2026-04-27
I recently read Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth.
Grit is usually framed as sustained effort toward long-term goals. A more useful interpretation is not that “some people have it,” but that: grit is a policy you run over time under friction.
Two components matter:
Perseverance of effort: Do you keep working when it is hard?
Consistency of interests: Do you stay with the same goals long enough to compound progress?
In practice, these components decouple. Early in a career, exploration is valuable; rigid consistency can be counterproductive. Later, persistence on a well-chosen problem becomes decisive.
Failure mode: treating persistence as inherently good. In research, persistence on the wrong problem is indistinguishable from inefficiency.
While reading this, I was reminded of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck.
The core idea is that abilities are malleable. This matters because it changes how failure is interpreted:
Fixed mindset → failure as evidence of limits
Growth mindset → failure as information for adjustment
This distinction is not cosmetic. It determines whether effort leads to learning or just repetition.
Failure mode: reducing growth mindset to a slogan (“try harder”). Without feedback and strategy, effort does not translate into skill.
How they relate and where they differ
They operate at different layers:
Growth mindset → why you continue (interpretation of failure)
Grit → whether you continue (behavior over time)
They reinforce each other, but neither guarantees progress. You can believe in improvement and still quit early; you can persist without learning.
When these ideas work and when they don’t
Fast feedback environments
Iteration is possible.
Growth mindset + grit → compounding improvement.
Slow, noisy environments (e.g., academia)
Feedback is delayed or ambiguous.
Risk: persistence without learning, or premature abandonment.
Misaligned problems
Even high grit + growth mindset produce little value.
The bottleneck is what you are working on, not how hard.
A missing variable: person × environment
Both frameworks implicitly treat performance as largely person-driven. A more accurate model is:
outcome = f(person, environment, interaction)
An intuitive analogy is gene × environment from biology:
a gene does not produce a fixed outcome; its effect depends on context. The same genotype can lead to different phenotypes under different conditions.
The parallel is direct:
The same “grit level” can produce very different outcomes depending on mentorship, problem structure, and institutional support.
What looks like “high grit” may simply be good alignment between a person and their environment.
What looks like “low grit” may be uncompensated friction.
This reframing shifts the intervention from only fixing people to also engineering contexts.
Practical implications:
Diagnose before prescribing effort: is the bottleneck skill, strategy, or environment?
Shorten feedback loops; persistence needs signal.
Define stopping rules; grit should be selective, not blind.
Treat interests as flexible early, more stable later.
Grit and growth mindset remain useful because they give individuals agency. But they are incomplete theories of performance.
The harder question is not just: Can this person persist and improve?
But: Under what conditions does their effort actually convert to progress?
That is the direction Situated, the upcoming book of Angela Duckworth, appears to be heading. Toward a more explicit account of how context shapes what individual traits can achieve.