**Grit is the combination of passion and perseverance.**

*   Passion is the consistency of goals held over long periods of time. It is NOT intensity or enthusiasm held for a brief moment. It is endurance.
*   Perseverance is the ability to overcome setbacks, put in hard work, and finish things you’ve started.

Grit predicts success, even when controlling for talent or IQ. That is, between two people of the same talent level, a grittier person will enjoy more success.

Make no mistake: talent and IQ are still important and still correlate with success. However, they are not _sufficient_ for high achievement. If you are talented, you get the most mileage by combining talent and hard work. And if you are less talented, you can make up for it with grit, exceeding someone with more talent who works less hard.

We tend to fetishize talent because it protects our ego – if other people’s successes are due to inborn talent, then we are at an inherent disadvantage, and thus we don’t have to feel bad about not measuring up. We look at Albert Einstein or Tom Brady and think, well they were born with it – there’s no way I could do what they do – thus, I don’t need to work hard.

Effort counts twice: skill = talent x effort. Achievement = skill x effort. The more effort you apply, the more your skill rises, and the more you achieve.

Grit is changeable. It increases with age, and small experiments show that it can be influenced.

There are 4 components to grit:

*   Interest: enjoy what you’re doing
*   Practice: conduct deliberate practice to improve on your weaknesses and continuously improve
*   Purpose: believe that your work matters and improves the lives of others
*   Hope: believe in your capacity for achievement and ability to overcome difficulties. Growth mindset

The most successful parenting style is both supportive and demanding. The two do not need to trade off with each other. Listen to your kids, talk to them, respect their viewpoints. Also, set ambitious goals for them, punish them for breaking rules. This is also true of leadership and coaching in professional environments.

To become more gritty, join a gritty culture. The social norms will force you to be gritty.

1-Page Summary

### Preface

Angela Lee Duckworth is the child of Chinese immigrants. Her father, Ying Kao Lee, was a chemist and research fellow at Dupont. Growing up, her dad was obsessed with how smart he and his family was, and he often told her when they disagreed, "you’re no genius!"

Later in life, Duckworth wins the MacArthur Fellowship, often called the "genius grant," ironically for the theory that accomplishment may depend more on passion and perseverance than inborn talent.

### What is Grit?

Duckworth’s early psychology research tried to predict success in a variety of fields, like the military, sales, business, and sports. She found that talent and luck were incomplete explanations for success. People who showed early potential sometimes dropped out before they showed signs of full potential. And some very successful people didn’t start off showing the most promise.

Instead of talent, Duckworth formulated the idea of **grit: the combination of passion and perseverance. Passion means long-term adherence to a goal and consistency of interest**, as opposed to being a dilettante and changing your goal mercurially. **Perseverance means overcoming setbacks, hard work, and finishing things, rather than giving up.**

(Shortform note: there is a similar trait called conscientiousness, one of the [Big Five personality traits](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Conscientiousness). Conscientiousness includes self-discipline and self-control. Grit expands on conscientiousness by including the retention of the _same_ high-order goals over long stretches of time.)

Gritty people constantly see themselves as never good enough. They’re never complacent with where they are. Yet they’re not miserable - gritty people are **content being discontent**. They work on things of great interest to them, and the idea of giving up rarely crosses their mind.

#### What the Data Show

As a researcher in psychology, Duckworth showed the predictive power of grit on success in a variety of fields:

*   West Point dropouts: New cadets endure an intense 7-week boot camp called Beast Barracks. 1 in 20 drops out. The admissions criteria used for West Point, the Whole Candidate Score (which consists of SAT score, high school rank, and physical fitness), didn’t reliably predict who would drop out. In contrast, **grit predicted completion better than any other predictor** – candidates with 1 standard deviation higher grit were 60% more likely to finish summer training.
*   Army Special Operations Forces: 42% of candidates withdrew during the Selection Course. Grit predicted retention.
*   Sales: Grit predicted salespeople retention better than other personality traits – extroversion, emotional stability, conscientiousness. Someone with 1 standard deviation higher grit showed 40% greater retention at the end of 6 months.
*   College GPA: Among U Penn undergrad psych majors, Grit was associated with higher GPAs, and had a stronger effect when controlling for SAT scores.
    *   Grit was associated with lower SAT scores. Possible explanation: because the lower IQ students (assuming SAT and IQ are correlated) had to have higher grit to get into U Penn.
*   Graduate degrees: adults who completed a graduate degree were grittier than those who’d only graduated from 4-year colleges.
    *   Adults who completed 2-year colleges showed higher grit than 4-year colleges too. Possibly because the dropout rate at 2-year colleges is very high, so those who make it through are especially gritty.
*   Spelling bees: grittier kids went further in the Scripps spelling bee, likely since they studied more hours and competed in more study bees. A finalist with a grit score a standard deviation higher than average was 41% more likely to advance to further rounds.

In all these studies, **grit had little relationship to IQ score, suggesting it is an orthogonal factor**.

And in these studies, grit was able to predict success even after accounting for IQ, meaning it contributes to success above and beyond IQ.

(Shortform note: in many of these studies, IQ was shown to be a stronger predictor of success than grit was. The author doesn’t mention this in the book since it would weaken its message. Just note that grit isn’t a total replacement for talent - it explains a different dimension of success, and, as we’ll explain later, talent and grit work together to increase achievement.)

#### Historical Data

Historically, high-achieving people have been known to be dogged in their pursuit of achievement. Darwin wrote that "men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work." Darwin himself was considered as someone not of superhuman intelligence but one who persisted stubbornly in tackling a problem well after others had already moved on.

In a 1926 study of accomplished figures from history, Catharine Cox inferred their IQs from their accomplishments and categorized the most eminent geniuses and the least eminent geniuses. The "most eminent geniuses" (Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton) had an average IQ of 146, and the "least eminent geniuses" (Giuseppe Mazzini, Joachim Murat) had an average IQ of 143. So IQ didn’t distinguish these two groups, but "persistence of motive" did. Cox found that **high enough intelligence, combined with strong persistence, achieved more than the smartest people with less persistence**.

Part 1: Why Grit Matters | Chapter 1: What is Grit?

Even though grit is so important, as a culture, we collectively obsess so much over talent.

When surveyed directly, Americans are more likely to point to hard work as the key to success, rather than talent. But when asked indirectly, we tend to show a "naturalness bias" toward internal talent rather than persistence.

A few illustrative research studies:

*   Professional musicians were given profiles of two pianists. One profile described the pianist as a “natural,” with early signs of talent. The other profile was described as a “striver,” with early signs of high motivation. The musicians then listened to recordings for each pianist (even though the recordings were actually different parts of the same pianist playing the same piece), then rated the two pianists on a few factors.
    *   The talent-based pianist received significantly higher ratings for "talent compared to other professionals," "likelihood of success in the future," and "value as an employee." **The effort-based pianist won only on one factor**: "ability to overcome obstacles to career.”
*   Study participants were given one of two profiles of entrepreneurs. The profile was identical, save for this sentence: "From the very beginning, Charles was able to demonstrate a keen sense of the market." (talent) vs "From this experience, Charles was able to gain a keen sense of the market." (hard work) Study participants then heard the same recording of a business pitch.
    *   **The talent-based entrepreneur was given higher scores for achievement potential and business pitch quality.**
*   Participants were given randomized profiles of entrepreneurs that varied in five dimensions (e.g. an IQ of 160, 130, or 100; leadership experience of 8, 5, or 2 years; source of achievement as "natural" or "striver"). They were then asked for their willingness to invest in the entrepreneur.
    *   Participants rated these in declining order of importance: investor capital raised (30.5% importance), IQ (20.9%), management skills by percentile (24.6%), leadership experience (13.7%), source of achievement (10.3%).
    *   Even though natural vs striver had the lowest importance, it still had a large effect: seasoned entrepreneur subjects were willing to give up 4.52 years of leadership experience, 8.95% in management skills, 28.30 points in IQ, and $39,143 in invested capital to invest in a "natural" entrepreneur.

Thus, the studies show a significant bias toward talent that can tip the scale in a decision.

Duckworth gives the example of comparing Hillary vs Bill Clinton. Bill seems to be a naturally gifted politician, while Hillary is competent but has to work hard to fit the role. The implication is that she’ll never be his equal without the talent.

### Why do we obsess so much over talent?

Nietzsche argues, "our vanity promotes the cult of the genius. 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, **if talent is the major contributor to success, we shouldn’t feel worse about ourselves when seeing high achievers**. "No matter how hard I worked, I wouldn’t be able to do what that person does, so there’s really no point in trying." By thinking this, we’re excused from effort. This is a fatalistic view, as though results were granted to us by fate, based on what we’re born with.

This is a warped view of reality, however. As the rest of the book discusses, grit is a vital component of success, and it’s trainable - you can develop more grit over time.

There are other problems with an obsession with talent. First, **it can cause a toxic and unproductive work environment.** Malcolm Gladwell critiques the talent mindset in employment as contributing to a narcissistic culture where people are pushed to prove they’re smarter than everyone else. At Enron, this encouraged short-term performance and showing off but discouraged long-term growth. Similarly, Enron had a practice of firing the bottom 15% of performers annually, which rewarded deception and discouraged integrity.

Obsessing over talent also implicitly sends the message that other factors like grit don’t matter as much as they really do. This can **bias us against hard-working but less talented people who could end up achieving even more**.

"The human individual lives far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. Men the world over possess amounts of resource, which only very exceptional individuals push to their extremes of use." – William James

Chapter 2: Is Talent Overrated?

How does grit actually lead to achievement?

Here’s the central model on why effort matters so much:

*   **talent x effort = skill**
*   **skill x effort = achievement**

Talent equates to how quickly your skills improve when you apply effort.

Achievement is the result of using your skill and applying effort.

In other words, effort factors in twice - **it increases talent, and then it increases the application of that talent to achieve**,

Here are important implications of this model:

*   Someone of lower talent can catch up in skill level by applying effort
*   Someone of lower talent can reach the same skill level but achieve more over time by applying the skill with more effort
*   Someone of higher talent can achieve less by putting in less effort

Here’s a simplistic model of what total achievement looks like, for a natural vs striver:

![alt_text](https://media.shortform.com/images/grit-achievement.jpg "image_tooltip")

The higher-talent person starts off with a lead. She expends some amount of effort, but then she stops early and plateaus.

The lower talent, higher grit person starts off with a disadvantage, and it takes a while for her to rev up. But once she does, **she catches up in achievement and exceeds the higher talent person**.

Consider an analogy: a potter improves her skill by applying effort and trying to make pots. While she’s improving the skill, she continues making a lot of pots, thus increasing output or achievement. A higher talent potter may start off making better pots, but with lower effort, she will create fewer pots over time than a lower-talent potter who works harder.

The same concept may apply to academics, athletics, career, even social relationships.

A 1940 study had a Treadmill Test where college-aged subjects tried to run on a sloped treadmill until they gave up. Even after controlling for baseline fitness, **the amount of time someone suffered on the treadmill was a good predictor of psychological adjustment through adulthood**.

And grit isn’t just about staying on the treadmill – **grit is about getting back on the treadmill**, day after day. If you stop jumping on the treadmill, your effort drops to zero, your skills stop improving, and you stop achieving output.

#### Helpful Quotes

"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." – Dan Chambliss, sociologist.

"The only thing that I see that is distinctly different about me is: I’m not afraid to die on a treadmill. I will not be outworked, period. You might have more talent than me, you might be smarter than me, you might be sexier than me. You might be all of those things. You got it on me in nine categories. But if we get on the treadmill together, there are two things: You’re getting off first, or I’m going to die. It’s really that simple." – Will Smith

Chapter 3: Why Effort Causes Achievement

How do you measure grit? In all the studies we’ve mentioned, grit was quantified through a self-assessed survey. You can take it yourself and see how gritty you are.

You’ll see 10 statements. For each statement, choose a number from 1 to 5, depending on how much you identify with it:

5 = Not at all like me  
4 = Not much like me  
3 = Somewhat like me  
2 = Mostly like me  
1 = Very much like me

The 10 statements:

1.  New ideas and projects sometimes distract me from previous ones.
2.  Setbacks discourage me. I give up easily.
3.  I often set a goal but later choose to pursue a different one.
4.  I am not a hard worker.
5.  I have difficulty maintaining my focus on projects that take more than a few months to complete.
6.  I have trouble finishing whatever I begin.
7.  My interests change from year to year.
8.  I don’t consider myself diligent. I give up often.
9.  I have been obsessed with a certain idea or project for a short time but later lost interest.
10.  I don’t often overcome setbacks to conquer an important challenge.

Now add up your score - there’s a possible total of 50. Then divide that by 10. The higher your score, then the more grit you have.

How do you stack up against the population? Here are the different percentiles of grit across the population:

**Percentile**

**Grit Score**

10%

2.5

20%

3.0

30%

3.3

40%

3.5

50%

3.8

60%

3.9

70%

4.1

80%

4.3

90%

4.5

95%

4.7

99%

4.9

Grit has two components: passion and perseverance, and the questions actually correspond to both.

For your passion score, add up the odd-numbered items above. For your perseverance score, add up the even-numbered items.

**Chances are, your perseverance score is higher than your passion score.** People tend to be better at working hard than at maintaining a consistent focus. It’s easy to get attracted to a new idea. It’s hard to maintain that passion over a consistent period of time without giving up.

Because people have different scores, this suggests passion and perseverance are different things.

Rather than letting your interest be an intense burst of firecrackers that vanishes into vapor, let your passion be a compass instead, guiding you on a long winding route to your ultimate goal.

### The Goal Hierarchy

People often have trouble figuring out what they’re aiming for in life. This is where people lack passion - they don’t care about what they’re doing all that much, and thus they tend to change what they like often, without committing to something.

The book suggests framing your goals as a hierarchy, with multiple levels:

![alt_text](https://media.shortform.com/images/grit-hierarchy1.jpg "image_tooltip")

The low-level goals are your day to day actions – writing emails, going to meetings, jogging for an hour. We do these low-level goals as a means to an end of a higher-level goal – such as executing a project or looking good to your boss.

To figure out your higher-level goals, keep asking yourself, “why do I do this thing? Why do I care?” Each answer forms a progressively higher-level goal. At some point, you ultimately have no answer – **you simply want to do something just because. This is your highest-level goal that is an end in itself**. You can also consider it your "ultimate concern" or your compass.

**This ultimate goal is what should drive every action at lower levels. If an activity doesn’t fit strongly within your goal hierarchy, then it likely isn’t moving you closer to your goal – and maybe you should stop.** (For example, you might find that answering emails and hanging out on Slack all day isn’t actually helping you make real progress on your project, which then isn’t driving you toward a promotion.)

Once you have an ultimate goal in place, it’s something you almost obsess over. You’re loyal to the goal, not changing it on a whim. You go to sleep thinking about it, and you wake up thinking about it. This is your passion, and passion drives grit.

#### Properties of Good Goal Hierarchies

Once you understand your top-level goal, you can see that **your low-level goals are merely in pursuit of the high-level goals**.

Low-level goals are not to be held sacred - they can be removed or changed. If you find a new low-level goal that is more effective or feasible or fun, you can swap it out for another. (Shortform example: If you find reading management books to be more effective than chatting on Slack, then you can swap the two as a low-level goal). This means you should reflect regularly on tasks you take for granted, and

Furthermore, this lowers how defeated you feel after failure. If you fail on a low-level goal, another can take its place. Lots of low-level activities can drive you toward your top-level goal. You have a lot of routes to getting there.

![alt_text](https://media.shortform.com/images/grit-hierarchy2.jpg "image_tooltip")

**When well-constructed, a goal hierarchy promotes grit – if all your activities are in pursuit of your highest-level goal, then your everyday activities apply effort toward your goal.**

#### Common Bad Goal Hierarchies

Here are common failings of goal hierarchies that lead to lower grit:

##### No lower-level goals

![alt_text](https://media.shortform.com/images/grit-hierarchy3.jpg "image_tooltip")

This person has a dream goal, like playing in the NBA or becoming a billionaire. But she hasn’t mapped out the lower-level goals that will get her there. This is "positive fantasizing" and makes it very difficult to achieve the goal.

##### Mid-level goals without a top-level goal

![alt_text](https://media.shortform.com/images/grit-hierarchy4.jpg "image_tooltip")

This person has frictions between multiple goals, without a unifying theme. This makes it difficult to tell when goals are in direct conflict with each other, so some goals actually negate others. The absence of an ultimate goal may also make your energy feel purposeless. It may feel like spinning your wheels – applying a lot of effort without going in any particular direction.

**If you feel pulled in too many directions, how do you prune your goal list?** Warren Buffett suggests this exercise for prioritization:

*   Write a list of 25 career goals.
*   Circle the 5 highest priority goals for you. Only 5 - be strict with this.
*   You must avoid the 20 goals you didn’t circle. These are your distractions.

If you can’t decide on 5, then consider quantifying your goals on two scales: interest and importance. Also, consider whether some of them contribute more to your ultimate concern than others.

Chapter 4: Test Your Grit

Let’s think about how much grit you have, and how to develop grit with better goals.

Exercise: Test Your Grit

All behavioral traits have contributions both from genetics and from the environment. When a trait changes rapidly in a population over time, this suggests the environment is the major cause, since genetics hasn’t had the time to change much.

*   The average male height increased from 5 feet 5 inches in 1850 to 5 feet 10 inches today. Since our genetics haven’t changed much since then, environmental influences like nutrition are responsible.
*   The Flynn effect finds that the average IQ today, calibrated to 1900 standards, would be somewhere around 130. Our brains aren’t necessarily biologically smarter - better, faster education may be responsible.

Duckworth tries to apply this logic to show that grit has some portion due to environment and is thus malleable. (Shortform note: Because if grit were purely genetic, the book would be self-defeating – you either have grit or you don’t! Time to go home.)

In unpublished twin studies, the heritability of perseverance is estimated to be 37%, and passion 20%. Supposedly, the rest of the contribution is from the environment.

Also, in a survey of US adults, grit rises steadily over age:

![alt_text](https://media.shortform.com/images/grit-age.jpg "image_tooltip")

Here are possible explanations for this:

*   Maturation could be genetically programmed – evolutionarily, grit may not be as beneficial in early years when seeking mates, and it may be more helpful later when caring for a family.
*   Older people could have endured more hardship throughout their lives (e.g. by surviving through World War 2 and the Cold War) and thus trained grit.
*   Maturation happens naturally over time as people learn that grit is a successful strategy for accomplishing goals, and that the opposite – quitting plans, shifting goals, starting over – leads to failure and is unsatisfying. Furthermore, life experiences – like getting a job, having children, caring for parents – require us to mature and adopt more grit.

Because we don’t have longitudinal studies of grit, we can’t distinguish between these explanations, but the third is Duckworth’s favorite. Anecdotally, people change when new expectations are thrust upon them – imagine the teen who sleeps in daily, but then enlists in the military and is punished for waking up past 6 AM. **Grit can be grown.**

Chapter 5: Grit is Changeable

If you’re not as gritty as you want to be, ask yourself why. Common reasons people lack either passion or perseverance include the following complaints:

*   What I’m doing is boring.
*   I’m not getting anything from my effort.
*   What I’m doing isn’t important.
*   I’m not capable of doing this, so I should give it.

In contrast, the very gritty tend to give up for the above reasons less. There are **four psychological assets** that paragons of grit have in common:

*   Interest: enjoy what you’re doing
*   Practice: conduct deliberate practice to improve on your weaknesses and continuously improve
*   Purpose: believe that your work matters and improves the lives of others
*   Hope: believe in your capacity for achievement and ability to overcome difficulties

Each asset directly addresses the corresponding complaints above it.

These four chapters cover these aspects. First, we’ll start with interest.

### Grit Component #1: Interest

Being interested by your pursuit is the beginning of developing grit. Paragons of grit say, "I love what I do. I can’t wait to get on with the next project." They’re doing things not because they’re forced to.

Grit cannot _truly_ exist without interest. **People who are not intrinsically interested in an activity will not work as hard or achieve as much as people who are.**

Research suggests that people are more satisfied and more effective at their jobs when they do something that fits their personal interests. For instance, if you prefer interacting with people, you’ll perform better as a salesperson than as a data entry clerk. Unfortunately, only 13% of adults consider themselves engaged at work.

What this means is that **most people are not working in the place of their greatest interest**. Of course, not every interest can lead to a sustainable career for most people (like playing videogames or reading books), but there ways to match the attributes of a career to people’s preferences.

Duckworth argues that high-achieving gritty people stick with an interest and have fewer career changes than low-grit people.

### How to Develop Your Interests

Part of the problem is an unrealistic expectation of how interests are discovered. People expect to find something that just clicks and to fall head-over-heels in love with "their passion," just as in romance.

This doesn’t happen in most cases. Instead, **passion needs to be developed. It starts with discovery, followed by development, then a lifetime of deepening.** You shouldn’t expect your passion to materialize suddenly one day - if you believe this, then you’ll flit from interest to interest, never giving one the shot it deserves to develop into a passion.

A few guidelines around finding interests:

*   **You shouldn’t expect to discover your interest early in life or right out of college** – many people find their life’s work after trying lots of different things.
*   Interests rely on trying things and receiving more information. You shouldn’t expect to arrive at your passion solely by introspection. You can’t simply will yourself to like things.
*   Ironically, it’s harder to feel when you’re interested. When you’re excited, you’re distracted by your task and thus not focusing on your level of interest. But if you’re bored, you’re painfully aware of your boredom.

Next, **interest deepens after engaging with an activity over time**. Through repeated exposures to your interest, you discover fascinating subtleties and facets that you would never find if you didn’t stick with it. (Shortform note: This may be related to the [Dunning-Kruger effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect) – when you know nothing, you think you know everything, which makes the task seem boring.) Eventually, your desire for mastery and continuous improvement becomes the driving force to continue engaging with the interest.

#### How to Discover an Interest If You Don’t Have One

Ask yourself questions: What do you like to think about? Where does your mind wander? What matters most to you? How do you enjoy spending your time? What did you dislike most about your last job or project?

Armed with a general direction, go out and try things. Trigger your interests with related activities. Don’t be afraid to guess.

After trying things, don’t be afraid to change direction based on more data.

Once you find an interest, keep digging. Keep asking questions about the craft. Seek out other people with the same interest. Find a supportive mentor. Combat the disappearance of novelty by appreciating the nuance.

#### Interests and Parenting

Interests thrive when encouraging supporters, like parents and coaches, provide positive feedback and ongoing stimulation to nurture the interest.

For parents, Duckworth argues that childhood is too early to detect interests. People only start to gravitate to general interests in middle school age. Also, forcing a passion doesn’t work. Allow open play to discover and retrigger interests, before enforcing discipline. This will develop intrinsic motivation. Consider this like starting a fire with an ember – blow it gently to get hotter and light the kindling, don’t smother it.

Part 2: Components of Grit | Chapter 6: Interest

The next obstacle to developing grit is the feeling that you’re not making any progress. Even if you’re interested in a task, if you put in a lot of time and don’t feel you’re getting a reward, it’s hard to keep persevering.

The way to guarantee progress with your time is to conduct **deliberate practice**. This is a structured, disciplined way to put in time and get results.

Deliberate practice consists of 4 steps:

*   **Set a stretch goal.** Focus on a narrow aspect that you want to improve. Set a reach goal that you can’t meet yet.
*   **Apply full concentration and effort.** Many greats do this in isolation, by themselves.
*   **Receive immediate and informative feedback.** Focus on what you can improve.
*   **Repeat with reflection and refinement.** Keep working until you meet that stretch goal. And when you meet it, choose a new stretch goal.

Note how deliberate this is, compared to merely putting in time absent-mindedly and going through the motions. Good practice requires _deliberate_ effort to do every time.

#### The Evidence behind Deliberate Practice

Much of the deliberate practice concept comes from Anders Ericsson, who popularized the well-known idea that to become an expert, you need to invest roughly 10 years of hard work or 10,000 hours. Other evidence cited to support deliberate practice:

*   Amount of time musicians spent practicing alone is a better predictor of how quickly they develop than time practicing with other musicians.
*   In spelling bees, deliberate practice was a better predictor of final round performance. Deliberate practice was also highly correlated with grit.

### What Deliberate Practice Feels Like

Deliberate practice is **more effortful** and **less enjoyable** than other forms of practice. Even world-class performers handle a maximum of one hour of deliberate practice before needing a break, and can **only do 3-5 hours of deliberate practice per day**. Dancer Martha Graham described the path to achievement as "daily small deaths."

Even very motivated people don’t necessarily practice deliberately. (Shortform note: This could be part of the reason people complain that a person can work very hard but not succeed. It’s not just about putting in time, but also using that time efficiently to get the best results.)

**Grittier people tend to find deliberate practice more enjoyable than less gritty people**, and they also do more of it. It’s unclear what direction the causality is – grittier people could spend more time in practice because of their perseverance and develop a taste for it, or grittier people innately enjoy hard work and that pushes them to do more of it.

#### How to Conduct Better Deliberate Practice

To increase deliberate practice, **make it a habit**. Figure out when and where you’re best at doing deliberate practice. Then commit to doing it then and there every day. This makes you get into deliberate practice automatically without thinking about it.

*   "There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual, for whom the beginning of every bit of work are subjects of express volitional deliberation." – psychologist William James

Furthermore, change how you feel about deliberate practice. Embrace the challenge and feel great at your improvement. Toddlers repeatedly try to learn to walk without getting anxious or embarrassed. Then they start getting cues that failure is bad from adults. Embrace it as "that was hard! It was great!"

### Deliberate Practice vs Flow

How does this painful deliberate practice idea fit in with the idea of flow, described as "performing at high levels of challenge and yet feeling effortless," a pleasurable state often reached by top performers? Athletes and performers describe it as an automatic performance at a very high quality, done without thinking. Deliberate practice is effortful and painful; flow is effortless and enjoyable.

There may be no conflict. Deliberate practice is a behavior or a habit, and flow is an experience. Gritty people do more deliberate practice and experience more flow than non-gritty people. **Deliberate practice and flow aren’t experienced at the same time.**

In other words, deliberate practice improves your skill, and the challenge level exceeds your current skill. This practice allows you to achieve flow at a different time, when the level of challenge meets your level of skill - here you’re not analyzing your mistakes, you’re just doing.

Analogously, a figure skater toils through deliberate practice to perfect her jumps and spins. Then, on performance day, she allows her skill to engage automatically – she’s already trained for that moment.

Chapter 7: Practice

If you have interest in your work and conduct deliberate practice, you’ll make progress. But ultimately, if you don’t believe that your work matters and contributes things of value, you will find it difficult to maintain your work for a long time.

This leads to the third component of grit: purpose. Purpose, as defined here, is **"the intention to contribute to the well-being of others."**

### Grit and Purpose

Duckworth found that universally, **grit paragons extend the benefits of their achievement to a level beyond themselves** – other people (like their children or clients) or an abstract concept (society, my country, science).

Evolutionarily, we may developed a drive for altruism, because a cooperative species thrives more than the individual. Altruism improves grit by both sustaining passion (because your goals are more important) and perseverance (because you fight harder for goals that you care more about).

There is a possible confound here where grittier people may take on jobs that are generally accepted to have more purpose (like being a doctor), making the purpose questions easier to answer. However, across a range of careers, Amy Wrzesniewski has found similar proportions of people who consider their occupations a job, a career, or a calling. Among secretaries and garbage collectors, there are people who find their work purposeful and those who don’t.

#### Self-Enjoyment vs Helping Others

Gritty people show a greater interest in purpose than non-gritty people. There are at least two large ways of achieving happiness: pleasure (self-centered enjoyment) and purpose (outward-benefiting). People of all grit levels show similar amounts of pleasure in their work, but **grittier people tend to feel a greater sense of purpose**.

It may seem that self-oriented and other-oriented motivations are on opposite sides of the spectrum, but research has found that they’re independent. You can have neither, and you can have both. You can at once want to be the most successful person, while at the same time helping others. People who have both self-oriented and other-oriented motives tend to be the most productive.

(Shortform note: do gritty people naturally empathize with people and want to be altruistic? Or can you develop purpose, which in turn makes you grittier? Is this malleable? The book doesn’t address this.)

#### Jobs vs Careers vs Callings

Here’s an illustrative story. Three bricklayers are asked, "what are you doing?"

*   The first says, "I am laying bricks."
*   The second says, "I am building a church."
*   The third says, "I am building the house of God."

The first bricklayer has a job. The second has a career. The third has a calling.

Defined further, people who have **jobs** are interested only in the material benefits from work and don’t receive other rewards from it. The work is not an end in itself. People who have **careers** have deeper personal investment and enjoy advancement within the organizational structure.

People who have **callings** find their work inseparable from their life – the work is personally fulfilling.

(Shortform example: a reporter visited the SpaceX factory floor and asked someone what he was working on. The SpaceX worker replied, "the mission of SpaceX is to make humans a multi-planetary species. To accomplish this, we need to lower the cost of rockets by making them reusable. I work on the guidance system that helps the rocket be reusable." These employees see their work as closely aligned to the company’s broad, humanity-wide purpose. Surely they feel a strong sense of purpose in their day-to-day work.)

### Benefits of Purpose

People who feel purpose in their work show meaningful benefits:

*   They feel more satisfied with their jobs and lives overall.
*   They miss fewer days of work.
*   They’re more willing to work unpaid after hours.
*   They work more overtime per week.
*   They improve performance metrics, like the number of calls made or dollars raised, for fundraising callers.
*   Anecdotally, having purpose pushes you beyond normal obstacles. Because you’re working for a greater cause and are backed by all the people you want to help, you’re not afraid to pound on doors and doggedly pursue your goal. Whereas when you’re acting selfishly, you become self-conscious about barriers.

Like interests, **purpose takes time to develop.** You don’t have to feel purpose right away. In fact, some students may be giving up too early if they skip from job to job every couple of years.

The book gives several anecdotes of a subway engineer and a physician who spent over a decade learning the intricacies of their craft and deepening their interest before broadening their purpose to a broader impact.

### How to Build a Sense of Purpose

How do you cultivate a sense of purpose?

**Reflect on how the work you’re doing can positively contribute to society.**

Researchers asked students to connect what they were learning with how the world could be a better place. The one-time intervention took just one class period. Compared to control, students increased their GPA (from 1.9 to 2.1), doubled their time studying on practice questions, and completed more math questions. Results were stronger for students who were at greater academic risk.

**Think about how you can change your current work to connect to your core values, even if just in small ways.**

An experimental group of employees was assigned to a job-crafting workshop, where they came up with their own ideas for changing their routines and building a map for what would constitute more meaningful work. Six weeks later, coworkers rated the employees as happier and more effective.

**Find a purposeful role model.**

Identify someone who inspires you to be a better person, and who acts on behalf of other people. This exemplar proves to you that it’s possible to be successful carrying a mission greater than yourself. In turn, this inspires your own belief that you can personally make a difference.

Chapter 8: Purpose

Try to see the greater purpose of your work.

Exercise: Build Purpose

**Grit depends on hope that you have the power to improve things.** Hope sustains passion by giving **optimism that one day you can achieve your goals**, and thus they’re worth holding for long periods of time. Hope sustains perseverance by encouraging thinking about **how to overcome setbacks**, rather than just accepting them as permanent.

### Helplessness vs Optimism

In a classic experiment, scientists Seligman and Maier split dogs into two groups. In one group, the dog is put in a cage and is shocked at random times. If the dog pushes against a panel at the front of the cage, the shock ends early. After 64 shocks, the pain ends. In the other group, there is no panel that ceases the shocks.

The next day, the dog is put into a box with a divider leading to another box partition. The shock is now announced with a warning tone, so the dog has a chance to react. There is not a difference in behavior. Nearly all the dogs who had control over the shocks learn to jump over the wall and escape the shocks. Of the dogs who originally had no control over the shocks, only 1/3 of the dogs who had no control escape – the other 2/3 simply lay down and wait for the shocks to end.

This concept is called **learned helplessness**. Suffering without the belief of control habitually leads to depression symptoms, lack of concentration, and mood disorders. It can feel like all is lost, and there is no solution to your problems.

The antithesis to learned helplessness is **learned optimism**. Optimists tend to explain their suffering with temporary and specific causes, while pessimists seek permanent and broad causes.

For example, consider the prompt of "you can’t get all the work done that others expect of you. Imagine one major cause for this event."

*   Pessimists are more likely to say a permanent, broad cause like "I screw up everything. I’m a loser." This attitude is broad and pervades nearly everything you do in life.
*   In contrast, optimists are likely to point to specific behaviors, like "I mismanaged my time" or "I didn’t communicate my expectations well enough." This leads to actionables to address next time and gives hope of improvement

Addressing specific and temporary causes is a part of cognitive behavioral therapy. If you keep searching for solutions to your problems, you at least have a chance of solving them. If you stop looking, you have zero chance.

"Whether you think you can, or think you can’t, you’re right." – Henry Ford

### The Growth Mindset

A similar concept is the **growth mindset**, that intelligence can be trained and is not innate.

To consider whether you have a growth mindset, see how much you agree with these statements:

*   Your intelligence is something very basic about you that you can’t change very much.
*   You can learn new things, but you can’t really change how intelligent you are.
*   No matter how much intelligence you have, you can always change it quite a bit.
*   You can always substantially change how intelligent you are.

If you disagreed with the first two and agreed with the last two, then you have more of a growth mindset.

A growth mindset increases grit and perseverance – if you hit an obstacle, you don’t attribute it to permanent personal traits. **You instead believe you have the capacity to improve**, no matter what you do. In contrast, with a fixed mindset, you think that you failed at something because you simply don’t have it in you and you’ll never have it – so why keep trying?

A surprising finding: adolescents change their IQs from adolescence to adulthood. This may be a special event in puberty, but it also suggests that our brains are plastic and can be rewired.

#### Why is a Growth Mindset Helpful?

What evidence shows the benefits of optimism and growth mindset?

Optimists are less likely to suffer from depression and anxiety, tend to earn higher grades, stay healthier, are twice as likely to stay in their jobs, and sell 25% more than pessimists. In a study of Teach for America teachers, optimistic teachers were grittier and happier, and they led to higher achievements for their students.

Growth mindset students are grittier, earn higher grades, and are more likely to persist through college. Employees in growth-mindset cultures (where employees were developed, rather than focusing on the top performers) were 47% more likely to say colleagues are trustworthy, 49% more likely to say their company fosters innovation, and 65% to say their company supports risk-taking.

#### Long-Term Effects of Mindset

Both optimism/pessimism and growth/fixed mindset can be self-reinforcing in vicious cycles or virtuous cycles.

Negatively, if you believe your skills have hit their permanent limits, and you believe life’s problems are caused by those limits, **you are less likely to overcome roadblocks** – after all, it’s logical to give up if there’s no way out. **Your recurrent failures then perpetuate your negative feelings**, which further reduce your likelihood of success and cause you to avoid challenges that would have led to growth.

In contrast, if you believe your skills can perpetually grow, and that misfortune is temporary and can be fixed, you keep trying to solve problems. **When you break through and improve, you further reinforce your positive beliefs, which makes you try even harder next time.** Importantly, you actively seek challenges beyond your ability that lead to growth (remember deliberate practice).

Suggestive evidence of long-term effects comes from the original Seligman/Maier shocking experiments. They performed the same experiment on adolescent rats and assessed them five weeks later as adults. The rats without control over shocks grew up timid and less adventurous. In contrast, the rats with control seemed resilient to learned helplessness.

Maier argues that **neural rewiring is strengthened by _actual_ success**. Just telling someone they can overcome roadblocks isn’t enough – you have to pair the low-level feeling of progress with high-level mindset changes to strengthen the connection between cause and effect.

The duration of learned helplessness is troubling for kids in poverty, who receive a lot of helplessness experiences and not enough mastery experiences. For kids at the more impressionable age, the wiring between failure and mindset can be strengthened repeatedly. Similarly, kids who coast through life without having to overcome adversity can have low grit that makes them crumble under pressure. Both situations can be reinforced by fixed mindset attitudes from parents or teachers – "you’re just no good at this, and you’ll never amount to anything."

### How to Increase Optimism and the Growth Mindset

How do you increase your optimism and growth mindset?

First, **update your beliefs about intelligence and talent**. Believe that your brain is plastic, and you have the ability to grow. Believing in the growth mindset is important to actually developing it.

Next, practice optimistic self-talk. (The book says to see a therapist and doesn’t give many examples, but optimistic self-talk may sound something like "great job! You tried hard, which gave you a chance of success." "That didn’t work. How did you approach it, and how can you improve next time?" "Don’t feel bad if you can’t do it _yet_. You’ll get there.")

A charter school network KIPP has the following Say/Don’t Say statements:

**Fixed Mindset**

**Growth Mindset and Grit**

"You’re a natural!"

"You’re a learner!"

"Well, at least you tried."

"That didn’t work. Let’s talk about how you approached it and what might work better."

"Great job! You’re so talented."

"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."

"This is hard. Don’t feel bad if you can’t do it _yet_."

"Maybe this just isn’t your strength. Don’t worry – you have other things to contribute."

"I have high standards. I’m holding you to them because I know we can reach them together."

Ask for help. Mentors with growth mindsets can coach you through introspection and set goals to push you on the virtuous cycle.

When you default to a fixed mindset, recognize it, and put a label to that persona. Call yourself "Pessimistic Pete" or "Abdicating Aaron."

Chapter 9: Hope

We’ve talked about developing grit internally. You can increase interest and purpose, and build in better deliberate practice helps.

But grit is developed over a long period of time and is affected by the environment you’re in. Grit depends on what kind of feedback you get and what opportunities you’re exposed to.

The last part of the _Grit_ book discusses our environments - childhood, parenting, and organization.

### Parenting Styles

Parenting styles are split along two axes:

\* Demanding ←→ Undemanding \* Supportive ←→ Unsupportive

This forms a 2x2 grid of parenting styles:

**Undemanding**

**Demanding**

**Supportive**

Permissive Parenting

**Wise Parenting**

**Unsupportive**

Neglectful Parenting

Authoritarian Parenting

(Wise parenting is also known as authoritative parenting.)

You might think that being demanding puts too much pressure on kids and is unsupportive. But this is a myth. High standards and loving support don’t exist on the same spectrum, and increasing standards doesn’t mean being less supportive. Parents who fear having high standards swing too hard in the other direction, giving unconditional support and open latitude, which isn’t good for grit.

Children aren’t always the better judge of what to do, how hard to work, and when to give up. They need proper reinforcement from adults to hone this sense.

#### Wise Parenting Leads to Better Outcomes

Wise parenting produces kids who get higher grades, are more self-reliant, and experience less anxiety and depression. This is generally true across ethnicity, social class, and marital status.

*   For instance, white children of middle-class, non-intact families showed a GPA difference of 3.14 vs 2.73 for authoritative vs nonauthoritative parenting. Black children of working-class, non-intact families showed GPA differences of 2.78 vs 2.42.

As children age, wise parenting leads to the healthiest behavior of all parenting styles.

*   Children of neglectful parents performed worst, drinking alcohol and smoking at a rate twice as much as their wise-parented peers. They also showed multiples more rates of antisocial behavior and internalizing symptoms (depression).
*   Indulgent parenting produced children slightly better than neglectful parenting.
*   Compared to wise parenting, authoritarian parenting produced children with similar alcohol and smoking use, but slightly more antisocial behavior and noticeably more internalizing symptoms.

#### How to Distinguish Parenting Styles

How do you distinguish parenting styles? The following statements are posed to children. (The lines in italics are inverted.)

**Supportive: Warm**

*   I can rely on my parents to help me with my problems.
*   I spend time talking with my parents.
*   My parents and I do fun things together.
*   _My parents don’t like when I tell them my problems._
*   _When I do well, my parents don’t praise me._

**Supportive: Respectful**

*   My parents respect my point of view.
*   _My parents say they’re correct and that I shouldn’t question their ideas._
*   My parents respect my privacy.
*   My parents give me personal freedom.
*   _My parents decide what I should do most of the time._

**Demanding**

*   My parents clarify family rules and expect me to follow them.
*   _When I do something wrong, my parents let me get away with it and don’t punish me._
*   My parents suggest how I can do better in the future.
*   My parents want me to try my best, even when it’s hard.

#### Teaching Style and Grit

Similar statements apply to teachers and how they manage their classrooms:

**Demanding (produces better academic results):**

*   My teacher insists on our best effort at all times.
*   Students in my class behave how my teacher wants them to.

**Supportive (improves student happiness):**

*   My teacher knows if something is bothering me and asks about it.
*   My teacher invites us to share our thoughts.

In an interesting experiment, graded student essays were sorted into two piles. The experimental group had a note that read: "I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations, and I know that you can reach them." The control read, "I’m giving you these comments so that you’ll have feedback on your paper." Students were then given the option of revising their essays. **80%** of the students with the wise feedback turned in a revised paper, compared to **40% in the control group**.

#### Parents Need to Model Grit

Supportive and demanding parenting may more likely lead to grit, this but requires that parents model grit for their children. Not all children under wise parenting will grow up gritty, and not all gritty parents will practice wise parenting.

Therefore, in her family, Duckworth applies the **Hard Thing Rule**:

1.  Everyone in the family has to do a hard thing. A hard thing requires daily deliberate practice (such as getting better at your job, yoga, violin).
2.  You can’t quit until a natural stopping point. Examples of stopping points include when tuition payments finish or when the sports season is over. You can’t quit just because you had a bad day.
3.  You get to pick your own hard thing. This develops interest.
4.  (In high school) Each child must commit to an activity for at least two years.

#### Quote

"You can quit. . . . But you can’t come home because I’m not going to live with a quitter. You’ve known that since you were a kid. You’re not coming back here." – Steve Young’s father, when Steve wanted to quit college football.

Part 3: An Environment for Grit | Chapter 10: Parenting

Outside of the home, extracurriculars have been found to correlate well with student outcomes like better grades, higher self-esteem, and lower delinquency. In particular, the longer and the more intensely you engage in an extracurricular, the better the outcomes.

#### Data on the Benefits of Extracurriculars

The cited studies:

*   Spending more than a year in extracurriculars increases graduation rate and adult volunteering. Spending more than 2 years in extracurriculars predicts having a job and earning more money.
*   After controlling for grades and SAT scores, follow-through was the best predictor of career accomplishments, graduating from college with honors, holding leadership positions. (Shortform note: but grades and SAT scores were still the best predictors)
*   Extracurricular follow-through correlates with higher grit scores and lowers dropout rates.
*   In a study of teachers, extracurricular follow-through correlates with longer retention and more effective academic gains. In contrast, GPA, SAT scores, and interviewer ratings did not correlate with retention or effectiveness.

#### Why are extracurriculars so helpful?

A few reasons:

*   There’s an adult who can practice supportive and demanding guidance. This allows a complementary role model to parents (whom kids probably get sick of listening to).
*   Extracurriculars are designed to cultivate grit – interest, practice, purpose, hope.
*   Kids feel challenged and have fun in extracurriculars. Other activities are lacking – in class, they feel challenged but unmotivated, and hanging out with friends is fun but not challenging.

But where is the causation? Do extracurriculars train grit, or do more gritty people happen to just participate in more extracurriculars?

Duckworth argues it’s both – **follow-through requires a baseline of grit, then builds it at the same time.** This is the "corresponsive principle" – the traits that steer us toward certain life situations are the same traits that those situations reinforce.

This can lead to both virtuous and vicious cycles. Someone who is encouraged to try and try again, against her comfort, may experience the satisfaction of a breakthrough. This may then encourage the child to try even more difficult things, then to welcome challenge.

The Dean of Admissions at Harvard College says these students stand out: students who "have made a commitment to pursue something they love, believe in, and value – and have done so with singular energy, discipline, and plain old hard work." He argues that the experience of persevering through obstacles teaches valuable lessons, and that this grit is then transferrable to something else.

Chapter 11: Extracurriculars and Grit

A culture exists when a group of people agrees on how to do things and why. The sharper the difference between this group and the rest of the world, the stronger the bonds.

**To be grittier, find a gritty culture and join it.** You will conform to the group and adopt their gritty habits. When it’s socially expected to wake up at 4 AM to practice, it becomes what you do.

The causation is bidirectional between the people and the culture. People need to be gritty to join a culture that selects for grit (like a top sports team). Then, because gritty people will reinforce each other, the culture gets grittier, which raises the bar for people who join. This is the corresponsive principle at work.

Eventually, the values of the culture we belong to become part of our identity. When values like grit become part of our identity, decisions depending on those values become habit and automatic.

If it’s part of your identity to finish what you complete, you don’t constantly stop and ask, "what is the cost-benefit tradeoff of continuing? What are the risks?" You ask: "Who am I? What is this situation? What does someone like me do in a situation like this?" Often grit will take you past the point when it’s seemingly rational to give up – **if grit is part of your identity, persevering and keeping passion is just something you do**.

Thus, think of yourself as someone who can overcome adversity, as someone who can get the better of bad fortune by proving you can stand worse. You will tend to act in a way that is consistent with your self-belief.

### How to Create a Gritty Culture

Repeat the value of grit repeatedly in your communication. Make it a tagline you can refer to easily, and that people will repeat to each other and themselves.

*   Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, wrote: "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."
*   Pete Carroll says: "Always compete." "You’re either competing or you’re not." "Compete in everything you do." "You’re a Seahawk 24-7." "Finish strong." "Positive self-talk." "Team first." "Be early."

Give the Grit Scale questionnaire to people and let them see their results.

Give a test of grit (like the treadmill test) and make the results publicly known.

Test your teammates on memorizing your cultural values and articulating what it means.

Lead by example. Built an improvement plan for someone who is struggling, and execute it alongside them. They will soon bootstrap themselves to improve independently.

Recruit people who are demonstrably grittier than the average in your team.

Praise behavior that is gritty.

Be a supportive and demanding mentor. Think about how you would treat your own children.

#### Quote

"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." – Teddy Roosevelt

"If you create a vision for yourself and stick with it, you can make amazing things happen in your life. My experience is that 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’ve created that vision, you’re on your way, but it’s the diligence with which you stick to that vision that allows you to get there. Getting that across to players is a constant occupation." – Pete Carroll, Seattle Seahawks coach

Chapter 12: Organizational Culture

Duckworth ends the book with a series of rebuttals to common counterarguments about grit.

Does grit conflict with happiness?

*   No – actually, **life satisfaction and grit correlate strongly**. Duckworth hasn’t yet studied the happiness of people _around_ gritty people – partners, children, parents. However, she believes her kids appreciate her grittiness and know achieving their goals is better than complacency.

Can you have too much grit, just like you can have too courageous or too honest?

*   Duckworth admits that persevering blindly and without exception isn’t the best default – this can cause you to miss opportunities. Ideally, you swap the activity with something else that is consistent with your ultimate concern.
*   She also argues that by far, most of us need more grit, not less.

Is grit the only thing that matters? No. In reflecting on this, morality is the most important character trait. Duckworth defines three clusters of character:

*   intrapersonal (grit, self-control) – the resume virtues
*   interpersonal (gratitude, social intelligence) – the eulogy virtues
*   intellectual (curiosity, zest)

Each of these clusters predicts different outcomes.

Does encouraging grit set expectations unrealistically high for children? Will they grow up thinking they can be Mozart or Einstein? If they realize they can’t get there, will they give up?

*   The point of growth is not to become Einstein – it’s to be the best you can, and to break past your self-imposed limits. To be gritty is to put one foot in front of the other, day after week after year, to fall down and rise again.

Chapter 13: Conclusion