Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

A key to mastery is continuous improvement. The Japanese call it “kaizen,” and it helps make Japanese businesses competitive in world markets. As for paragons of grit, “they all exude kaizen. There are no exceptions” (118). All of them constantly want to improve their skills.

Cognitive psychologist Anders Ericsson studied world-class experts and found that it takes about 10,000 hours, over a 10-year period, to acquire elite-level skills. Some people achieve this level sooner, some later, but these numbers are typical. The sheer number of hours, however, isn’t enough: What’s required is “deliberate practice,” the setting of specific goals to be achieved.

Experts don’t practice mindlessly by rote; instead, they look for weaknesses in their performance and try to improve them. This is called a “stretch goal”: “They intentionally seek out challenges they can’t yet meet” (121). Experts often practice alone, working on specific skills, but they also seek feedback, taking note especially of mistakes so they can refine those behaviors. Then they practice again until their performance is flawless. When they have completed this stretch goal, they choose a new one and repeat the process.

This can be applied to any skill, not just chess or music or athletics. Ben Franklin improved his writing by studying essays he admired and then rewriting them and comparing his result to the original, making changes and improving flawed passages where needed. To improve the arguments in his own essays, Franklin converted them into notes, then shuffled them and try to reconstruct their proper order. He also transcribed poetry into prose and vice versa. The result of this hard work was prose that appeared effortless.

Duckworth and Ericsson studied spelling bee winners to learn whether they do deliberate practice. Three techniques are commonly recommended by spellers, teachers, and parents: (1) reading for pleasure and playing word games; (2) taking practice quizzes; and (3) memorizing words. The third activity qualifies as deliberate practice in Ericsson’s system. Winners are grittier, practice longer, and do more deliberate practice. Quizzes help mainly in directing contestants toward words they need to memorize. Reading for pleasure has no impact on who wins. Spellers report that deliberate practice takes more effort and is less fun than other preparation activities.

Ericsson has found that deliberate practice is very intense and that elite performers in any field can only do about an hour of it at a time, with a maximum of five hours per day. Much of the intensity is mental; musicians and athletes often nap after an especially intense practice session. Olympic swimmers report that they don’t particularly like pool practice, though they love the results. After retirement, most top performers abandon high-intensity practice, which suggests it’s not an intrinsically pleasurable activity.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, on the other hand, discovered that elite performers often report a state of “flow” where their work feels effortless and spontaneous. Ericsson believed that deliberate practice requires planning and intense effort and therefore is incompatible with flow. Noting that deliberate practice is an activity and flow is a feeling, Duckworth hypothesized that there might be some overlap. She followed up with respondents to her Grit Scale study, asking them to report any experiences of flow in their work, and found that “[g]ritty people do more deliberate practice and experience more flow” (131). Practice and flow don’t necessarily overlap, but each seems to contribute to high-level performance.

The author recalls her own experience of practicing to deliver a TED Talk. The first draft was wordy and boring, and she had bad speaking habits, like saying “um” a lot and biting her lower lip. After much rewriting and practicing, her speech went very well, and she felt herself “in flow.” The effortlessness of the product belied the intense effort that led up to it.

A review of the spelling bee data reveals that the winners not only put in more effort but also enjoy that process more. Successful people in other lines of endeavor also report enjoying the challenges of practice, and this can provide satisfaction that rivals flow.

Deliberate practice has four parts: (1) a clear stretch goal; (2) full effort; (3) feedback; and (4) refine and repeat. Many people simply put in hours and hours of rote practice, but it’s much better to do a few hours of concentrated deliberate practice daily.

Duckworth and a colleague developed a method to teach children how to do deliberate practice. Included in the system is an explanation that it takes hours of practice to get good at anything and that feelings of frustration are normal, signposts that point toward what to practice next. Students began spending more time on schoolwork, and their grades improved.

Getting into the habit of deliberate practice—same time and place every day—helps produce consistent improvements. Students shouldn’t regard mistakes as failures; they’re part of the process of learning and getting better.

Psychologist Benjamin Bloom believes skill development passes through three phases: “early years,” “middle years,” and “later years.” Chapters 6 through 8 reflect these phases as “interest,” “practice,” and “purpose,” respectively. As practice moves into the later years, practitioners feel an increase in their sense of purpose: More and more, their reason for doing what they love is that it benefits other people.

Jane Golden has installed thousands of murals in Philadelphia despite the constant pain of lupus; she’s inspired by the desire to bring the benefits of murals to as many people as she can. Wine critic Antonio Galloni has an overriding mission “to help people understand their own palates” so they can truly appreciate fine wine (146). He says, “in this one small way, I think I’m going to make the world better. I wake up every morning with a sense of purpose” (146).

The pleasure to be obtained from interest in a field seems selfish, while purpose seems other-driven, but purpose also provides benefits: Helping others improves the community and improves interpersonal relations, both of which benefit the giver. Grittier experts are motivated more by purpose than pleasure, and those who are inspired by both do better than those who merely practice their expertise for pleasure or purpose alone.

What about gritty villains, such as dictators, terrorists, and serial killers? Grit can help them, too, but gritty people overwhelmingly want to provide value to others, and there are many more gritty heroes than villains.

Purpose can scale up. Work can simply be a job or it can be a career or even a calling. People who consider their work a calling believe their “work makes the world a better place” (150), and they have better job and life satisfaction. Most people don’t feel that way about their jobs, though most wish they did. Studies show, however, that it’s not the job itself but the attitude of the worker that determines whether an occupation has meaning.

Joe Leader needed a job out of college, and he did work with New York City Transit, at first laboring on the subway tracks. He found it interesting, and as his skills improved, he advanced into engineering. Leader realized that his work helped millions travel to where they needed to go, and he began to see his work as a calling; in the process, he became chief engineer of the subway system.

As a child, Michael Baine had a profound experience of oneness with the universe, and he discovered he could repeat that experience just by paying mindful attention to his thoughts and feelings. Baine became a prominent physician at the University of Pennsylvania, where he established a meditation clinic that has trained more than 15,000 doctors, nurses, and patients in mindfulness. Baine says his work is a calling.

Duckworth spent a college summer teaching science to disadvantaged students. She worked long hours and came away with the sense that the work was important. She and a friend decided to open their own summer enrichment program, spending countless hours with fundraising and administration—work so daunting that, if the project had been “merely interesting,” it never would have gotten off the ground. Their sense of mission helped them push through to a successful launch. The program, Breakthrough Greater Boston, now serves hundreds of students year-round and has launched the teaching careers of many of the volunteers.

Stanford researcher Bill Damon says adolescents develop a sense of purpose only if they observe a role model who overcomes obstacles and accomplishes things for others in a gratifying way. Students must then discover problems they believe they can help solve.

As a child, Kat Cole watched and emulated her mother, who worked three jobs yet found time to help others by baking for them or doing errands. At 18, Kat became a Hooters waitress; when the cook quit one day, she took his place so customers would get fed and she’d get tipped. Also, she recalls, “I was so curious to see if I could do it. And third, I wanted to be helpful” (164). Now and then, someone else would quit, and Kat would fill in at their job; soon, she knew every assignment in the restaurant and began training others. By age 26, Kat had become a Hooters vice president, helping expand the company into 28 countries. Cinnabon recruited her at age 32 to be its president, and within four years she had grown its sales past $1 billion.

Simply by reflecting on how their education can help them do good for others, high school students put in more study time, and their grades improve. At work, employees can think up ways to incrementally alter their current tasks so they better reflect their values; one study showed that doing so improves happiness and job effectiveness.

The author remembers how kind her mother was to others, inviting crowds of people to the family’s Thanksgiving dinner or giving away household items to those in need. Her good deeds were her purpose, and Duckworth took her own inspiration to help children thrive from her mom’s example.

Most people hope that the world will change and their life will get better. Gritty people resolve that their life will be better.

In college Duckworth enrolled in a neurobiology class. Poorly prepared by her high school biology instruction, she foundered on the first two exams. The class teaching assistant warned her to drop the class. Instead, she resolved to succeed in the class and major in the topic. She took on extra homework and practiced until she knew she was too well prepared to panic or choke during the big exam. She aced the final and got a B in the class.

To study learned helplessness, in 1964 Marty Seligman and Steve Maier administered electric shocks to the feet of caged dogs. Some cages had a lever the dog could press to stop the shocks, and some cages had no lever. Dogs without levers soon gave up trying to avoid the shocks. The next day, the dogs were placed in cages with a low barrier they could jump over to avoid the shocks. Dogs who had had access to a stop-lever quickly learned to jump over the barrier; dogs who had had no lever simply gave up and never tried to escape the shocks.

The experiment showed that dogs are capable of reaching conclusions and acting on them. More importantly, it showed that hopeless situations lead dogs—and, by implication, humans—to give up, even when new chances for escape arise. Duckworth believes her constructive response to her neurobiology class test failures put her in the camp of those who don’t give up and instead are willing to do something to solve their dilemmas.

Seligman developed a theory of “learned optimism,” by which some people habitually resolve problems in their lives on the belief that problems generally stem from temporary, solvable situations. This includes mistakes they make. Pessimists, on the other hand, tend to believe that problems are monolithic and unsolvable; “[p]ermanent and pervasive explanations for adversity turn minor complications into major catastrophes” (174).

Optimists stay in school longer and get better grades than pessimists; later in life, their health is better, they live longer, and they experience greater marital satisfaction. Optimistic salespeople outsell pessimists by 20% to 40%. Gritty elites overwhelmingly are optimists; they consider problems opportunities to learn and get better.

Seligman’s postgraduate mentor, Aaron Beck, developed cognitive behavioral therapy, which holds that depression comes not from childhood trauma but from the way a person frames problems. If they see difficulties as permanent disasters, or berate themselves as losers, they will give up and sink into depression; if they see those same difficulties as resolvable problems, they will take steps to fix them. Cognitive therapy has proven more effective than antidepressant medications.

Duckworth collaborated on a study of grit among inner-city teachers. Optimistic teachers were happier and had more grit than less optimistic instructors, and their students achieved better academic gains.

Carol Dweck wondered how people become pessimistic, and her research shows that people tend to interpret the world either with a fixed mindset about their abilities—intelligence is unchangeable—or a growth mindset, by which intelligence can be improved. People with fixed mindsets tend to give up after a setback like a poor grade in school, while those with growth mindsets keep trying to improve. High school students with growth mindsets are grittier, get better grades, and have more success in college.

Students praised simply for their talent can have trouble dealing with setbacks, while those praised for their effort tend to keep going and overcome problems. Dweck has found that people often praise or console students based on their talent instead of their effort. For example, one teacher might say, “This is hard. Don’t feel bad if you can’t do it,” while a growth-oriented instructor might say, “This is hard. Don’t feel bad if you can’t do it yet” (182).

If parents become upset by mistakes, their children tend to adopt a fixed mindset. In corporations that pay attention to their stars and ignore other employees, trust declines and cheating increases, but in growth-mindset companies, employees believe trust, innovation, and risk-taking are higher there. In any situation, even when people believe in a growth mindset, they can backslide into a fixed mindset under stress. Keeping an eye out for relapses, and giving funny names to those tendencies—for example, “Oops. I guess I brought Controlling Claire to the meeting today. Let me try that again” (184)—can help.

Telling someone they’re smart can hinder them. Bill McNabb, CEO of the Vanguard investment company, was told as a child that he was smart, and he took pride in acing tests with little effort. It wasn’t until he joined the college rowing team and struggled with the skill set, then worked his way up to the varsity team, that he realized persistent work can pay off. He also learned not to quit in the face of setbacks (like getting demoted from varsity when the man he replaced returned to the team). Both of these attitudes are instrumental to a growth mindset and to grit.

Steve Maier repeated the dog-shocking experiment using rats and found that adolescent rodents subjected to unpreventable shocks grew up to be timid adults, while young rats exposed to shocks they could control grew up to be “more adventurous” and largely immune to any further experiments that subjected them to shocks they couldn’t control.

Maier concluded that rats—and people—must learn directly from stressful situations that they can handle problems. People may lecture students all day, but students must undergo the stresses themselves and solve them so that various brain areas can adjust to coordinate future efforts. Inner-city youth may be experiencing too many hopeless situations and not enough challenges they can meet successfully.

One of the author’s students, Kayvon Asemani, had a brilliant high school career—star athlete, musician, student body president, A-student. He did well as a freshman but struggled with quantitative courses. Duckworth suggested there’d be no shame if he dropped out of the Wharton business school, but Kayvon decided to stay the course, even if it meant a lower GPA, and he worked hard to master the math he needed. His is a great example of growth mindset in practice.

Dweck has shown that, with effort, IQ can improve, and studying math and English strengthens brain regions responsible for those skills. People who learn how to alter their “self-talk” can improve their performance; pessimists who enter cognitive behavioral therapy benefit similarly.

Mathematician Rhonda Hughes overcame doubts and biases to become a professor and, later, to found EDGE, or Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education, which encourages women to get PhDs in math. She firmly believes math skills are not innate but developed. She implores, “Don’t give up!” (194).