Common Questions About Grit

What is grit, exactly?
Grit is the combination of passion and perseverance for long-term goals. Psychologist Angela Duckworth popularized the idea after studying people in demanding settings like military academies, spelling bees and difficult sales jobs, and finding that sticking power often predicted who made it through better than raw talent did. The key word is long-term. Grit isn’t intensity, and it isn’t working hard for a weekend. It’s staying pointed at the same goal for months or years, and continuing to put in effort when progress is slow, boring, or invisible. That’s why grit has two parts. Passion, in this sense, means consistency of interest: caring about the same thing over time instead of chasing whatever is newest. Perseverance means continuing to work when it gets hard. Some people are strong in one and weaker in the other, which is why a good grit test looks at both instead of giving you a single number.

Is grit more important than talent?
Not more important, but often more overlooked. Talent tells you how quickly you improve when you put in effort. Grit tells you how long you’ll keep putting in effort. Over a short stretch, talent usually wins. Over years, the person who keeps showing up often passes the person who was gifted but quit when it stopped being easy. Research on grit has been debated, and later studies found it overlaps quite a bit with conscientiousness and predicts success more modestly than early headlines suggested. That’s a fair correction. But the everyday lesson holds up: most meaningful things, like a skill, a career, a marriage or a craft, are built slowly, and the ability to stay through the dull middle is a real advantage. Talent is the starting point. Grit is what decides how far that starting point gets to travel.

Can you develop grit, or are you born with it?
You can grow it. Grit tends to rise with age and experience, which suggests it’s shaped by what you live through, not fixed at birth. A few things seem to build it. First, interest that deepens: people rarely stick with something they don’t care about, so finding a goal that genuinely matters to you comes before willpower. Second, deliberate practice: working on the specific part you’re weakest at, not just repeating what you’re already good at. Third, a sense of purpose, meaning a reason bigger than yourself for doing the work. Fourth, hope, which here means the expectation that your effort can actually change the outcome. Practically, the fastest way to build grit is to shrink the daily commitment until you never miss it. A tiny habit you keep for a year does more than a huge plan you abandon in three weeks.

Can you have too much grit?
Yes. High grit has a shadow side that doesn’t get talked about enough. Very gritty people can keep pushing on a goal long after the evidence says it’s time to stop, simply because quitting feels like failure. Economists call part of this the sunk cost trap: the more you’ve already invested, the harder it becomes to walk away, even when walking away is the wise choice. Extreme grit can also slide into burnout, poor sleep, and a sense that your worth depends on how much you can endure. The healthiest version of grit is flexible. It holds on tightly to the big goal and loosely to the specific plan. It knows the difference between a rough patch and a dead end. And it includes rest, because people who rest well usually last longer than people who never stop.

How accurate is a grit test?
A short grit test is a snapshot, not a diagnosis. It relies on how you see yourself, and most of us are a little generous with our own perseverance and a little harsh about our follow-through. It also can’t tell the difference between a season of life and a lasting pattern, so a stressful year can pull your score down. What a well-built test can do is separate your passion from your perseverance and show you which one is carrying the other. That’s useful, because the fix is different for each. If your perseverance is high and your passion is low, the question is direction. If it’s the other way around, the question is follow-through. Treat your result as a starting point, then watch how you actually behave the next time a goal gets boring. Take the free 2-minute grit test above to see your own passion and perseverance scores.