Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

Outside activities led by supportive and demanding coaches and teachers can improve a student’s understanding of deliberate persistence: “The ballet studio, the recital hall, the dojo, the basketball court, the gridiron—these are the playing fields of grit” (223-24).

Kids benefit from after-school activities because they’re both challenging and fun. Grades and self-esteem improve, while getting into trouble declines. Benefits accrue strongly if students participate in an activity longer than one year.

A 1978 study, the Personal Qualities Project, rated several thousand students on over 100 personal characteristics—family background, career goals, test scores, school grades, and the like—and followed their progress over five years. The most consistent predictor of success was follow-through. High follow-through scores correlated with active participation in extracurricular projects; those with low follow-through scores participated rarely or not at all in after-school activities. The type of project didn’t matter; what counted was participation for more than a year and making progress in the activity.

Duckworth noticed that follow-through is similar to grit. With a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, she studied 1,200 seniors and their after-school projects. A Grit Grid was set up that gave a point for multiyear participation and for improvements achieved during those endeavors. As well, high achievement—such as student body president, sports MVP, employee of the month, and the like—received a point. The highest possible score, involving two multiyear activities with high achievement, was six points; no activities got zero points.

Two years after high school graduation, two-thirds of the highest-scoring students were still in college, while only 16% of students who had scored zero on extracurricular activities remained enrolled. A similar study of new teachers showed that those who participated in extracurricular activities during college tended to stay in the profession and get better results from their students; their college scores and ratings had no such effect.

It’s possible that gritty people participate more in outside activities; it’s also possible that outside activities train people to be gritty. The author believes both factors affect grittiness. A study of student adaptiveness shows that people can change their personalities. According to the “corresponsive principle,” good work habits create good outcomes that reinforce good behavior, while bad habits create bad results that do the opposite. Activities can bring out nascent traits: “the situations to which people gravitate tend to enhance the very characteristics that brought us there in the first place” (233). This can apply to grit.

Harvard admissions dean Bill Fitzsimmons is well aware of the importance of follow-through, and he searches for it among student applicants. Like the author—who was admitted to Harvard partly on the strength of her extracurriculars—the university makes a point of rewarding applicants who demonstrate grit. Bill believes after-school activities both signal a student’s inspired persistence and teach and reinforce those traits.

Unfortunately, while affluent neighborhoods can afford ample after-school activities, poorer neighborhoods generally cannot, and the gap has widened in recent years. Grit Grid scores for poor students are a full point lower than those of well-off ones. Geoffrey Canada, director of the highly successful Harlem Children’s Zone education program, believes extracurricular activities are vital to a child’s growth and success.

University of Houston psychologist Bob Eisenberger made rats work hard to acquire pellets of feed, then gave them subsequent tasks; the rats that struggled for their food also worked harder on the next assignment. He then rewarded children either for doing challenging or easy mental activities, then gave them a tedious list-copying task; the kids who’d been challenged earlier worked harder on the later task. Eisenberger calls this phenomenon “learned industriousness.”

Duckworth’s family has a “Hard Thing” rule: Mom, Dad, and the kids all must do at least one hard thing and stick with it for a set amount of time. (They then can quit and find another hard thing to do.) The parents work hard on their professions and their exercise regimens. Daughter Lucy tried six activities before settling on viola, which she has practiced for three years and plays in orchestras. Piano-playing daughter Amanda, on entering high school, agreed to commit to a new rule: doing her hard things for two years.

Early in 2013, Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll watched Duckworth’s TED Talk on grit. He contacted her to say that grit already was “exactly what the Seahawks culture is all about” (244), and he picked her brain on additional grit pointers. Nine months later, Pete’s Seahawks won Super Bowl XLVIII. After the win, Pete declared publicly that one of the most important traits he seeks in players is grit.

A culture is a set of beliefs about how things should get done. A person joins a culture wholeheartedly, accepting its rules and seeing herself as a member of an in-group. Nations, companies, athletic teams, and schools have cultures. The Seahawks possess a culture of grit; West Point has a culture of grit. The KIPP, or Knowledge Is Power Program, teaches low-income students a gritty culture of self-challenge and mastering new topics.

A culture of grit can make a difference: “If you want to be grittier, find a gritty culture and join it” (245). Sociologist Dan Chambliss, who has studied Olympic swimmers, says it’s odd for people to get up at 4:00 a.m. to swim laps, but if everyone in a group does it, early rising becomes normal to them. A team with a culture of high, gritty standards will cause newcomers to strengthen their efforts so they can fit in. They begin to see themselves as the kind of people their culture encourages.

West Point graduate and Airborne Ranger Tom Deierlein was shot while on duty in Iraq and told he might never walk again. Determined not to give up and wanting to run the Army 10-Miler, Tom began a rigorous training program, first completing all the assigned physical therapy, then doing more after the program ended, learning to walk and then jog on a treadmill while holding the railings. Tom went from using a walker to running the 10-Miler and two triathlons. He has been CEO of two companies and a nonprofit. He credits his recovery and success to grit. Much of his grittiness came from his membership in the army culture.

Finland is a small country with a culture of perseverance called sisu, or guts, that has enabled it to withstand multiple attacks. This attitude famously allowed Finland to hold off Russian invaders in 1939 for months longer than expected. Duckworth and a Finnish grad student interviewed 1,000 Finns on their views of sisu, and 83% believed it could be developed and strengthened with “conscious effort.” Finnish culture encourages Finns to see themselves as gritty.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon believes in grit, which he calls “fortitude.” His prep school motto was “grytte”: He and his classmates taught themselves calculus when their teacher fell ill. On his watch, Chase survived the 2008 downturn with a profit. Jamie communicates relentlessly to his employees—it’s called “the cult of Jamie” (253)—adjuring them to “[h]ave a fierce resolve in everything you do” and to “[u]se mistakes and problems as opportunities to get better—not reasons to quit” (254).

Anson Dorrance coaches the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Women’s Soccer team. Out-recruited by several other schools, Anson focuses on a culture of teamwork and grit. He engages the team in “continuous experimentation,” administers the Grit Scale test annually, and uses a “Beep Test” of accelerating sprints to exhaustion that tests character. Players must memorize 12 core values and a famous quote for each; they’re tested at every player conference. Anson’s Tar Heels have won 22 national championships.

At West Point, the old “attrition model” of hazing freshman until some dropped out was replaced with a “developmental model” that maintains even stricter standards but supports cadets until they meet minimums. Failures lead to extra training; trainers often “lead from the front” by doing workouts with cadets. Motivation goes up, and students learn to propel themselves.

Pete Carroll’s Seahawks conduct Competition Wednesdays, in which defense and offense scrimmage with great intensity, creating challenges for each other to meet. Pete encourages the grittiest players to become examples to the others; this creates a self-reinforcing positive work ethic within the team’s culture of “deep and rich support and relentless challenge to improve” (266). This parallels the idea of parents who are both supportive and demanding.

Given the Seahawks’ gritty culture of constant improvement, Pete was asked about the disastrous final play in Super Bowl XLIX. Pete replied that he would “use it” to become better.

Grit can be nurtured and enhanced. People can develop it on their own, and they can work with instructors and teammates to grow it further. But does gritty success have a downside?

Wondering if gritty people were less happy, Duckworth surveyed 2,000 American adults and found that “the grittier a person is, the more likely they’ll enjoy a healthy emotional life” (270). Then she wondered if grit causes problems for others. Gritty people often see their work as a calling in which they can benefit people, but it’s possible their hard work takes a toll on their families or coworkers. She asked her kids, Amanda and Lucy, if her gritty pursuits bothered them; they replied that they wished she wasn’t always talking about her research, but they wouldn’t want her to be non-gritty. (They’re fairly gritty themselves.)

Too little courage is cowardice and too much is foolhardiness; too little or too much of many traits, such as generosity, honesty, and self-control, can be a bad thing. Duckworth hasn’t yet found that someone can be too gritty, though it’s possible to stick with a given pursuit long after it’s no longer worth doing. In that case, a person can reassess and select a new activity. The author queried 300 adult Americans about their grit scores, and all said either that they were happy with them or wanted to improve them, but none expressed the desire to be less gritty.

Grit leads to achievement, but that’s not the only value in life. There are things more important, such as being a good and loving person, and there are things equally as important, such as having an open-minded curiosity about the world. In the Chapter 13 notes Duckworth adds: “In many endeavors, creativity is absolutely essential” (322).

Why try to be better if we can’t be Albert Einstein or Usain Bolt or Amadeus Mozart? Grit isn’t always glorious, but its purpose is always to add value to our lives. For example, author Ta-Nehisi Coates says that “writing is failure” (276) and that all a writer can expect is to get up each day and make it a little better. Nonetheless, Coates has written a number-one best-seller and has won a MacArthur Grant.

Duckworth isn’t a genius, but she and the rest of us can work “toward excellence, ceaselessly, with every element of [our] being” (278), and that becomes a form of genius.

“What about work-life balance? Doesn’t grit come at a cost?” A gritty life takes a lot of time, sometimes 70 to 80 hours a week, and that cuts into family-and-friends time, among other things. It helps to focus on a single, overriding goal, like Will Smith’s “Create and relate” (278), which can help clarify career efforts.

“Can you lose your grit? I was passionate about something before but, for some reason, I feel like I no longer have it in me.” Overworked careerists can suffer the exhaustion of burnout, with its sense of depersonalization and helplessness. Sometimes a change of employer can fix things; sometimes helping others with their burnout can help you deal better with your own.

“Is there a relationship between grit and socioeconomic opportunity? Is it easier to grow up gritty in poverty or in affluence?” Trauma doesn’t help, and sometimes it hurts. Also, “overparenting” prevents a child from learning how to make independent, confident decisions. Finally, underprivileged children “get too much challenge and not enough support” (278); this is something the society as a whole must tackle.

“What about grit and romantic relationships?” It takes time to grow a good relationship. School dropouts have more divorces; grittier people stay married longer. Sometimes, though, a relationship simply isn’t worthwhile, and it’s better to cut losses and find a more suitable partner.

“It seems that cell phones and social media provide immediate gratification in a way I didn’t experience growing up. As a result, do we live in an especially ‘ungritty’ era?” The current generation, with its cell phones and other distractions, seems to have a low tolerance for boredom, which today can be ended with the push of a button. This low threshold makes grit harder to achieve, and this will likely get worse in the future. Duckworth and her family have strict rules about phone use, forbidding it until family activities and chores are done.

“I want my kid to develop grit. When should I expect him or her to have the single-minded focus of mature world-class achievers?” Many kids engage in “sampling,” trying out different activities before they settle on one. This helps them learn about themselves, which contributes to their later grit. Sometimes, after years of dedication, another passion will emerge as well, as happened with Duckworth’s daughter Lucy, who suddenly became fascinated with baking even while continuing her viola practice.

“Is grit the only psychological factor that determines success?” Self-control is important against distractions; emotional intelligence is vital for making friends; conscientiousness, general intelligence, and luck also factor in. Grit, however, is the single most powerful attribute for success.