95 pages • 3 hours read
Angela DuckworthGrit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Index of Terms
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaThemes
The Nature of Grit
Many people dabble in different activities but don’t stick to them and never develop the expertise that leads to success and achievement. Others find subjects that intrigue them, pursue that interest diligently, master the skills involved, and achieve satisfying and successful results. These people have “grit,” a quality of persistent interest that, over years of practice, can overcome obstacles, distractions, and drudgery to achieve useful mastery in an activity.
According to Duckworth, “Grit is about working on something you care about so much that you’re willing to stay loyal to it” (54). It’s not a short-term crush but a long-term love for an endeavor, an enduring appreciation that pulls a person into the ongoing efforts they need to reach a level of expertise that generates success.
Without grit, the demands of high skill and high achievement will go unfulfilled. Most people believe success comes from raw, natural talent, but studies show that persistent effort is twice as important as native ability. Interviews with very successful professionals, including artists, scientists, and athletes, suggest that no one reaches the heights of achievement without long, hard hours of practice, upward of 10,000 hours over several years.
Few people can develop expertise in a subject that holds no interest for them. The grittiest people search for an activity they find intriguing and enjoyable; this gives them the energy and enthusiasm to take on the hard work that lies between them and achievement.
An important attribute of grit is focus, the ability to see a subject or activity through to completion: “you care about that same ultimate goal in an abiding, loyal, steady way” (64). High achievers often have more than one outside interest, and students who pursue two after-school activities tend to do better in college and professional life than students who pursue only one or none. What matters isn’t so much the number of activities but the amount of sustained effort in each.
The purpose of grit isn’t simply to be tough; it’s a foundational attitude that supports endeavors that require persistence for success. Grit gives a person the habit of mind to keep moving forward through obstacles, distractions, failures, doubts, and disappointments—it’s an attitude of relentless pursuit of improvement, no matter what. With such an approach, goals often are quickly reached and surpassed. Ideally, the purpose is no longer “Will I get there?” but “How much farther than my aim can I reach?”
The Achievement of Grit
Interest is the original attraction of a goal, the way it intrigues and entices a practitioner. Young people encounter many possible activities that might interest them; the ones that capture their imagination, that motivate them to dig deeper into the topic and to learn and master the skills required, are the projects that inspire the development of grit. Parents and teachers may try to emphasize persistence in any endeavor, but grit won’t grow unless the student wants to pursue the project.
Interest generates the desire to practice. Without practice, even the most naturally talented people will only go so far, and success will remain out of reach. Continuing practice, on the other hand, develops the skills a person needs to achieve strong results in an activity.
Practice can be daunting or tedious, and practitioners often get stuck on plateaus of learning where their advancement is stymied. For this reason, it’s important that practice be “deliberate”—every session should be an effort to push upward toward higher levels of skill, toward “continuous improvement.” The best workouts in any field, from athletics to the arts to math and science, feel tiring, and people need to take breaks between such bouts. The rewards of a sustained commitment to practice, though, are well worth the effort.
As students achieve higher levels of skill, they begin to see possibilities for using their training in jobs where they can generate value for others. A job soon becomes a career, a higher purpose than the simple pleasure of learning and practicing. With time, the career may evolve into a life’s calling, and those who see their work in that way “are significantly grittier than those who feel that ‘job’ or ‘career’ more aptly describes their work” (150).
The last element of grit is hope. This isn’t the typical kind where a person wishes that the world would dispense benefits, but the optimistic expectation that the person will achieve, through sustained personal effort, success in their chosen field. A thought like “‘I have a feeling tomorrow will be better’ transforms into ‘I resolve to make tomorrow better’” (169). This kind of hope is constructive; it looks past obstacles to the goal, and it draws confidence that, with enough effort, anything of value can be achieved.
Interest, practice, purpose, and hope create an enthusiastic and gritty relentlessness that enables a person to tackle obstacles and reach remarkable goals.
The Teaching of Grit
Parents, teachers, coaches, and mentors can impart grittiness to their children and students. There are three main ways through which they can encourage gritty behavior: support and high standards, extracurricular activities, and a culture of grit.
Parents sometimes break into two groups, the supportive and the demanding. Supportive parents encourage their kids to explore new ideas and activities, and they offer financial and other resources where needed. Demanding parents, on the other hand, set high standards, often with strict rules. If parents are merely supportive, their children feel no need to live up to a standard, and they may browse life’s offerings without making a commitment to anything. If parents are merely demanding, kids learn proper behavior but often don’t discover inspiring goals on which to ply those behaviors.
A better approach is a style of parenting that includes both support and demanding standards. Supported children can find their passions and begin to pursue them, while standards help keep them on track and teach them to be persistent and thorough. Kids who have a passionate interest embedded in a setting of high standards will develop the grit they need to push past obstacles and achieve success in their endeavors.
If not from a parent, a child can benefit from a mentor or concerned outsider who brings supportive yet demanding attention to them. According to Cody Coleman, whose mentors helped him rise from childhood poverty to a PhD at Stanford, “You don’t need to be a parent to make a difference in someone’s life. If you just care about them and get to know what’s going on, you can make an impact” (222).
Support and demanding standards can also apply to after-school activities, where students engage in fun and challenging endeavors that train them in useful skills. Extracurricular programs pursued for more than a year generate a gritty attitude that persists into college and beyond; for this reason alone, after-school programs provide a vital resource that improves student success in academic and other areas.
When a young student joins a group, such as a sports team, student newspaper, or musical ensemble, the student enters into the group’s culture and conforms to its standards to fit in. If that group has a culture of gritty, goal-oriented achievement, its members will learn to become grittier and more ambitious. Some of the most successful organizations deliberately sustain a culture of grit. The Seattle Seahawks live by grit; the University of North Carolina Tar Heel Women’s Soccer team, the winningest in history, lives by grit; even JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon oversees a culture of fortitude and relentless effort that has helped make that bank one of the most successful in recent decades.
The care and feeding of grit in young people begins, then, with supportive yet demanding elders; it grows during challenging extracurricular activities; it blossoms in teams that emphasize grit; and it paves the way to success in sports, the arts, and other callings.
