Grit : The Power of Passion and Perseverance

“There's a vast amount of research on what happens when we believe a student is especially talented. We begin to lavish extra attention on them and hold them to higher expectations. We expect them to excel, and that expectation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

I'm not giving this such a high rating because I'm totally sold on the premise or her research. Her theory has been challenged by other studies with equally intriguing findings which suggest that grit is not a trait that can be easily influenced because it's mostly determined by genetics while Duckworth claims that it's something that can be learned and trained. They also suggest there are so many more factors that influence someone's success while she chose to focus on this one specifically. Her book is heavy with anecdotal evidence from successful people from the US, which is a first world country offering privileges some people can only dream of, so you could say her samples are pretty skewed because the people she mentions already have a head start even people that were initially underprivileged simply because they later have access to opportunities which in other places are basically nonexistent.

However, I did find a lot of value in this book, I do feel more inspired and hopeful. It might be a placebo, but at the end of the day, it doesn't matter that much to me. Having grown-up in an environment that placed so much emphasis on natural intelligence and talents, I was taught to always stick to what I'm immediately good at, avoid failure at all costs (because failure is something inherently bad) and other elements of a closed mindset. Based on my experience and that of the people around me, I realized this kind of thinking was detrimental to our development and throughout the years I've learned that people are so much more adaptable and can achieve so much more when they simply try harder and they believe they can make it, which is the opposite of what I've been taught to believe. Ironically, the easiest way to fail is to simply not try because you fear failure.

I don't necessarily think that grit the is main/only reason behind someone's success (what I mean by success is the achievement of one's personal goals whatever these may be, I'm not talking about the standard version of success: money and fame) but I do think it helps a lot. It feels that it should be common sense that applying grit (read as perseverance when odds seem to be against you) can only bring someone a step closer to what to what they want to accomplish. And even if it turns out to be true, that grit is mostly determined by genes, how could it hurt to try improving it, even if just by a little. Life can be unpredictable, messy, unfair but to give up on improving as a person and improving the quality of your life just because you were handed a certain genetic makeup is just adding to the unfairness of it all. I wish I'd learned this earlier.