Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

Connection
(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008). See also Roy F. Baumeister and Mark R. Leary, “The Need to Belong:
Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation,” 
Psychological Bulletin
117 (1995): 497–529. Finally,
see Edward L. Deci with Richard Flaste, 
Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation
(New York: Penguin, 1995).
Note that recent primate studies show that longevity and reproductive success depend on the ability to form strong, enduring social
bonds with others. The desire to connect is as basic a human—even mammalian—need as the need for pleasure. See Robert M.
Seyfarth and Dorothy L. Cheney, “The Evolutionary Origins of Friendship,” 
Annual Review of Psychology
63 (2012): 153–77.
Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci, “On Happiness and Human Potential: A Review of Research
on Hedonic and Eudaimonic Well-Being,” 
Annual Review of Psychology
52 (2001): 141–66.
Amy Wrzesniewski, Clark McCauley, Paul Rozin, and Barry Schwartz, “Jobs, Careers, and Callings:
People’s Relations to Their Work,” 
Journal of Research in Personality
31 (1997): 25.
We collected this data in 2015.
:
Wrzesniewski et al., “Jobs, Careers, and Callings,” 25.
J. Stuart Bunderson and Jeffery A. Thompson, “The Call of the Wild: Zookeepers, Callings, and the
Double-Edged Sword of Deeply Meaningful Work,” 
Administrative Science Quarterly
54 (2009): 32–57.
Studs Terkel, 
Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel
About What They Do
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), xi. Note that the names of the workers in Terkel’s book were
pseudonyms.
:
Ibid., 521–24.
Ibid., xi.
:
Ibid., 103–6.
Wrzesniewski et al., “Jobs, Careers, and Callings.”
Amy Wrzesniewski, professor of organizational behavior at Yale School of Management, in an interview
with the author, January 27, 2015.
Metropolitan Transit Authority, “Facts and Figures,” accessed March 10, 2015,
http://web.mta.info/nyct/facts/ffsubway.htm
.
:
Joe Leader, senior vice president at New York City Transit, in an interview with the author, February 26, 2015.
Michael Baime, clinical associate professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and director of
the Penn Program for Mindfulness, in an interview with the author, January 21, 2015.
The next year, we doubled in size and, to better support our students, developed an after-school
enrichment program. The following year, the program won the Better Government Award for the state of Massachusetts. Around the
same time, professors at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government wrote up the story of Summerbridge Cambridge as a case
study in social entrepreneurship.
For more information on Breakthrough Greater Boston, see 
www.breakthroughgreaterboston.org
.
Adam Grant, Class of 1965 Wharton Professor of Management, in an interview with the author, July 15, 2015.
Adam Grant, 
Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success
(New York:
Penguin, 2014).

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Adam Grant, “Does Intrinsic Motivation Fuel the Prosocial Fire? Motivational Synergy in Predicting
Persistence, Performance, and Productivity,” 
Journal of Applied Psychology
93 (2008): 48–58.
:
Ibid.
:
David S. Yeager and Matthew J. Bundick, “The Role of Purposeful Work Goals in Promoting
Meaning in Life and in Schoolwork During Adolescence,” 
Journal of Adolescent Research
24 (2009): 423–52. Relatedly, it’s been
shown that affirming values can boost performance for other reasons, particularly by maintaining a sense of personal adequacy.
Geoffrey L. Cohen and David K. Sherman, “The Psychology of Change: Self-Affirmation and Social Psychological Intervention,”