Grit
Sustained passion and perseverance toward very long-term goals, beyond mere short-term effort.
What it means
Grit is defined as perseverance and passion for long-term goals — the disposition to sustain interest and effort toward an overarching aim over years despite plateaus, setbacks, and the absence of immediate reward. It comprises two facets, consistency of interest and persistence of effort, and is theorized to predict achievement above and beyond talent or IQ. The construct has drawn sharp critique: meta-analyses find grit correlates strongly with conscientiousness and that its predictive power over outcomes is often modest once that overlap is removed. The consistency-of-interest facet, in particular, predicts less than effort does. It matters as a popular, intuitive account of why some people of equal ability achieve far more, while serving as a cautionary tale about repackaging older traits.
Examples
A would-be surgeon who keeps the same demanding goal for over a decade, grinding through failures that make peers switch paths.
A novelist writing the same book for nine years through eleven rejections shows both facets at once: the effort not to stop, and an interest that never wandered off to another book.
Two employees work equally hard, but one has changed field three times in five years. They diverge on consistency of interest, not effort — and that facet predicts less than people assume.
First described in Angela Duckworth and colleagues (2007).