For instance, most people become more conscientious, more dependable, more agreeable, more wise, and more emotionally stable as they mature.īut what those averages obscure is that really what’s going on is some people are not changing nearly at all, while some people are making dramatic changes. If you look at the data on personality change, the first thing you note is that people’s personalities change in every dimension, but what that data obscures is that if you gather 100 people’s personality change, and you take their average, what the data looks like is gradual growth. But neuroscience and longitudinal research on people suggests that people change a lot actually, and they change sometimes in dramatic ways. There are all these Biblical phrases like “show me the child at seven, and I’ll show you the man,” or Freud, who thought everything interesting happened in childhood, that there was no growth after that.

She then spent years analyzing the short- and long term effects of grit on people’s performance in school, at work, and in personal relationships, and published her research in Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, a New York Times bestseller documenting how grit predicts long-term success in nearly every realm of life (a theory also explained in her viral TED Talk).ĪD: Most of the research and psychology says that people change much more after childhood than you first would think. She realized IQ wasn’t the only factor separating successful students from those who struggled, and that grit-holding steadfast to a goal through time-was highly predictive of success. The University of Pennsylvania psychologist’s studies of grit began when she was teaching math to seventh graders. It combines resilience, ambition, and self-control in the pursuit of goals that take months, years, or even decades. As Duckworth defines it, grit is passion and sustained persistence applied toward long-term achievement, with no particular concern for rewards or recognition along the way.

Angela Duckworth is the world’s leading expert on “grit,” the much-hyped ingredient in personal success.

Pursuit of happiness genius