Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

The World According to Garp
(New York: Ballantine, 1978), 127.
“the great storyteller”
:
Peter 
Matthiessen, 
quoted 
in 
“Life 
& 
Times: 
John 
Iriving,” 
New 
York 
Times
,
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/15/lifetimes/irving.html
.
Garp “could make things up”
:
Irving, 
Garp,
127.
“my lack of talent”
:
John Irving, 
The Imaginary Girlfriend: A Memoir
(New York: Ballantine, 1996), 10.
SAT verbal score was 475
:
Sally Shaywitz, 
Overcoming Dyslexia: A New and Complete Science-based Program for Reading
Problems at Any Level
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 345–50.
“lazy” and “stupid”
:
Ibid., 346.
“frequently misspelled words”
:
Irving, 
Imaginary Girlfriend
, 9.
“slowly—and with my finger”
:
Shaywitz, 
Overcoming Dyslexia
, 346.
“you have to overextend yourself”
:
Ibid., 347.
“no matter how difficult it is”
:
Ibid.
“Rewriting is what I do best”
:
John Irving, “Author Q&A,” Random House Online Catalogue, 2002.
“to have to go slowly”
:
Shaywitz, 
Overcoming Dyslexia
, 347.
“sickening work ethic”
:
60 Minutes
, CBS, December 2, 2007, 
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/will-smith-my-work-ethic-is-sickening
.
A lyric in one of Will Smith’s raps goes: “If you say you’re going to run three miles, and you only run two, I don’t ever have to worry
about losing in nothing to you.” See “Will Smith Interview: Will Power,” 
Reader’s Digest
, December 2006.
“or I’m going to die”
:
Tavis Smiley, PBS, December 12, 2007.
“healthy young men”
:
Clark W. Heath, 
What People Are: A Study of Normal Young Men
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1945), 7.
for only four minutes
:
Katharine A. Phillips, George E. Vaillant, and Paula Schnurr, “Some Physiologic Antecedents of Adult Mental
Health,” 
The American Journal of Psychiatry
144 (1987): 1009–13.
“strength of will”
:
Heath, 
Normal Young Men
, 75.
“becomes too severe”
:
Ibid., 74.
“with mental health”
:
Phillips, Vaillant, and Schnurr, “Some Physiologic Antecedents,” 1012.
“I’m not all that persistent”
:
George Vaillant, professor at Harvard Medical School and former director of the Grant Study, in an
interview with the author, April 8, 2015.
“never write the play or book”
:
William Safire, “On Language; The Elision Fields,” 
New York Times
, August 13, 1989.
“Eighty percent of success in life is showing up”
:
Ibid.
less than they’d expected
:
Consumer Reports
, “Home Exercise Machines,” August 2011.
“beating on your craft”
:
Today
show, NBC, June 23, 2008.
CHAPTER 4: HOW GRITTY ARE YOU?
Grit Scale
:
The original twelve-item Grit Scale, from which this ten-item version is adapted, was published in Duckworth et al., “Grit.”
The correlation between these two versions of the scale is 
r
= .99. Note also that, as you’ll learn in chapter 9, I’ve revised item 2,
adding, “I don’t give up easily” to “Setbacks don’t discourage me.”

---

how your scores compare
:
Data for these norms are from Duckworth et al., “Grit” Study 1. Note that there are numerous limitations
of any measure, including self-report questionnaires like the Grit Scale. For an extended discussion, see Angela L. Duckworth and
David S. Yeager, “Measurement Matters: Assessing Personal Qualities Other Than Cognitive Ability for Educational Purposes,”