What’s In It for Me?
What drives long term success, more than natural talent or “genius”? Celebrated researcher, author, and professor Angela Duckworth proves that a unique combination of passion and perseverance known as grit is an integral component to success. More importantly, everyone has the ability to grow their grit and instill grit in others. Whether you are a parent, coach, teacher, or simply striving for self improvement, the book has valuable information that is based on scientific research that will surely help you be grittier.
The Big Idea
Duckworth shares stories from high-performing successful people and ties that in with psychological research from her own studies and other prominent studies. Whether it is cadets at West Point, national spelling bee champions, or sales people, a common thread among all high-performers is their level of grit. The book was written to describe how the power of grit can help you achieve your potential. An important conclusion from the book is that grit is not a fixed trait; it can be grown. There are two ways to grow your grit: 1) On your own through a combination of cultivating your interests, developing a daily deliberate practice routine, connecting your work to a purpose, and fostering hope by understanding that effort leads to outcomes. 2) By having excellent parents, teachers, bosses, friends, and mentors who are both supportive and demanding.
Although the book may seem to focus on achievement and pushing oneself to reach their potential, an additional important conclusion was made on happiness. Duckworth conducted an extensive study that concluded that higher levels of grit coincided with greater life satisfaction. Satisfaction comes from doing something important, for yourself and others, and doing it well even though it can often times be very hard. Complacency may have its charms, but is it worth trading for the fulfillment of realizing your potential? After reading the key concepts below, you will have a clear answer.
“I’m convinced there are no more important qualities in striving for excellence than those that create true grit…I hope you enjoy the book as much as I did.” Brad Stevens, head coach of the Boston Celtics
Key Concept #1
Effort Counts Twice
“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.” Grit p.36
We all like to think of athletes, musicians, or anyone else with jaw-dropping talent as a natural, but numerous researches studies have concluded it is the result of countless individual elements, each of which is in a sense ordinary. The title of a study of competitive swimmers, “The Mundanity of Excellence” sums it up well. The sociologist who completed the study concluded there is nothing extraordinary or superhuman in excellent performances, but rather the result of many actions that are done consistently and correctly and all together produce excellence. Great swimmers of course put in thousands of hours of practice in the pool over years and years, but also had parents who were interested in the sport and earned enough money to pay for coaching and travel to swim meets. The point is not anybody can be Michael Phelps, but greatness is achievable.
In her Ph.D program, the author published an article with two simple equations that explained how one gets from talent to achievement:
Talent x effort = skill
Skill x effort = achievement
Talent is how quickly your skills improve when you invest effort, while achievement is what happens when you take your acquired skills and use them. Admittedly the equations above do not address outside forces such as the role of opportunities or luck, but it is still useful because when you consider individuals in identical circumstances, what each person achieves is really just based on talent and effort
Notice how effort factors into the above equations twice. Effort builds skill, and at the same time, effort makes skills productive. Without effort, your talent is nothing more than your unmet potential, and without effort, your skill is nothing more than what you could have done but didn’t.
Key Concept #2
Grit Grows
How much of our grit is related to our genes? Like all human traits, grit is influenced by a combination of both genes and experience. Data from a sample of American adults shows that older adults are actually more “gritty” than young adults. One potential explanation the author gives is people grow grit as they figure out their life philosophy, learn to dust themselves off after failure, and learn to tell the difference between low-level goals and higher-level goals. Essentially, people likely develop the capacity for long-term passion and perseverance as they get older.
If you are not as gritty as you would like to be, start by asking yourself why. The most obvious answer people give is they are lazy or think the effort is not worth it, but the underlying answer is often more complex than that. When the author interviewed and researched men and women who epitomized the qualities of perseverance and passion, she found four important characteristics:
Interest: Passion begins with intrinsically enjoying what you do. Of course most people have aspects of their work they enjoy less than others, but they are captivated by the endeavor as whole and find it meaningful.
Practice: After you have discovered and developed interest in a particular area, you must devote yourself to deliberate practice that incorporates challenges that eventually lead to mastery. You have to resist complacency and have a “whatever it takes” type of attitude.
Purpose: Conviction that your work matters adds to passion. For most people, interest without purpose is almost impossible to sustain for a lifetime. It is imperative that you identify your work as both personally interesting and integrally connected to the well-being of others.
Hope: Hope does not define the last stage of grit, but actually defines every stage.
It is imperative to learn to keep going when things are difficult and when we have doubts. Grit prevails when we get back up after being knocked down.
Key Concept #3
Interest and Practice
Follow your passion may be a popular theme in commencement speeches, but is that really great advice? Within the last decade, scientists who study interests have arrived at a definitive answer. The conclusion of a meta-analysis that aggregated data from nearly one hundred different studies of working adults in just about every conceivable profession is people are significantly more satisfied with their jobs when they do something that fits their personal interests, and in turn happier with their lives as a whole. For instance, people that really enjoy interacting with people are not happy working a job where they are alone in front of a computer all day. Not surprisingly, people also perform better at work when what they do what interests them. Unfortunately there are a lot of people in the world whose circumstances prevent the luxury of choosing a wide array of occupational options, and it’s difficult to make a living playing video games all day. If following your passion is truly the answer, it does not reconcile with a 2014 Gallup poll indicating more than two-thirds of adults not engaged at work. The conclusion that author makes on this topic is instead of telling students to follow their passion, the best advice to begin with may be to foster a passion. Many of the grit paragons interviewed by the author explored many different options and did not necessarily fall in love with their chosen path right away. For instance, award winning chef Marc Vetri was as interested in music as he was in cooking. To supplement his music career, he worked in restaurants and slowly started to like it, especially since he was not making any money in music. Olympic gold medalists winner Rowdy Gaines went out for football, baseball, basketball, golf, and tennis in high school, all before prioritizing swimming. The important message to remember is although we might envy those who truly 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, it took significant trial and error to figure out exactly what they wanted to do with their lives.
If you would like to follow your passion, but have not fostered one yet, begin with discovery. Ask yourself a few simple questions:
What do I like to think about?
Where does my mind wander?
What do I really care about?
What matters most to me?
How do I enjoy spending my time? In contrast, what do I find absolutely unbearable?
If you have a hard time answering the above questions, try recollecting on your teenage years, which is when vocational interests commonly sprout. It is important to have patience, and development of interests takes time.
Kaizen is Japanese for continuous improvement, a trait that is shared among all the grit paragons the author interviewed. In addition to the persistent desire to improve, the quality of time practicing, not just quantity of time, is essential. Anders Ericsson has devoted his entire career to studying how experts acquire word-class skills. Ericsson’s research concluded it takes about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to achieve excellence. Deliberate practice can be defined as pushing yourself just outside your comfort level and focusing on specific narrow aspects of a skill you are trying to improve. For instance, one will see minimal improvement in running if they simply jog in the park 3 days a week. To employ deliberate practice, a runner would have to record their times, set goals, run varying distances to improve endurance, and ideally have a running coach. The steps below summarize basic requirements of deliberate practice:
Have a clearly defined stretch goal
Employ full concentration and effort
Receive immediate and informative feedback (this is where coaches can be very useful)
Repetition with reflection and refinement
Deliberate practice may sound incredibly arduous, and it is, but people have the ability to learn to embrace challenge rather than fear it. The author offered three suggestions for getting the most out of deliberate practice: 1). understand the science behind deliberate practice, as this will increase your motivation. 2) make it a habit by figuring out when and where you are most comfortable doing deliberate practice 3) change the way you experience deliberate practice by reframing failures/setbacks as learning opportunities.
Key Concept #4
Purpose and Hope
“Grit depends on a different kind of hope. It resets on the expectation that our own efforts can improve our future.” Grit p.169
For most people, purpose is an incredibly powerful source of motivation. Across the research conducted by the author, most gritty people saw their ultimate aims as deeply connected to the world beyond themselves. While interest is crucial to sustaining passion over the long-term, the desire to connect with and help others is at least as equally as important.
Several studies have confirmed that workers who are fortunate enough to see their work as a calling, as opposed to just a job or career, are more satisfied with their jobs and their lives overall. So should you change jobs if you do not see it as a calling? Not necessarily. The research suggests that callings actually have little to do with formal job descriptions, and instead how you see your work is more important than your job title. Take the simple parable of three bricklayers: When asked “What are you doing?” The first bricklayer responded, “laying bricks” the second “I am building a church” and the third “I am building the house of God.” A lot of people make the mistake of assuming they need to first find their calling, which can create a lot of anxiety. Instead, a better approach is to play in active roll in developing and deepening your interests. A calling is not necessarily a fully formed thing you find, but is more dynamic. Whether you are a CEO or janitor, you can continually look at what you do and ask how it connects to other people and how it can be an expression of your deepest values.
Hope is an important component for fostering grit. However, instead of just hoping for the best or getting lucky, hope in the context of grit depends on knowing that our own efforts can improve our future. The author goes on to describe several prominent psychological studies that link hopelessness to a lack of perceived control. In the real world, the success of KIPP schools provides an example for how allowing students to believe they have control over their success to shapes outcomes. KIPP schools serve seventy thousand elementary, middle, and high school students across the country. The vast majority of students who attend the school come from low-income families, yet against the odds, more than 80 percent go on to college. The teachers praise effort and learning over “natural talent” and focus on reinforcing the message that life is about challenging yourself and learning to grow. Although this approach may seem subtle, students begin to have more hope because they realize they control over their academics and their future through the effort they put in.
The author references the work of psychologist Carrol Dweck, who introduced the concept of a growth mindset and fixed mindset. Within the context of grit, a fixed mindset about ability leads to pessimistic explanations of adversity, which lead to both giving up on challenges and avoiding them in the first place. In contrast, a growth mindset creates optimistic ways of explaining adversity, and that in turn leads to perseverance and seeking out new challenges that will ultimately make you even stronger.
Key Concept #5
Parenting For Grit
“If you want to bring forth grit in your child, first ask how much passion and perseverance you have for your own life goals. Then asking yourself how likely it is that your approach to parenting encourages your child to emulate you.” Grit p.216
Since grit is an extremely important component to success in life, many parents are left wondering how they foster grist in their children. Although the author admits there is no scientific conclusion on the best approach for parents, she does offer several important conclusions based on her own work and other important studies on high performers. There is no either/or trade-off between supportive parenting and demanding parenting. The best approach to parenting seems to be a combination of being both demanding and supportive, which Duckworth dubs “wise parenting”. In contrast, permissive parenting (supportive and undemanding), authoritarian parenting (demanding and unsupportive), and neglectful parenting (undemanding and unsupportive) created worse outcomes, with neglectful parenting obviously the worst approach.
A young child’s instinct to copy adults is very strong, so leading by example is important. Psychologist Benjamin Bloom’s study on world class performers confirmed almost without exception, the supportive and demanding parents were “models of the work ethic in that they were regarded as hard workers, they did their best in whatever they tried, they believed that work should come before play, and that one should work toward distant goals.” Grit p. 215.
Perhaps not surprisingly, research on the most effective teachers parallels the research on parenting. Harvard economist Ron Ferguson partnered with the Gates Foundation to study students and teachers in 1,892 different classrooms. Ron’s work found that students with the best outcomes had teachers that were both demanding (i.e. “my teacher accepts nothing less than our best effort”) and supportive (i.e. “my teacher seems to know if something is bothering me”). Unfortunately, just as in parenting, there are also teachers that exhibit permissive, authoritarian, or negligent approaches.
In an interesting study on teaching, students were instructed to write an essay, and the essays marked up with edits by teachers and divided into two groups. The first group had a post-it note that read: I’m giving you these comments so you will have feedback on your paper. This was the placebo control condition. The second group of essays had a post-it note that read: I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them. This was the wise feedback condition. Researchers placed each essay in a folder for teachers to hand back to students so that the teachers did not see which student received which note and the students did not notice that some of their classmates had received a different note than they had. Students were given the option to revise their essays the following week. In the placebo control group, 40 percent of students decided to revise their essay, while in the wise feedback group, 80 percent of students completed a revised essay. Although post-it notes are not substitute for daily actions that communicate respect, warmth, and high expectations, the study does illustrate the powerful motivating effect that a simple message can have.
Apply It
- Even if you are not an athlete, musician, or chess player, the principles of deliberate practice still apply to all paradigms. After all, even the most complex and creative human abilities can be broken down into component skills. How can you employ deliberate practice to improve a specific area of your life?
- Interest, practice, purpose, and hope are the four components to grow grit within yourself. Identify the one component that you think is holding you back from growing your grit, and focus on that. For example, if you are feeling demotivated at your current job, think about how your work connects to a greater purpose.
- The author is the mother of two daughters, and describes that her family has something called “The Hard Thing Rule.” The rule has three components: 1)Everyone, including Mom and Dad have to do a hard thing. 2) The hard thing must require daily deliberate practice. 3) You can quit the hard thing, but it cannot be until the natural stopping point (i.e. the seasons is over of the tuition payment is up). For parents that want to foster grit in their children without stepping on their child’s ability to choose their own path, the Hard Thing Rule can be an excellent learning tool.