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