book.chapter Understanding grit's importance

Grit is the capacity to persist until you've tapped into the deepest reserves of your potential. It's a unique combination of passion and perseverance that fuels the victorious to persist despite initial failures, numerous obstacles, and countless missteps. In life, it's not talent that matters most, but the amount of grit you possess. The United States Military Academy at West Point, known for its stringent admissions process, is a testament to this. Out of approximately 14,000 applicants, only around 1,200 are accepted into West Point. Yet, despite this rigorous process, about one-fifth of cadets will not graduate from West Point. Interestingly, a significant portion of these dropouts will leave during their first summer, during the infamous seven-week training program known as "Beast". For generations, military psychologists have been trying to understand why so many students who spend two years trying to get into West Point leave within the first two months, but no concrete theories have been formulated. High SAT scores or exceptional athletic abilities did not seem to affect the dropout rate. However, in 2004, a "Grit Scale" test was introduced, which measured the students' passion and perseverance. This test turned out to be a remarkably accurate predictor of who would complete West Point and who would leave. Since then, the grit test has been used in various settings, such as sales companies, public school systems, and Green Beret training, and each time it has demonstrated that aptitude and talent do not guarantee success. Instead, those who excelled in these challenging environments were those who had more grit than their peers. Angela Duckworth, a renowned psychologist, asks, "What else, other than grit, predicts success in the military, education, and business?" She found that in sales, prior experience helps—novices are less likely to keep their jobs than those with experience. In the Chicago public school system, a supportive teacher increased the likelihood of students graduating. And for aspiring Green Berets, baseline physical fitness at the start of training is essential. But in each of these domains, when you compare people matched on these characteristics, grit still predicts success. Regardless of specific attributes and advantages that help someone succeed in each of these diverse domains of challenge, grit matters in all of them. The conventional thinking in business has always been that there is a war for talent and the organization which manages to hire and retain the "smartest people" or the "A-Players" will win in the marketplace because they will figure it out. If you ask business managers "Which more important – talent or effort?", managers are nearly five times more likely to endorse intelligence as a predictor of success. However, the data does not support this conclusion at all. In fact, most people tend to have this kind of mental model when it comes to business, academic and athletic success: Yet when sociologists study high-performing individuals, a number of studies have concluded the most dazzling human achievements are not made by incredibly talented individuals but by ordinary people who paid the price required to excel. It's easy to say talent (physical attributes, genetic, psychological, or other) is the reason why people achieve great success but the reality is there are always many factors involved. For example this study found the most accomplished swimmers: - Had parents who were interested in the sport and who also had the financial resources to be able to pay for coaching, travel to swim meets and access to pools for training. - Were prepared to spend thousands of hours training spread over many years. - Had coaches who were able to help the swimmers refine numerous individual elements until they were able to produce a world-class performance in key swim meets like the Olympics. The simple fact is talent alone can never explain achievement. Talent is really more a measure of how quickly your skills will improve if you invest effort. Achievement only happens when you've paid the price in effort to acquire a skill and then learn to use that skill purposefully. What you achieve depends on talent and the effort you put in to fine-tune that talent. In other words, without effort talent counts for little. Talent reflects your potential. If you don't put in the effort, your skills are nothing more than what you could have done but didn't. Effort makes your skills productive. The harder you work, the more you will accomplish irrespective of your original skill levels. Grit means you work on something which you care about so much you fall in love with it and then stay in love for an extended period of time. To have grit, you have to be intensely committed to achieving your goals come hell or high water. You have to put in consistent and sustained effort over an extended period of time to truly have grit. Goals generally tend to exist at several levels: Your top-level goals are what you ultimately want to achieve with your life or career. You then break those top-level goals into several mid-level goals which are areas you're working on. You finally break those mid-level goals down again into low-level goals which are tasks for your daily or short-term to-do lists. Grit arises when you have the same top-level goal or goals for an extended period of time. That goal becomes your "life's philosophy" and it is something so interesting and so important you organize a great deal of your waking time's activities around that goal. People with lots of grit focus on achieving the same top-level goal over a career or a lifetime but are then flexible about the lower-level goals they pursue. Scientists have shown quite definitively that both nature and nurture play a role in determining how much grit you have. Furthermore, numerous studies have also shown grit tends to increase with age. Grit grows as people figure out their life philosophy (top-level goals) and become more selective about which mid-and lower-level goals should be abandoned and which should be pursued with tenacity. With more study, it has also become clear grit can be grown both from the outside in or from the inside out. "Our potential is one thing. What we do with it is quite another." – Angela Duckworth "Grit predicts success. Regardless of specific attributes and advantages that help someone succeed in diverse domains of challenge, grit matters in all of them." – Angela Duckworth "Many of us, it seems, quit what we start far too early and far too often. Even more than the effort a gritty person puts in on a single day, what matters is that they wake up the next day, and the next, ready to get on that treadmill and keep going." – Angela Duckworth