Think you quit too early, you're right!

In many leadership discussions I’ve been engaged in recently, there is a term that I'm hearing more frequently of late. It’s not a term that is uncommon to me or most people I know. However, in my immediate circles, it is being talked about as a necessity for success in business today. 

The term I am referring to is “Grit.” 

In a nonbusiness setting, the term “grit” is usually referring to something hard or abrasive such as sand or gravel, but in the business world it has taken on quite a different meaning. Ongoing discussions about self-improvement and individual achievement center around resilience and today that term is more commonly known as grit.

Resilience is characterized as the capacity to confront difficulty and defeat it. Doing so builds character, and those who can face difficulty head-on and drive forward are rewarded for endurance. Character has a lot of capacities or qualities that are particularly adaptable and completely attainable for nearly anyone. They are skills you can learn; they are skills you can practice, and they are skills you can teach.

Resilience is a non-cognitive capacity. So are interest, empathy, integrity, and restraint. Our measurements for achievement in work and life will, in general center around cognitive capacities, measures of our knowledge by systematic learning and testing known quantities. Yet, interest and empathy are not effectively quantifiable, which is the reason we rely on clinicians and sociologists that help us to dig deeper into the mysteries of the human mind and will.  

Angela Duckworth, a clinician, and recipient of the MacArthur “genius” grant stated that “grit,” not talent, was the best indicator of future success. She also defined grit in her TED talk as a “passion and perseverance for very long-term goals.” Duckworth also built up the Grit Scale, a short questionnaire in which individuals can grade themselves dependent on questions like "setbacks do not discourage me" and "I complete whatever I start."

You can take it now by clicking here if you’d like to see your results. (You can see my results below. Good thing I have some grit, because I wasn't always the best student)

Duckworth believes that grit/resilience is a component of character, a feature or result of an inquisitive and reserved life. Regardless, grit or resilience appears to be unquantifiable, elusive proportions of character, however, Duckworth and her associates took the 12-point Grit Scale to the streets and discovered it was surprisingly congruent with levels achievement.

Grit, Duckworth found, is just faintly correlated with IQ. As you can imagine, there are most definitely intelligent, gritty individuals while there are also unintelligent gritty individuals, however, high grit scores allow individuals with a lower IQ to perform at similar levels with higher IQs that exhibit lower levels of grit. For example, at the National Spelling Bee, Duckworth found that kids with higher grit scores were far more likely to see will themselves into the later rounds.

So what does this tell us? I believe there is a lot to be learned here, but one specific point I'd like to highlight is that grit is something that can be learned. Many of the people we see as more talented than us, in many cases, are just grittier. 

In the most recent studies that Angela Duckworth and others have conducted, the more likely factor of personal success is resilience (grit), not talent. I believe this is excellent news for anyone who has a passion for something and isn't necessarily the most talented. Because you're hard work and your grit are vital ingredients to accomplishing most anything we truly want in life. Music to my ears for sure.

If you did take the test, do you feel it was it a fair assessment? Is it accurate to say that you are incredibly gritty or somewhat gritty? Maybe you land in the moderate side of grittiness. Do you believe sum grit matters? Leave your comments below.   

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