Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

An Argument for Mind
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 49–54.
West Point admissions
:
For more information on the Whole Candidate Score and its history, see Lawrence M. Hanser and Mustafa
Oguz, 
United States Service Academy Admissions: Selecting for Success at the Military Academy/West Point and as an Officer
(Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2015).
those with the lowest
:
Angela L. Duckworth, Christopher Peterson, Michael D. Matthews, and Dennis R. Kelly, “Grit: Perseverance
and Passion for Long-term Goals,” 
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
92 (2007): 1087–1101.
“I was tired, lonely, frustrated”
:
Michael D. Matthews, 
Head Strong: How Psychology Is Revolutionizing War
(New York:
Oxford University Press, 2014), 16.
“never give up” attitude
:
Mike Matthews, professor of engineering psychology at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, in
conversation with the author, May 25, 2015.
physical fitness marks
:
Hanser and Oguz, 
Selecting for Success.
seventy-one cadets had dropped out:
 Duckworth et al., “Grit.”
55 percent of the salespeople
:
Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, Elizabeth P. Shulman, Scott A. Beal, and Angela L. Duckworth, “The Grit
Effect: Predicting Retention in the Military, the Workplace, School and Marriage,” 
Frontiers in Psychology
5 (2014): 1–12.
graduate degree were grittier
:
Duckworth, et al., “Grit.”
as high as 80 percent
:
For more information on college dropout rates in the United States, see “Institutional Retention and Graduation
Rates 
for 
Undergraduate 
Students,” 
National 
Center 
for 
Education 
Statistics, 
last 
updated 
May 
2015,
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cva.asp
.
“where we decide”
:
Dick Couch, 
Chosen Soldier: The Making of a Special Forces Warrior
(New York: Three Rivers Press,
2007), 108.
42 percent of the candidates
:
Eskreis-Winkler et al., “The Grit Effect.”
Success in the military, business, and education
:
Ibid. Importantly, the bivariate associations between grit and outcomes were in
all cases significant as well.
to all 273 spellers
:
Duckworth et al., “Grit.”
SAT scores and grit
:
Ibid. See also Kennon M. Sheldon, Paul E. Jose, Todd B. Kashdan, and Aaron Jarden, “Personality, Effective
Goal-Striving, and Enhanced Well-Being: Comparing 10 Candidate Personality Strengths,” 
Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin
1 (2015), 1–11. In this one-year longitudinal study, grit emerged as a more reliable predictor of goal attainment than any other
measured personality strength. Likewise, my colleagues Phil Tetlock and Barbara Mellers have found in their longitudinal research
that people who forecast future events with astonishing accuracy are considerably grittier than others: “The strongest predictor of
rising into the ranks of superforecasters is perpetual beta, the degree to which one is committed to belief updating and self-
improvement. It is roughly three times as powerful a predictor as its closest rival, intelligence.” See Philip E. Tetlock and Dan
Gardner, 
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
(New York: Crown, 2015), page 192.
CHAPTER 2: DISTRACTED BY TALENT
in the classroom
:
The school I taught at was created by Teach For America alumnus Daniel Oscar, and in my view, the best teacher
in the school was a guy named Neil Dorosin. Both Daniel and Neil are still in the vanguard of education reform.
“I was a little behind”
:
David Luong, in an interview with the author, May 8, 2015.
learning came easy
:
Karl Pearson,