The Half of Grit That Actually Predicts Achievement

T-Michael Dougherty, Ed.D., MPA

Grit splits into two parts when researchers measure it. Continued effort goes with achievement; keeping the same interest barely does. What that means if you change direction.

The Half of Grit That Actually Predicts Achievement — Mastery Notes, T-Michael Dougherty, Ed.D., MPA

Grit is usually described as a single trait: passion and perseverance for long-term goals (Duckworth et al., 2007). When researchers pooled the studies that measure it, the trait came apart into two pieces that behave very differently. Continuing to put in effort was modestly related to achievement. Keeping the same interest over time was related to it hardly at all (Lam & Zhou, 2022).

Grit splits into two parts when it is measured.

Kin Kit Li Lam and Mingming Zhou combined well over a hundred studies of grit and academic achievement from many countries. The perseverance half of grit carried almost all of the relationship with achievement. The consistency-of-interest half added very little.

Marcus Credé, Michael Tynan and Peter Harms reached a similar conclusion from a different starting point (Credé, Tynan & Harms, 2017). The two parts of grit did not hold together as a single trait, grit overlapped heavily with conscientiousness, which psychologists have measured for decades, and the perseverance part was the one that predicted performance.

Read together, the two reviews point the same way. What these measures pick up is whether a person keeps working. Whether the person’s interest stays fixed on one target adds almost nothing.

Changing direction does not count against you.

If you have ever worried that switching fields or projects means you were never serious about any of them, this research does not support the worry. The part of grit that goes with achievement is continued effort, and effort can move from one target to another.

It also changes what is worth paying attention to. Interests shift as circumstances and knowledge change, and much of that shift is outside anyone’s control. Effort over time is something you can arrange, including when you work and what you do when the work stops being enjoyable.

The one thing to do.

Pick the pursuit that matters most to you right now and plan for the stretch when it gets dull, before you reach it. Write down when you will work on it next week and what you will do on the days it feels like a chore, such as shrinking the task to fifteen minutes instead of skipping it. The post on discipline and design goes further into how to set that up.

What this does not show.

These are correlations from observational studies. They show that perseverance and achievement tend to go together, and they do not show that one causes the other. The relationship is also modest: perseverance is one contributor to achievement among many, alongside ability, opportunity, teaching and luck. And because grit overlaps so much with conscientiousness, some of what gets credited to grit may be a familiar trait under a new name.

References

  1. 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, 113(3), 492–511. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000102
  2. 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, 92(6), 1087–1101. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.92.6.1087
  3. Lam, K. K. L., & Zhou, M. (2022). Grit and academic achievement: A comparative cross-cultural meta-analysis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 114(3), 597–621. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000699
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T-Michael Dougherty, Ed.D., MPA, is a learning scientist and researcher and the founder of Mastery Pathways. He is Vice President of Learning Operations at The EMG Solutions Institute, where he is developing AI-enhanced learning and professional development tools for healthcare professionals. He spent ten years as an instructor in higher education and eight years as the founding program director of an accredited healthcare education program, and he holds a doctorate in educational leadership and instructional technology. At Mastery Pathways, he reads the research on attention, learning, motivation, practice, recovery, and leadership, and reports what it supports and where it stops. He is the author of The Mastery Series and hosts The Mastery Project Podcast at masterypathways.org.

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