Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

The World According to Garp
. Like that novel’s
fictional protagonist, Irving tells a great story. He has been lauded as “the great storyteller of
American literature today.” To date, he’s written more than a dozen novels, most of which have been
best sellers and half of which have been made into movies. 
The World According to Garp
won the
National Book Award, and Irving’s screenplay for 
The Cider House Rules
won an Academy Award.
But unlike Garp, Irving was not a natural. While Garp “could make things up, one right after the
other, and they seemed to fit,” Irving rewrites draft after draft of his novels. Of his early attempts at
writing, Irving has said, “Most of all, I rewrote everything . . . I began to take my lack of talent
seriously.”
Irving recalls earning a C– in high school English. His SAT verbal score was 475 out of 800,
which means almost two-thirds of the students who took the SAT did better than him. He needed to
stay in high school an extra year to have enough credits to graduate. Irving recalls that his teachers
thought he was both “lazy” and “stupid.”
Irving was neither lazy nor stupid. But he was severely dyslexic: “I was an underdog. . . . If my
classmates could read our history assignment in an hour, I allowed myself two or three. If I couldn’t
learn to spell, I would keep a list of my most frequently misspelled words.” When his own son was
diagnosed with dyslexia, Irving finally understood why he, himself, had been such a poor student.
Irving’s son read noticeably slower than his classmates, “with his finger following the sentence—as I
read, as I 
still
read. Unless I’ve written it, I read whatever ‘it’ is very slowly—and with my finger.”
Since reading and writing didn’t come easily, Irving learned that “to do anything really well, you
have to overextend yourself. . . . In my case, I learned that I just had to pay twice as much attention. I
came to appreciate that in doing something over and over again, something that was never natural
becomes almost second nature. You learn that you have the capacity for that, and that it doesn’t come
overnight.”
Do the precociously talented learn that lesson? Do they discover that the capacity to do something
over and over again, to struggle, to have patience, can be mastered—but not overnight?
Some might. But those who struggle early may learn it better: “One reason I have confidence in
writing the kind of novels I write,” Irving said, “is that I have confidence in my stamina to go over
something again and again no matter how difficult it is.” After his tenth novel, Irving observed,
“Rewriting is what I do best as a writer. I spend more time revising a novel or screenplay than I take
to write the first draft.”
“It’s become an advantage,” Irving has observed of his inability to read and spell as fluently as
others. “In writing a novel, it doesn’t hurt anybody to have to go slowly. It doesn’t hurt anyone as a

---

writer to have to go over something again and again.”
With daily effort, Irving became one of the most masterful and prolific writers in history. With
effort, he became a master, and with effort, his mastery produced stories that have touched millions of
people, including me.
Grammy Award–winning musician and Oscar-nominated actor Will Smith has thought a lot about
talent, effort, skill, and achievement. “I’ve never really viewed myself as particularly talented,” he
once observed. “Where I excel is ridiculous, sickening work ethic.”
Accomplishment, in Will’s eyes, is very much about going the distance. Asked to explain his
ascendancy to the entertainment elite, Will said:
The only thing that I see that is distinctly different about me is: I’m not afraid to die on a
treadmill. I will not be outworked, period. You might have more talent than me, you might be
smarter than me, you might be sexier than me. You might be all of those things. You got it on me
in nine categories. But if we get on the treadmill together, there’s two things: You’re getting off
first, or I’m going to die. It’s really that simple.
In 1940, researchers at Harvard University had the same idea. In a study designed to understand
the “characteristics of healthy young men” in order to “help people live happier, more successful
lives,” 130 sophomores were asked to run on a treadmill for up to five minutes. The treadmill was set
at such a steep angle and cranked up to such a fast speed that the average man held on for only four
minutes. Some lasted for only a minute and a half.
By design, the Treadmill Test was exhausting. Not just physically but mentally. By measuring and
then adjusting for baseline physical fitness, the researchers designed the Treadmill Test to gauge
“stamina and strength of will.” In particular, Harvard researchers knew that running hard was not just
a function of aerobic capacity and muscle strength but also the extent to which “a subject is willing to
push himself or has a tendency to quit before the punishment becomes too severe.”
Decades later, a psychiatrist named George Vaillant followed up on the young men in the original
Treadmill Test. Then in their sixties, these men had been contacted by researchers every two years
since graduating from college, and for each there was a corresponding file folder at Harvard literally
bursting with questionnaires, correspondence, and notes from in-depth interviews. For instance,
researchers noted for each man his income, career advancement, sick days, social activities, self-
reported satisfaction with work and marriage, visits to psychiatrists, and use of mood-altering drugs
like tranquilizers. All this information went into composite estimates of the men’s overall
psychological adjustment in adulthood.
It turns out that run time in the Treadmill Test at age twenty was a surprisingly reliable predictor of
psychological adjustment throughout adulthood. George and his team considered that staying on the
treadmill was also a function of how physically fit these men were in their youth, and that this finding
merely indicated that physical health predicted later psychological well-being. However, they found
that adjusting for baseline physical fitness “had little effect on the correlation of running time with
mental health.”
In other words, Will Smith is on to something. When it comes to how we fare in the marathon of
life, effort counts tremendously.

---

“How long would 
you
have stayed on the treadmill?” I asked George recently. I wanted to know
because, in my eyes, George is himself a paragon of grit. Early in his career, not long after completing
his residency in psychiatry, George discovered the treadmill data, along with all the other information
on the men collected to that point. Like a baton, the study had been handed from one research team to
another, with dwindling interest and energy. Until it got to him.
George revived the study. He reestablished contact with the men by mail and phone and, in
addition, interviewed each in person, traveling to all corners of the world to do so. Now in his
eighties, George has outlived most of the men in the original study. He is currently writing his fourth
book on what is by now the longest continuous study of human development ever undertaken.
In answer to my question about his own treadmill perseverance, George replied, “Oh, I’m not all
that persistent. When I do crossword puzzles on the airplane, I always look at the answers when I am
a little bit frustrated.”
So, not very gritty when it comes to crossword puzzles.
“And when something is broken in the house, I turn it over to my wife, and she fixes it.”
“So you don’t think you’re gritty?” I asked.
“The reason why the Harvard study works is that I have been doing it constantly and persistently.
It’s the one ball I’ve kept my eye on. Because I’m totally fascinated by it. There is nothing more
interesting than watching people grow.”
And then, after a short pause, George recalled his days at prep school, where, as a varsity track
athlete, he competed in pole vaulting. To improve, he and the other vaulters did pull-ups, which he
calls “chins,” because you start by hanging off a bar and then pull yourself up to where your chin
hovers just above, then you drop down again, and repeat.
“I could do more chins than anyone. And it wasn’t because I was very athletic—I wasn’t. The
reason is that I 
did
a lot of chin-ups. I practiced.”
The prolific writer and director Woody Allen, when asked about his advice for young artists, once
said:
My observation was that once a person actually completed a play or a novel he was well on his
way to getting it produced or published, as opposed to a vast majority of people who tell me
their ambition is to write, but who strike out on the very first level and indeed never write the
play or book.
Or, in Allen’s snappier formulation, “Eighty percent of success in life is showing up.”
Back in the 1980s, both George H. W. Bush and Mario Cuomo frequently repeated this bit of
wisdom in speech after speech, turning the saying into something of a meme. So, while these leaders
of the Republican and Democratic parties must have disagreed on a great many things, they were in
complete consensus on the importance of following through on what one has started.
I told George Vaillant that, if I’d been on the Harvard research team in 1940, I would have made a
suggestion. I would have allowed the young men to come back the next day, if they wanted, and try the
Treadmill Test again. I suspect that some would have come back to see if they could stay on longer,
whereas others would have been content with their first timed effort. Maybe some would ask the
researchers whether they knew of any strategies, physical or mental, in order to last longer. And

---

maybe these fellows would even be interested in a third try, and a fourth. . . . Then I would create a
grit score based on how many times men voluntarily returned to see if they could improve.
Staying on the treadmill is one thing, and I do think it’s related to staying true to our commitments
even when we’re not comfortable. But getting back on the treadmill the next day, eager to try again, is
in my view even more reflective of grit. Because when you don’t come back the next day—when you
permanently turn your back on a commitment—your effort plummets to zero. As a consequence, your
skills stop improving, and at the same time, you stop producing anything with whatever skills you
have.
The treadmill is, in fact, an appropriate metaphor. By some estimates, about 40 percent of people
who buy home exercise equipment later say they ended up using it less than they’d expected. How
hard we push ourselves in a given workout matters, of course, but I think the bigger impediment to
progress is that sometimes we stop working out altogether. As any coach or athlete will tell you,
consistency of effort over the long run is everything.
How often do people start down a path and then give up on it entirely? How many treadmills,
exercise bikes, and weight sets are at this very moment gathering dust in basements across the
country? How many kids go out for a sport and then quit even before the season is over? How many
of us vow to knit sweaters for all of our friends but only manage half a sleeve before putting down the
needles? Ditto for home vegetable gardens, compost bins, and diets. How many of us start something
new, full of excitement and good intentions, and then give up—permanently—when we encounter the
first real obstacle, the first long plateau in progress?
Many of us, it seems, quit what we start far too early and far too often. Even more than the effort a
gritty person puts in on a single day, what matters is that they wake up the next day, and the next, ready
to get on that treadmill and keep going.
If I have the math approximately right, then someone twice as talented but half as hardworking as
another person might reach the same level of skill but still produce dramatically less over time. This
is because as strivers are improving in skill, they are also