Stay Gritty

A Short Review of Angela Duckworth’s Grit

https://www.strivediary.com/grit-by-angela-duckworth-book-summary/

Grit, like many books in the self-help / positive psychology sub-genres, doesn’t do much new. It follows a standard formula: pose an interesting and important question, then attempt to answer it by connecting some journals, studies (often on mice, of course), and anecdotes from people the author has interviewed.

Question: What makes people successful?

Answer: Passion and perseverance (or grit)*

* Necessary but not sufficient

The premise sounds absolutely generic and cliched, but Grit comes in an enjoyable package that actually has a few nuggets of wisdom if you’re willing to endure the various repetitive stories of triumph.

Formulas of Grit

Duckworth frames the book as a hunt for a for a thesis or formula for success (mostly for her PhD). The distinction she makes in her explanation of grit is that it consists of two main components — passion (unparalleled interest) and perseverance (determination with direction). In order to keep showing up day after day to accomplish anything, you need to feel it’s important and you need the discipline to keep going despite pain, discomfort, and frustration. Okay, nothing particularly surprising here.

Then Duckworth introduces some fluffy ideas about effort, making a somewhat unnecessary distinction — that effort “counts” twice:

You need to apply effort to innate talent to hone any skill. You need to then apply effort to those skills to produce anything of value (finished work). The illustration doesn’t really communicate much, but I think she simply brings it up to talk about how innate talent is overrated. Employers and schools in particular over-emphasize singular metrics like GPA and SAT scores that aren’t super predictive of future success while ignoring more qualitative aspects of character which might be better predictors. A fair assertion for sure. I liked her point that in general, we tend to idolize talent in others because it mentally lets us off the hook for not applying as much effort with our own potential.

One interviewee made a particularly simple yet striking point — that most of achievement comes down to complex feats broken down into simple actions that are repeated over and over until they become natural (reminded me of The Talent Code and The Little Book of Talent). In other words:

Greatness is many, many individual feats, and each of them is doable.

Growing Grit and What to Emphasize

For the all the author’s focus on passion, she admits that most of the high-achievers she’s interviewed talk less about passion and more about consistency over time.

Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare.

But how do we go about showing up every day? One thing Duckworth suggests is organizing our goals into a hierarchy or pyramid of importance. We have one overarching, critical goal that aligns with some major value we have. Then we have some mid-tier goals that are fairly important in their own right and contribute majorly to the main goal. Finally, we have low-level goals, or the day-to-day activities that get us where we want. Creating this pyramid and seeing how the mundane, little actions contribute to our overarching purpose can give us the drive to show up and get things done. But we should take care to see if low-level goals aren’t doing what they are intended to. Sometimes to maintain our output we have to improvise, adapt, and prune some lower-level activities to keep moving forward.

The rest of the book largely focuses on what Duckworth considers the four major hallmarks of a gritty person:

1. Interest — interests are not discovered through introspection but rather experimentation (and chance)
2. Practice — deliberate practice, in particular (see Peak)
3. Purpose — conviction that the work you are doing matters
4. Hope — for improvement and future achievement

These sections of the book rely fairly heavily on anecdotes and a study here and there. It’s light reading and gets you thinking about how you might practice your craft better, how you might cultivate a sense of purpose better, and how you can positively re-frame your setbacks as you struggle to achieve something. But there are a quite a few asides from the author like “There isn’t much research on this particular thing yet, but here’s my best guess!” [insert anecdote]. It’s fun, light, and sometimes inspiring. Maybe not rigorous, but you probably didn’t pick up this book to read some academic literature.

Other Takeaways

• Optimists frame their problems as all temporary and specific rather than permanent and pervasive; optimists are naturally more gritty because they don’t blame themselves as much at the first sign of trouble
• Duckworth had a neat 4-pronged rule for parenting and family: 1) Everyone in the family has to do a hard thing; 2) You can quit, but only at a natural stopping point (end of a sports season or something similar, not because something is tough); 3) You get to pick your hard thing; 4) Stick to the thing for a minimum of two years. I thought this made a lot of sense — it teaches us to buckle down and learn as opposed to bailing at the first sign of trouble. It also gives the kid in this case a sense of ownership over what they’re doing — you’re not simply assigning an arbitrary hard thing to them.
• The author finishes by talking about how doing difficult things in groups and immersing ourselves in that group’s culture can totally transform the way we look at struggle. You stop questioning whether or not you’re going to do that difficult activity, and instead start subconsciously identifying as part of the group that does this particular thing (reminiscent of Atomic Habits and reframing your identity).

Overall, nothing ground-breaking in this book. But it’s thought-provoking, has a few nuggets of wisdom, and comes in a neat, entertaining package. Can’t ask for too much more than that.

Score: 7/10

Notes:

Chapter 1: Showing Up

• In West Point study, most who made it through Beast had some combination of passion + perseverance (direction and a particularly strong desire to achieve something), which allowed them to keep showing up day after
• Potential and actual realization are very different things

Chapter 2: Distracted By Talent

• Corporate culture tends to focus too much on A-players and innate aptitude, while ignoring persistence + resilience
• Naturalness bias — hidden prejudice against those who’ve achieved what they have because they worked for it; preference for those whom we think arrived via natural talent

Chapter 3: Effort Counts Twice

• Effort is required twice — once to improve the skills (talent * effort), and second to produce anything of value (effort* skill)
• “Greatness is many, many individual feats, and each of them is doable.”
• Most of achievement comes down to complex feats broken down into simple actions that are repeated over and over until they become natural (think Talent Code + Little Book of Talent)
• However, most people prefer to mythologize and idolize talented because it mentally lets us off the hook for not applying as much effort with our own potential

Chapter 4: How Gritty Are You?

• High-achievers don’t usually talk about obsession or passion as much as they do consistency over time
• “Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare.”
• Aligning smaller scale goals with a grander vision/mission (or ultimate concern) often gives people the stamina they need to show up every day
• When you prioritize and organize your goals, you’ll realize that most low-level goals are not super important
• Maintaining or pruning low-level goals that aren’t working requires improvisation and adaptation

Chapter 5: Grit Grows

• (In regards to increasing societal IQ over time) Either small environmental differences, or genetic ones, can trigger a virtuous cycle. Either way the effects are multiplied socially, through culture, because each of us enriches the environment of all of us
• Exemplars have:
• Interest — captivated by the endeavor even if they don’t like every part of it
• Practice — daily discipline, focusing on weaknesses
• Purpose — conviction the work matters
• Hope — for improvement and achievement

Chapter 6: Interest

• Interest isn’t always sudden and epiphany-like: “A lot of things seem uninteresting and superficial until you start doing them and, after a while, you realize there are so many facets you didn’t know at the start, and you never can fully solve the problem. Well, that requires that you stick with it.”
• Passion is a little bit of discovery, followed by a lot of development, and then a lifetime of deepening
• General pattern
• Childhood is too early to really gauge interests
• Interests are not discovered through introspection but rather experimentation (and chance)
• Interests thrive when there is community involved
• Beginners need encouragement + playfulness to develop interest sustainably
• “For the beginner, novelty is anything that hasn’t been encountered before. For the expert, novelty is nuance.”

Chapter 7: Practice

• Deliberate practice
• Set a stretch goal on some narrow aspect of performance, particularly a weakness
• Time spent drilling that weakness
• Seek immediate feedback, then adjust
• Repeat until mastery; then begin with new stretch goal
• Deep practice is more effortful and significantly less enjoyable, but yields the greatest improvements
• It’s not hours of brute-force exhaustion you are after, but rather high-quality, thoughtful training goals pursued

Chapter 8: Purpose

• For some, the intention to contribute to the well-being of others comes before interest
• Believing what you are doing is a calling rather than just a job necessarily makes you grittier
• Important to have both pro-social and self-interested motivations or drivers
• Three recommendations for cultivating purpose:
• Reflect on how the work you’re already doing can make a positive contribution to society
• Think about how, in small but meaningful ways, you can change your current work to enhance its connection to your core values
• Find inspiration in a purposeful role model

Chapter 9: Hope

• Grit depends on an internal-based hope — I resolve to make tomorrow better
• Optimists frame problems as all temporary and specific — their fixability motivates you to start clearing them away as problems; pessimists tend to view causes of problems as permanent and pervasive, which leads them to giving up earlier

Chapter 10: Parenting

• Should be both demanding and supportive at different times — not mutually exclusive

Chapter 11: Fields of Grit

• Follow-through is both a signal of grit and something that develops it; being able to stick with a singular commitment for a multi-year period is a great predictor of success in many aspects
• Industriousness and tenacity can be trained as any other skill
• Important to stick with things until natural stopping points — whatever interval you committed for — “you can’t quit on a bad day”

Chapter 12: Culture of Grit

• Over longer time periods, culture has the power to shape our identity, norms, and values
• “The way we do things around here and why eventually becomes The way I do things and why”