Where’s the evidence that grit predicts success?

This means applying more "grit" is useful in life, until some point where more grit becomes less useful.

To make things more complicated, the amount of grit also depends on and interacts with all other variables of life.

So not only the optimal amount of grit varies constantly, but you also get a fractal of local maxima and minima along the way. Basically your "how much grit I need for optimal performance" graph looks like the outline of a mountain.

So given that situation, discussing whether "grit predicts success" is kind of silly, isn't it. If life was this simple, we wouldn't evolve these big brains to account for everything at once and constantly balance and rebalance the equation in attempt to find equilibrium.

EDIT: Maybe we need to run a survey and find out the mean grit we have as a society, and then mandate, say 1% more grit and measure global outcomes. So please draw on this line how much grit you have between 0 and 100. The graph is log, because actual grit varies between 0 and +Infinity.

Turns out that having both grit and a large family nest egg too reduce the consequences of failure go a long way together. But maybe they're rare to have together: the safety net reduces the need for grit.

Success is almost by definition a hindsight measure. You can only work backwards from it, but never guarantee a forward path into it.

Effort / "working-hard" has no value unless it is effectively directed at something.

The fact is that there are as many different definitions of success as different people in the world.

For some people success is being free to travel the world without constraints or having lots of friends or having sex with lots of people. For others is raising a healthy family and spending lots of time with them. For other people is having power over others, other people want to have a second or third house. Other people want to have more money that they could spend. Or being famous. Other people want to get something significant that merits a Nobel Price.

There is this delusion that you could have it all, you could make yourself rich without working or risking anything, have all the time on the world, travel and be famous.

There is no such a thing. I have met elite sport people that are the best in the world, rich and famous, but they really hate being famous. They have very little time or freedom, and if they want to travel anywhere, specially in South America, Asia or Africa everybody knows they are rich and they can be kidnapped or blackmailed at any time. They can not trust the people around them, unless is family or old friends(or people as rich as them).

I have met very rich business people that don't have free time at all. The money they earn, the wife or children waste. Children getting addictions like drugs or alcohol because their parents send them to internship and demand from them only work and more hard work.

I have met travelers that have traveled dozens of countries, but were incapable of raising a family and always short of money because they stop working as soon as they have enough for discovering a new place.

For me personally success is learning, traveling the world and having free time. I sacrificed money in order to get what I wanted.

I got what I wanted, but had to sacrifice other things for it. Over time I got back most of the things I sacrificed, like money, probably thanks to the people I met along the way, but I did lose it first.

If success is only "economical success", most people from the US are way richer than 90% of the people in the world. They have non economic wealth like rule of law and legal security that in countries like China, most of Africa or in some countries in South America does not exist.

There's a big psychometrics literature on conscientiousness. Start there.

There seems to be a whole subgenre of HN posts along the lines of "I decided college was a waste of time for someone as uniquely gifted as me, so I self studied and have never had a problem getting hired for my next contract. Now I want to work at a FAANG, but they ask me to code a breadth first search. Why is the hiring process so broken?"

- Does grit predict success? (forwards)

- Do successful people project grit? (backwards)

Although it's always somewhat context-sensitive, with both figures you could learn how much signal to derive from the latter.

If we learned that grit wasn't necessarily an indicator of success, then it'd arguably be a bit callous of successful people to project grit, given that plenty of other people go through hard times without being able to achieve similar outcomes.

On the other hand most challenging fields are adverse learning environments - where the objective may be open-ended, feedback is few and misleading, and information on the state of the world is mostly inferred. To succeed in this type of environment you probably need a lot more intrinsic drive and tolerance for failure.

Many scientists already know that ‘grit’ is over-hyped and over-sold. Now there’s a really well-articulated piece explaining it.

Stay away from one size-fits all ‘solutions’ to very complex problems. Same goes for ‘growth’ vs. ‘fixed mindset’ btw.

On the other hand something like “grit” is inspirational to people who like that kind of thing (“I’m going to improve my grit”), scammers (“Take my course on improving your grit”), and the comfortably well off who can use it as an excuse not to worry about the less fortunate (“Not my problem if they lack grit. I worked on mine and look at the result!”).

PS: as with so many cases, the US ignores international ISO standards when grading sandpaper grit.

What we are experiencing in this country is a strip-mining of infrastructure, support, and education. Then instead of stories about reinvestment in our next generation, we're fed pablum about 'grit.' "Oh, I set your house on fire? Here's this awesome story about someone who got a PhD even after her house burned down." We're looking at the wrong problem.

First there is Victor Frankl's observation that those who were expected to survive in the concentration camps were the people who were young adults, healthy, well fed, smart, and quick. However, these people often reacted very badly to sudden change, chaos, and the lack of obvious opportunities and would end up dead in a week or two as much from hopelessness as privation. Meanwhile people who were skinny, weak, sick, and wounded often survived one trauma after another because they had something they were determined to live for--often family, sometimes cherished places or work. Something they longed to return to could keep them going.

Second there is the actually rather robustly documented phenomenon of John Henryism in which people suffering from discrimination or lack of opportunity find success by expending tremendous effort only to fall victim to illness early in life as the tolls from their exertions accumulate. This is a good example of how the grit to success story could have a serious downside that should be considered even if the success side might actually be realistically and meaningfully obtainable.

1) Set up my own pile of anecdotes (and the importance of luck, grit, natural ability, etc. in people I know)

2) Attempt to build a model.

3) Think about Stanislav Andreski's book 'Social Sciences as Sorcery'.

4) Go back to my coffee and think about something useful.

You can work hard, yes, but you also need to walk into an opportunity to exploit your hard work, for ultimate success.

Developing skills to see a better opportunity matters. Some people just grind away at it without thinking, and some pause and re-evaluate. Think more, work less. Don't be a dumb work ant.

In programming, I found that when I was younger, I did that a lot. I kept coding and rewriting. Now that I am older, I think for days before I start something, and it usually results in less starting from scratch. I try to play things out, visualize, etc. The code does not just work the first time because I am "lucky".

Building requires endurance (which is “grit-in-itself”) in overcoming the status quo, which, in this context, seems to be people who think massive fortunes are caused by predestined massive affordances, and not by any free determination from the character of the individual. It’s as if the presence of uncertainty in determining where their life will be in the future is obviated.

The issue appears to be that there are conflicts over what grit actually represents in this context and whether Duckworth's scale is a good measure (and if she's overselling her findings).

These are very relevant questions, but they're very different from grit != success, or that grit doesn't matter.

It’s a truism that can’t be refuted: trying something multiple times increases the likelihood by some amount that one will succeed (when compared to fewer attempts).

> “My lab has found that this measure beats the pants off I.Q., SAT scores, physical fitness and a bazillion other measures to help us know in advance which individuals will be successful in some situations,”

Need more be said? Science is itself a self-perpetuating industry. Statistics and findings can be massaged into whatever you want to see -- that's simply abusing our propensity to recognize patterns, to its utmost extreme.

More new, novel, monkey-go-ape patterns to fuss about. More books to sell. More speeches to give. More money to make.

Here's a hot-take, that won't drive unneeded publicity and revenue towards another idea salesman: the more you persevere -- i.e the more grit you have -- the more chances you get to succeed.

Please please, there's no need to write a PhD dissertation a la "A meta-analytic synthesis of the grit literature."[0]

Absolutely absurd.

[0] Credé, M., Tynan, M.C., & Harms, P.D. Much ado about grit: A meta-analytic synthesis of the grit literature. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 113, 492-511 (2017).