Grit (9 page)

To calculate your total grit score, add up all the points for the boxes you checked and divide by 10. The maximum score on this scale is 5 (extremely gritty), and the lowest possible score is 1 (not at all gritty).

You can use the chart below to see
how your scores compare to a large sample of American adults.
^I

Keep in mind that your score is a reflection of how you see yourself right now. How gritty you are at this point in your life might be different from how gritty you were when you were younger. And if you take the Grit Scale again later, you might get a different score. As this book will continue to show, there is every reason to believe that grit can change.

Grit has two components: passion and perseverance. If you want to dig a little deeper, you can calculate separate scores for each component: For your passion score, add up your points for the odd-numbered
items and divide by 5. For your perseverance score, add up your points for the even-numbered items and divide by 5.

If you scored high on passion, you probably scored high on perseverance, too. And vice versa. Still, I’ll take a guess that your perseverance score is a wee bit higher than your passion score. This isn’t true for all people, but it’s true for most people I’ve studied. For instance, I took the scale while writing this chapter, and I scored 4.6 overall. My perseverance score was 5.0, and my passion score was only 4.2. Strange as it sounds, staying focused on consistent goals over time is more of a struggle for me than working hard and bouncing back from setbacks.

This consistent pattern—perseverance scores more often topping passion scores—is a clue that passion and perseverance aren’t exactly the same thing. In the rest of this chapter, I’ll explain how they differ and show how to understand them as two parts of a whole.

While taking the Grit Scale, you might have noticed that none of the passion questions asked how
intensely
you’re committed to your goals. This may seem odd, because the word
passion
is often used to describe intense emotions. For a lot of people, passion is synonymous with infatuation or obsession. But in interviews about what it takes to succeed, high achievers often talk about commitment of a different kind. Rather than intensity, what comes up again and again in their remarks is the idea of
consistency over time
.

For instance, I’ve heard of chefs who grew up watching Julia Child on television and remained fascinated with cooking into adulthood. I’ve heard of investors whose curiosity about the financial markets is as keen in their fourth or fifth decade of investing as it was on their very first day of trading. I’ve heard of mathematicians who work on a problem—the
same
problem—day and night for years, without once deciding, “Oh, to heck with this theorem! I’m moving on to something else.” And that’s
why the questions that generate your passion score ask you to reflect on how
steadily
you hold to goals over time. Is
passion
the right word to describe sustained, enduring devotion? Some might say I should find a better word. Maybe so. But the important thing is the idea itself: Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare.

Consider, for example, Jeffrey Gettleman. For about a decade, Jeff has been the East Africa bureau chief for the
New York Times
. In 2012, he won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his coverage of conflict in East Africa. He’s a bit of a celebrity in the world of international journalism, widely admired for his courage to pursue stories that put his life at risk and, also, for his willingness to unflinchingly report events that are unthinkably horrific.

I met Jeff when we were in our early twenties. At the time, both of us were pursuing master’s degrees at Oxford University. For me, this was before McKinsey, before teaching, and before becoming a psychologist. For Jeff, this was before he’d written his first news story. I think it’s fair to say that, back then, neither of us knew quite what we wanted to be when we grew up—and we were both trying desperately to figure it out.

I caught up with Jeff on the phone recently. He was in Nairobi, his home base between trips to other parts of Africa. Every few minutes, we had to ask each other if we could still be heard. After reminiscing about our classmates and trading news about our children, I asked Jeff to reflect on the idea of passion and how it had played out in his life.

“For a very long time, I’ve had a very clear sense of where I wanted to be,” Jeff told me. “And that passion is to live and
work in East Africa.”

“Oh, I didn’t know—I assumed your passion was journalism, not a certain area of the world. If you could only be a journalist or only live in East Africa, which would you choose?”

I expected Jeff to pick journalism. He didn’t.

“Look, journalism is a great fit for me. I’ve always gravitated towards writing. I’ve always been okay being in new situations. Even the
confrontational side of journalism—that speaks to my personality. I like to challenge authority. But I think journalism has been, in a sense, a means to an end.”

Jeff’s passion emerged over a period of years. And it wasn’t just a process of passive discovery—of unearthing a little gem hidden inside his psyche—but rather of active construction. Jeff didn’t just go looking for his passion—he helped create it.

Moving to Ithaca, New York, from Evanston, Illinois, Jeff, at eighteen years old, could not have predicted his future career. At Cornell, he ended up majoring in philosophy, in part because
“it was the easiest to fulfill the requirements.” Then, the summer after freshman year, he visited East Africa. And that was the beginning of the beginning: “I don’t know how to explain it. This place just blew my mind. There was a spirit here that I wanted to connect with, and
I wanted to make it a part of my life.”

As soon as he got back to Cornell, Jeff started taking courses in Swahili, and after sophomore year, he took a year off to backpack around the world. During that trip, he returned to East Africa, experiencing the same wonder he’d felt the first time he visited.

Still, it wasn’t clear how he’d make a life there. How did he hit on journalism as a career path? A professor who admired Jeff’s writing suggested as much, and Jeff remembers thinking, “That is the dumbest idea I had heard . . .
who wants to work for a boring newspaper?” (I remember thinking the same thing once about becoming a professor:
Who wants to be a boring professor?
) Eventually, Jeff did work for the student paper, the
Cornell Daily Sun
—but as a photographer, not a writer.

“When I got to Oxford,
I was pretty lost academically. It was shocking to the Oxford professors that I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. They were like, ‘Why are you here? This is a serious place. You should have a firm sense of what you want to study or you shouldn’t be here.’ ”

My guess at the time was that Jeff would pursue photojournalism.
He reminded me of Robert Kincaid, the worldly, wise photographer played by Clint Eastwood in
The Bridges of Madison County
, which was released around the time we became friends. In fact, I can still remember the photographs Jeff showed me twenty years ago. I thought they were from
National Geographic
, but he’d actually taken them himself.

By his second year at Oxford, he figured out that journalism was an even better fit: “Once I learned more about being a journalist and how that could get me back to Africa, and how that actually would be fun, and I could write more creatively than I first imagined journalism was, then I was like, ‘Screw it, this is what I’m going to do.’ I set out a very deliberate path that was possible, because the journalism industry was very hierarchical, and it was clear how to get from A to B to C to D, et cetera.”

Step A was writing for Oxford’s student newspaper,
Cherwell
. Step B was a summer internship at a small paper in Wisconsin. Step C was the
St. Petersburg Times
in Florida on the Metro beat. Step D was the
Los Angeles Times
. Step E was the
New York Times
as a national correspondent in Atlanta. Step F was being sent overseas to cover war stories, and in 2006—just over a decade since he’d set himself the goal—he finally reached step G: becoming the
New York Times
’ East Africa bureau chief.

“It was a really winding road that took me to all kinds of places. And it was difficult, and discouraging, and demoralizing, and scary, and all the rest. But eventually, I got here. I got exactly where I wanted to be.”

As for so many other grit paragons, the common metaphor of passion as fireworks doesn’t make sense when you think of what passion means to Jeff Gettleman. Fireworks erupt in a blaze of glory but quickly fizzle, leaving just wisps of smoke and a memory of what was once spectacular. What Jeff’s journey suggests instead is passion as a
compass
—that thing that takes you some time to build, tinker with, and finally get right, and that then guides you on your long and winding road to where, ultimately, you want to be.

Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll puts it this way: “Do you
have a life philosophy?”

For some of us, the question makes no sense. We might say:
Well, I have a lot of things I’m pursuing. A lot of goals. A lot of projects. Which do you mean?

But others have no problem answering with conviction:
This is what I want
.

Everything becomes a bit clearer when you understand the level of the goal Pete is asking about. He’s not asking about what you want to get done today, specifically, or even this year. He’s asking what you’re trying to get out of life. In grit terms, he’s asking about your passion.

Pete’s philosophy is:
Do things better than they have ever been done before.
Like with Jeff, it took a while to figure out what, in the broader sense, he was aiming for. The pivotal moment came at a low point in his coaching career: just after getting fired as head coach of the New England Patriots. This was the first and only year in his life when Pete wasn’t playing or coaching football. At that juncture, one of his good friends urged him to consider something more abstract than which job to take next: “You’ve got to have a philosophy.”

Pete realized he didn’t have one and needed to: “If I was ever going to get the chance to run an organization again, I would have to be prepared with a philosophy that would
drive all my actions.” Pete did a lot of thinking and reflecting: “My life in the next weeks and months was filled with writing notes
and filling binders.” At the same time, he was devouring the books of John Wooden, the legendary UCLA basketball coach who won a record-setting ten national championships.

Like a lot of coaches, Pete had already read Wooden. But this time, he was reading Wooden and understanding, at a much deeper level, what the coaching icon had to say. And the most important thing
Wooden said was that, though a team has to do a million things well, figuring out the overarching vision is of utmost importance.

Pete realized in that moment that particular goals—winning a particular game, or even a seasonal championship, or figuring out this element of the offensive lineup, or the way to talk to players—needed coordination, needed purpose: “A clear, well-defined philosophy gives you the guidelines and boundaries that keep you on track,” he said.

One way to understand what Pete is talking about is to envision
goals in a hierarchy.

At the bottom of this hierarchy are our most concrete and specific goals—the tasks we have on our short-term to-do list: I want to get out the door today by eight a.m. I want to call my business partner back. I want to finish writing the email I started yesterday. These low-level goals exist merely as
means to ends
. We want to accomplish them only because they get us something
else
we want. In contrast, the higher the goal in this hierarchy, the more abstract, general, and important it is. The higher the goal, the more it’s an end in itself, and the less it’s merely a
means
to an end.