But whether perseverance in controlled laboratory challenges, lasting minutes or seconds, reflects the same trait that inclines individuals toward the dogged pursuit of their personally valued goals over the course of months and years is an unanswered question.Īn alternative measurement approach, pioneered in the same historical era, entails asking respondents to judge their own or another individual’s tendency to persist toward goals over time. Less gritty individuals are, in contrast, more easily discouraged, prone to take “naps” mid-course, and frequently led off track by new passions.Įarly 20th-century psychologists attempted to measure trait-level persistence using tasks of physical fortitude (e.g., arm extension tasks) and mental effort (e.g., unsolvable anagrams). Gritty individuals are tortoise-like, distinguished by their propensity to maintain “effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress” (Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, & Kelly, 2007, p. Nevertheless, individuals differ dramatically in their stamina for long-term goals.
Recognition of the necessity of hard work and persistence is age-old and universal. But how easy is it to forget this fact in moments when we feel tortoise-like relative to our seemingly hare-like peers? Who among us presses on even as we are passed by those stronger, faster, and/or smarter? Who among us stays the course, running the race we committed to rather than choosing a different, new pursuit, after stumbling and losing ground? Who lives life as if it were a marathon, not a sprint? Measuring Individual Differences in Grit It may be obvious that effort and stamina are required to accomplish anything worthwhile in life. When the hare awakes, the tortoise, who all the while has been laboring toward his destination, is too close to the finish line to beat. Sure enough, the hare quickly outpaces the tortoise, accumulating so great a lead that he lies down to take a nap mid-race. At the starting line, it is the hare who is expected to finish first. This oft-told story, which many of us heard as children in one form or another, preaches the value of plodding on, no matter how slow or uneven our progress, toward goals that at times seem impossibly far away. The metaphor of achievement as a race recalls Aesop’s fable of the tortoise and the hare. It’s really that simple…” -Oscar-nominated actor and Grammy award-winning musician Will Smith
But if we get on the treadmill together, there’s two things: You’re getting off first, or I’m going to die. You might have more talent than me, you might be smarter than me, you might be sexier than me, you might be all of those things - you got it on me in nine categories. “The only thing that I see that is distinctly different about me is I’m not afraid to die on a treadmill.
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