Grit: Passion and Perseverance, Honestly Assessed

Passion plus perseverance — the practices, and the honest evidence

What is grit and does it really predict success?

Grit, from Angela Duckworth, is passion and perseverance for long-term goals — sustaining effort and interest over years, not just intensity in the moment. It’s an intuitive and useful idea, but be honest about the science: meta-analytic work suggests grit overlaps heavily with the established trait of conscientiousness and adds relatively little predictive power beyond it, and the perseverance component does more of the work than passion. Treat grit as a helpful lens, not a settled predictor.

Grit captured something real: people who stick with long-term goals through setbacks tend to get further than those with talent alone. But the research story is more contested than the popular one — much of grit’s predictive power appears to come from its overlap with conscientiousness, and the perseverance facet carries more weight than passion. Below are the practices grit points to, each with its mechanism and a calibrated, honest read on what the evidence supports.