Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

something
, signed up 
again
the following year, and during that time had made some
kind of 
progress
.
I learned about the Personal Qualities Project a few years after I started studying grit. When I got my
hands on the original study report, I read it cover to cover, put it down for a moment, and then started
again on page one.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. Instead, I lay awake thinking: 
Holy smokes! What Willingham calls
“follow-through” sounds a lot like grit!
Immediately—desperately—I wanted to see if I could replicate his findings.
One motive was practical.
Like any self-report questionnaire, the Grit Scale is ridiculously fakeable. In research studies,
participants have no real incentive to lie, but it’s hard to imagine using the Grit Scale in a high-stakes
setting where, in fact, there’s something to gain by pretending that “I finish whatever I begin.”
Quantifying grit as Willingham had done was a measurement strategy that could not easily be gamed.
Not, at least, without outright lying. In Willingham’s own words: “Looking for clear signs of
productive follow-through is a useful way to mine the student’s track record.”
But the more important goal was to see whether follow-through would predict the same showing-
up-instead-of-dropping-out outcomes that are the hallmark of grit.
For the support of a new longitudinal study, I turned to the largest philanthropic funder in
education: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
I soon learned that the foundation is especially interested in why college students drop out in such
large numbers. At present, the dropout rate for two- and four-year colleges in the United States is
among the highest in the world. Escalating tuitions and the byzantine labyrinth of financial aid in this
country are two contributing factors. Woefully inadequate academic preparation is another. Still,
students with similar financial circumstances and identical SAT scores drop out at very different
rates. Predicting who will persist through college and earn their degree and who won’t is among the
most stubborn problems in all of social science. Nobody has a very satisfying answer.
In a meeting with Bill and Melinda Gates, I had an opportunity to explain my perspective in
person. Learning to follow through on something hard in high school, I said, seemed the best-possible
preparation for doing the same thing later in life.

---

In that conversation, I learned that Bill himself has long appreciated the importance of
competencies other than talent. Back in the days when he had a more direct role in hiring software
programmers at Microsoft, for instance, he said he’d give applicants a programming task he knew
would require hours and hours of tedious troubleshooting. This wasn’t an IQ test, or a test of
programming skills. Rather, it was a test of a person’s ability to muscle through, press on, get to the
finish line. Bill only hired programmers who finished what they began.
With generous support from the Gates Foundation, I recruited 1,200 seniors and, just as Willingham
had done, asked them to name their extracurricular activities (if they 
had
any), when they’d
participated in them, and how they’d distinguished themselves doing them, if at all. Around the lab,
while we were doing this study, we began calling this measure what it looks like: the Grit Grid.
Directions: Please list activities in which you spent a significant amount of time outside of
class. They can be any kind of pursuit, including sports, extracurricular activities, volunteer
activities, research/academic activities, paid work, or hobbies. If you do not have a second