Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

This book actually made me see myself in a new, encouraging, positive light. I might be a crybaby, but I'm a crybaby who follows through anyways, and apparently that qualifies as grit.

Note: I wrote this as part of a book review series I started at my workplace, thus the (slight) emphasis on work.So, what is this book about?According to bestselling author Stephen King, “Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.” I don’t know about you, but I didn’t always understand this. I used to believe that talent alone determines success—that if you have enough talent, you can be successful in something, and if you don’t have enough talent, you won’t succeed. Psychologist Angela Duckworth sets out to disprove this mistaken notion in her book. When you want to achieve an important goal, talent only gets you started. What keeps you going is a combination of passion and perseverance that Duckworth calls “grit.” For those of you who worry that you don’t have much grit (I’m talking to myself), good news: grit can grow. This book shows you how.How difficult is the subject matter?Duckworth is a psychologist, so naturally a lot of the material for Grit draws from her own research in the field as well as from the work of other psychologists and social scientists. However, you need not fear that this book is a bunch of statistics and clinical studies thrown together with some text. For Duckworth, the subject of grit and how it can help people thrive is her personal passion, so she shares much of what she has learned in a very approachable way: through stories. Inspiring stories about people from many different backgrounds, including West Point cadets, National Spelling Bee finalists, the women’s soccer coach at UNC Chapel Hill, a potter in Minnesota, a New York Times journalist in Kenya, the Seattle Seahawks, and students Duckworth herself used to work with when she taught seventh-grade math in New York’s Lower East Side. From these stories of gritty people doing gritty things, you’ll learn how grit is formed, how it grows, and how you can develop more grit in your own life and work.How can this book help me in my daily work?The subject of this book is too big to apply only to your daily work, in my opinion. Grit is a mindset encompassing one’s entire outlook on life. So if you are seeking specific practices for improving specific aspects of your work, this book will not be much help. But I believe this book can definitely help you, whatever your goals and responsibilities are, if you want to become a grittier person. And being grittier can certainly help improve your work performance.What’s the main takeaway?Duckworth sums it up like this: “Our potential is one thing. What we do with it is quite another.” In other words, talent is overrated; grit, a combination of passion and perseverance, is a better determinant of success.What are some key nuggets?Grit is chock-full of great nuggets! Here are a few:• “In my view, the biggest reason a preoccupation with talent can be harmful is simple: By shining our spotlight on talent, we risk leaving everything else in the shadows. We inadvertently send the message that these other factors—including grit—don’t matter as much as they really do.”• “From the very beginning to the very end, it is inestimably important to learn to keep going even when things are difficult, even when we have doubts. At various points, in big ways and small, we get knocked down. If we stay down, grit loses. If we get up, grit prevails.”• “How you see your work is more important than your job title. And this means that you can go from job to career to calling—all without changing your occupation.”• “When you keep searching for ways to change your situation for the better, you stand a chance of finding them. When you stop searching, assuming they can’t be found, you guarantee they won’t.”• “The bottom line on culture and grit is: If you want to be grittier, find a gritty culture and join it. If you’re a leader, and you want the people in your organization to be grittier, create a gritty culture.”Any caveats?This book is not a best practices guide per se; as I said earlier, it’s about an overarching mindset. Rather than giving specific techniques, what it gives instead are insights into how you can develop a mindset of grittiness. You won’t get instant results. You’ll have to show up every day and rise every time you fall down. You’ll have to face a lot of resistance—mainly your own. But if you put in consistent effort over time and don’t give up, you’ll be a grittier person than you were before, and who knows what you’ll achieve?Personal note:It’s been about a month since I first read Grit, and I can report that I have grown a little grittier already. I still struggle a lot with inner resistance and the temptation to give up when things turn out to be harder than I anticipated; I’m sure these struggles will always be present to some extent. However, lately I’ve become more self-aware and often catch myself before I’m about to procrastinate or give up. I tell myself that gritty people keep going, and then I dust myself off and do my best to keep going.

For decades the U.S. Army has been educating their finest at West Point military academy. Only about half of the 2,500 applicants meet its rigorous academic and physical standards, which are as high as the elite universities. Nearly all men and women are ‘varsity athletes’. The first few months, known as the Beast, are the most physically and emotionally demanding of the four-year course. All admitted candidates have been selected, based on the ‘Whole Candidate Score’ test.However, those who stayed and those who dropped out during the Beast, had indistinguishable scores. Both the Army and Dr. Duckworth were perplexed by the question: “Who spends two years trying to get into a place and then drops out in the first two months?”What emerged from Duckworth’s work on the problem was the Grit Scale—a test that measures the extent to which you approach life with grit. Grit turned out to be an astoundingly reliable predictor of who made it through and who did not.The Grit Scale was tested with sales people, among others, who are subject to the daily hardship of rejection. In an experiment involving hundreds of men and women who sold vacation time-share, Grit predicted who stayed and who left. Similar results were found in other demanding professions such as education.“I came to a fundamental insight that would guide my future work,” explains Duckworth. “Our potential is one thing. What we do with it is quite another.”Natural talent as the explanation of success, according to sociologist, Professor Dan Chambliss, “is perhaps the most pervasive lay explanation we have for athletic success.” However, his research led him to the conclusion that the minimal talent needed to succeed, is lower than most of us think.“Without effort, your talent is nothing more than your unmet potential. Without effort, your skill is nothing more than what you could have done but didn’t. With effort, talent becomes skill, and effort makes skill productive.”Grammy Award–winning musician and Oscar-nominated actor, Will Smith, says of himself: “I’ve never really viewed myself as particularly talented. Where I excel is a ridiculous, sickening work ethic.”Too many of us, it appears, give up far too early and far too often.Duckworth’s research has led her to the conclusion that Grit has four components: interest, practice, passion, and hope.According to the meta-analysis of sixty studies conducted over the past sixty years, employees whose personal interests fit with their occupations, do their jobs better, are more helpful to their co-workers, and stay at their jobs longer.Of course, just because you love something doesn’t mean you will excel at it. Many people are poor at the things they love. Many of the Grit paragons interviewed by Duckworth spent years exploring several different interests before discovering the one that eventually came to occupy all of their waking thoughts. “While we might envy those who love what they do for a living, we shouldn’t assume that they started from a different place than the rest of us. Chances are, they took quite some time figuring out exactly what they wanted to do with their lives,” she explains.The second requirement of Grit is practice. Numerous interviews of Grit paragons revealed that they are all committed to continuous improvement. There are no exceptions. This continuous improvement leads to a gradual improvement of their skills over years.“That there’s a learning curve for skill development isn’t surprising. But the timescale on which that development happens is,” Duckworth discovered. Anders Ericsson’s work with a German music academy revealed that those who excelled, practised about 10,000 hours over ten years before achieving elite levels of expertise. The less accomplished practised half as much.Ericsson’s crucial insight is not that experts practice much more, but that they practice very deliberately. Experts are more interested in correcting what they do wrong rather than what they did right, until conscious incompetence becomes unconscious competence.Dancer Martha Graham says “Dancing appears glamorous, easy, delightful. But the path to the paradise of that achievement is not easier than any other. There is fatigue so great that the body cries even in its sleep. There are times of complete frustration. There are daily small deaths.”Gritty people do more deliberate practice than others.The third component of Grit is purpose, the desire to contribute to the well-being of others. If Grit starts with a relatively self-oriented interest to which self-disciplined practice is added, the end point is integrating that work with an other-centred purpose.“The long days and evenings of toil, the setbacks and disappointments and struggle, the sacrifice—all this is worth it because, ultimately, their efforts pay dividends to other people,” Duckworth identified. Most Gritty people saw their ultimate aims as deeply connected to the world beyond themselves.The bricklayer may have a job laying bricks so he can pay for food. He may later see bricklaying as his career, and later still as a calling to build beautiful homes for people. It is this last group who seem most satisfied with their jobs and their lives overall, and missed at least a third fewer days of work than those with merely a job or a career as opposed to a calling.The final component of Grit is hope, but a different kind to the “hopium” many embrace. It is the expectation that our own efforts can improve our future. The hope that creates Grit has nothing to do with luck, so failure is a cue to try harder, rather than as confirmation that one lacks ability.The book also includes chapters on developing Gritty children, sports teams, and companies.It is a book for those who relish solid research and well-reasoned conclusions. It is highly motivational, in a mature and thoughtful way. Get the book. Work it, and share the knowledge. It could be transformative.Readability Light ---+- SeriousInsights High +---- LowPractical High -+--- Low*Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy and is the author of Strategy that Works.