A few weeks ago we looked at Angela Duckworth’s grit research, the empirical case that sustained perseverance predicts achievement, and the meta-analyses that walked the claim back considerably. The conclusion was, roughly, that grit matters — modestly, contextually — but that it’s not the master key to success that its popularisation suggested.
This article picks up from there. Because even after the technical debate about whether grit is a distinct psychological construct or a rebrand of conscientiousness, a more interesting question remains. Not does grit predict success but when does persistence help, and when does it harm? The answer, drawn from several intersecting research traditions, is sharper than either the grit enthusiasts or the grit critics usually admit.
The question the grit research didn’t ask
Duckworth’s original research, taken on its own terms, tested whether gritty people achieved more in specific demanding environments. It didn’t ask — and couldn’t, given its design — whether those gritty people were better off for having persisted. This is a different question. A student who keeps pushing through a degree they’re starting to hate might, on the grit metric, be succeeding. But if they’re heading into a career mismatched with their temperament, paid for with years of joyless effort, the success looks different when you zoom out.
The psychologist Ed Diener, one of the most respected researchers on wellbeing, spent much of his career documenting a specific and uncomfortable finding. People who persist in pursuit of goals poorly matched to their own values, abilities or circumstances pay real psychological costs. They report lower life satisfaction, higher anxiety, worse health outcomes, and more regrets at the end of their lives — even when they achieve the goals they persisted toward.
This is the shadow side of grit. The virtue of persistence, applied to the wrong goal, can produce a life of durable commitment to something the person didn’t actually want. And because persistence makes us persist, the mechanism that would otherwise help us notice the mismatch is precisely the one grit asks us to override.
The poker player’s counter-tradition
Annie Duke, whose research on strategic quitting we’ve covered separately, has made the sharpest recent case against the cultural default of valuing persistence over quitting. Her argument, worth repeating here: most people, in most situations, quit too late rather than too early. The social and psychological costs of admitting a mistake — sunk-cost feelings, identity investment, fear of looking uncommitted — systematically delay quits that honest analysis would recommend. Grit culture adds a moral glaze to this, making it not just uncomfortable but virtuous to keep going.
Duke’s research, drawing on decision science and her own poker career, suggests the correct question in the face of difficulty isn’t can I keep going? but should I? The ability to keep going, celebrated as grit, answers the first. The second requires a different skill — the willingness to assess the situation without being attached to the answer. Gritty people, by the data, are worse at this second skill, because the psychological apparatus that makes them gritty also makes them less willing to consider quitting.
This doesn’t mean grit is bad. It means grit alone, without a calibration mechanism, produces durable commitment whether or not the commitment is wise.
Where mindset interacts
A useful third angle comes from Carol Dweck, whose mindset research has been discussed in this series more broadly. Dweck has argued that grit and mindset interact. A person with a fixed mindset who is gritty tends to persist stubbornly, interpreting difficulty as a challenge to their identity rather than as information. They hold on because giving up would mean admitting something damaging about themselves. A person with a growth mindset who is gritty persists more flexibly — they try different approaches, seek feedback, adjust, keep learning. The two look similar on a grit questionnaire but produce very different outcomes in practice.
This has practical implications. The grit intervention that doesn’t also build growth-mindset habits can produce exactly the stubborn, unreflective persistence Duke warns about. The grit intervention that does build those habits produces something more adaptive — durable commitment coupled with ongoing calibration.
What Duckworth herself has emphasised more in her later writing is that grit matters most when it’s directed at a goal the person has genuinely chosen and continues to affirm. Grit toward a goal imposed by parental pressure, or social expectation, or unexamined teenage commitment is a different thing from grit toward a goal you keep choosing even when the difficulty gets real. The word grit covers both, which is part of why the research has been confusing.
The way grit gets weaponised
A more recent critique has come from Denise Pope, a researcher at Stanford who has studied American high-achieving high schools. Pope’s work documents how grit culture can become, in school settings, a mechanism for justifying unreasonable demands. Students are told to be gritty about workloads that have quietly expanded well beyond what previous generations faced. The language of perseverance is used to normalise sleep deprivation, burnout, and the sacrifice of adolescent life to achievement. A student who questions the load is accused of lacking grit.
Pope’s concern isn’t with grit as a personal virtue. It’s with grit as an institutional excuse. When systems fail to examine their own demands and instead ask participants to persevere harder, grit becomes a cover for structural problems rather than a personal strength. The same dynamic shows up in workplaces, in elite sport, in certain creative industries. The language of perseverance can conceal conditions that no amount of perseverance should be asked to solve.
This is worth holding. Grit culture can be a useful antidote to a genuine cultural problem — the tendency of some environments to reward talent over effort, to treat ability as fixed, to let students give up at the first difficulty. In those environments, emphasising grit helps. But grit culture has spread far beyond the environments it was designed for, and in many of them it now functions as the opposite of what it was meant to be.
What honest persistence looks like
Stepping back from the various critiques, a defensible synthesis emerges:
Grit matters when the goal is genuinely chosen, still affirmed, and difficult in ways that reward practice. This is the domain where Duckworth’s original findings hold up best. Learning a craft. Writing a book. Training for a sport. Building a business. These are situations where the difficulty is the path, not a signal to change paths.
Grit matters less — or works against you — when the goal isn’t genuinely yours. If you’re persisting because your parents want you to, or because you announced the goal publicly and can’t face quitting, the grit is sustaining an identity, not a pursuit. Honest reflection before more persistence is probably warranted.
Grit should come with a calibration practice. Every few months, or whenever the difficulty changes character, check whether the goal still fits. Not as an excuse to quit at the first friction — as a regular practice of asking whether the persistence is aimed where you still want it aimed. People who do this well aren’t less gritty. They’re more gritty, toward things that continue to be worth it.
Grit is a tool, not a virtue. The cultural framing of grit as a character trait to be celebrated has done more harm than the research supports. Grit is useful in certain contexts toward certain goals. In other contexts, it’s exactly the wrong response. Treating it as a uniformly good trait is a category error.
The question that remains
The deep question under the grit debate is one about the shape of a life. A person who persists at nothing ends up with little. A person who persists at everything ends up imprisoned by their own earlier commitments. The skill of a good life, in this narrow respect, is knowing which of the difficulties you face are worth enduring because the thing on the other side is what you actually want, and which are worth examining because your persistence is sustaining something you wouldn’t choose again if you were starting fresh.
The grit research, stripped of the cultural amplification, points at this more interesting question. It doesn’t answer it. Answering it is your job.
The question to carry, especially if you’ve been gritting your way through something difficult for a while:
If you weren’t already this far into it, would you still be choosing to do it — and if not, what are you really being gritty about?
Key research referenced: Angela Duckworth’s grit research (Duckworth et al., 2007; 2016); Marcus Credé’s 2017 meta-analysis; Ed Diener’s research on wellbeing and mismatched persistence; Annie Duke, Quit (2022); Carol Dweck’s mindset research; Denise Pope’s work on high-achieving schools (Doing School, 2001).