Grit

01Introduction

A book that says effort beats talent. The meta-analysis says grit barely predicts performance. Both can't be the whole story.

02Core Idea

Start with the definition, because the whole argument rests on it. Angela Duckworth, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, defines grit as a combination of passion and perseverance. She claims it is one of the most important factors in success, and that it can be trained.

She does not deny that talent exists. In the book, Duckworth defines talent as the rate at which a person learns with effort. Her claim is that a focus on talent crowds out something she calls "at least as important" — and that something is effort.

So what holds that claim up? A research paper in Educational Researcher sorts the support into two lines. The first line is interviews with high achievers, plus older writing on genius going back to Francis Galton. The second line is correlational data Duckworth and her co-authors gathered in military, school, work and social settings.

Name those two kinds plainly. The first line is stories. The second is measurement, but it is correlation, not experiment. Neither one, by itself, shows that raising someone's grit raises their success.

03The Evidence

The stories are vivid. The New Yorker's review lists people Duckworth interviewed or studied from a distance: Jeff Bezos of Amazon, the crossword editor Will Shortz, the banker Jamie Dimon. These profiles illustrate grit. They cannot test it, because nobody profiles the gritty people who failed.

The measurements tell a quieter story. The Educational Researcher paper points out that in many of Duckworth's own samples, grit is only a very weak predictor of success. Admissions test scores, cognitive ability and physical ability often predict better.

A meta-analysis pools many studies into one estimate. The meta-analysis led by Marcus Credé found the same thing: a generally weak relationship between grit and performance. It also reported that two of the stronger claims for grit appear to rest on a statistical misunderstanding.

Then there is a large study the Scientific American blog review describes. Among four thousand six hundred forty-two British sixteen-year-olds, grit added little prediction of test scores beyond a trait psychologists already measure: conscientiousness.

Duckworth's reply deserves airtime. She has pointed out that standardized test scores are not the only measure of achievement. Her earlier work found self-control predicted school grades better than achievement tests did. And she has argued grit matters most where the outcome depends on simply showing up.

So the fair ledger reads like this. Demonstrated: grit scores correlate with some outcomes, weakly. Illustrative, not demonstrated: that grit is the key ingredient of high achievement.

04The Critiques

The sharpest critique is about naming. Marcus Credé has criticized Duckworth for using the word grit where psychology already had a well-known trait, conscientiousness. If grit is mostly conscientiousness under a new name, the book's novelty shrinks, and so does its practical promise.

There is a structural problem too. The Educational Researcher paper finds that the higher-order view of grit, passion and perseverance rolled into one score, does not appear to be supported. Someone high in perseverance but low in passion may not be "moderately gritty" at all.

A friendlier critic still has a complaint. The Scientific American blog review, which likes the book, objects that the reception treats grit as brand new. Creativity researchers Joseph Renzulli and E. Paul Torrance wrote about task commitment and persistence long before. That reviewer notes Duckworth cites that work carefully in her journal articles. The complaint is aimed at the media framing, not at her scholarship.

The New Yorker's objection is broader. Its reviewer reads the book as treating grit as the single trait that accounts for success, above temperament, contingency and luck. That is a reading, not a finding. But it is a fair description of the book's emphasis.

And one essay on the SuperMemo site argues the book gets causation backwards. That essay's author says healthy grit follows from passion, and that many readers take away the message to clench their teeth and grind. That is one writer's argument, not a study. It names a real risk of misreading.

One for the comments: is grit a new idea, or conscientiousness with better marketing? Tell me which evidence moved you.

05Who It's For

The Scientific American reviewer calls the book lucid, informative and entertaining, a tour of Duckworth's own research over roughly a decade. As a readable account of one research program and its author's reasoning, it does that job.

Coaches and school leaders will recognise themselves in it. The New Yorker describes Duckworth calling the Seahawks coach, Pete Carroll, a "grit paragon". Carroll had seen her TED talk nine months before the Super Bowl win and got in touch. That tells you who adopted the idea early. It tells you nothing about whether the idea caused the win.

If what you want is a settled answer on whether grit can be trained, and whether training it changes outcomes, this is not that book. The strongest evidence for that step is the thinnest part of the case. A reader looking for permission to push through a situation that is simply wrong for them may also take away the wrong lesson.

06Offshoots

There are no verified sales, translation or adaptation figures in this review's file, so none will be quoted here. What the sources do trace is lineage. Duckworth popularised grit through journal articles, a widely viewed TED talk and the book, and educational researchers took it up quickly.

Duckworth also leans on the fixed versus growth mindset distinction. The Critical Reader essay, titled "Why grit failed", describes the idea as once all the rage in education and now in the background. That is one commentator's reading of the trend, not a measured decline.

07Verdict

Readability — strong

Originality of idea — weak; overlaps conscientiousness

Strength of evidence — weak for prediction, thin for training

Fairness to critics — mixed

Practical usefulness — conditional on reading it as one factor, not the factor]

Grit is persuasive at the level of stories and weak at the level of measurement. The profiles are real and the correlations exist, but they are small. And the claim that grit stands apart from conscientiousness has not held up well under independent analysis.

Read as a portrait of effort, it holds. Read as a scientific claim about what predicts success, it outruns its data. Strong on the page, thin in the meta-analysis.

That is the evidence as it stands, including the parts that cut against the book. If this kind of claim-by-claim check is useful, like the video and subscribe to Gem Harvester for the next one.