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 is Angela Duckworth's name for passion and perseverance toward long-term goals, and her Grit Scale measures it as two facets: perseverance of effort (keeping at it through setbacks) and consistency of interests (staying pointed at the same goal for years). Early studies made the idea famous. Grittier West Point cadets were more likely to finish their first summer of training, and grittier National Spelling Bee finalists got further in the competition, partly because they did more deliberate practice. The later evidence is more sobering. A 2017 meta-analysis by Credé, Tynan and Harms (88 samples, roughly 66,000 people) found grit correlated about .84 with conscientiousness, a well-established personality trait, and added little prediction beyond it. It also found that perseverance of effort did most of the predictive work, while consistency of interests did little. So grit is a useful way to think about staying power, but not a proven, separate predictor of success.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.