Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Grit, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Passion, Perseverance, and Success
Developing Grit
Psychology and Human Development
Grit and Society
Summary
Analysis
Getting into the US Military Academy at West Point is extremely difficult. Students have to go through a complicated nomination process and stand out academically, personally, and athletically. Every year, 14,000 high schoolers start the application process, but only 1,200 get in. But paradoxically, a huge number of these students drop out of West Point in the summer before they even start classes, leaving during the demanding program called Beast Barracks. For seven weeks, new cadets train intensively from 5 in the morning to 10 in the evening every day. They have no breaks, weekends, or contact with their families.
The US Military Academy is the kind of elite, competitive environment that readers are likely to associate with “grit.” Indeed, Duckworth plays on this word’s connotations—strength, toughness, and endurance—by starting with the example of Beast Barracks. But by pointing out that many cadets drop out of the program, Duckworth also signals that grit is much, much more than just hard work. As she will eventually argue, grit also requires sustained interest in a certain area, passionate commitment to a certain goal, and the ability to learn from failure.
Themes
In the 1950s, one of Duckworth’s mentors, the psychologist Jerry Kagan, tried to predict who would drop out of West Point. But he failed, and so did many other psychologists for decades after him. In 2004, as a graduate student, Duckworth took a shot at the same puzzle. The military psychologist Mike Matthews told her that West Point selects students based on an admissions score that measures academic, physical, and leadership ability. But there’s no correlation between this score and who drops out. Remembering his own time in the military, Matthews suggested that the cadets who stay are the ones with a “‘never give up’ attitude.”
West Point’s highly selective admissions process (and generations of psychologists) couldn’t determine which cadets would succeed at the school. The reason they couldn’t figure this out was because they were primarily concerned with measuring ability. But Mike Matthews’s observation that successful cadets have a “‘never give up’ attitude” suggests that performance at West Point isn’t about ability at all—instead, it appears to be about how people apply their abilities. Duckworth will soon argue that grit is the key measure of whether or not they do so.
Themes
In graduate school, Duckworth also interviewed leaders in fields ranging from business and sports to academia and art. She learned that, in all these fields, the people who succeed are the ones who keep trying when they fail and keep working to improve even when they succeed. Their standards and ambitions are high, but they love chasing their goals. In other words, they have grit: passion combined with perseverance.
Duckworth introduces her book’s central thesis: grit is the most important personality trait for success. Of course, this is similar to the “‘never give up’ attitude” that Mike Matthews described in successful West Point cadets. Duckworth explains how she arrived at her conclusions through a years-long research process, and she notes that her analysis applies to people working in a wide variety of different professional fields and functions.
Themes
In 2004, Duckworth developed the Grit Scale, a questionnaire to measure grit, and gave it to West Point’s 1,200 new cadets. To her surprise, the cadets’ grit scores weren’t correlated with their admissions scores. But grit did predict who quit during Beast Barracks and who stayed on. Duckworth then took her grit experiments to other settings. She found that grit is the best predictor of whether timeshare salespeople stay in their jobs, whether students graduate high school, and whether people earn graduate degrees. In the army, grit also predicted which soldiers would complete the Special Forces Selection Course, which is so grueling that it “makes Beast Barracks look like summer vacation.”
Duckworth’s research shows why grit is such a significant concept: it predicts outcomes that ability simply can’t. Specifically, grit determines whether people stick with difficult programs that have long-term rewards, but not immediate ones—like Beast Barracks, timeshare sales, and formal education. Duckworth’s experiment also shows how psychology can illuminate the true links between personality and behavior by applying the scientific method.
Themes
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After watching Spellbound, a documentary about the Scripps National Spelling Bee, Duckworth began to wonder whether the spellers’ success was about talent, grit, or both. So, she tested it by giving the spellers the Grit Scale and a verbal intelligence test. She found that grit and intelligence both predicted success, but that there was no correlation between the two. In other words, talent has nothing to do with grit. In fact, Duckworth found that Ivy League students with higher SAT scores were less gritty. All this evidence led Duckworth to an important insight: “Our potential is one thing. What we do with it is quite another.”
Like West Point, the National Spelling Bee is another high-pressure setting where performance is both extremely important and very easy to measure. This made it a perfect setting for Duckworth’s experiment. Again, Duckworth found not only that grit predicts success, but also that inherent ability doesn’t. This leads to the crucial distinction that she draws at the end of this introductory chapter: people might have varying levels of potential, but their achievement depends on “what [they] do with” that potential. In other words, grit is the factor that enables people to translate their potential into performance.
Themes
