Is Grit Overrated? The Downside of Persistence

The psychologist Angela Duckworth argues that dogged, single-minded persistence is a key to career success—but it carries downsides, too.

- Jerry Useem

Where does the power come from to see the race to its end?” asks the Scottish sprinter Eric Liddell in a scene from Chariots of Fire. His answer—“from within”—was until recently about as far as we’d come in understanding the roots of dogged persistence.

Besides the famous “marshmallow test,” in which preschoolers who abstain from eating one get rewarded with two, measures of motivation have remained mushy. For most of its existence, even the United States Military Academy at West Point, where the celebration of unflagging commitment is etched into the campus statuary, lacked a reliable determinant of which cadets would have the drive to endure their first seven weeks (colloquially known as “Beast Barracks”) and which would say no más and go home. SAT scores, it turned out, were no predictor, nor were

ACT scores, high-school rank, physical fitness, “leadership potential,” or any other measure of aptitude. At one point, military psychologists even showed cadets flash cards of random images in hopes of unearthing some subconscious basis for staying power. That, too, failed.