The Canon / Living / Success & Self-Help
Living · 2016
Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
Positive psychology / achievement researchGrit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance brings Angela Duckworth's academic research on the non-cognitive predictors of achievement to a general readership. Its central claim is that sustained effort and consistency of interest predict success better than talent or IQ alone.
Duckworth defines grit as the combination of passion, a stable and long-term direction of interest, and perseverance, the willingness to keep working through setbacks. She argues that effort counts twice in the path from talent to achievement: effort builds skill, and effort makes skill productive. The case rests on studies across demanding settings, from military training to competitive spelling, and she frames grit as developable through interest, practice, purpose, and hope rather than as a fixed trait.
For the mind-power lineage the book supplies an empirically tested account of how durable commitment shapes what a person becomes, while remaining carefully bounded as a psychological rather than a metaphysical claim.
In its words
Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare.
Without effort, your talent is nothing more than your unmet potential. Without effort, your skill is nothing more than what you could have done but didn't. With effort, talent becomes skill and, at the very same time, effort makes skill productive.
Our potential is one thing. What we do with it is quite another.
It's doing what you love, but not just falling in love—staying in love.
It isn't suffering that leads to hopelessness. It's suffering you think you can't control.
Grit depends on a different kind of hope. It rests on the expectation that our own efforts can improve our future.
At its core, the idea of purpose is the idea that what we do matters to people other than ourselves.
I have a feeling tomorrow will be better is different from I resolve to make tomorrow better.
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The author
Angela DuckworthGrit: perseverance and passion for long-term goals
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