Grit

Duckworth studied neurobiology at Harvard, went through McKinsey and left consulting to teach middle-school math; today she is a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. In the classroom she saw something that led her to a PhD: her most talented students were not the ones who finished best. At West Point she found the same thing. No admissions indicator predicted who would survive the brutal summer of initiation; what did predict it was a twelve-question scale she designed to measure grit, the combination of passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. The same scale later predicted who won the National Spelling Bee and who lasted in sales jobs.

Three ideas to remember:

• Her pair of equations: talent times effort equals skill, and skill times effort equals achievement. Talent matters, but effort appears twice, and that's why in the long run it beats talent that isn't exercised.
• Passion is not love at first sight but a sustained direction. Duckworth describes it as a compass, not as fireworks, and shows that the greats develop interest in their field over years, not in an epiphany.
• Grit has four components that are cultivated in order: interest, deliberate practice, purpose and hope. Interest makes you start; deliberate practice makes you improve; purpose keeps you going when it stops being fun; and hope picks you up when you fall.

The scale she measures it with is twelve statements, half passion and half perseverance. What's valuable is not the score but what it reveals: changing interests every year, getting distracted by the new idea or dropping the project after a few months counts against you, even if in the moment it feels like enthusiasm.

Duckworth is careful about one thing: grit is not stubbornness. Abandoning low-level goals to serve the high-level goal is part of grit; what you don't abandon is the goal at the top. Her image is a hierarchy of goals, with a single one at the top and many below that can be changed, replaced or thrown out; the founder who can't throw out a product doesn't have grit, he has attachment. The recipe for your company is to write that hierarchy on one page: the goal at the top in one sentence, three or four mid-level goals that serve it, and below them the concrete projects; then review which of the lower ones no longer serve the top one and cancel them as soon as possible. And for your team, hire by asking the question Duckworth asks everyone: tell me about something hard you started years ago and still do.

The author's line: "Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare." And it works beyond your role as a founder: it's a lens for evaluating hires, cofounders and partners. Those who arrive with lots of enthusiasm and little history of perseverance usually leave in the first winter.