Grit and Society Theme Analysis

In her conclusion to Grit, Angela Duckworth addresses an unusual question: is it possible to have too much grit? Yes, she says, in theory. But in practice, nobody has ever told her they wanted to be less gritty (that is, less passionate and tenacious). Indeed, given the option, most people in modern societies would choose to become grittier. After all, this would help them set and achieve more meaningful goals. Because grit promotes achievement, commitment, and hard work, Duckworth argues, it’s a profound asset to society as a whole: everyone stands to gain when people become grittier. And because norms like grit spread naturally through organizations and societies, people who start to improve their own grit are likely to help others do the same. Thus, Duckworth doesn’t just want to help people tackle their individual problems through grit—she also wants to build a national or even global culture of grit by teaching as many people as possible to recognize and pursue its benefits.

While grit is primarily an individual trait—it describes people’s attitude toward their own goals and accomplishments—it’s also highly dependent on shared cultural norms and identities. This is partially because people make many of their “critical gritty-or-not decisions”—including whether to stick with their commitments and interests—based on their sense of identity. As Duckworth puts it, people don’t simply weigh the costs and benefits of these kinds of important decisions. Instead, they more often ask, “What does someone like me do in a situation like this?” Thus, if grit is part of person’s identity, they’re likely to habitually make gritty decisions. And, importantly, people’s identities are almost always collective—in other words, people define the “someone like me” in terms of their membership in certain groups. For example, after getting shot, soldier Tom Deierlein insisted on outdoing his physical therapist’s expectations and running a 10-mile race because belonging to the military is central to his identity. If most people can form shared identities that involve grit, like Deierlein did, then grit’s benefits are likely to spread far and wide.

Groups can also make people grittier by changing or enforcing certain social norms. For instance, laypeople might view competitive swimmers as extraordinarily dedicated because they wake up to train at four every morning, but swimmers generally surround themselves with peers who do the same, so they don’t see it as unusual. For that reason, it’s easy to see how swimmers who surround themselves with other swimmers are more likely to train regularly. Similarly, Duckworth thinks, entire organizations and cultures can make grit a norm. In fact, Duckworth gives numerous examples of organizations (like the US Military Academy at West Point, the Seattle Seahawks football team, and KIPP charter schools) and even countries (like Finland) that have become successful by building grit into their cultures. For instance, KIPP schools raise more academically successful students than their competitors because they specifically train teachers to adopt and pass on a growth mindset, and Finland mounted a remarkably successful defense during the 1939 Winter War in part because its people believed in a cultural trait called sisu (perseverance). These examples are clear blueprints for how Duckworth thinks society at large can start to value grit. And just as new norms can spread through teams or institutions, they can also spread throughout society as a whole. Duckworth notes that people tend to learn attitudes like grit as children by imitating and emulating the adults around them. Similarly, peers can educate one another—for instance, Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll points out how his star player, Earl Thomas, helps his teammates learn to be grittier. Thus, when some people become grittier, it’s likely that the people around them will also learn about grit (if not actually develop it). This shows that if enough people dedicate themselves to learning and teaching grit, it can spread organically throughout a culture and eventually become a norm.

Because it’s clearly possible to foster and spread grit on a large scale, then, Duckworth views making the world grittier as a key part of her mission as a psychologist. She points out that just like IQ scores, average grit scores do change noticeably over generations. Specifically, younger people’s grit scores are lower than older people’s scores. It’s difficult to say whether this is because they simply haven’t matured yet or because of cultural and societal changes (like new technologies) that make grit less common today. Perhaps it’s both. Regardless, Duckworth’s data shows that it’s possible for a generation’s grittiness to change, which means that it’s also perfectly possible to make society grittier as a whole. In fact, West Point shows how it’s possible for an organization to completely turn around by changing its attitude toward grit. Hazing was the norm at West Point for decades, in part because the US Army believed that it would weed out weak or uncommitted students (in other words, those that lacked grit). But now, instead of encouraging low-grit cadets to drop out, West Point focuses on making them grittier. As a result, more of its cadets graduate and more of them are proficient at the skills they need to succeed in the military. Thus, because West Point has incorporated grit into its culture, it has become a much more successful institution overall. Duckworth sees no reason why other institutions—and society as a whole—can’t do the same and build robust cultures of grit in the process.

Grit’s social implications explain Duckworth’s decision to publicize her Grit Scale (the questionnaire she developed to measure grit) and write this book: she hopes that grit can become a popular movement, at least to a limited extent. For now, it’s all too easy to mistake Duckworth’s “paragons of grit” for talented geniuses and miss the real lessons that their success holds for everyday people. But in time, Duckworth thinks, perhaps popular culture can stop worshipping genius and start worshipping hard work instead.