How Gritty Are You?

Pre-College Topics High School Life
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<p>“Across six studies, individual differences in grit accounted for significant incremental variance in success outcomes over and beyond that explained by IQ, to which it was not positively related. As summarized in Table 3, grit accounted for more variance in outcomes than commonly observed for Big Five Conscientiousness. In Studies 1 and 2, we found that grittier individuals had attained higher levels of education than less gritty individuals of the same age. Older individuals tended to be higher in grit than younger individuals, suggesting that the quality of grit, although a stable individual difference, may nevertheless increase over the life span. As we expected, grittier individuals made fewer career changes than less gritty peers of the same age. In Study 3, undergraduates at an elite university who scored higher in grit also earned higher GPAs than their peers, despite having lower SAT scores. In Studies 4 and 5, grit was a better predictor of first summer retention at West Point than was either self-control or a summary measure of cadet quality used by the West Point admissions committee. However, among the cadets who persisted to the fall semester, self-control was a better predictor of academic performance. In our final study, grittier competitors in the Scripps National Spelling Bee outranked less gritty competitors of the same age, at least in part because of more accumulated practice.”</p>

<p>Source: 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.</p>

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<p>Hey kollegekid - do you store all of your journal articles somewhere? Have you made a list of all of them?</p>

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<li>I’m on some project of storing all of my journal articles on Gmail. Then I can forward them all to someone (without a subscription :p). Anyhow - a general rule of thumb - always save journal articles to disk! </li>
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<p>This is a key observation. The success of a person’s amount of grit is contingent upon his finding the field that most matches his interests at the beginning of his career. The problem is - not all gritty individuals do find such fields that most match their interests at the beginning of their careers (although this doesn’t hurt them too much as a whole - as they still do better than non-gritty individuals). Still, I wonder if there is a substantial number of gritty individuals who are truly miserable (because they initially made the wrong choices of fields to go into - and are too gritty to move out).</p>

<p>This becomes less of a problem when people have a chance to explore more fields of potential interest (and don’t spend too much time exploring them. Personally, I think that unschooling/homeschooling is the best way for this sort of exploration - given that school offers people very few opportunities to do so - and more to the point - it kills the time of those individuals)</p>

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<p>It seems pretty obvious that grittiness is something that adcoms assess. </p>

<p>“High school students who received a 5-point rating for follow-through were involved for several years in at least two different activities and, in each of these domains, demonstrated significant advancement and achievement”</p>

<p>“Follow-through was a better predictor than all other variables including SAT scores and high school rank, of whether a student would achieve a leadership position in college. Follow-through was also the single best predictor of significant accomplishment in science, art, sports, communications, organization, or some other endeavor. Follow-through was the third best predictor, after SAT scores and high school rank, of who would graduate with academic honors. It is important to note that ratings of follow-through were better than ratings of overall high school extracurricular involvement in predicting success outcomes. Consistent with our finding that grit was not positively associated with IQ, follow-through was orthogonal to SAT scores (φ = .01). Given that college grades are only modestly correlated with adult success, we wonder whether follow-through or, as we prefer to call it, grit, may in fact matter more than IQ to eventual success in life.”</p>

<p>Accomplished individuals worked day after day, for at least 10 or 15 years, to reach the top of their fields”</p>

<p>“Our suspicion is that grit, like IQ, is of ubiquitous importance in all endeavors in which success requires months or even years of sustained effort and interest”</p>

<p>Source: 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.</p>

<p>PS - I have a pdf for the article if anyone is interested.</p>

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Follow-through was the third best predictor, after SAT scores and high school rank, of who would graduate with academic honors. It is important to note that ratings of follow-through were better than ratings of overall high school extracurricular involvement in predicting success outcomes

Ah yes - that is true. Many individuals do demonstrate significant follow-through in activities completely orthogonal to anything in school (for example, self-studying a particular textbook and maintaining interest in self-study for years). This is a sort of grit that can only be demonstrated by essays. And while people could lie about grit, I think that lying about grit is only what someone with antisocial personality disorder could do (oh my god I’d feel horrible if I lied about it - and I don’t believe in universal moral standards). I am NOT talking about self-studying APs, which don’t require any grit at all.

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<p>I definitely do see a few acquaintances building pseudo-grittiness around these parts, usually at the behest of their parents. I wonder how much grittiness they’ll have once they are away at college.</p>

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<p>Another interesting phenomena that I’d like someone to study:</p>

<p>“perceived grittiness”</p>

<p>It’s difficult to measure grittiness by means of a single class (because people have differing degrees of grittiness that differ from activity to activity - some people are not gritty on classes they acknowledge as useless).</p>

<p>I’ve been perceived as BOTH a very hard worker and a slacker, which is somewhat interesting…</p>

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<p>I’ve been called an “infuriating slacker”…but i’m 5/~460 students.</p>

<p>I’m not quite sure on what your guys’ definition of “grit” or “grittiness” is, I’m sorry.</p>

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<p>Coming up with a grittiness measurement tool might be a good project for someone.</p>

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<p>The thing with grittiness is that it’s contingent upon (a) intrinsic grittiness and (b) motivation towards the particular task at hand. People have a natural maximum amount of grittiness towards particular tasks - but they never utilize their maximum amount of grittiness towards a single task - because there are always other tasks. I wouldn’t be so gritty towards a laboratory test, for example, since I know that it’s fully useless. So then the intrinsic grittiness would not be maximized in such a test.</p>

<p>The task would obviously have to be a task without continual reinforcements (lots of people are gritty wrt computer games)</p>

<p>Another thing is that gritty people have to be gritty towards something they recognize as important - and they have to be good in recognizing what is important and what is not important</p>

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<p>“Perceived grittiness” could have two dimensions: how others perceive you and how you perceive yourself. Grittiness may also be linked to self-efficacy.</p>

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<p>Grittiness for gaming is common but not widely valued. I did hear about a school district that is inaugurating a gaming academy/magnet school, though.</p>

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<p>Self-perception of grittiness could have several components in itself as well (motivational and attitudinal components). “I have to do this” vs. “I want to do this” are different attitudes towards a task that can produce different outcomes wrt the expression of creative ideas. Numerous research papers illustrate the importance of grittiness in creativity (there’s the so-called “10-years for genius rule”). Yet on the other hand we recognize gritty individuals who toil for years all for nothing (other than subservience). We do recognize in both cases that grittiness is important both for creative expression and for non-creative submission, however, we also must note that one’s attitudes and motivations can have an influence on how far that grittiness really carries us (can we recognize when we’ve gone too far? can we recognize when continuing performance leads to diminishing returns? do we recognize that we can notice things subconsciously and when we’re doing some more relaxing activity - such as taking a small walk instead of studying more and more?)</p>

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<p>There definitely are ceilings that prevent even a determined person’s progress, despite grittiness. </p>

<p>Yes, there are people who can apply their grittiness to what might be considered mediocre pursuits. Free will permits it. </p>

<p>Then again, is it wiser to change pursuits when interest wanes, or is it more important to stick with the chosen activity? What really does it prove to demonstrate grittiness?</p>

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<p>Context-dependent: one has to distinguish between (a) when one’s interest might be waning temporarily, and (b) when one’s interest is clearly no longer productive for the long-run. The question is - does one have enough information to be able to make that distinction? Often the answer is no.</p>

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<p>Hard to say - we can only group people by different levels/categories of grittiness and recognize that those levels and categories have some explanatory power (but do not have the power to explain all the variations in behavior that are associated with grittiness)</p>

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<p>…I really wish there was an active social science forum somewhere…</p>