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
At the National Spelling Bee, Duckworth found that high-grit contestants practiced more—and this practice explained their success. Similarly, her math students who studied the longest were generally the most successful. Yet many people also work the same jobs for decades, without significantly improving at them. In their interviews, Duckworth and Hester Lacey have both found that gritty people constantly try to improve, no matter how skilled they already are.
After interest, practice is the second key trait of gritty people. This is the effort that goes into Duckworth’s two equations: talent multiplied by effort equals skill, and skill multiplied by effort equals achievement. In other words, practice enables people to develop the skills necessary for success and then apply those skills in a consistent and effective way in order to actually succeed.
Themes
Psychologist Anders Ericsson famously found that becoming a world-class expert requires an average of 10,000 hours of practice over 10 years. However, his research is actually more about how “experts practice differently.” When Duckworth told Ericsson that she has been jogging for years but hasn’t improved, he replied that she doesn’t practice the right way.
Ericsson’s research explains Duckworth’s insight that simply doing something repetitively for years isn’t enough to develop genuine skill at it. Specifically, Ericsson explains why practicing effectively is just as important as practicing a lot.
Themes
Ericsson argues that experts improve through “deliberate practice.” They identify their weaknesses, then try to improve them by setting specific stretch goals—meaning goals that are just beyond their current ability. Then, they practice hard to achieve those goals. Often, experts practice best alone. They also crave feedback, especially negative feedback about what they’ve done wrong. It helps when this feedback is immediate. And they also have to actively process this feedback. For example, on a computer training program, a doctor kept repeating the same mistakes and ignoring the computer’s feedback until he actively reflected on all of his decisions. After receiving feedback, experts keep practicing until they achieve their goals. Then, they set new ones. Over time, this process leads to mastery.
Deliberate practice is a specific, intentional, evidence-based technique for developing skills. While most people simply practice the skill they want to improve and hope that they automatically get better over time, gritty people analyze their goals and determine which specific abilities they have to improve in order to build their overall skills. For example, whereas Duckworth jogs every day but doesn’t get faster, professional runners intensively train particular muscles, distances, and parts of a race—and carefully track their progress over time.
Themes
Anyone can use deliberate practice to improve. For instance, Benjamin Franklin became a better writer by repeatedly trying to recreate his favorite essays from his notes. The business expert Peter Drucker, the surgeon Atul Gawande, and the magician David Blaine have all argued that practice is the key to succeeding in their fields.
Duckworth gives these examples in order to illustrate two key principles. First, that even the most accomplished people have had to develop their skills through practice. And second, that readers can also use deliberate practice in their own lives—no matter what stage they’re at in developing their skills, and no matter what kind of skills they specifically want to improve.
Themes
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Duckworth teamed up with Ericsson to try and understand whether deliberate practice was the key to success at the National Spelling Bee. Spellers practiced in many ways, but only solitary, intensive study really counted as deliberate practice. Duckworth and Ericsson sent spellers the Grit Scale and a log to record their practice time. The winner, Kerry Close, spent thousands of hours doing deliberate practice, and the overall results showed that deliberate practice was the best predictor of success in the spelling bee. However, spellers also viewed it as much harder and less fun than other kinds of practice. This is consistent with Ericsson’s findings: deliberate practice is exhausting. Even world-renowned experts can only handle about an hour at a time, a few times per day.
Duckworth and Ericsson’s experiment confirmed both of their hunches: it supported Ericsson’s hypothesis that deliberate practice is the key to developing skills and Duckworth’s hypothesis that gritty people are more likely to use deliberate practice techniques. In particular, gritty people appear to be more willing to withstand the discomfort associated with deliberate practice. This may be because they feel that the benefits of deliberate practice are worth the costs—or because they simply aren’t as averse to pain or boredom as most people. Regardless, this experiment confirms that short-term stamina is an important part of grit—although it’s not the only aspect of true grit. Still, this is the dimension of grit that most closely conforms to the word’s popular connotations of toughness, endurance, and a tolerance for pain.
Themes
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi connects expertise to the state of automatic, spontaneous, total concentration known as flow. Ericsson believes that flow is impossible during deliberate practice, which by definition involves planning and suffering. But Csikszentmihalyi disagrees with Ericsson: when people understand that they’re learning something valuable, he argues, they can still enjoy deliberate practice. To see who was right, Duckworth arranged a public debate the two men. However, while they respectfully summarized their research, they didn’t reach a clear resolution.
Csikszentmihalyi and Ericsson fundamentally disagree about whether highly skilled people enjoy practicing or merely endure it. This disagreement is significant because it speaks to gritty people’s motivations—and what kind of approaches people who wish to develop grit should take towards their lives and work. If Csikszentmihalyi is right, and deliberate practice is inherently enjoyable for gritty people, then practice is its own reward. In contrast, if Ericsson is right, then deliberate practice is inherently unpleasant and people who want to be gritty should work on building their stamina when they start a deliberate practice routine.
Themes
Duckworth decided to study the relationship between grit and flow on her own. After giving thousands of people both the Grit Scale and a questionnaire about flow, she found that grittier people are more likely to experience flow. Of course, they’re also more likely to do deliberate practice. But this makes sense—they practice in order to improve their skills, and they experience flow when they use those skills in a performance.
Duckworth’s experiment showed her that she was wrong to view deliberate practice and flow as opposites. In reality, practice and flow are two sides of the same coin, so Ericsson and Csikszentmihalyi are both right. In fact, deliberate practice and flow correspond to the two equations Duckworth used to describe the relationship between talent, effort, and achievement. First, talent multiplied by effort equals skill: deliberate practice is part of this arduous process of skill-building. Second, skill multiplied by effort equals achievement: this is the performance, the enjoyable part when gritty people experience flow.
Themes
For instance, Rowdy Gaines swam thousands of miles to practice for the Olympics, and he didn’t enjoy it at all. But he did love racing, which made all the practice worth it. Meanwhile, when swimmer Katie Ledecky set a new world record, she said that she felt totally relaxed during the race but knew that practice was the key to her success. Similarly, when Duckworth prepared to give a TED Talk, she got hours of negative feedback from TED producers and her family. But her talk vastly improved, and she delivered the finished product in a state of flow.
Gaines, Ledecky, and Duckworth all feel that the rewards of flow and performance make up for the pain of deliberate practice. In other words, for them, the pleasure of exercising skills makes up for the pain of developing them. Thus, gritty people’s work encompasses both pain and flow, just at different times. The issue for people who want to develop grit is that the pain of deliberate practice often comes first.
Themes
Most of the world-class experts Duckworth has interviewed say that deliberate practice is extremely difficult. But many think it’s a positive experience anyway. According to Duckworth’s spelling bee data, high-grit competitors rated deliberate practice “as both more enjoyable and more effortful.” But it’s unclear if they enjoy hard work because they do so much of it, or if they do so much of it because they enjoy it. While Duckworth has seen her daughters learn to enjoy hard work, for instance, Katie Ledecky’s coach says that she has always worked hard to improve her weaknesses. Regardless, even if deliberate practice can be enjoyable and rewarding, it’s unlikely that it can ever truly feel like flow.
These experiments and anecdotes suggest another explanation for why gritty people are more willing to undertake deliberate practice. Namely, they aren’t just more willing to withstand pain—they’re also less likely to experience this pain in the first place. However, as Duckworth notes, psychologists need to perform more research in order to determine whether people can learn this reduced sensitivity to pain. If so, this would further support Duckworth’s conclusion that, for the most part, gritty people are not born but made.
Themes
Duckworth identifies three key steps people must take to benefit from deliberate practice and achieve flow. First, people have to follow the science. They must define specific stretch goals, maximize their concentration and effort, receive immediate and useful feedback, and repeat this process many times. Doing high-quality, intense practice is more important than just doing a lot of practice. But it’s possible to learn how to practice better. For example, when Duckworth developed a curriculum to teach children deliberate practice, they performed better in school.
Thanks to generations of dedicated research, psychologists have essentially boiled deliberate practice down to an algorithm. This shows why psychology benefits the public in significant ways: by showing people how to make the most of deliberate practice, researchers can help them save vast amounts of time and energy.
Themes
What’s more, people must make deliberate practice into a habit. If possible, they should do it at the same time and place every day. In his book Daily Rituals, Mason Currey pointed out that accomplished creative people generally follow consistent routines. In fact, Duckworth only managed to finish Grit by making a morning ritual out of rereading her drafts.
Habits are an effective tool for developing grit: they make difficult, tiring, and even undesirable behaviors (like deliberate practice) into automatic routines. This makes it significantly easier to do them over and over. In addition to helping people develop consistent practice routines, habits can also help them build their interests, passions, and hope by automating the behaviors that make this possible.
Themes
People should also try to change their experience of deliberate practice. The swimming coach Terry Laughlin pointed out that swimmers can make practice more pleasurable by learning to embrace challenges and avoid self-judgment. Similarly, child psychologists Elene Bodrova and Deborah Leong know that babies can learn from their mistakes without feeling shame or embarrassment. Adults will learn more effectively from deliberate practice if they can do the same.
Duckworth recognizes that it’s difficult for people to actively enjoy deliberate practice, but she suggests that they can still make it less painful by changing the way they think about it. In fact, her advice foreshadows her central argument in Chapter 9, which is about how to cultivate hope—or learn to maintain confidence and continue improving despite failure. After all, deliberate practice is really just a process of continual improvement through continual failure: people set stretch goals that they know they won’t meet because reaching for these goals allows them to gradually improve. Thus, gritty people must learn to befriend failure—or at least be comfortable with it.
Themes
