UNLOCK THE KEY TO SUCCESS In this must-read for anyone seeking to succeed, pioneering psychologist Angela Duckworth takes us on an eye-opening journey to discover the true qualities that lead to outstanding achievement. Winningly personal, insightful and powerful, Grit is a book about what goes through your head when you fall down, and how that – not talent or luck – makes all the difference.
Chapter 1: SHOWING UP
"By the time you set foot on the campus of the United States Military
Academy at West Point, you’ve earned it.
The admissions process for West Point is at least as rigorous as for
the most selective universities. Top scores on the SAT or ACT and
outstanding high school grades are a must. But when you apply to Harvard,
you don’t need to start your application in the eleventh grade, and
you don’t need to secure a nomination from a member of Congress,
a senator, or the vice president of the United States. You don’t, for
that matter, have to get superlative marks in a fitness assessment that
includes running, push-ups, sit-ups, and pullups.
Each year, in their junior year of high school, more than 14,000
applicants begin the admissions process. This pool is winnowed to just
4,000 who succeed in getting the required nomination. Slightly more
than half of those applicants—about 2,500—meet West Point’s rigorous
academic and physical standards, and from that select group just
1,200 are admitted and enrolled. Nearly all the men and women who
come to West Point were varsity athletes; most were team captains.
And yet, one in five cadets will drop out before graduation. What’s more
remarkable is that, historically, a substantial fraction of dropouts leave in
their very first summer, during an intensive seven-week training program
named, even in official literature, Beast Barracks. Or, for short, just Beast.
Who spends two years trying to get into a place and then drops out
in the first two months?
Then again, these are no ordinary months. Beast is described in the
West Point handbook for new cadets as “the most physically and emotionally
demanding part of your four years at West Point . . . designed
to help you make the transition from new cadet to soldier.”
A Typical Day at Beast Barracks
5:00 a.m. Wake-up
5:30 a.m. Reveille Formation
5:30 to 6:55 a.m. Physical Training
6:55 to 7:25 a.m. Personal Maintenance
7:30 to 8:15 a.m. Breakfast
8:30 to 12:45 p.m. Training/Classes
1:00 to 1:45 p.m. Lunch
2:00 to 3:45 p.m. Training/Classes
4:00 to 5:30 p.m. Organized Athletics
5:30 to 5:55 p.m. Personal Maintenance
6:00 to 6:45 p.m. Dinner
7:00 to 9:00 p.m. Training/Classes
9:00 to 10:00 p.m. Commander’s Time
10:00 p.m. Taps
The day begins at 5:00 a.m. By 5:30, cadets are in formation, standing
at attention, honoring the raising of the United States flag. Then
follows a hard workout—running or calisthenics—followed by a nonstop
rotation of marching in formation, classroom instruction, weapons
training, and athletics. Lights out, to a melancholy bugle song called
“Taps,”* occurs at 10:00 p.m. And on the next day the routine starts
over again. Oh, and there are no weekends, no breaks other than meals,
and virtually no contact with family and friends outside of West Point.
One cadet’s description of Beast: “You are challenged in a variety of
ways in every developmental area—mentally, physically, militarily, and
socially. The system will find your weaknesses, but that’s the point—
West Point toughens you.”
***
So, who makes it through Beast?
It was 2004 and my second year of graduate school in psychology
when I set about answering that question, but for decades, the
U.S. Army has been asking the same thing. In fact, it was in 1955—
almost fifty years before I began working on this puzzle—that a young
psychologist named Jerry Kagan was drafted into the army, ordered to
report to West Point, and assigned to test new cadets for the purpose of
identifying who would stay and who would leave. As fate would have it,
Jerry was not only the first psychologist to study dropping out at West
Point, he was also the first psychologist I met in college. I ended up
working parttime in his lab for two years.
“What struck Mike was that rising to the occasion had almost nothing to do with talent. Those who dropped out of training rarely did so from lack of ability. Rather, what mattered, Mike said, was a “never give up” attitude.”
Jerry described early efforts to separate the wheat from the chaff
at West Point as dramatically unsuccessful. He recalled in particular
spending hundreds of hours showing cadets cards printed with pictures
and asking the young men to make up stories to fit them. This test
was meant to unearth deep-seated, unconscious motives, and the general
idea was that cadets who visualized noble deeds and courageous
accomplishments should be the ones who would graduate instead of
dropping out. Like a lot of ideas that sound good in principle, this one
didn’t work so well in practice. The stories the cadets told were colorful
and fun to listen to, but they had absolutely nothing to do with decisions
the cadets made in their actual lives.
Since then, several more generations of psychologists devoted
themselves to the attrition issue, but not one researcher could say with
much certainty why some of the most promising cadets routinely quit
when their training had just begun.
Soon after learning about Beast, I found my way to the office of Mike
Matthews, a military psychologist who’s been a West Point faculty member
for years. Mike explained that the West Point admissions process
successfully identified men and women who had the potential to thrive
there. In particular, admissions staff calculate for each applicant something
called the Whole Candidate Score, a weighted average of SAT or
ACT exam scores, high school rank adjusted for the number of students
in the applicant’s graduating class, expert appraisals of leadership potential,
and performance on objective measures of physical fitness.
You can think of the Whole Candidate Score as West Point’s best
guess at how much talent applicants have for the diverse rigors of its
four-year program. In other words, it’s an estimate of how easily cadets
will master the many skills required of a military leader.
The Whole Candidate Score is the single most important factor
in West Point admissions, and yet it didn’t reliably predict who would
make it through Beast. In fact, cadets with the highest Whole Candidate
Scores were just as likely to drop out as those with the lowest. And
this was why Mike’s door was open to me.
From his own experience joining the air force as a young man, Mike
had a clue to the riddle. While the rigors of his induction weren’t quite
as harrowing as those of West Point, there were notable similarities.
The most important were challenges that exceeded current skills. For
the first time in their lives, Mike and the other recruits were being
asked, on an hourly basis, to do things they couldn’t yet do. “Within
two weeks,” Mike recalls, “I was tired, lonely, frustrated, and ready to
quit—as were all of my classmates.”
Some did quit, but Mike did not.
What struck Mike was that rising to the occasion had almost nothing
to do with talent. Those who dropped out of training rarely did so
from lack of ability. Rather, what mattered, Mike said, was a “never
give up” attitude.
***
Around that time, it wasn’t just Mike Matthews who was talking to me
about this kind of hang-in-there posture toward challenge. As a graduate
student just beginning to probe the psychology of success, I was
interviewing leaders in business, art, athletics, journalism, academia,
medicine, and law: Who are the people at the very top of your field? What
are they like? What do you think makes them special?
Some of the characteristics that emerged in these interviews were
very field-specific. For instance, more than one businessperson mentioned
an appetite for taking financial risks: “You’ve got to be able to
make calculated decisions about millions of dollars and still go to
sleep at night.” But this seemed entirely beside the point for artists,
who instead mentioned a drive to create: “I like making stuff. I don’t
know why, but I do.” In contrast, athletes mentioned a different kind
of motivation, one driven by the thrill of victory: “Winners love to go
head-to-head with other people. Winners hate losing.”
In addition to these particulars, there emerged certain commonalities,
and they were what interested me most. No matter the field, the
most successful people were lucky and talented. I’d heard that before,
and I didn’t doubt it.
But the story of success didn’t end there. Many of the people I talked
to could also recount tales of rising stars who, to everyone’s surprise,
dropped out or lost interest before they could realize their potential.
Apparently, it was critically important—and not at all easy—to
keep going after failure: “Some people are great when things are going
well, but they fall apart when things aren’t.” High achievers described
in these interviews really stuck it out: “This one guy, he wasn’t actually
the best writer at the beginning. I mean, we used to read his stories
and have a laugh because the writing was so, you know, clumsy
and melodramatic. But he got better and better, and last year he won
a Guggenheim.” And they were constantly driven to improve: “She’s
never satisfied. You’d think she would be, by now, but she’s her own
harshest critic.” The highly accomplished were paragons of perseverance.
“In sum, no matter the domain, the highly successful had a kind of ferocious determination that played out in two ways.”
Why were the highly accomplished so dogged in their pursuits? For
most, there was no realistic expectation of ever catching up to their
ambitions. In their own eyes, they were never good enough. They were
the opposite of complacent. And yet, in a very real sense, they were
satisfied being unsatisfied. Each was chasing something of unparalleled
interest and importance, and it was the chase—as much as the
capture—that was gratifying. Even if some of the things they had to
do were boring, or frustrating, or even painful, they wouldn’t dream of
giving up. Their passion was enduring.
In sum, no matter the domain, the highly successful had a kind of
ferocious determination that played out in two ways. First, these exemplars
were unusually resilient and hardworking. Second, they knew
in a very, very deep way what it was they wanted. They not only had
determination, they had direction.
It was this combination of passion and perseverance that made
high achievers special. In a word, they had grit.
***
For me, the question became: How do you measure something so
intangible? Something that decades of military psychologists hadn’t
been able to quantify? Something those very successful people I’d
interviewed said they could recognize on sight, but couldn’t think of
how to directly test for?
I sat down and looked over my interview notes. And I started
writing questions that captured, sometimes verbatim, descriptions of
what it means to have grit.
Half of the questions were about perseverance. They asked how
much you agree with statements like “I have overcome setbacks to
conquer an important challenge” and “I finish whatever I begin.”
The other half of the questions were about passion. They asked
whether your “interests change from year to year” and the extent to
which you “have been obsessed with a certain idea or project for a
short time but later lost interest.”
What emerged was the Grit Scale—a test that, when taken honestly,
measures the extent to which you approach life with grit.
In July 2004, on the second day of Beast, 1,218 West Point cadets sat
down to take the Grit Scale.
The day before, cadets had said goodbye to their moms and dads (a
farewell for which West Point allocates exactly ninety seconds), gotten
their heads shaved (just the men), changed out of civilian clothing and
into the famous gray and white West Point uniform, and received their
footlockers, helmets, and other gear. Though they may have mistakenly
thought they already knew how, they were instructed by a fourth-year
cadet in the proper way to stand in line (“Step up to my line! Not on
my line, not over my line, not behind my line. Step up to my line!”).
Initially, I looked to see how grit scores lined up with aptitude.
Guess what? Grit scores bore absolutely no relationship to the Whole
Candidate Scores that had been so painstakingly calculated during the
admissions process. In other words, how talented a cadet was said
nothing about their grit, and vice versa.
The separation of grit from talent was consistent with Mike’s observations
of air force training, but when I first stumbled onto this finding
it came as a real surprise. After all, why shouldn’t the talented endure?
Logically, the talented should stick around and try hard, because when
they do, they do phenomenally well. At West Point, for example, among
cadets who ultimately make it through Beast, the Whole Candidate
Score is a marvelous predictor of every metric West Point tracks. It not
only predicts academic grades, but military and physical fitness marks
as well.
So it’s surprising, really, that talent is no guarantee of grit. In this
book, we’ll explore the reasons why.
***
By the last day of Beast, seventy-one cadets had dropped out.
Grit turned out to be an astoundingly reliable predictor of who
made it through and who did not.
The next year, I returned to West Point to run the same study. This
time, sixty-two cadets dropped out of Beast, and again grit predicted
who would stay.
In contrast, stayers and leavers had indistinguishable Whole Candidate
Scores. I looked a little closer at the individual components that
make up the score. Again, no differences.
So, what matters for making it through Beast?
Not your SAT scores, not your high school rank, not your leadership
experience, not your athletic ability.
Not your Whole Candidate Score.
What matters is grit.”
* “Taps” is played by a single bugle at dusk by the United States armed forces. It is also played at military funerals and during flag ceremonies.
Extracted from Grit by Angela Duckworth, out now.
YOU MAY ALSO ENJOY
Extract: Zero to One by Peter Thiel