting to grow.
The really crucial insight of Anders Ericsson’s research is not that experts log more hours of practice. It is that experts practice differently. Unlike most of us, they are logging thousands upon thousands of hours of what Ericsson calls deliberate practice.
Here is how experts practice. First, they set a stretch goal, zeroing in on just one narrow aspect of their overall performance. Rather than focus on what they already do well, they strive to improve specific weaknesses. They intentionally seek out challenges they can’t yet meet. Olympic gold medal swimmer Rowdy Gaines said, “At every practice, I would try to beat myself.” Virtuoso violist Roberto Díaz describes “working to find your Achilles’ heel — the specific aspect of the music that needs problem solving.” Then, with undivided attention and great effort, experts strive to reach the stretch goal. Many choose to do so while nobody is watching. They keep going until conscious incompetence becomes unconscious competence. Even the most complex and creative of human abilities can be broken down into component skills, each of which can be practiced, trained, and experimented with while pushing through the pain to be the best one can be.
A study of competitive spellers makes the distinction concrete. Experienced spellers, their parents, and their coaches recommend three kinds of activities: first, reading for pleasure and playing word games like Scrabble; second, getting quizzed by another person or a computer program; and third, unassisted, solitary spelling practice — memorizing new words from the dictionary, reviewing words in a spelling notebook, and committing to memory Latin, Greek, and other word origins. Only this third category met the criteria for deliberate practice. Several months before the final competition, spellers were mailed questionnaires, including the Grit Scale and a log estimating their hours per week on each activity, along with ratings of how those activities felt in the moment, in terms of enjoyment and effort.
Deliberate practice predicted advancing to further rounds in the final competition far better than any other kind of preparation. Quizzing wasn’t useless — winner Kerry Close used it to diagnose her weaknesses, identifying certain words or types of words she consistently misspelled so she could focus her efforts on mastering them. Quizzing turned out to be a necessary prelude to more targeted, more efficient deliberate practice.
If you judge practice by what it feels like, though, you 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 books for pleasure and playing Scrabble felt effortless and as enjoyable as “eating your favorite food.” And world-class performers who retire tend not to keep up the same deliberate practice schedule. If practice were intrinsically pleasurable — enjoyable for its own sake — you would expect them to keep doing it.
For Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the signature experience of experts is flow, a state of complete concentration “that leads to a feeling of spontaneity.” Flow is performing at high levels of challenge and yet feeling effortless, like “you don’t have to think about it, you’re just doing it.” Ericsson is skeptical that deliberate practice could ever feel as enjoyable as flow. In his view, skilled people can sometimes experience highly enjoyable states during their performance, but those states are incompatible with deliberate practice. Why? Because deliberate practice is carefully planned, and flow is spontaneous. Because deliberate practice requires working where challenges exceed skill, and flow is most commonly experienced when challenge and skill are in balance. And, most important, because deliberate practice is exceptionally effortful, and flow is, by definition, effortless. The roots of knowledge are bitter, but its fruits are sweet. In other words, deliberate practice is for preparation, and flow is for performance. Deliberate practice can be deeply gratifying, but in a different way than flow — the thrill of getting better is one kind of positive experience, and the ecstasy of performing at your best is another.
Each of the basic requirements of deliberate practice is unremarkable on its own. A clearly defined stretch goal. Full concentration and effort. Immediate and informative feedback. Repetition with reflection and refinement. But how many hours of practice do most people accomplish that check all four of those boxes? Many people are cruising through life doing precisely zero hours of daily deliberate practice. Even supermotivated people who are working to exhaustion may not be doing deliberate practice at all.
Once you discover that there is an actual science of practice — an approach that improves your skills more efficiently — both the quality of your practice and your satisfaction with your progress can skyrocket. Students taught about deliberate practice were more likely to recommend “focus on your weaknesses” and “concentrate one hundred percent.” Given the choice between deliberate practice in math and entertaining themselves with social media and gaming websites, they chose more deliberate practice. And among those who had been performing below average in class, learning about deliberate practice increased their report card grades.
The second suggestion for getting the most out of deliberate practice is to make it a habit. Figure out when and where you are most comfortable doing it. Once you have made your selection, do deliberate practice then and there every day. Routines are a godsend when it comes to doing something hard. A mountain of research studies shows that when you have a habit of practicing at the same time and in the same place, you hardly have to think about getting started. As William James observed, “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.” A simple daily plan can do the trick — when it is eight in the morning and I am in my home office, I will reread yesterday’s draft. The habit doesn’t make the writing easier, exactly, but it sure makes it easier to get started.
The third suggestion is to change the way you experience deliberate practice. It is all about in-the-moment self-awareness without judgment — about relieving yourself of the judgment that gets in the way of enjoying the challenge. Researchers Elena Bodrova and Deborah Leong ask teachers to model emotion-free mistake making for their students.
Chapter 8 — Purpose
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 is as basic a human need as our appetite for pleasure, and grittier people are dramatically more motivated than others to seek a meaningful, other-centered life. This is not to say that all grit paragons are saints, but rather that most gritty people see their ultimate aims as deeply connected to the world beyond themselves. There may be gritty villains in the world, but the research suggests there are many more gritty heroes.
Three bricklayers are asked, “What are you doing?” The first says, “I am laying bricks.” The second says, “I am building a church.” And the third says, “I am building the house of God.” The first bricklayer has a job. The second has a career. The third has a calling. People tend to locate their own work in one of those three categories: a job (“I view my job as just a necessity of life, much like breathing or sleeping”), a career (“I view my job primarily as a stepping-stone to other jobs”), or a calling (“My work is one of the most important things in my life”).
There is 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.” Amy Wrzesniewski’s conclusion is that it isn’t that some kinds of occupations are necessarily jobs and others are careers and still others callings. What matters is whether the person doing the work believes that laying down the next brick is just something that has to be done, or instead something that will lead to further personal success, or, finally, work that connects the individual to something far greater than the self. How you see your work is more important than your job title. You can go from job to career to calling — all without changing your occupation.
”A lot of people assume that what they need to do is find their calling,” Wrzesniewski says. “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.” That is the same mistake people make about interests. They don’t realize they need to play an active role in developing and deepening either one.
Writing this book brought a personal recognition: an inkling about interests in adolescence, some clarity about purpose in one’s twenties, and finally, in one’s thirties, the experience and expertise to name a top-level, life-organizing goal. For Duckworth, the goal — the one that will hold until her last breath — is to use psychological science to help kids thrive.
Three concrete moves can help anyone cultivate purpose. David Yeager recommends reflecting on how the work you are already doing can make a positive contribution to society. Amy Wrzesniewski recommends thinking about how, in small but meaningful ways, you can change your current work to enhance its connection to your core values. And Bill Damon recommends finding inspiration in a purposeful role model.
Chapter 9 — Hope
Grit depends on a different kind of hope. It rests on the expectation that our own efforts can improve our future. “I have a feeling tomorrow will be better” is different from “I resolve to make tomorrow better.” The hope that gritty people have has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with getting up again.
Picture two first-year psychology doctoral students named Marty Seligman and Steve Maier in a windowless laboratory, watching a caged dog receive electric shocks to its back paws. The 1964 experiment that followed proved for the first time that it isn’t suffering that leads to hopelessness. It is 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 — 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 not directly related to mental health. Optimistic undergraduates earn higher grades and are less likely to drop out of school. Optimistic young adults stay healthier through middle age and live longer than pessimists. They are more satisfied with their marriages. A one-year field study of MetLife insurance agents found that optimists were twice as likely to stay in their jobs and sold about 25 percent more insurance than their pessimistic colleagues. Studies of salespeople in telecommunications, real estate, office products, car sales, banking, and other industries have shown that optimists outsell pessimists by 20 to 40 percent.
When highly resilient people — whether artists, entrepreneurs, or community activists — are asked, “What has been your greatest disappointment?” the response is nearly identical. “Well, I don’t really think in terms of disappointment. I tend to think that everything that happens is something I can learn from.”
Cognitive behavioral therapy, which aims to treat depression and other psychological maladies by helping patients think more objectively and behave in healthier ways, has shown that whatever our childhood sufferings, we can generally learn to observe our negative self-talk and change our maladaptive behaviors. As with any other skill, we can practice interpreting what happens to us and responding as an optimist would. CBT is now a widely practiced psychotherapeutic treatment for depression, and has proven longer-lasting in its effects than antidepressant medication.
A working hypothesis took shape: teachers who have an optimistic way of interpreting adversity have more grit than their more pessimistic counterparts, and grit, in turn, predicts better teaching. An optimistic teacher keeps looking for ways to help an uncooperative student; a pessimist assumes there is nothing more to be done. Sure enough, optimistic teachers were grittier and happier, and grit and happiness in turn explained why their students achieved 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, assuming they can’t be found, you guarantee they won’t. Or, as Henry Ford is often quoted as saying, “Whether you think you can, or think you can’t — you’re right.”
In one of Carol Dweck’s first studies, she worked with middle schools to identify boys and girls who, by consensus of their teachers, principal, and school psychologist, were especially “helpless” when confronted by failure. Her hunch was that these children believed a lack of intellectual 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 core beliefs about success and learning. People of all ages, Dweck soon discovered, carry around private theories about how the world works. They are conscious enough that if asked directly, you have a ready answer — but, like the thoughts you work on with a cognitive behavioral therapist, you may not be aware of them until asked.
Students with a growth mindset are significantly grittier than students with a fixed mindset. They earn higher report card grades and, after graduation, are more likely to enroll in and persist through college. Across younger children and older adults alike, growth mindset and grit go together. Where mindsets come from is no mystery: people’s personal histories of success and failure, and how the people around them — particularly those in authority — have responded to those outcomes. Consider what people said to you when, as a child, you did something really well. Were you praised for your talent? Or were you praised for your effort? Either way, chances are you use the same language today when evaluating victories and defeats.
A handful of phrases promote a growth mindset and grit. “You’re a learner! I love that.” “That didn’t work. Let’s talk about how you approached it and what might work better.” “Great job! What’s one thing that could have been even better?” “This is hard. Don’t feel bad if you can’t do it yet.” “I have high standards. I’m holding you to them because I know we can reach them together.”
Language is one way to cultivate hope. But modeling a growth mindset — demonstrating by our actions that we truly believe people can learn to learn — may be even more important. As James Baldwin wrote, “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.” Research on workplace culture confirms the pattern. In fixed-mindset companies, employees agreed with statements like “When it comes to being successful, this company seems to believe that people have a certain amount of talent, and they really can’t do much to change it.” They felt that only a few star performers were highly valued and that the company wasn’t truly invested in others’ development. They also admitted to keeping secrets, cutting corners, and cheating to get ahead. By contrast, in growth-mindset cultures, employees were 47 percent more likely to say their colleagues were trustworthy, 49 percent more likely to say their company fosters innovation, and 65 percent more likely to say their company supports risk taking. The reality is that most people have an inner fixed-mindset pessimist sitting alongside their inner growth-mindset optimist. It is easy to make the mistake of changing what we say without changing our body language, facial expressions, and behavior.
When does struggle lead to hope, and when does it lead to hopelessness? The answer is partly biological. Limbic structures that produce distress are regulated by higher-order brain areas like the prefrontal cortex. If you have an appraisal — a thought, a belief, whatever you want to call it — that says, “Wait a minute, I can do something about this!” or “This really isn’t so bad!” then inhibitory structures in the cortex activate and send a message: “Cool it down there. Don’t get so activated. There’s something we can do.” There is plasticity in that circuitry. If you experience adversity — something pretty potent — that you overcome on your own during your youth, you develop a different way of dealing with adversity later on. The adversity has to be pretty potent, because these brain areas really have to wire together in some fashion, and that doesn’t happen with minor inconveniences. You can’t just talk someone into believing they can master challenges. 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 areas. That happens when you experience mastery at the same time as adversity.
There are two failure modes. The first is poverty. Children growing up in poverty are getting a lot of helplessness experiences and not enough mastery experiences. They are not learning, “I can do this. I can succeed in that.” Those earlier experiences can have really enduring effects. You need to learn that there is a contingency between your actions and what happens to you — if I do something, then something will happen. The second failure mode is the opposite. It is the people who cruise through life, friction-free, for a long, long time before encountering their first real failure. They have so little practice falling and getting up again, and so many reasons to stick with a fixed mindset. Many invisibly vulnerable high-achievers stumble in young adulthood and struggle to get up — the “fragile perfects.” Bright and wonderful people who know how to succeed, but not how to fail.
The recommendation for teaching yourself hope is to take each step in this sequence and ask, What can I do to boost this one? First, update your beliefs about intelligence and talent. Next, practice optimistic self-talk: the link between cognitive behavioral therapy and learned helplessness led to the development of “resilience training,” an interactive curriculum that delivers a preventative dose of CBT. If you recognize yourself as an extreme pessimist, find a cognitive behavioral therapist. And, finally, 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 in our lives.
First and foremost, there is no either/or trade-off between supportive parenting and demanding parenting. It is a common misunderstanding to think of “tough love” as a carefully struck balance between affection and respect on the one hand, and firmly enforced expectations on the other. In actuality, there is no reason you can’t do both. The parents of NFL quarterback Steve Young and comedian Francesca Martinez made exactly that point. The Youngs were tough, but they were also loving. The Martinezes were loving, but they were also tough. Both families were “child-centered” in the sense that they clearly put their children’s interests first, but neither family felt that children were always the better judge of what to do, how hard to work, and 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.
In one of Larry Steinberg’s studies, about ten thousand American teenagers completed questionnaires about their parents’ behavior. 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 has been studied, at every stage of child development, and longitudinal research indicates that the benefits are measurable across a decade or more.
One of the major discoveries 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, or a prohibition against swearing — may or may not be coercive. What may seem permissive — letting a child drop out of high school, say — may simply reflect differences in the rules parents value as important. Don’t pass judgment on that parent lecturing their child in the supermarket cereal aisle. In most cases, you don’t have enough context to understand how the child interprets the exchange, and at the end of the day, it is the child’s experience that really matters.
The same dynamic shows up in classrooms. Teachers who are demanding — whose students say, “My teacher accepts nothing less than our best effort,” and “Students in this class behave the way my teacher wants them to” — produce measurable year-to-year gains in their students’ 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 both: I am giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.
Chapter 11 — The Playing Fields of Grit
Like a lot of parents, Duckworth had a strong intuition that grit is enhanced by doing activities like ballet, piano, football — really any structured extracurricular activity. These activities possess two important features that are hard to replicate in any other setting. First, there is 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 is not intrinsically interesting. Texting your friends is interesting, but it is 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 Educational Testing Service knew that, together, high school grades and test scores did only a half-decent job of predicting success later in life. Very often, two kids with identical grades and test scores end up faring very differently. The simple question Warren Willingham set out to answer was: What other personal qualities matter? One horse did win, and by a long stretch — follow-through. Notably, the particular pursuits to which students had devoted themselves in high school 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. Following through on our commitments while we grow up both requires grit and, at the same time, builds it. Harvard, the admissions dean confirmed, was paying the utmost attention to follow-through. Following through on hard things teaches a young person powerful, transferable lessons: you are learning from others, you are finding out more and more through experience what your priorities are, you are developing character.
Bob Eisenberger called this learned industriousness. His major conclusion was that 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.
That is the first part of the Hard Thing Rule. Everyone in the family does a hard thing. The second part is just as important: you can quit. But you can’t quit until the season is over, the tuition payment is up, or some other natural stopping point has arrived. You must, at least for the interval to which you have committed yourself, finish whatever you begin. You can’t quit on a day when your teacher yells at you, or you lose a race, or you have to miss a sleepover because of a recital the next morning. You can’t quit on a bad day. And, finally, the Hard Thing Rule states that you get to pick your hard thing. Nobody picks it for you, because it would make no sense to do a hard thing you are not even vaguely interested in.
Chapter 12 — A Culture of Grit
When asked what it means to be a Seahawk — what philosophy guides the search for players — coach Pete Carroll’s answer begins with grit. “We’re looking for great competitors. That’s really where it starts. 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. They’re not going to be deterred by challenges and hurdles and things.”
The bottom line on culture and grit is this: if you want to be grittier, find a gritty culture and join it. If you are a leader and you want the people in your organization to be grittier, create a gritty culture. As one swimmer put it, “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.”
The drive to fit in — to conform to the group — is powerful indeed. Some of the most important psychology experiments in history have demonstrated how quickly, and usually without conscious awareness, the individual falls in line with a group that is acting or thinking a different way. There is 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 are around a lot of people who are gritty, you are going to act grittier.
Often, the critical gritty-or-not decisions we make — to get up one more time, to stick it out through this miserable, exhausting summer, to run five miles with our teammates when on our own we might only run three — are a matter of identity more than anything else. Our passion and perseverance do not spring from a cold, calculating analysis of the costs and benefits of alternatives. The source of our strength is the person we know ourselves to be. Political scientist James March put it this way: when you are deciding what to order for lunch or when to go to bed, you often think through pros and cons. It is very logical. But other times, we don’t think through the consequences of our actions at all. We don’t ask ourselves: What are the benefits? What are the costs? What are the risks? Instead, we ask: Who am I? What is this situation? 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; 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.
Some teams put their values into words and require those words to be lived. “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.” Or, as one motto puts it, “Talent is common; what you invest to develop that talent is the critical final measure of greatness.” Anson Dorrance’s program goes further. Each year that you play soccer for him, you must memorize three different literary quotes, each handpicked to communicate a different core value. “You will be tested in front of the team in preseason,” his memo to the team reads, “and then tested again in every player conference. Not only do you have to memorize them, but you have to understand them.”
But West Point’s superintendent, Lieutenant General Robert Caslen, is the first to point out that words, even those committed to memory, don’t sustain a culture when they diverge from actions. The origin of great leadership begins with the respect of the commander for his subordinates. On the battlefield, leading from the front means, quite literally, getting out in front with your soldiers, doing the same hard work, and facing the same mortal risks. At West Point, it means treating cadets with unconditional respect and, when they fall short of meeting the academy’s extraordinarily high standards, figuring out the support they need. “On the physical fitness test, if there are cadets that struggle with the two-mile run and I’m their leader, what I’m going to do is sit down with them and put together a training program. Some afternoons, I’m going to say, ‘Okay, let’s go run,’ or ‘Let’s go workout,’ or ‘Let’s go do intervals.’ I will lead from the front to get the cadet to the standard. Very often, the cadet who was unable to do it on their own all of a sudden is now motivated, and once they start to improve, their motivation increases, and when they meet those objectives they gain even more confidence. 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 have 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 have created that vision, you are on your way, but it is 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, then over time you can expect what social scientist Jim Flynn calls a “social multiplier” effect.
Chapter 13 — Conclusion
A few final thoughts. The first is that you can grow your grit. There are two ways to do so. On your own, you can grow your grit “from the inside out.” You can cultivate your interests. You can develop a habit of daily challenge-exceeding-skill practice. You can connect your work to a purpose beyond yourself. And you can learn to hope when all seems lost. You can also grow your grit “from the outside in.” Parents, coaches, teachers, bosses, mentors, friends — developing your personal grit depends critically on other people.
Aristotle argued that too much, or too little, of a good thing is bad. He speculated, for example, that 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 the argument, speculating that there is 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.
Do I want my children to be great at whatever they do? Absolutely. But greatness and goodness are different, and if forced to choose, I would put goodness first. 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. We take notice if neighbors seem lazy, but we are especially offended if they seem to lack qualities like honesty, integrity, and trustworthiness.
David Brooks calls grit and self-control “resume virtues” because they are the sorts of things that get us hired and keep us employed. Interpersonal character — gratitude, social intelligence, self-control over emotions like anger — helps you get along with and provide assistance to other people. Brooks prefers the term “eulogy virtues,” because in the end they may be more important to how people remember us than anything else. When we speak admiringly of someone being a “deeply good” person, it is this cluster of virtues we are thinking about. Intellectual character — curiosity, zest — encourages active and open engagement with the world of ideas. Longitudinal studies show these three virtue clusters predict different outcomes. For academic achievement, including stellar report card grades, the cluster containing grit is the most predictive. For positive social functioning, including how many friends you have, interpersonal character matters more. For a positive, independent posture toward learning, intellectual virtue trumps the others. The plurality of character operates against any one virtue being uniquely important.
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.
Afterword — Seven Questions About Grit
What about work-life balance — doesn’t grit come at a cost? Yes, grit involves a trade-off. The root of the word passion is pati, Latin for “to suffer.” And it is not only you, personally, who pays the cost. It is also your family and friends. Clarity won’t give you more hours in the week, but it will help you get more out of the hours you have.
Can you lose your grit? No matter what you have fallen in love with doing, it is possible to fall out of love, too. Burnout is not an illusion or a myth. It is a psychological reality, and its cardinal feature is exhaustion. In workplace surveys, what usually accompanies exhaustion is depersonalization — the sense that you are unconnected to the people you are serving or working with — and helplessness, the sense that no matter what you do or how hard you try, you are not making progress.
Is there a relationship between grit and socioeconomic opportunity? Whatever their parents’ education or income, all children really 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. Many others, 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.”
What about grit and romantic relationships? Sociologist Paul Glick noticed that high school and college dropouts had significantly higher divorce rates than the general population — 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. If anything, the bells and whistles of the future will be louder than those of the present.
When should I expect my kid to have the single-minded focus of mature world-class achievers? Contrary to popular wisdom, both professional and Olympic athletes don’t specialize early. They spend much of their youth sampling from a variety of sports before eventually committing to just one.
Is grit the only psychological factor that determines success? 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.