THE ARTICLE · 8 MIN
Grit is a best-selling book built on its author’s own research, and that research has been argued over in print. Here are its big ideas in our own words, what later studies found, and a few small practices drawn from the parts that hold up.
About the book
Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance is by Angela Duckworth, a psychologist who is the Rosa Lee and Egbert Chang Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a 2013 MacArthur Fellow. Scribner published it in New York in 2016; it runs to 333 pages, plus xv pages of front matter. Her website calls it a “#1 New York Times best seller”.
It is popular psychology for a general reader, built on her own research. Part I explains what grit is and why she thinks it matters; Part II is about growing grit “from the inside out” (interest, practice, purpose and hope); Part III is about growing it “from the outside in”, through parenting, activities and the culture around you.
The book is in copyright, so we did not read it in full. We read the library catalogue record of the Scribner edition, short passages of it through the Internet Archive’s search-inside tool, Duckworth’s own website and her 2013 TED talk, and the studies listed below.
The big ideas
1. We are distracted by talent
Duckworth argues that people overrate natural talent when they explain success, and underrate staying power. In her 2013 TED talk she said that “in our data, grit is usually unrelated or even inversely related to measures of talent”.
2. Effort counts twice
Her model has two steps: talent times effort gives skill, and skill times effort gives achievement. Effort appears in both, which is the point of the chapter title. Her website defines talent narrowly, as “the rate at which a person improves in skill”.
3. Grit is passion plus perseverance
She defines grit as “passion and perseverance for long-term goals”. Passion here means steady commitment to one top-level goal over years, not intensity in the moment; perseverance means working hard through setbacks. The book includes a short Grit Scale so readers can rate themselves.
4. Grit can grow
She argues that grit is not fixed. From the inside, it grows through four “psychological assets”: interest, practice, purpose and hope. The practice she means is deliberate practice, a term she takes from K. A. Ericsson, a co-author of her 2011 spelling bee study: a clearly defined stretch goal on one narrow part of a skill, worked at with full concentration. It is often not enjoyable.
5. The setting shapes it too
From the outside, grit grows through parents, coaches and the groups people belong to. Her own family uses a “Hard Thing Rule”: everyone does something that takes deliberate practice; you can quit, but not in the middle of a season or on a bad day; and you get to pick your own hard thing.
6. Grit is not the only thing that matters
On her website Duckworth writes that “Grit is necessary but not sufficient”, that opportunity, mentors and support matter, and that if she had to choose for her children she would choose honesty and kindness over grit.
What holds up
Some of the book’s findings hold up in their own samples: grittier spellers practised more and went further, and grit predicted who stayed in several hard programmes. The bigger claims have had a harder time. Grit predicts outcomes, but modestly; it overlaps heavily with conscientiousness, a long-studied personality trait; and the perseverance half does most of the predicting. The rows below give each claim, the verdict and the source.
Is grit more than conscientiousness?
This is a genuine disagreement, so here are both sides and where we think the evidence leans.
Duckworth’s case. Her website says grit and conscientiousness are related but not the same trait, because grit “predicts achieving challenging goals even when these other characteristics are held constant”. Her 2007 paper found grit “highly correlated with Big Five Conscientiousness” but still predicting success beyond it and beyond IQ.
The case for a large overlap. Credé, Tynan and Harms (2017) pooled 88 samples in all; in the 22 that measured both traits, they estimated the correlation between grit and conscientiousness at .84 after correcting for measurement error (.66 before correction). Once conscientiousness was taken into account, overall grit explained no variance in high school grades and very little in college grades. A UK twin study of 4,642 16-year-olds (Rimfeld and colleagues, 2016) found that personality, mainly conscientiousness, predicted about 6% of the variance in GCSE exam grades and that grit “adds little” to that; it found the perseverance part and conscientiousness “to a large extent the same trait”. Ponnock and colleagues (2020) concluded that the two “are not unique constructs”.
Where it leans. Three independent teams, using a meta-analysis, a large twin sample and item-level analysis, all found heavy overlap. So the evidence leans towards a large overlap between grit and conscientiousness, with the perseverance part the piece that may add something: the 2017 meta-analysis found it still explained variance in academic performance after controlling for conscientiousness. Duckworth herself, with two colleagues, acknowledged in 2021 an “error in interpretation” in how they had read the scale’s structure, though they still treat grit as a compound of passion and perseverance.
How to use it
These practices come only from the parts that hold up. They describe what people do; what fits your life is your call.
- Practising the hard part on purpose. In the spelling bee study, studying and memorising words alone predicted performance better than being quizzed or reading for fun, though spellers found it the least enjoyable. People who use this spend part of their practice time on focused, solitary work rather than only on the kinds they enjoy.
- Keeping the effort going through a bad patch. Perseverance of effort is the part of grit with the best record, in the 2017 meta-analysis and in a 2019 study across many countries. In practice, some people judge a project by whether the work continued through the slow weeks, rather than by how keen they felt.
- Treating a grit score as a prompt, not a label. Duckworth’s website says you can fake a higher score “without much effort”, that scores carry “reference bias”, and that the scale is not appropriate for selecting employees, admitting students or comparing schools.
- Looking at the situation as well as the person. In the Chicago study, school safety and teacher support also predicted graduation when each was looked at on its own, and teacher support still did once everything else was controlled for. When someone is struggling, the setting is part of the question.
- Keeping expectations modest. Grit’s measured effects are real but small (an average of 4% of the variance in the 2007 paper), so a grit score says little about any one person’s future.
Who it’s for, and who can skip it
It suits readers who want an encouraging account of why staying power matters, and parents, teachers and coaches looking for language about effort and practice. Its stories are vivid and its central attitude, keep going at something that matters to you, is reasonable. The claims that grit is a distinct trait that beats talent are stronger in the book than in the research that followed. Readers who know the research on conscientiousness and deliberate practice will find much of it familiar. Duckworth’s own limits on the Grit Scale are worth keeping in mind: it is a tool for reflection and research, not for judging people.
If you liked this
- Mindset, summarised: in 2013 Duckworth called the growth mindset the best idea she had heard for building grit in children; a 2025 review of 66 studies found a correlation of 0.19 between growth mindset and overall grit.
- Mindsets, checked: seven popular mindset ideas and what the research found.
- Atomic Habits, summarised, on building the daily routines that keep effort going.
- Numbers that mislead, on base rates and relative changes, the trap behind the West Point figure.
Sources
- A. Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (Scribner, 2016): catalogue record and short passages via the Internet Archive’s search-inside tool; the author’s grit page and FAQ and about page; “Grit: The power of passion and perseverance”, TED Talks Education (April 2013).
- A. L. Duckworth, C. Peterson, M. D. Matthews and D. R. Kelly, “Grit: Perseverance and passion for long-term goals”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92 (2007); A. L. Duckworth and P. D. Quinn, “Development and validation of the Short Grit Scale (Grit-S)”, Journal of Personality Assessment 91 (2009); A. L. Duckworth, T. A. Kirby, E. Tsukayama, H. Berstein and K. A. Ericsson, “Deliberate practice spells success”, Social Psychological and Personality Science 2 (2011).
- L. Eskreis-Winkler, E. P. Shulman, S. A. Beal and A. L. Duckworth, “The grit effect”, Frontiers in Psychology 5 (2014).
- M. Credé, M. C. Tynan and P. D. Harms, “Much ado about grit”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 113 (2017); M. Credé, “What shall we do about grit?”, Educational Researcher 47 (2018).
- K. Rimfeld, Y. Kovas, P. S. Dale and R. Plomin, “True grit and genetics”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 111 (2016); A. R. Ponnock et al., “Grit and conscientiousness: Another jangle fallacy”, Journal of Research in Personality 89 (2020); D. J. Disabato, F. R. Goodman and T. B. Kashdan, “Is grit relevant to well-being and strengths?”, Journal of Personality 87 (2019).
- A. L. Duckworth, P. D. Quinn and E. Tsukayama, “Revisiting the factor structure of grit”, Journal of Personality Assessment 103 (2021).
- S. Alan, T. Boneva and S. Ertac, “Ever failed, try again, succeed better”, Quarterly Journal of Economics 134 (2019).
- B. N. Macnamara, D. Z. Hambrick and F. L. Oswald, “Deliberate practice and performance in music, games, sports, education, and professions”, Psychological Science 25 (2014), and its corrigendum (Psychological Science 29, 2018); D. Z. Hambrick, B. N. Macnamara and F. L. Oswald, “Is the deliberate practice view defensible?”, Frontiers in Psychology 11 (2020); K. A. Ericsson, “Given that the detailed original criteria for deliberate practice have not changed, could the understanding of this complex concept have improved over time?”, Psychological Research 85 (2021).
- J. M. Jachimowicz, A. Wihler, E. R. Bailey and A. D. Galinsky, “Why grit requires perseverance and passion to positively predict performance”, PNAS 115 (2018); D. Park, A. Yu, R. N. Baelen, E. Tsukayama and A. L. Duckworth, “Fostering grit”, Contemporary Educational Psychology 55 (2018).
- M. Calo, B. Judd and C. Peiris, “Grit, resilience and growth-mindset interventions in health professional students”, Medical Education (2024).
- K. K. L. Lam and M. Zhou, “A meta-analysis of the relationship between growth mindset and grit”, Acta Psychologica 255 (2025).
Checked October 2026. What we read: the catalogue record and short search-inside passages of the 2016 Scribner edition (not the whole book), Duckworth’s website and TED talk transcript, and the studies above (abstracts, plus the full texts of the 2014 Chicago study, the 2017 meta-analysis and the 2020 review of deliberate practice).
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