How Much Grit Do You Have?
Sticking with something long after the excitement wore off
Grit is made of two separate things: not giving up when something gets hard, and not changing direction every few months. Plenty of people have one without the other, and the combination you have says more about how your career will go than either part alone.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about the last few years of your life, not about who you intend to be next year.
What it measures
Two components: perseverance of effort, meaning you keep working when it stops being fun, and consistency of interest, meaning your goals stay roughly the same over years rather than months.
Based on: Grit scale (Duckworth et al.)
Possible results
Perseverance of effort
Whether you keep going once the difficulty arrives.
Consistency of interest
Whether your goals stay the same long enough to compound.
Common questions
Is low consistency of interest a problem?
Less than the popular framing implies. The 2017 meta-analysis found consistency of interest barely predicts performance at all - almost all the useful signal in grit comes from the effort side. If you switch interests but work hard on each one, you are fine.
Can grit be increased?
Somewhat, and more by changing your circumstances than your character. People persevere far longer at things they chose, that have visible progress, and that are practised in an environment where quitting is socially awkward. Structure beats willpower.
When is quitting the right answer?
When the cost is still rising and the thing you learn from continuing is not. Grit research is often read as an argument against ever quitting, which its author does not claim - persistence on a goal that is wrong for you is just an expensive way of being stubborn.
Sources
- Duckworth, A. L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M. D., & Kelly, D. R. (2007). Grit: Perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
- Duckworth, A. L., & Quinn, P. D. (2009). Development and validation of the Short Grit Scale (Grit-S). Journal of Personality Assessment.
- Credé, M., Tynan, M. C., & Harms, P. D. (2017). Much ado about grit: A meta-analytic synthesis of the grit literature. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
An honest note Worth knowing: a large 2017 meta-analysis found that grit overlaps heavily with conscientiousness and predicts performance only modestly - considerably less than the popular version of the idea suggests. Perseverance of effort does most of the predictive work; consistency of interest does very little. Treat a low score as information, not a verdict.