Grit is the determination to put in the months or even years of effort to succeed at a goal.
Grit is more about passion than personality, research finds.
It is not just about being born or brought up with a ‘gritty’ personality.
Everyone can find the determination in themselves to succeed if they have passion for their goal.
Developing a passion for a goal is linked to a kind of adaptive perfectionism.
Adaptive perfectionism means perfectionism with some level of obsession, but not so much that it is ultimately destructive.
Setting oneself attainable goals is one of the keys to avoiding destructive perfectionism.
The conclusions come from a study of 251 students who completed a series of questions about grit.
People with high levels of grit tend to agree with statements like:
- Setbacks don’t discourage me. I don’t give up easily.
- I have overcome setbacks to conquer an important challenge.
Ms Danielle Cormier, the study’s first author, said:
“We wanted to know whether people bring grit to every aspect of their life, or if they are gritty athletes or gritty students, or even a gritty parent or a gritty hobbyist.”
It emerged that people were more gritty in specific areas of their life, rather than being gritty overall.
In other words, some students were passionate about their academic studies and they did better at those.
Others were more passionate about sports, so they did better at those.
Ms Cormier said:
“It seems grit is best conceptualized as a domain-specific trait, and not in general, which is how the field has been measuring grit since it was conceptualized.”
A growth mindset is key to success, Ms Cormier said:
“Instead of thinking talents are fixed, like believing your intelligence is just the way it is, a growth mindset allows you to believe that intelligence, or other character traits and talents, can be grown.
In order to do that you must embrace failures and setbacks, because without any of those learning opportunities, you’re not going to get better.
Everyone has an element of grit in them, it is just finding that passion.”
The study was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences (Cormier et al., 2019).
