Grit: what research says about perseverance, passion and success, and whether grit can be taught

You set a goal, but a few months later your interest has faded, or you cannot finish the course you started, and you wonder whether you simply lack staying power. A word that often comes up with this worry is “grit”. The US psychologist Angela Duckworth’s team defined grit as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals”. In the first studies, grit accounted for an average of 4% of the differences in success outcomes such as educational attainment, university grades, staying on at the US Military Academy at West Point and spelling bee rankings, and it was not positively related to IQ (Duckworth et al., 2007). The idea became widely known through Duckworth’s 2016 book of the same name (Duckworth, 2016).

The short answer is that grit is linked to success, but less strongly than first claimed. In a 2017 meta-analysis of 88 samples and 66,807 people, the correlation between grit and academic performance was moderate, ρ = 0.18, while grit overlapped very strongly with conscientiousness, one of the Big Five personality traits (ρ = 0.84). Of grit’s two parts, most of the predictive power came from “perseverance of effort”, while “consistency of interest” was weak (Credé et al., 2017). This fed a continuing criticism that grit may be conscientiousness under a new name (Ponnock et al., 2020).

That does not mean perseverance is useless. In a study that followed 11,258 West Point cadets from nine classes entering over a decade through to graduation, grit predicted who completed the gruelling first-summer training better than cognitive or physical ability did. The study looked at links, though, so it cannot show that grit causes success (Duckworth et al., 2019). This guide sets out neither “perseverance is all you need” nor “grit is hype”, but what the research has actually shown.

The guide covers how grit is measured and how well it predicts success, how it relates to conscientiousness, studies across cultures including Korea and Japan, whether grit can be built, the talent-versus-effort debate and the 10,000-hour rule, and realistic ways to build perseverance in light of the research. Adapting after hard times is covered in the resilience guide, the belief that abilities grow with effort in the growth mindset guide, and resisting temptations in the moment in the willpower guide. mind.io does not offer a grit test.

Grit is usually measured with a questionnaire that people fill in about themselves. The original Grit Scale has 12 items and two parts: “perseverance of effort”, keeping up effort despite difficulties, and “consistency of interest”, staying interested in the same goal over a long time (Duckworth et al., 2007; Disabato et al., 2019). In 2009 an 8-item short form (Grit-S) followed, keeping the same two-part structure with 4 fewer items (Duckworth & Quinn, 2009).

Early studies reported that grit predicted “sticking with it” in many areas. In the first studies, it was linked to educational attainment in two adult samples (1,545 and 690 people), the grades of 138 Ivy League undergraduates, staying on at West Point in two classes of cadets (1,218 and 1,308) and the rankings of 175 national spelling bee competitors (Duckworth et al., 2007). Adults with higher short-form scores had changed careers less often, and adolescents later had higher grades and watched less television (Duckworth & Quinn, 2009). Reports followed linking grit to completing a special forces selection course, keeping a sales job, graduating from high school and staying married (Eskreis-Winkler et al., 2014).

The largest data set comes from a study that followed 11,258 West Point cadets from nine classes entering over a decade, through to graduation. During the six-week initiation training in the first summer, an average of 3 in 100 cadets dropped out; cadets 1 standard deviation higher in grit had 54% greater odds of finishing, while cognitive and physical ability did not reliably predict dropping out in this period. About 81 in 100 cadets graduated within four years, and grit and physical ability predicted graduation better than cognitive ability. Academic and military grades, by contrast, were best predicted by cognitive ability, and grit’s contribution there was small. The authors noted that the findings cannot be assumed to hold outside the military, and that, as correlational data, they show prediction rather than causes (Duckworth et al., 2019). The study did not measure conscientiousness.

Pooling the studies, the links turn out smaller. In the 2017 meta-analysis, the correlation between grit and academic performance was ρ = 0.18 (39 samples, 13,141 people), and the correlation with staying on rather than dropping out was ρ = 0.12 with a marriage study included and ρ = 0.18 without it. Here ρ is a correlation corrected for measurement error. The authors pointed out that some other known predictors, such as study habits and skills or adjustment to university, show correlations with academic performance more than twice as large (Credé et al., 2017). A 2022 meta-analysis of 137 studies (285,331 people) likewise put the correlation between grit and academic achievement at r = 0.19, weak to moderate (Lam & Zhou, 2022).

The biggest debate around grit is how different it is from conscientiousness, one of the Big Five personality traits. Even in the first studies grit was highly correlated with conscientiousness, though it was reported to predict success beyond IQ and conscientiousness (Duckworth et al., 2007). In the 2017 meta-analysis, however, the correlation between grit and conscientiousness was ρ = 0.84 (22 samples, 18,826 people), and the correlation with self-control, often seen as a facet of conscientiousness, was ρ = 0.72. The authors argued that grit, as currently measured, may simply be a repackaging of conscientiousness, warning of the “jangle fallacy”: treating what is essentially the same concept as new because it has a different name. Once conscientiousness was taken into account, the overall grit score added almost nothing to the prediction of grades (Credé et al., 2017).

Studies using other methods came to similar conclusions. In a study of 4,642 British 16-year-old twins (2,321 pairs), personality, mainly conscientiousness, predicted about 6% of the differences in GCSE grades, the exams taken at the end of compulsory schooling, and grit added little. Grit’s perseverance of effort and conscientiousness were to a large extent the same trait, both in the observed scores (r = 0.53) and genetically (genetic correlation 0.86) (Rimfeld et al., 2016). A 2020 study analysing the items in a diverse sample of adolescents also found that the factor structures of grit and conscientiousness strongly overlap, and concluded that the two are not separate concepts (Ponnock et al., 2020).

Interestingly, the two parts of grit behave differently. In the meta-analysis, perseverance of effort correlated ρ = 0.26 with academic performance and consistency of interest ρ = 0.10, and it was perseverance that still added to the prediction of grades once conscientiousness was taken into account (Credé et al., 2017). In the 2022 meta-analysis, too, perseverance of effort (r = 0.21) was more strongly linked to achievement than consistency of interest (r = 0.08) (Lam & Zhou, 2022). In an online survey of 7,617 people across six continents, perseverance of effort was moderately to strongly related to subjective well-being and personality strengths, while consistency of interest had weak or even negative correlations with them (Disabato et al., 2019).

This led some researchers to argue that the “passion” side of grit is not properly measured. One team treated the Grit Scale as a measure of perseverance only, and measured separately whether people feel as much passion for their field as they want. Pooling 127 studies (45,485 people) that used the Grit Scale and measured performance, they found that grit was more strongly linked to performance where participants were more passionate about the field, and in studies of 422 employees and 248 students, the combination of perseverance and passion predicted higher performance (Jachimowicz et al., 2018). Taken together, the research points less to “a tendency to hold on to anything for a long time” than to “working through difficulties on something you care about”.

Grit is a concept developed in the United States, so researchers have tested whether it looks the same elsewhere. In a study of 7,617 people across six continents, the stronger links of perseverance of effort with well-being and strengths were replicated in seven regions of the world. But the idea of an “overall grit” combining perseverance and consistency was supported in individualistic countries, not in collectivistic countries such as those in Latin America and Asia (Disabato et al., 2019).

When it comes to grades alone, however, cultural differences were not clear. The 2022 meta-analysis concluded that the links of overall grit and its two parts with academic achievement did not differ between individualistic and collectivistic cultures (Lam & Zhou, 2022). In Japan, a Japanese version of the short grit scale was developed with 1,043 university students, and it showed the same two-part structure (perseverance and consistency) as the original (Nishikawa et al., 2015).

In Korea, a 2021 study built a Korean grit scale (K-GRIT) from data on 556 Korean university students. Adding new items about how meaningful and enjoyable a specific long-term goal is to the 12 original items produced 20 items in three factors: “effort-persistence”, “passion-meaning” and “passion-enthusiasm”. The scale’s total grit score correlated r = 0.55 with conscientiousness, and effort-persistence r = 0.62 (Lee et al., 2021).

In particular, the original scale’s consistency of interest explained no more of life satisfaction or mental well-being once perseverance was taken into account, whereas the two new passion factors did add to it. For academic achievement, though, once conscientiousness and self-control were taken into account, neither the original nor the new scale added more than a borderline amount (p = 0.08). Drawing on earlier work, the authors distinguished the two traits this way: conscientious people work hard at whatever they are given even without a goal, while people high in grit set a long-term goal and keep up their effort and passion towards it (Lee et al., 2021). These results come from one sample of university students answering questionnaires, so they should be generalised with care, but they point the same way as the international studies above: the consistency part is weak, and passion needs to be measured differently.

If grit is linked to success, can schools teach it? The authors of the 2017 meta-analysis judged that whether grit can be raised through interventions is not yet clear, and that, since grit is only modestly linked to grades, programmes to raise it may have only weak effects on performance (Credé et al., 2017). A 2018 critical review added that there is no support for the claim that grit is likely to respond to interventions (Credé, 2018).

The most often cited experiment is a randomised study of more than 3,200 fourth-graders in 52 state primary schools in Istanbul, Turkey. Over about 12 weeks, teachers used animated videos, short case studies and classroom activities to teach that the brain and abilities grow with effort (a growth mindset), that you try again after failing, and that you set goals. Pupils in the programme more often chose a hard but well-rewarded task over an easy one, and more often tried the hard task again after being told they had failed. Two and a half years later, an effect of about 0.2 standard deviations remained on a standardised maths test. Grades given by teachers, however, did not differ clearly (Alan et al., 2019).

The result is encouraging, but a few points matter. The programme bundled a growth mindset and goal setting together, so it is hard to say it changed grit itself. Its participants were also primary-school pupils in one city, mostly from lower-income areas (Alan et al., 2019). The effects of growth mindset interventions and the debate about them are covered in the growth mindset guide.

Many people also wonder whether grit is inborn. In the British twin study, the heritability of perseverance of effort was estimated at 37% and that of consistency of interest at 20%, with no sign of influence from the environment that family members share (Rimfeld et al., 2016). This splits up where differences between people come from; it does not mean one person’s perseverance cannot change. In the meta-analysis, grit was slightly higher in older people (ρ = 0.12), which the authors likened to the general rise in conscientiousness with age (Credé et al., 2017).

The same authors noted that schools and colleges have limited resources and advised them to focus first on things that are more strongly linked to grades and that interventions have been shown to change, such as study skills and habits (correlated about 0.40 with university grades), adjustment to university and class attendance (Credé et al., 2017).

Much of grit’s appeal lies in the message “effort over talent”. One root of this idea is a 1993 study of “deliberate practice” by K. Anders Ericsson’s team. The team argued that differences even among elite performers are closely related to the amount of deliberate practice, and that many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are the result of intense practice extended for at least 10 years (Ericsson et al., 1993). The study later spread widely as the “10,000-hour rule” through Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers: with 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, one becomes an expert (Macnamara & Maitra, 2019).

Pooling the studies, though, practice turned out to matter without being everything. In a 2014 meta-analysis of deliberate practice, the amount of practice explained 26% of the differences in performance for games, 21% for music, 18% for sports, 4% for education and less than 1% for professions, and the authors concluded that deliberate practice is important, but not as important as had been argued (Macnamara et al., 2014). In a 2019 replication of the 1993 violin study, the amount of practice alone explained 26% of the differences in skill, far from trivial but much less than the original 48%, and the core finding that practice amounts lined up with each skill level did not replicate (Macnamara & Maitra, 2019).

How do grit and practice connect? In a study of US National Spelling Bee competitors, deliberate practice, studying and memorising words alone, predicted performance better than being quizzed by others or reading for pleasure. Competitors rated deliberate practice as the most effortful and least enjoyable kind of preparation, and grit’s link with final performance ran through it: grittier competitors did more of this practice (Duckworth et al., 2011). In other words, grit may connect with performance less through “holding on” as such than through keeping up practice that is dull but effective.

Our attitudes to talent and effort are also contradictory. Professional musicians said they strongly believed that strivers would achieve more than naturals, yet of two pianists with equal achievements, they judged the one described as showing innate talent early on to be more talented, more likely to succeed and more hirable. This “naturalness bias” appeared in experts but not in non-experts (Tsay & Banaji, 2011). Grit is also barely related to cognitive ability (ρ = 0.05), so at least intellectual ability and perseverance look like largely separate dimensions (Credé et al., 2017).

What follows is not a set of methods tested in research but suggestions in light of the studies above. First, think of perseverance less as “the power to endure anything” and more as effort towards a goal you care about. Grit was more strongly linked to performance where people felt more passion for the field (Jachimowicz et al., 2018), and in the Korean study how enjoyable and meaningful a goal felt added to life satisfaction and mental well-being beyond effort (Lee et al., 2021). You could start by writing down, in one sentence, why the goal you are working on matters to you.

Second, look at how you practise rather than how long. In the spelling bee study, the best predictor of performance was hard, focused study and memorisation done alone (Duckworth et al., 2011). How much practice explains varies by field, though, and it was small in education and professions (Macnamara et al., 2014). If grades are your goal, the evidence fits better with first looking after study skills and habits and class attendance, which are more strongly linked to grades (Credé et al., 2017).

Third, practise how you interpret failure, together with setting goals. The Turkish primary-school experiment taught the message that failure does not mean a lack of ability together with goal setting, and pupils more often tried hard tasks again (Alan et al., 2019). You cannot copy that programme at home, but writing down “what will I change next time?” rather than “I am not good enough” when you get stuck points in the same direction. If getting started is the problem, the methods in the procrastination guide may fit better, and if temptations are the problem, the situation changes in the willpower guide.

Fourth, treat stopping as a judgement too. In lab tasks and games, people higher in grit kept going longer while they were losing, even at a cost, and were more willing to risk losing money to persist (Lucas et al., 2015). The ability to let go of goals that cannot be reached and to put your energy into other goals has been linked to higher subjective well-being (Wrosch et al., 2003). Perseverance helps when the direction is right, so review your goals regularly. If holding on is costing you sleep or health, or you feel worn out all the time, what you need may be rest and support rather than more perseverance; if work has left you exhausted, see the burnout symptoms guide. If a lack of staying power comes from a long stretch of feeling flat and unmotivated, do not treat it only as a personality problem; read the lack of motivation guide too.

Q. Can a grit test tell me my grit score? A. The grit scales used in research (the 12-item original and the 8-item short form) are questionnaires you answer about yourself, so a score is best read as how you see yourself now (Duckworth & Quinn, 2009). mind.io does not offer a grit test. To see five personality traits as scores, including conscientiousness, which overlaps heavily with grit, you can take the Big Five test; to see where perseverance ranks among your strengths, the VIA strengths test. Neither is a grit scale.

Q. If my grit is low, will I struggle to succeed? A. Grit correlates about ρ = 0.18 with academic performance, so a score alone says little about any one person’s future (Credé et al., 2017). In the West Point study, too, what mattered depended on the kind of success: cognitive ability best predicted grades, grit best predicted finishing the first summer’s training, and grit and physical ability better predicted graduating (Duckworth et al., 2019).

Q. Is grit inborn, or can it be developed? A. In a twin study, the heritability of perseverance of effort was estimated at 37% (Rimfeld et al., 2016). One experiment found that a classroom programme made pupils more likely to take on hard tasks again (Alan et al., 2019), but evidence for grit interventions overall is still lacking (Credé, 2018).

Q. How do grit, resilience and a growth mindset differ? A. Grit is a tendency to keep up effort and interest towards long-term goals (Duckworth et al., 2007). Resilience is closer to the process of adapting after hard experiences, and a growth mindset is the belief that abilities can grow with effort. More on each is in the resilience guide and the growth mindset guide.

Q. Does 10,000 hours of practice make anyone an expert? A. The “10,000-hour rule” came about when research on deliberate practice spread through popular books (Macnamara & Maitra, 2019). How much of the differences in performance practice explained ranged from 26% in games to less than 1% in professions (Macnamara et al., 2014). Practice matters, but logging hours alone does not settle how good you become.

References: Duckworth, A. L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M. D., & Kelly, D. R. (2007), Grit: perseverance and passion for long-term goals, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92(6), 1087-1101, https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.92.6.1087; Duckworth, A. (2016), Grit: the power of passion and perseverance, New York: Scribner (book; mentioned, not quoted); Credé, M., Tynan, M. C., & Harms, P. D. (2017), Much ado about grit: a meta-analytic synthesis of the grit literature, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 113(3), 492-511, https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000102; Ponnock, A., Muenks, K., Morell, M., Yang, J. S., Gladstone, J. R., & Wigfield, A. (2020), Grit and conscientiousness: another jangle fallacy, Journal of Research in Personality 89, 104021, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2020.104021; Duckworth, A. L., Quirk, A., Gallop, R., Hoyle, R. H., Kelly, D. R., & Matthews, M. D. (2019), Cognitive and noncognitive predictors of success, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116(47), 23499-23504, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1910510116; Disabato, D. J., Goodman, F. R., & Kashdan, T. B. (2019), Is grit relevant to well-being and strengths? Evidence across the globe for separating perseverance of effort and consistency of interests, Journal of Personality 87(2), 194-211, https://doi.org/10.1111/jopy.12382; Duckworth, A. L., & Quinn, P. D. (2009), Development and validation of the Short Grit Scale (Grit-S), Journal of Personality Assessment 91(2), 166-174, https://doi.org/10.1080/00223890802634290; Eskreis-Winkler, L., Shulman, E. P., Beal, S. A., & Duckworth, A. L. (2014), The grit effect: predicting retention in the military, the workplace, school and marriage, Frontiers in Psychology 5, 36, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00036; Lam, K. K. L., & Zhou, M. (2022), Grit and academic achievement: a comparative cross-cultural meta-analysis, Journal of Educational Psychology 114(3), 597-621, https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000699; Rimfeld, K., Kovas, Y., Dale, P. S., & Plomin, R. (2016), True grit and genetics: predicting academic achievement from personality, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 111(5), 780-789, https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000089; Jachimowicz, J. M., Wihler, A., Bailey, E. R., & Galinsky, A. D. (2018), Why grit requires perseverance and passion to positively predict performance, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115(40), 9980-9985, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1803561115; Nishikawa, K., Okugami, S., & Amemiya, T. (2015), Development of the Japanese Short Grit Scale (Grit-S), The Japanese Journal of Personality 24(2), 167-169, https://doi.org/10.2132/personality.24.167; Lee, S., Ahn, T. Y., Park, S. D., & Yang, S. (2021), Development and validation of the Korean Version of Grit Scale (K-GRIT) [in Korean], The Korean Journal of Psychology: General 40(3), 351-387, https://doi.org/10.22257/kjp.2021.9.40.3.351; Credé, M. (2018), What shall we do about grit? A critical review of what we know and what we don’t know, Educational Researcher 47(9), 606-611, https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X18801322; Alan, S., Boneva, T., & Ertac, S. (2019), Ever failed, try again, succeed better: results from a randomized educational intervention on grit, Quarterly Journal of Economics 134(3), 1121-1162, https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjz006; Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993), The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance, Psychological Review 100(3), 363-406, https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.100.3.363; Macnamara, B. N., & Maitra, M. (2019), The role of deliberate practice in expert performance: revisiting Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer (1993), Royal Society Open Science 6(8), 190327, https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.190327; Macnamara, B. N., Hambrick, D. Z., & Oswald, F. L. (2014), Deliberate practice and performance in music, games, sports, education, and professions: a meta-analysis, Psychological Science 25(8), 1608-1618, https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614535810; Duckworth, A. L., Kirby, T. A., Tsukayama, E., Berstein, H., & Ericsson, K. A. (2011), Deliberate practice spells success: why grittier competitors triumph at the National Spelling Bee, Social Psychological and Personality Science 2(2), 174-181, https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550610385872; Tsay, C.-J., & Banaji, M. R. (2011), Naturals and strivers: preferences and beliefs about sources of achievement, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 47(2), 460-465, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2010.12.010; Lucas, G. M., Gratch, J., Cheng, L., & Marsella, S. (2015), When the going gets tough: grit predicts costly perseverance, Journal of Research in Personality 59, 15-22, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2015.08.004; Wrosch, C., Scheier, M. F., Miller, G. E., Schulz, R., & Carver, C. S. (2003), Adaptive self-regulation of unattainable goals: goal disengagement, goal reengagement, and subjective well-being, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 29(12), 1494-1508, https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167203256921