Grit: Perseverance And Passion For Long Term Goals

A paper written by Angela Duckworth which builds on previous research done by psychologists over the past 100 years titled “Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long Term Goals” demonstrates through many different studies how grit can affect our success. The start of the paper gives the reader a background about grit and researchers a foundation about the attributes needed to bring success.
William James, 1907 proposed two questions to cover the field of psychology: What are the types of human abilities and how do people show these? Sir Francis Galton, “a British contemporary of James’”, has researched many professionals in their fields such as; lawyers, artists, musicians, poets, scientists, wrestlers and more and concluded that “ability alone cannot bring success” he later concluded that stamina is also required to bring success in your field. Galton was an early researcher of grit and gave researchers today a framework for how to be successful. This framework became “The Big Five Model” which was developed by several sets of researchers but later extended by J.M Digman and Lewis Goldberg in 1990. The Big Five Model includes openness to experience, conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion, and neuroticism.

Researchers expected grit to be associated with The Big Five Model but were shown that “high accomplishment was achieved above and beyond those constructs”. Six studies in present research aimed to demonstrate how a “Grit Scale” could give others a better understanding of grit. The four criteria used for the scale included; psychometric soundness, face validation from others in a variety of domains, a low chance of people plateauing in a high populated situation, and most importantly, how well someone fit grit. With the scale developed researchers conducted six