“Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success.”
— Biz Stone

Grit: The “Special Sauce” of Success

A great place to finish our module on personal growth is to reinforce the understanding that these efforts will take considerable time, effort, persistence, and passion. In other words, you need to cultivate the character trait of grit, defined in recent positive psychology research as passion plus perseverance.

Highlighted in recent years by the work of Dr. Angela Duckworth, grit has been shown to be a predictor of success across a wide array of disciplines including rank in the national spelling bee, college success in Ivy League schools, and military retention at West Point. The main finding of Dr. Duckworth’s research is that along with innate intelligence, resources, and economic status, grit is the great predictor of personal success (Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, & Kelly, 2007). Individuals with grit wake up every day with a clear idea of what they want (passion) and they understand the action they will need to take to get there (perseverance).

Here’s a brief introduction to the concept of grit:


People are born with different amounts of innate intelligence, so why doesn’t that alone predict success? One thing to realize is that hardly anyone reaches their maximum potential. In the words of William James, “the human individual lives usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum, and he behaves below his optimum” (James, 1907). Although talent is important, it is not enough to have a successful life. Furthermore, although you can’t change your genetics, you can increase your effort. In fact, Duckworth emphasizes that talent is not the same thing as achievement, and, without effort, talent is just unmet potential. Effort builds skills and makes skill productive. For example, you use effort to learn how to ride a bike and then again use effort when you ride. The innate talent to ride a bike is useless without effort. Although you may have genes you can’t change, what you do have power over is your effort and persistence.

Let’s watch Angela Duckworth summarize why grit matters and what we know so far about developing it (some of this should ring familiar):


Examining the components of grit more closely, we start with passion. Duckworth (2016) describes the passion aspect of grit as being like a compass: while you may take daily actions that change regularly, your passion is the thing that ultimately guides your behavior in the long-term. The best way to determine what you’re passionate it about is to figure out what brings you the most meaning. Some may say that work is work, and it doesn’t matter if you like it or not. However, Duckworth found that individuals who have careers they like are more satisfied and perform better at their jobs. If you are stuck in a job that isn’t your passion you can still find other ways to bring meaning to your life such as volunteer work and interpersonal relationships. This search for your compass should not be a short process. Spend a considerable amount of time thinking about what you want your life to be about, because whatever answer you find can give you direction to get to the places you want to go. You can learn more about this process in the Purpose module.

The second aspect of grit is perseverance. Perseverance is the ability to stick with and pursue a goal over a long period of time. Although passion is key to a successful and meaningful life, if you can’t stick to a goal long-term, then your passion doesn’t matter because real change takes time. Whether you're trying to write a book, pursuing a promotion, or figuring out how to be a parent, expect change to come with time and practice. In order to increase perseverance, it helps to define a clear path to success that includes plenty of structure and uninterrupted work time. Essentially, you need to make a daily habit of taking the small but important steps that lead to your long-term goals. As William James observes “there is no more miserable human being than the one for whom the beginning of every bit of work must be decided anew each day” (James, 2008). Big projects get completed through thousands of small steps, and the same principle applies to your efforts for personal growth. The best way you can create sustained effort towards a purposeful life is by making your structured “growth time” as routine as possible.

Would you like to see where you stand right now with your level of grit? Take a short break and head over to Angela Duckworth’s website to complete the Grit Questionnaire, which will also give you scores for the two subcategories of passion and perseverance. Once you see your scores, you can choose which of the two areas you want to focus on improving.

Increasing Passion

The main emphasis for increasing passion is having a singular unified vision of who you want to be and what you want to accomplish. One way to define your passion and create a plan is to make a goal tree. A goal tree consists of several hierarchical levels going from your high-level overarching life plan down to the everyday habits that will make that plan become reality. Lower-level goals should always serve the purpose of higher-level goals. For example, your overarching goal may be to live an environmentally sustainable life. Goals beneath that may be to limit your personal carbon footprint and increase awareness at your workplace. Beneath that may be more day to day goals such as avoiding single-use plastics and writing an article about sustainable alternative energy sources. Consistent with what we’ve shared in previous sections on goals, lower level goals can be changed or removed, while higher level goals should stay the same over many years and even across a whole lifetime. That being said, you may continue to critique your higher goals to better suit your personal meaning, especially at the beginning. Do not continue towards goals that don’t bring your life more meaning.

Increasing Perseverance

In addition to what Duckworth noted about cultivating a growth mindset, another valuable way to increase your perseverance is through a psychological concept emphasized by the psychologist Anders Ericsson called deliberate practice. Ericsson’s research found that individuals who became leaders in their fields engage in a specific type of practice that includes targeting weak areas and seeking immediate feedback (Ericsson, 1998). To integrate deliberate practice into your life you should supplement your work days with several hour-long segments where you put away distractions and focus exclusively on your work. Those hours should be spent focusing on problem areas and then checking your work. Deliberate practice is very hard and not much fun which is why it should become a daily habit so that it isn’t a choice every single day. By engaging in deliberate practice every day, you can greatly increase your performance and ability over the long term.

In summary, grit is a learnable character trait; by using the principles above you can make your life both more meaningful and more productive. With increased passion and perseverance, you’ll be able to find the motivation to keep going and the structure to succeed in your most important goals for growth and achievement.

“Every artist was first an amateur.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Persistence and Life Design

There’s a golden thread that weaves its way through this entire module on personal growth: persistence. We’ve discussed it as a driver of neuroplasticity, as a hallmark of a growth mindset, as a key to achieving one’s goals, as a critical component of developing growth habits, and as a core ingredient of grit. The research literature in positive psychology over the past two decades shows that this assertion by Calvin Coolidge was no exaggeration:    

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”

Given the critical importance of persistence in our efforts toward personal growth, are there ways to make this less of a white-knuckle, gut-it-out, blood-draining, teeth-clenching battle of raw willpower? Could a slight shift in perspective make persistence more of a simple habitual response instead of feeling like a march through Mordor?

Dr. Kyra Bobinet, author of the excellent book Well Designed Life, uses a metaphor that can be helpful in facilitating persistence toward personal growth. Drawing from practices common in the software development industry, she applies the concept of iterative design to our life improvement efforts. Consider how a software developer will start with a “beta” version of a program. There’s no assumption whatsoever that the software will be perfect in its first iteration. There’s an expectation that there will be bugs that need to be worked out once it’s been put through some testing. The software continues to go through regular updates and refinements as it gets used in real life, like the internet browser software I’m using right now (current version 71.0.3578.98). Early versions that are subsequently updated aren’t considered failures, just natural steps toward building a more effective product.

We can approach our efforts at personal growth the same way. In developing growth habits, working toward our goals, and overcoming obstacles in life, we can achieve successful change and positive outcomes through persistent iterative design. We learn what works and what doesn’t. We make updates and refinements to our efforts. And early attempts that didn’t work out aren’t “failures”; they are necessary experiments in behavior that we can learn from and make use of in the next update. The best software programs go through hundreds or thousands of iterations and updates; as an infinitely more complex human being, why would you expect your life design efforts to be any different?

Your persistent efforts at iterative life design will help you become everything you were meant to be. The world should be very excited for the next version of your best self!

“Well-being is realized by small steps, but is truly no small thing.”
— Zeno