Summary and Analysis of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance: Based on the Book by Angela Duckworth
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Summary and Analysis of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance: Based on the Book by Angela Duckworth
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This short summary and analysis of Grit by Angela Duckworth includes:
- Historical context
- Chapter-by-chapter summaries
- Important quotes
- Fascinating trivia
- Glossary of terms
- Supporting material to enhance your understanding of the original work
About Angela Duckworth’s Grit:
Psychologist Angela Duckworth blows the lid off of theories that suggest IQ and socioeconomic status are the sole predictors of success. Not intellectually gifted, according to her traditional, Asian-American father, Duckworth nevertheless became a MacArthur “Genius.” Winning the award led her to reflect upon the qualities that got her there: perseverance and passion.
Interviewing dozens of the world’s winners, Duckworth ventures into the playing fields of achievement, speaking with CEOs and coaches, and visits West Point, competitive swim teams, and even the National Spelling Bee to discover the common threads.
Pulling from history, as well as cutting-edge neuroscience and behavioral science, Grit offers tips and advice for everyone—from parents to athletes to entrepreneurs—about how getting gritty can help you to succeed.
The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504043779 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Worth Books |
| Publication date: | 01/31/2017 |
| Series: | Smart Summaries |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 30 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Summary and Analysis of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
Based on the Book by Angela Duckworth
By Worth Books
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2017 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4377-9
CHAPTER 1
Summary
Preface
The author shares the fact that she grew up in a Chinese immigrant household with a father who prized intellect and talent above anything else. There was very little that Duckworth felt she could do to impress him. Her father frequently told her, "You know, you're no genius," and she internalized these put-downs. In school, she didn't test highly enough for the gifted and talented program. Never feeling like she was particularly brilliant or skilled, she got by with hard work, dedication, and a commitment to everything she took on, eventually graduating from excellent universities. But it was only when she won a MacArthur Fellowship — often called a "genius grant" — that she had her light-bulb moment. She looked back on what had gotten her to where she was — a distinguished professor of psychology and a scholar who had attended some of the top schools in the world — and realized that so-called "genius" had little to do with it. It was about character. She knew she had a calling and she challenged herself every day. "I may not be the smartest person in the room, but I strive to be the grittiest," she says.
Part I: What Grit Is and Why It Matters
Chapter 1: Showing Up
One of the most important characteristics of grit is refusing to quit. A gritty person shows up and sticks to the task at hand, no matter how hard it gets. It's that "never give up" attitude that determines who stays in the race. This chapter starts with a description of what West Point cadets go through in their first months at the military academy. They've already reached high levels of academic achievement, with top scores on their SATs and ACTs. They've trained hard and passed the required physicals. They've gotten the glowing recommendations of congressmen and senators and beaten out more than 14,000 applicants in the admissions process. Only 1,200 are admitted and enrolled, and yet one in five of these high achievers drops out before graduation. In fact, most of those who quit do so during their first summer, when they must go through a rigorous seven-week training program known as Beast Barracks — or just Beast — with days of drills, marching, and calisthenics that begin at 5 a.m. and end at 10 p.m.
For generations, psychologists and West Point leaders had struggled to figure out why some of these impressive people got through that period and others quit. Examining what it takes to make it through Beast, and many other career challenges, Duckworth develops the Grit Scale, a test designed to rate the level of perseverance and passion of an individual. In 2004, West Point cadets were given the test, asked to agree or disagree with statements such as "I finish whatever I begin," and "[My] interests change from year to year." By the end of the Beast training, a pattern emerged: Those with the grittiest answers made it through.
Need to Know: The Grit Scale became an accurate predictor of success when applied to employees in sales, a profession where rejection is a daily, if not hourly, experience. It also worked for juniors in a Chicago public high school, Green Berets, and Scripps National Spelling Bee contestants. The conclusion? "Our potential is one thing. What we do with it is quite another."
Chapter 2: Distracted by Talent
Examining some of the earliest treatises on what makes some people successful and others not, Duckworth cites a discussion between the founder of evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin, and his half cousin, Francis Galton. In 1869, Galton wrote a paper concluding that high achievers were remarkable for their combination of ability, zeal, and capacity for hard labor. Darwin agreed (although he actually considered natural talent to be the least important aspect of success). In 1907, psychologist William James furthered this hypothesis, making the observation that there is a gap between our potential and our achievements — we have the inner resources and intellect but we don't work at the optimum level. Those few who do put in the effort to push their innate powers to the outer extremes, however, are very successful.
Duckworth's point is that this notion is nothing new, and yet we've allowed ourselves to become sidetracked by talent, favoring the gifted over the strivers. She first noticed the importance of striving after she quit her job at McKinsey, a global management consulting firm, to teach middle school math to inner-city students. She noticed that the kids who didn't grasp the mathematical formulas right away ultimately fared better in terms of grades than many of the more naturally gifted students. This surprised her, leading her to examine why those with less natural aptitude would excel. The pattern she noticed was that the high achievers showed up every day, focused and prepared. They were less distracted by their classmates or by what was going on outside the window. When they didn't understand something the first time around, they tried again and again, coming for extra help at lunchtime.
Need to Know: Aptitude does not guarantee achievement.
Chapter 3: Effort Counts Twice
We have a built-in bias that favors talent and intellect. But by overemphasizing talent, we've underemphasized not only the importance of effort, but also of the dozens of small or ordinary skills that can amount to extraordinary achievement. Duckworth refers to a study of competitive swimmers by sociologist Dan Chambliss, a swimmer himself. After six years of interviewing, watching, and traveling with swimmers and coaches at all levels, from the local swim club to a top team made up of future Olympians, Chambliss discovered that, beyond having families with means and access to swimming pools and coaches, it was the thousands of hours these swimmers spent practicing that made them stand out. While these incremental efforts seem mundane, the success of the swimmers bolsters the argument that, by cultivating grit, anyone has the potential for greatness if he is willing to spend years refining the many individual elements that can add up to a single flawless performance. Of course, you can't train for certain anatomical differences that may help an athlete or natural aptitudes that may help an artist. Nevertheless, we tend to overestimate talent's role. We do this because it lets us off the hook and allows us to relax into the status quo. Those who have grit don't allow themselves this luxury.
Need to Know: Luck and innate talent are incomplete explanations for success. Effort factors into the equation twice, not once, because it builds a skill and makes that skill more productive.
Chapter 4: How Gritty Are You?
Grit is about much more than simply working hard on a project or endeavor; it is about stamina. Whether in business, academia, a profession, or a vocation, there are no shortcuts to excellence. Solving the problem, building real expertise, developing a product, or completing a project that has value to others takes far more time than most people imagine. Grit means not only falling in love with something enough to commit your all to it, but also staying in love with it. In order to help her readers rate their grittiness, Duckworth provides an example of a Grit Scale, on which readers can rate their responses, from one to five, to statements such as:
• New ideas and projects sometimes distract me from previous ones.
• I am a hard worker.
• I have overcome setbacks to conquer an important challenge.
To drill down deeper, readers can also rate themselves on the two components of grit: passion and perseverance. (By passion, Duckworth means intensity, not obsession or infatuation.) Most score a little higher on perseverance than passion, although you can't have one without the other.
Need to Know:Grit is mutable, and it can be cultivated. People can keep themselves on track by setting a hierarchy of goals. You know you have grit when you are able to hold the same top-level goal for a long time.
Chapter 5: Grit Grows
Whether it's generosity or talent, compassion or IQ, every human trait is influenced by genetics, or nature. But nurture plays a huge role, too. Scientists have been studying identical and fraternal twins for decades to try to understand the inheritability of traits. To this effect, the Grit Scale was administered to more than 2,000 pairs of teenage twins in the United Kingdom, finding that there is an estimated 27% heritability of perseverance and 20% of passion. These results prove that, while some grit variability in the general population can be explained as genetics, most of it is attributable to experience. This means that the deck is not stacked against anyone.
Age does not limit us, either. In fact, according to dozens of studies, most people become more conscientious, confident, caring, and calm with life experience. Perhaps grit is a function of our particular cultural era, or we get grittier as we get older. Either way, it's not a fixed character trait, and it can be cultivated by understanding where we are today, changing our patterns of self-talk, zeroing in on weaknesses, engaging in the daily discipline of trying to do things better, and digging deeper to find purpose, because what ripens passion is the conviction that your work matters.
Need to Know: Complacency is the enemy of grit. A paragon of grit doesn't say, "This will never work," or "I might as well give up." Instead, she says, "Whatever it is, I want to improve," regardless of his level of skill or accomplishment.
Part II: Growing Grit from the Inside Out
Chapter 6: Interest
All the great achievers point to one quality that drives them: passion. They love what they do, and work doesn't seem like work because they are excited when they wake up every morning. Their professions are callings rather than jobs.
But that exhortation to "follow your passion" was not something that Duckworth, or many of her contemporaries, heard from her family while growing up. Like many, she was encouraged to find a safe, stable profession that prioritized security and financial reward over fulfillment. But research clearly shows that people are more satisfied and motivated in their jobs when they fit with their personal interests. They also perform better: Visionaries and big-picture thinkers don't thrive when they are managing logistically complicated projects, and those who love dealing with people aren't at their best when they work alone at computers all day. Clearly, interest is another critical component of the grit factor — and something that more than two-thirds of adults are missing. That's why many feel disengaged at work, according to a 2014 Gallup Poll. Desire, passion, and the strength of our interest: This is the fuel that fires up grit. And yet, it's not always immediately obvious what what our passions are.
Need to Know: Accept that it may take years to find your true passion. Julia Child didn't realize her true calling until middle age. Award-winning chef Marc Vetri was more interested in music than food as a teen.
Chapter 7: Practice
High-achieving gritty people generally stick with their commitments longer than others, whether they are National Spelling Bee winners, PGA golfers, or Scrabble champions. It is not only this persistence that makes a difference, though. We all know plenty of people who do things for decades and only achieve middling levels of competence. The difference is that gritty people are constantly striving to better themselves. Duckworth points to the Japanese term kaizen, which means to resist the plateau of arrested development — literally, "continuous improvement." Extremely successful people all have this innate desire to excel beyond their already notable talents or achievements. It is a never-ending desire to do better and a positive state of mind in which one looks forward and wants to grow. The author cites a study that compared violinists at a German music academy. Those musicians who reached the highest level of skill had put in a thousand hours of practice per year, while those who never achieved that level practiced far less. She quotes the choreographer Martha Graham, who said, "It takes about ten years to make a mature dancer."
Need to Know: The trick is not to log long hours of practice so much as to practice deliberately, with the set goal of getting better at a particular task while keeping track of performance.
Chapter 8: Purpose
Purpose, the other component of passion, means doing something with intent and for the well-being of others. Duckworth cites the example of Alex Scott as someone who was purpose-driven in her quest for grit. Alex was diagnosed with neuroblastoma when she was a year old, and spent her early childhood in and out of hospitals. She told her mother she was going to run a lemonade stand when she got out of the hospital, and she did, raising $2,000 so that her doctors could help other sick children. By the time she passed away at the age of eight, she'd inspired so many to do the same that she raised more than $1 million. The foundation her family started to uphold her legacy, Alex's Lemonade Stand, has raised more than $100 million for cancer research.
It is common to start out with a self-oriented interest, develop it with practice, and then integrate that work into something that serves others. This correlates to psychologist Benjamin Bloom's study on the three-phase progression of how people develop in a field, from the "early years," when they start based on interest, to "the middle years," when they focus on practice, to the "later years," when mature, gritty people find larger purposes and meanings. Duckworth posits that the grittier the person, the more likely he is to view his job as a calling, something that is beneficial to the world. She explains this by referencing a parable about three bricklayers: One bricklayer thinks of himself as laying bricks, the second considers himself to be constructing a church, and the third believes he is building a house of God. The third bricklayer, Duckworth would say, has grit.
Need to Know: There is no inherent conflict in doing something for your own good that is also for the good of others.
Chapter 9: Hope
Having grit depends on the hope that one's own efforts can improve the future. The gritty person must have a resolve to make tomorrow better or, as the Japanese proverb says, "Fall seven, rise eight." Conversely, pessimists have a pervasive belief that things will not get better. This is a mindset that influences everything they do, or don't do, turning minor setbacks into catastrophes. But those with gritty hope respond to setbacks with thoughts such as, "I mismanaged my time" or "I was distracted." In other words, they assess the situation and find fixable things that are temporary, specific, and surmountable. They are optimists, able to come up with creative solutions to problems. Optimism is integral to the perseverance aspect of the grit equation.
Need to Know: Hope, or optimism, can be cultivated. Cognitive behavior therapy treats pessimistic, depressive states of mind by getting people to observe their negative self-talk. We can practice reinterpreting what happens to us and respond as an optimist would, developing hope as we might any other skill.
Part III: Growing Grit from the Outside In
Chapter 10: Parenting for Grit
Developing grit does not depend only upon our internal resources. Outside influences, particularly parents, can help to raise grittier children. Families can instill interest, hope, purpose, and practice. But that doesn't mean authoritarian, demanding, "tiger" parenting, nor does it mean the type of supportive, permissive parenting that would give a child a trophy for tying their shoe. Gritty parenting borrows elements of both styles, combining compassion with the belief, trust, and expectation that a child will persist. San Francisco 49er quarterback Steve Young credits his success to a father and mother who would never let him quit. When he desperately wanted to leave college, where he'd been recruited as a quarterback and was struggling, his father told him that if he did quit, he couldn't move back home because his parents weren't going to live with a "quitter." But Young's father was not heartless, though it may sound that way. In fact, the aptly nicknamed "Grit" Young, a corporate attorney, was all about hard work and never whining, and he applied the same standards to his children, who were made to understand that you finish what you start. Without coddling, he was tremendously supportive and present for his children and tuned in to their emotional needs.
Need to Know: Tough love is not a contradiction in terms. To foster grit, parents need to enable their children's success. Teaching them it is okay to quit difficult tasks could create a negative habit that they will carry for the rest of their lives.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Summary and Analysis of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Worth Books. Copyright © 2017 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Context,Overview,
Summary,
Cast of Characters,
Direct Quotes and Analysis,
Trivia,
What's That Word?,
Critical Response,
About Angela Duckworth,
For Your Information,
Bibliography,
Copyright,