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
When Duckworth saw her four-year-old daughter Lucy give up on opening a stubborn box of raisins, she started to worry that Lucy wouldn’t grow up to be gritty, so she signed her up for ballet classes. Extracurricular activities teach children to follow a supportive, demanding adult who isn’t their parent and develop the four key components of grit (interest, practice, purpose, and hope). This is why Duckworth strongly recommends signing children up for activities that they enjoy.
Duckworth’s panic over four-year-old Lucy’s box of raisins might seem overblown, but what really matters is her proposal that young people can develop grit by pursuing activities outside of school. Of course, the underlying principle behind this idea is that parents can raise gritty children by putting them in environments that are appropriately interesting, challenging, and supportive, all at the same time.
Themes
There are relatively few studies on extracurriculars because research on children is ethically complex. One study has shown that children find school challenging but not interesting, social time interesting but not challenging, and extracurricular activities both interesting and challenging. Others have found a clear link between extracurriculars, higher grades, and better mental health. And all children have time for extracurriculars—most already waste many hours on TV, video games, and social media every day.
Duckworth again emphasizes the limits of the existing research in the psychology field. In this case, she points out how the ethical requirements of psychology research make adequately testing her hypothesis very difficult. Therefore, she encourages her readers to approach this chapter with more skepticism than the rest of her book. She argues that activities teach passion because they’re interesting and teach perseverance because they’re challenging. If young people don’t get to experience both halves of this equation together in the same setting, they might grow up to prefer interesting but easy things and avoid the kind of hard, uninteresting things that they’re asked to do at school.
Themes
Sticking with extracurriculars for multiple years helps students set and stick with long-term goals (which are key to grit). Psychologist Margo Gardner found that teenagers are more successful in college and more likely to get jobs after graduation if they spend two years in the same high school activity (rather than one).
Duckworth cites this evidence about the benefits of multi-year commitments in order to again emphasize that grit depends on taking a long-term interest in certain interesting and purposeful goals.
Themes
Similarly, in the 1970s, the psychologist Warren Willingham studied thousands of students from the end of high school through college. Among the 100 traits he studied, follow-through was the most important in determining success. Specifically, high schoolers who stuck with several extracurricular activities over multiple years were more likely to graduate college, succeed academically, reach leadership positions, and make significant achievements in their fields. Duckworth noticed that the meaning of the term “follow-through” seemed to be pretty similar to the meaning of “grit,” so she decided to replicate Willingham’s research.
As Duckworth has noted, psychologists cannot conduct specific experimental studies on the effects of sticking with extracurriculars over multiple years, which would be the gold standard for psychological evidence. Still, Willingham’s research comes close: it shows that a consistent commitment to activities benefits students. In fact, this kind of commitment is the single best predictor of academic and career success. Of course, this echoes Duckworth’s research on academic achievement and the Grit Scale.
Themes
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Bill and Melinda Gates funded Duckworth to study whether involvement in high-school extracurriculars can predict college drop-out rates. She asked 1,200 high schoolers to describe their extracurriculars, then calculated a grit score from zero to six for each student. Two years later, students with higher scores were far more likely to stay in college: there was an apparent connection between high grit scores and heavy extracurricular involvement. Duckworth notices that following through with extracurriculars might build grit, though gritty people might also just be more likely to follow through with extracurriculars—but it’s probably both.
Duckworth replicated Willingham’s findings and showed that commitment to extracurriculars is a useful proxy for grit in young people. Again, however, she carefully separates correlation from causation: on its own, the link between extracurriculars and grit is not enough to prove that young people will become grittier simply by joining activities. Yet the other research that Duckworth has cited does support this point—such as Seligman and Maier’s experiments, which show that overcoming challenges makes people more likely to develop what Carol Dweck calls a growth mindset.
Themes
Psychologist Brent Roberts has shown that people reinforce their personality traits through the “corresponsive principle.” People’s traits influence the situations they end up in, and these situations reinforce their traits. For instance, sociable teenagers are more likely to take well-paying, high-status jobs, and these jobs make them more sociable over time. Similarly, Duckworth suspects that young people who learn to quit difficult tasks (like opening a box of raisins) end up avoiding the exact situations that would help them build grit. In contrast, young people who succeed at difficult tasks (like ballet) learn to embrace other challenges in the future.
The corresponsive principle is really just a scholarly way of saying that people’s personalities and experiences reinforce one another in a positive feedback cycle. This is why people tend to become more extreme versions of themselves as they age—their traits become more pronounced over time because they make decisions that reinforce them. Of course, it also helps explain many of the key findings that Duckworth has cited, such as the observation that gritty people are more likely to be optimistic—gritty people are more likely to overcome challenges and learn to view failure as a temporary obstacle. Similarly, optimists are likely to develop grit because challenges don’t derail them. The corresponsive principle also illustrates why Duckworth thinks gritty young people are more likely to follow through with extracurriculars, while extracurriculars also help them build grit.
Themes
Harvard admissions dean Bill Fitzsimmons told Duckworth that he agrees with Willingham’s research and strongly values follow-through in his applicants. Students who have made a sustained commitment to something they care about are likely to bring the same grit to Harvard, Fitzsimmons explained, even if they switch to different activities. In fact, he remembers admitting Duckworth because of her extracurricular activities. And even when a student joins an activity because of parental pressure, Fitzsimmons added, the activity can still transform the student. However, Fitzsimmons also worried that too few poor students get to participate in extracurriculars. In fact, this participation is actually declining, in part because extracurriculars are increasingly expensive and time-consuming. This explains why income strongly correlated with grit scores in Duckworth’s study.
Even if there still isn’t sufficiently robust evidence on the link between grit and extracurriculars, experts on the issue—like Fitzsimmons, who has dedicated his life to evaluating young people’s potential—clearly see this connection. Moreover, Fitzsimmons’s comments about the transferability of grit and students’ capacity to learn it even when parents pressure them into joining activities support Duckworth’s hypothesis that extracurriculars help build grit (in addition to reflecting it). Of course, it also suggests that grit is something that affluent parents can buy—and this helps explain why Fitzsimmons and Duckworth predict a dangerous social trend of inequality in grit. Of course, it’s impossible to reverse this trend simply by teaching everyone grit. In fact, Duckworth’s book might do just the opposite: while she hopes to help more people become gritty through this book, affluent families are far more likely to buy her work and heed her advice.
Themes
Geoffrey Canada runs the Harlem Children’s Zone, a supplemental education program for poor children in New York City. After giving Penn’s commencement speech, he met with Duckworth and told her that the key to getting children out of poverty is giving them “a decent childhood.” During a TED talk, Canada explained that extracurricular activities clearly help children grow, learn, and enjoy their childhoods—even if there still aren’t enough scientific studies to prove it.
Like Fitzsimmons, Canada strongly believes that activities foster grit because of his deep expertise in youth development. But unlike Fitzsimmons, Canada primarily works with under-resourced students who lack the opportunity to participate in such activities. Of course, these students face plenty of challenges—but not necessarily the kind of structured, surmountable challenges that Duckworth’s research has found are crucial to building grit.
Themes
Duckworth agrees: the scientific evidence on extracurriculars isn’t sufficient yet, but their benefit is still obvious. And there are studies showing that people who work hard at one task tend to work harder at another. Robert Eisenberger has shown that if rats are assigned a hard task (like eating their food through dense wire mesh), they’re better at other hard tasks (like running on a plank). He repeated his experiment with his wife’s elementary school class: children who received hard memory tasks worked harder at a subsequent task than students who received easy ones. Just like Seligman and Maier discovered “learned helplessness,” Eisenberger discovered “learned industriousness.”
Eisenberger’s research again supports Duckworth’s hypothesis that children can develop grit by participating in challenging, structured activities—even if they only start these activities because of parental pressure. Of course, Duckworth has already shown that all the components of grit—interest, practice, purpose, and hope—are learnable. But, in one way or another, commitment and hard work are foundational to all of these elements: people have to commit in order to develop their interests, build a routine of deliberate practice, find a sense of purpose in their work, and learn to approach setbacks with optimism. Thus, by showing that industriousness is learnable, too, Duckworth affirms that it truly is possible to build grit from the ground up.
Themes
As a new mother, Duckworth struggled to apply Eisenberger’s conclusions—rather than just rewarding her daughters when they worked hard, she tended to praise them all the time. But their ballet teacher had very high standards and taught them the key components of grit: interest, practice, purpose, and hope. Duckworth’s family follows “the Hard Thing Rule”: everyone has to do something hard (like yoga, running, or piano), nobody can quit in the middle of their season or semester, and everyone chooses their own hard thing depending on their interests. When Duckworth’s daughters reach high school, they will have to add a second activity for two years. Duckworth recommends using this rule to raise gritty children.
Duckworth’s experience shows how difficult it can be for parents to maintain the balance of support and high expectations that is necessary to foster grit. But this helps explain why extracurriculars can be so valuable: when parents fail to provide the right environment for grit, activities can do so instead. “The Hard Thing Rule” is Duckworth’s way of ensuring that her children always spend time in enriching extracurricular environments. And the Rule’s different components help foster different parts of grit: by banning quitting, the Rule teaches perseverance, and by giving young people the power to choose their own activities, the Rule helps them discover and develop their interests.
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