You’ve probably seen it on book covers. Heard about it on podcasts. Maybe watched a few TED talks about it. “Grit” is a touted buzzword of industry, performance, and inspiration that has taken the world by storm over the last 10 years. You don’t have to try too hard to find it or a smattering of similar sounding buzzwords throughout the professional self-help section at Barnes and Noble.The overachievers and best of the best have unlocked the key to accessing it and, with some self-knowledge, you can too! But this is exactly where some reasonable caution is in order. Because when it comes down to the nitty gritty details, grit may need a rethink or two.
So, what actually is grit? Grit is a unique personality trait first proposed by a team of researchers led by Angela Duckworth back in 2007. They suggested that this trait is defined by “perseverance and passion for long-term goals” above and beyond that of mere resilience to failure. Grit is essentially the combination of two facets—perseverance of effort and consistency of passion. Grit has been touted as explaining why some people overperform their means, why some highly successful individuals have achieved so much, and is perhaps more important than cognitive ability (Sackett et al., 2012). In other words, grit suggests that what really matters to being successful is not your smarts or your means, but rather your long-term determined effort and passion. It’s an attractive and intuitive idea and one that has spawned millions of views on YouTube and loads of entrepreneurial books. And not only that, it’s backed by science! …right? But we need to be a bit careful about science that has been vociferously translated into commercialized life-advice.
Grit may be an intuitive, attractive concept to find for yourself, but recent research shows that grit may not be “all that.” Marcus Crede and colleagues (2017) reviewed a massive trove of research on grit (584 different measurements of grit, sampling a combined total of nearly 67,000 people) to see if it actually does what it purports to be—a distinct personality trait of perseverance and passion that predicts high performance. First, lets talk about that perseverance and passion part. Crede and colleagues broke down these two parts of grit to see how they would individually fair in predicting high performance. Academic performance is used most often in these studies because it’s a huge, accessible well of data that approximates performance for all-manner of areas of life and work. They found that perseverance of effort was far more important than consistency of interest—e.g. consistent interest in school isn’t going to predict your grades, in fact it barely matters relative to how important perseverance of effort is. It’s the perseverance that matters. Consistent interest or passion, not so much. So that’s strike one for how we traditionally think of grit.
But strike two comes with that crucial “predicting performance” bit. Grit doesn’t seem to predict academic performance any better than other things we know that predict performance (e.g. study habits, cognitive ability, etc.). In reviewing all of this research, Crede and his colleagues found that grit doesn’t look all too distinct from other personality traits, particularly conscientiousness (Crede, Tynan, & Harms. 2017). This finding is backed up by another big recent study, involving 2321 twin pairs, that wanted to see more precisely how and where grit was ‘doing its thing’, as it were. They found that grit and conscientiousness are very related to each other, both when tracking outward scores but also in heritability (Rimfield et al. 2016). Personality does predict performance to a small extent, but grit isn’t a super-personality trait that is uniquely making that happen. Grit is heritable to a similar extent as your other personality traits and it is not discernibly better at predicting performance than other personality traits (Rimfield et al. 2016). In fact, they are so similar that grit may just be a re-packaged name for conscientiousness. All told, grit seems to be very similar, if not the same thing, as other parts of your personality.
Working hard and persevering through hardships does lead to great success and high performance in all manner of things. You didn’t need a scientist to tell you that, but that also doesn’t mean you need a hardly-qualified inspirational speaker or anecdote-filled author to do the same. Don’t get me wrong, grit is a real psychologically studied concept. But 1) recent research has shown that psychologists need a deep re-think about grit and 2) grit is not a unique buzzword endorsed by science to turn you into a “success.” Like many things in life (and psychology) grit is messy, complicated, and takes a lot more work behind the scenes than meets the eye. Some very smart and capable scientists have been exploring grit, and other concepts, for a long while. And good science is rife with disagreement as the things that work slowly stick and the things that don’t get combed out. In other words, this stuff can take a while. So in the meantime, some extra discernment is needed when considering these kinds of in-vogue “backed by science” buzzwords that appear and gain steam so quickly. We may see a lot of them around bookstores, LinkedIn posts, and the like—but it pays off being a critical consumer of this advice. Sometimes the nitty-gritty details can be the difference between getting ahead or getting distracted by a starstruck crowd.
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References
Crede, M. Tynam, M. C., & Harms, P. D. (2017). Much Ado About Grit: A Meta-Anlaytic Synthesis of the Grit Literature. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(3), 492-511. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000102
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, 1087–1101. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.92.6.1087
Rimfield, 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. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000089
Sackett, P. R., Kuncel, N. R., Beatty, A. S., Rigdon, J. L., Shen, W., & Kiger, T. B. (2012). The role of socioeconomic status in SAT-grade relationships and in college admissions decisions. Psychological Science, 23, 1000–1007. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797612438732
