What Is Grit? Duckworth's Research, the Critiques, and How to Build It Honestly

Somebody takes the quiz after watching the talk. Twelve statements, one to five each, and the sheet averages them. I got a 3.1. So that's it, then. I'm just not one of those people. Their friend takes the same quiz, scores a 4.6, and over the next year quits a job, a half-marathon plan and a relationship. The quiz did not lie to either of them. It measured something narrower than what they took it to mean.

That gap is the subject of this post. Grit is real and worth building, and it is also smaller than the TED talk: it overlaps heavily with ordinary conscientiousness and predicts success modestly, which means the useful way to hold the idea is as a set of behaviors you practice, not a verdict on what kind of person you are. Here is the definition, what the scale measures, where the research cut the claim down, and how to build the part that holds up.

What is grit, in Duckworth's exact definition?

Grit is "perseverance and passion for long-term goals." That is the phrase from the 2007 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Angela Duckworth, Christopher Peterson, Michael Matthews and Dennis Kelly. Perseverance is the effort half: you keep working when it is hard. Passion, in Duckworth's sense, is not intensity. It is consistency of interest: you keep caring about the same top-level goal for years rather than switching every season.

The paper tested this across six samples: educational attainment in two groups of adults, grade point average among Ivy League undergraduates, whether cadets in two West Point classes stayed, and ranking in the National Spelling Bee. Grit predicted all of them. It was unrelated to IQ, and it added predictive power beyond IQ and beyond conscientiousness. The number people skip: grit accounted for an average of 4 percent of the variance in those outcomes. Four percent is real. It is also 4 percent.

What does the Grit Scale measure, and what is a "gritty" score?

The scale measures how you describe your own perseverance and consistency of interest, averaged on a 1 to 5 scale, and higher means grittier. The original has 12 statements; the Short Grit Scale (Grit-S), from Duckworth and Quinn's 2009 paper in the Journal of Personality Assessment, trims it to eight and keeps the same two factors. Half the statements are about effort: "I finish whatever I begin," "Setbacks don't discourage me." The other half are about interest and are reverse scored: "My interests change from year to year," "I often set a goal but later choose to pursue a different one." The scoring sheet says 5 is "extremely gritty" and 1 is "not at all gritty." Both versions are free for non-commercial use on Duckworth's research page.

Before you take a score personally: the directions ask you to compare yourself with "most people in the world," and almost nobody does. Your frame of reference is your friends and your office, and it changes the number. Duckworth told NPR in 2015 that students at stricter, higher-standards schools rated themselves lower on grit even though their academic gains were larger. Her line: "Some of the hardest-working people rate themselves as lazy." A grit score is a decent conversation starter and a poor identity.

Can grit be learned?

Partly, and the evidence for that is thinner than the evidence that grit exists. Duckworth's position is yes: the middle section of her 2016 book is titled "Growing grit from the inside out" and runs through four chapters, interest, practice, purpose and hope, each of which she argues can be developed.

What the research can show is more modest. The 2007 and 2009 studies are correlational: people who scored grittier did better on certain outcomes, which does not tell you what happens when someone tries to raise their score. The 2017 meta-analysis concluded that "interventions designed to enhance grit may only have weak effects on performance and success." So: the behaviors that make up grit can be practiced, because they are behaviors. Whether practicing them moves your score, and whether a moved score changes your life, is not established. You do not need to become a gritty person. You need to do the next gritty thing, which is the whole subject of the zeal guide.

What is the difference between grit and resilience?

Resilience is how you recover from a specific blow. Grit is whether you keep heading the same direction over years. They are related and not the same.

Perseverance, the effort half of grit, is the part that overlaps most with resilience and the part that does the most work in the research. Tenacity is the everyday word for the same thing. Mental toughness is a separate construct from sport psychology about performing under pressure, with its own questionnaire, and the people who study it argue about whether it is distinct from the others. Our guide to building mental resilience covers the recovery skill on its own.

Where the grit story is overclaimed

In three places.

The meta-analysis. In 2017, Marcus Credé, Michael Tynan and Peter Harms published "Much ado about grit," pooling 584 effect sizes from 88 samples and 66,807 people. Their findings: the two facets do not combine into one higher-order trait the way the theory says; grit is "only moderately correlated with performance and retention"; and grit is "very strongly correlated with conscientiousness," the Big Five trait. The perseverance facet did almost all of the predicting; the "passion" half added little. They concluded that the construct validity of grit is in question and that its main use may lie in the perseverance facet. Put bluntly: the part of grit that works is the part we already had a word for.

The individual-versus-structure critique. When a scale asks whether you "finish whatever you begin," it cannot tell the difference between a person who lacks follow-through and a person whose housing fell through. Ethan Ris, writing in the Journal of Educational Controversy, traced the word back more than a century and found that grit has mostly been an anxiety of middle- and upper-class parents, with poor children cast as an idealized solution rather than the problem. Stuti Shukla's review in the Harvard Educational Review made the related point that the book's account of success is "stripped of any context" and ignores how race, class and income limit access to the opportunities it treats as available. Neither says grit is fake. They say it is being asked to explain things it cannot.

Grit in schools. Duckworth has made this argument herself. When districts started talking about evaluating teachers on student grit scores, she said "the enthusiasm is getting ahead of the science," pointed to the self-report and reference-bias problems, and argued against mandating grit measures in schools. The person who built the scale does not think it should be used to grade anyone, and that includes a manager, a coach or an influencer grading you.

How to build grit without the hustle

Take Duckworth's four and translate each into one behavior you can do this week. Then add the one her list leaves out.

1. Interest: pick the thing and stop auditioning. Write your top-level goal in one sentence. If you cannot, that is a choosing problem, not a grit problem, and reading more about grit will not fix it.
2. Practice: work on the weak part. Duckworth's chapter is about deliberate practice: practice aimed at a specific weakness, with feedback, repeated. Twenty minutes on the weak part beats two hours on the comfortable part.
3. Purpose: name who else this is for. One sentence. "Finishing this certification means my kids see me finish something." Vague purpose does not survive February.
4. Hope: collect evidence, not feelings. Hope in Duckworth's sense is not optimism. It is the belief that your effort changes outcomes, and you build it with data. Keep a plain log of what you tried and what happened.
5. Accountability: give the plan a witness. This is the piece the four assets skip. Tell one person the goal and the date you will report back. Our guide to holding yourself accountable when nobody is checking has the mechanics, and if the goal itself is the problem, start with goal-setting that survives contact with real life.
6. Decide your quitting rules in advance. Grit is not "never quit." It is "do not quit on a bad day." Write down what would make stopping the right call (a deadline, a cost, a changed situation) so the decision gets made by the calm version of you, not the 11 p.m. version. If you quit everything in the same way, our post on why you give up so easily takes that pattern apart.

Two caveats. If you cannot start anything, not just the hard thing but anything, that can be depression, ADHD, burnout or the aftermath of something you went through, and it needs a professional, not a questionnaire. And if "I can't keep going" has stopped being about a project and started being about your life, that is not a grit problem at all. If you are in crisis, call or text 988 in the US, 9-8-8 in Canada, or find your country's line at findahelpline.com.

What does grit look like when nobody is filming?

It looks like the nurse who failed the licensing exam and sat it again four months later. The man learning Portuguese at 41 who has done 15 minutes a day for 14 months, still cannot follow the news, and is doing today's 15 anyway. The woman who has sat in the same recovery meeting every Tuesday for six years. None of them would call themselves gritty, and most would score about a 3, because they compare themselves with the version of them that is faster. For the days it does not feel like enough, we collected perseverance quotes for when you're actually struggling.

Frequently asked questions

Is grit just conscientiousness with better branding? Mostly, according to the largest analysis to date. Credé and colleagues found grit "very strongly correlated" with conscientiousness, with its perseverance facet doing nearly all of the predictive work. Duckworth's original paper reported the same high correlation but showed grit added some prediction beyond conscientiousness. Either way, work on the perseverance behaviors and ignore the label.

What is a good grit score? The scale runs from 1 ("not at all gritty") to 5 ("extremely gritty"), and the sheet does not define good. Because it is self-report and the frame of reference shifts, a 3.2 from someone at a demanding workplace and a 4.4 from someone with easy comparisons can describe similar behavior. Treat the number as a prompt, not a grade.

Is grit more important than talent? The research does not say that. The 2007 paper found grit unrelated to IQ and predictive beyond it: different things that both matter. The 4 percent figure in the same paper is a reminder that most of what explained success was not grit.

Can you have too much grit? Yes, in the form of staying with a goal that has stopped being worth it. Grit is a tool for the goals you have decided on, not a rule that you may never decide again. Schedule a check on whether the goal is still the goal; that is a different question from whether today was hard.

Sources and further reading

• Duckworth AL, Peterson C, Matthews MD, Kelly DR (2007). "Grit: Perseverance and passion for long-term goals." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
• Credé M, Tynan MC, Harms PD (2017). "Much ado about grit: A meta-analytic synthesis of the grit literature." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
• Duckworth A. "Research: Measures (12-Item and 8-Item Grit Scale)." angeladuckworth.com
• Ris EW (2015). "Grit: A Short History of a Useful Concept." Journal of Educational Controversy
• Shukla S (2017). Review of "Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance." Harvard Educational Review
• Kamenetz A (2015). "A Key Researcher Says 'Grit' Isn't Ready For High-Stakes Measures." NPR

ILTY does not hand out grit scores. What it does is hold the goal still. Tell Mr. Relentless the one thing you said you would do and he will keep coming back to it, without the pep talk, and The Architect will help you turn "be grittier" into a plan with a weak part to practice. Every conversation ends with action items, and because ILTY remembers them, the next conversation starts with whether you did them. It isn't therapy, and it isn't for crisis. It's the witness a questionnaire can't be. Try it free.