Education policy wonks have been hearing the gospel of grit as evangelized by Angela Duckworth for years now. Her premise that academic success can be attributed to a child’s tolerance for the hard work of persevering through the frustrating learning stage to mastery was popularized in Paul Tough’s book “How Children Succeed.”
Now, in her own book, “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance,” Duckworth fleshes out the concept so it can be applied to any endeavor. She explains that using grit to achieve a major life goal means combining passion, practice, purpose and hope.
The point of her emphasis on grit is that it replaces the common belief that innate talent, or even genius, is what makes high performers successful. Duckworth believes that it is this incorrect assumption about the other-ness of high achievement that leads people to put self-imposed limitations on themselves.
Unfortunately, people who are lacking in grit are likely to also lack one or more of passion, purpose or hope. This was my thought as I plowed through the many examples of people who made it to the top of their disciplines through grit. Duckworth terms them “grit paragons” and, frankly, the vast catalog gets a little discouraging.
However, if you are naturally a diligent worker and can plow through this book, Duckworth addresses how to develop all the necessary qualities.
For instance, you’ll learn that grit is not merely concentrated practice, it’s about working hard on something that’s so meaningful to you that you are willing to commit to working on it for the many, many years it will take to master it. This is where the passion, purpose and hope come into play.
Passion, Duckworth says, is not about the falling-in-love euphoria with which most of us approach new interests. It is about finding something that captures your interest and imagination and staying with it. It is the difference between enthusiasm and endurance.
The purpose part is more difficult to wrap the mind around. If you want to raise money to build orphanages or find a cure for cancer or teach inner-city kids to read, it makes sense that the idea of sticking to your goal, working hard at it and seeing the value that your effort will have on the world will make it easier to persevere.
But what if you just want to learn to play the piano, meditate or paint seascapes because it’s a passion but not one that’s really going to pay off for anyone but yourself? That remains unclear.
The last piece of the puzzle is hope, which helps gritty people persist through the inevitable disappointments and setbacks of achieving a big goal. Yet this is another land mine if you’re pessimistic, prone to depression or not terribly resilient.
My favorite parts of Duckworth’s book are those in which she details how miserable, torturous and hard it can be to persist. She quotes author Joyce Carol Oates comparing writing the first draft of a book to “pushing a peanut across a dirty kitchen floor with your nose” and dancer Martha Graham describing dance as “fatigue so great that the body cries even in its sleep. There are times of complete frustration. There are daily small deaths.”
If that level of sacrifice doesn’t sound appealing to you, it may be that you haven’t yet found something that seems worth that amount of trouble. But once you do, don’t make the mistake of thinking you have to be a genius to really go for it.
