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
A young entrepreneur once approached Duckworth before one of her lectures to tell her how long and hard he worked on his start-up. He thought this made him gritty, but Duckworth explained that grit is really about long-term stamina, not short-term intensity. Real grit means not just working super hard but working on the same thing for many years. This doesn’t have to mean working on the same exact project or sticking with one particular company. It really means “doing what you love, but not just falling in love—staying in love.”
The young entrepreneur’s commitment to grit may be admirable, but he deeply misunderstands the concept by setting his sights on the short term instead of the long term. Duckworth uses this anecdote to once again emphasize the vast difference between common assumptions about grit and her actual argument: grit is about whether an individual designs their entire life around certain goals, not just whether they work hard while they do it.
Themes
Duckworth includes her Grit Scale, which asks people to rate whether 10 different statements, like “I am a hard worker” and “I finish whatever I begin,” accurately describe them. She asks the reader to complete the scale, score it, and then compare themselves to the general population. But she emphasizes that grit can change over people’s lifetimes. Readers can also score themselves on grit’s two key elements: passion and perseverance. Generally, people score somewhat higher for perseverance than for passion. In this chapter, Duckworth will explain why by illustrating the difference between passion and perseverance.
Duckworth gives her readers the Grit Scale so that they can better understand the concept of grit, apply it to their own lives, and evaluate whether they ought to work on building more of it. Notably, the grit scale depends on people’s self-reports, which are inherently unreliable. Still, they can be used for studies with large number of participants, and there’s no better way to measure grit, which shows how difficult it can be for psychologists to measure personality constructs.
Themes
Duckworth points out that on the Grit Scale, the questions about passion ask about the consistency of people’s commitments, not the intensity of them. High-grit people are curious about the same questions for decades, and this kind of enduring interest is far less common than simple enthusiasm.
Duckworth reiterates her note from the beginning of the chapter: passion means consistently remaining interested in the same issues over time. Thus, in the context of grit, passion is more like a long-term relationship than the kind of short-term infatuation that people might intuitively associate with the word.
Themes
Jeffrey Gettleman is now a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who works in East Africa for The New York Times. But Duckworth first met him when they were both getting master’s degrees at Oxford in their early twenties. Gettleman didn’t know what he wanted to do, but he did know that he wanted to work in East Africa, where he had first traveled during college. At Oxford, he realized that journalism could get him there, so he made a plan to start reporting and eventually move back to Africa. It took him a decade, but he succeeded. Gettleman’s story shows that passion is less like fireworks (which fizzle out), than a compass (which consistently guides people in the right direction).
Gettleman’s life story exemplifies the kind of passion that gritty people have. He consistently pursued his most important goal—reaching East Africa—for many years before he finally achieved it. But during this time, he never lost his focus. Crucially, Gettleman’s story also shows that people’s passions don’t have to encompass their entire jobs, or even focus on the professional aspect of their work—Gettleman became a journalist to go to Africa, and not vice versa. Similarly, his long path to journalism also shows how people have to actively explore and develop their interests over time, until they are passionate enough about them to fully commit.
Themes
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Pete Carroll, the coach of the Seattle Seahawks, defines passion in terms of a life philosophy. Some people want many different things, while others know exactly what they want. Carroll developed his own life philosophy after losing his job and reading books by the famous basketball coach John Wooden. Carroll realized that people need an overarching vision of their lives in order to give meaning to their other, smaller and more specific goals.
Carroll’s definition of passion is useful because it highlights how passion gives meaning to people’s lives. Specifically, passion is an organizing principle for people’s goals, plans, and actions. In other words, each person’s passion defines the single overarching purpose of their life—and gritty people, like Carroll, organize their entire lives in order to fulfill that purpose.
Themes
The smallest goals, like getting to work on time, are really just a means to mid-level goals, like respecting others. These mid-level goals are a means to higher-level goals, like becoming an effective leader, and so on. And the highest-level goals aren’t a means to anything: they’re ends in and of themselves. These final goals are like a guiding compass or a life philosophy. For instance, baseball pitcher Tom Seaver’s highest-level goal was to pitch to the best of his ability every day. This structured all of his lower-level goals, like what he ate, how he slept, and even which hand he used to do everyday tasks.
Duckworth offers a more detailed analysis of how passion gives meaning and order to gritty people’s lives. Because passion defines gritty people’s highest-level, overarching goals, it also helps them understand where all of their other goals and commitments fit into the broader picture. In other words, high-level goals help people plan their lives. Tom Seaver illustrates this process because all of his lower-level goals—like eating well, sleeping consistently, and saving his throwing arm for baseball—were designed to serve his high-level goal of succeeding as a pitcher.
Themes
Duckworth concludes that passion means pursuing the “same ultimate goal in an abiding, loyal, steady way.” Gritty people’s lower-level goals serve their higher-level ones, while people who lack grit tend not to have their goals in order. For instance, many people fantasize about successful careers but have no clear idea of how to get there. Others have many separate goal hierarchies that aren’t unified by any top-level goals. Of course, to some extent, everyone has multiple goal hierarchies. For instance, Duckworth has two top-level goals: using psychology to help young people and raising her daughters well.
Grit doesn’t require just identifying one’s top-level goal(s), but also organizing one’s life in order to effectively achieve it (or them). This means that passion isn’t just about strong feelings and interests: it’s also about effective planning. Moreover, avoiding distractions from less important goals and priorities is just as important as following one’s primary passion. Duckworth’s life shows how it’s possible for gritty people to juggle separate personal and professional goals, but this can create difficulties when these goals contradict each other.
Themes
Still, Duckworth thinks that people are more likely to succeed if they can narrow down their top-level goals—and especially their professional goals. Allegedly, the billionaire Warren Buffet gave his private pilot an exercise to narrow down his career goals: list 25 of them, choose the five most important, and then avoid the other 20. When Duckworth tried this, she came up with more than 30 goals, then realized that most of them were connected. Rather than five main career goals, she thinks that people need one clear goal hierarchy for their careers. By prioritizing their goals, people can learn which ones are really worth their stubborn effort, which ones are worth abandoning, and which ones are merely a means to an end.
While Buffet’s exercise is about defining primary goals instead of clear goal hierarchies, it still emphasizes the importance of prioritization. Moreover, it gives readers clear, actionable advice for doing so, and it’s easy to adapt this advice to form a hierarchy instead of just a list. Listing, selecting, and understanding the relationships between different goals is the crucial first step towards finding one’s passion. Indeed, Buffet’s exercise also affirms that passion is something people must actively develop, not something that simply comes to them.
Themes
The story of legendary New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff also demonstrates how to build an effective goal hierarchy. Mankoff rejects 96 percent of the cartoons by the magazine’s official contract cartoonists. (The overall rejection rate, including cartoons from non-contract cartoonists, is even higher.) Mankoff loved drawing as a child, but he quit in high school. Then, after college, he realized that he wanted to be a humorist. He started drawing cartoons and writing comedy routines—but he soon quit stand-up to focus on cartoons. Over two years, the New Yorker rejected more than 2,000 of Mankoff’s cartoons. But in 1977, it finally accepted one. In the following years, it took dozens. And in 1981, the New Yorker hired Mankoff as a contract cartoonist.
Mankoff exemplifies passion and perseverance, the two key elements of grit. First, he discovered and stuck to the same passion: once he figured out that he wanted to be a cartoonist, he stayed focused on his ambitious overarching goal, even if it often seemed distant or unachievable. Meanwhile, he continued to submit new cartoons after thousands of rejections, which required true perseverance. But Mankoff’s grit eventually paid off, which neatly illustrates this chapter’s central thesis: grit is about people’s overall approach to life in the long term. It’s not just about whether or not they can drum up passion or perseverance for particular short-term goals.
Themes
Based on Mankoff’s story, Duckworth argues that people should be willing to give up their lower-level goals when necessary—like when they find an easier, more efficient, or more entertaining alternative. But they should be stubborn about their high-level goals.
Consistency and commitment to high-level goals generally requires serious flexibility about low-level ones. This is why Buffet’s exercise asks people to discard all but their most important career goals. Mankoff illustrates this because he gave up on psychology and stand-up comedy when he realized that comics were a better way to pursue his goal of becoming a humorist.
Themes
In the 1920s, the psychologist Catharine Cox studied 301 historical high achievers, estimated their IQs, and published an 800-page book about her findings. However, her IQ scores didn’t predict which geniuses were more eminent or influential. Neither did most of the 67 personality traits that she measured. The few that did matter were variations on passion and perseverance. In conclusion, Duckworth explains that the Grit Scale is just a tool for reflecting on how gritty people are now. The rest of her book will focus on how to strengthen and develop grit.
Ironically, even though she is best known for studying talent and genius, Cox’s study actually shows that, across history, in every field, effort predicts success better than IQ. Thus, her research echoes Duckworth and Chambliss’s findings: grit (passion and perseverance) trumps talent. Indeed, Cox definitively shows that Duckworth’s father was wrong: even genius depends more on hard work than inherent talent.
Themes
