Grit may be defined by strenuous effort, but what drives that work, Ms. Duckworth finds, is passion, and a great service of Ms. Duckworth’s book is her down-to-earth definition of passion. To be gritty, an individual doesn’t need to have an obsessive infatuation with a goal. Rather, he needs to show 'consistency over time.'
In this book, Duckworth, whose TED talk has been viewed more than eight million times, brings her lessons to the reading public. My guess is you’ll find Grit in the business section of your local bookstore. As marketing strategies go, it’s not a bad one, although the conventions of the self-help genre do require Duckworth to boil down her provocative and original hypotheses to some rather trite-sounding formulas...You can’t blame Duckworth for how people apply her ideas, but she’s not shy about reducing them to nostrums that may trickle down in problematic ways.
With Grit, Duckworth has now put out the definitive handbook for her theory of success. It parades from one essential topic to another on a float of common sense, tossing out scientific insights as it goes along. How to raise your kids, how to unearth your inner passion, how to find a higher purpose—like other self-help authors, Duckworth finds authoritative answers to these questions, promising to change how we see the world. And like other self-help authors, she pulls a sleight of hand by which even widely held assumptions end up looking like discoveries...But a closer look at Duckworth’s seminal research, as well as some recent studies from her colleagues in the field, suggest there isn’t much supporting evidence for either of her theses.
Grit is a useful guide for parents or teachers looking for confirmation that passion and persistence matter, and for inspiring models of how to cultivate these important qualities. But there are some troubling unintended consequences to Duckworth’s theories...Moreover, in Grit, Duckworth dances around the question of poverty. She notes that young children who feel helpless in the face of significant trauma and adversity develop altered brain circuitry that makes it much more difficult to feel the degree of control and hope required for true grit. And she reports that scores on her Grit Scale were a full point lower on average for high school seniors who qualified for federally subsidized meals. Yet she doesn’t offer any solutions for this quandary...
The book, as Duckworth acknowledges, does not address elements such as 'outside forces' and luck that can make all the grit in the world irrelevant. As she writes, the book is 'about the psychology of achievement, but because psychology isn't all that matters, it's incomplete.' I'd add this country's - and this city's - obsession with saviors, which can lead to finger-pointing and inaction; and our continuing national failure to provide equal educational opportunities. Still, her book gives cause for hope and an immediate path to action: A student's failure or setback should be 'interpreted as a cue to try harder,' she writes, 'rather than as confirmation that they lacked the ability to succeed.'
