
Is grit the true secret of success? - sgift
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/may/07/is-grit-the-true-secret-of-success
======
not_a_terrorist
Grit and perseverence, however you call them, are important aspects to
success, but not THE secret to success.

If you look at the subset of people who enjoy "success" in life, a large
number of them will display those qualitites, no doubt. But some of them could
have attained it by sheer luck, filial connections, or others.

Now, if you look at the complementary subset (people who do not enjoy
"success" in life), I guarantee you will find plenty of gritee people in
there, in addition to people who display personal qualities not conducive to
success (which by no mean excludes them from enjoying success in live, given
the proper circumstances - see previous paragraph).

That's the aspect I do not enjoy about those "secret to success stories: no
one ever considers the people who did everthing rigth, but did not succeed. It
happen much more often than we think. No one cares for the losers, whatever
the cause, alas. This is the 'survivorship paradox' described by Cicero...
Taleb called it the Silent cemetary evidence.

One more aspect, if I may: when can one determine someone else is a "success",
or a "failure"? People certainly are entitled to more than one shot at
success, and negative results are certainly a valid way to pinpoint your path
towards success.

So, grit is not THE secret path to success, but if your goal is to be
successful, then internalising a gritee spirit certainly demultiply the
possibilities to enjoy success.

~~~
ryandrake
Survivorship bias is the major flaw in every business book and in all
biographies of successful people. "Look at the attributes that success stories
have in common, and IGNORE them when present in unsuccessful stories." This
leads to people and companies cargo-culting the behaviors of well-known rich
people and businesses, expecting success. Go read _Good To Great_. Business
schools across the world are enamored with this book, but it's basically 300
pages of survivorship bias.

For every person you point to and say grit and perseverance made them
successful, I'll point to ten who failed despite grit and perseverance.

~~~
mwfunk
Very true. It's a lot easier to look at failures and understand why they
failed than look at successes and understand why they succeeded. I would read
the hell out of a book full of accurate postmortems of failed businesses,
products, movements, governments, etc.

It's the whole "success hides failure" problem. It's really tempting to assume
that everything a successful person or company does contributes to their
success, but the truth is closer to, they did 10 things right and 9 things
wrong. But it's difficult or impossible to determine which is which, hence the
cargo-culting.

Even more frustrating is working for a successful company, because anybody who
advocates change can be shot down with the argument that everything is going
well therefore that's empirical proof that the thing you want to change is
clearly just fine and dandy.

Ultimately the best we can do as individuals is to cultivate an innate sense
of skepticism in all things, avoid reductivism, never drink our own Kool-Aid,
and never fall into the trap of thinking that we've figured it all out and
don't need to think and grow anymore.

~~~
stdbrouw
> Very true. It's a lot easier to look at failures and understand why they
> failed than look at successes and understand why they succeeded. I would
> read the hell out of a book full of accurate postmortems of failed
> businesses, products, movements, governments, etc.

Survivorship bias actually works both ways: by studying only the failures you
are quite likely to misunderstand what made them fail and you might zero in on
characteristics that are actually shared by many successful businesses.

------
ThomPete
No. Luck and network is.

It's the only defining factor that can't be trained. Lucky beats smart. And if
you take most of the really big successes like Facebook, Google etc. they
where successful were a bunch of other people with equal grit and talent
werent.

Many many people have grit and perseverence. Many people have talent, business
understanding, good timing, excellent understanding of product and so on. And
of course the more you play the game the better chance of success
(statistically)

But when all is said and done unless we are talking about crony capitalism
where you use political control to ensure success. Luck and network are the
single most defining factors of why some are successful and others are not
IMO.

~~~
notduncansmith
Luck just means you don't know the cause behind an effect.

Attributing success to "luck" is therefore simply putting the conditions for
success outside your locus of control.

Attributing it to "grit" or some other personal quality puts the conditions
for success within your locus of control.

For many people (myself included), the latter philosophy is more helpful as it
makes success seem more deliberately achievable. Combined with a strong sense
of agency, this philosophy can imbue its proponents with more confidence than
those waiting for "luck" to happen (or who have given up on it happening).

~~~
ThomPete
That doesn't really change that of all those with grit those who are the
luckiest win over those with grit who aren't.

You are trying to apply a method to being successful. Have grit and you will
be succesful.

But having grit is only going to take you so far. Many people have grit. Luck
will take you the rest.

The problem with you way of looking at things is that you are basically saying
that those that don't have success don't have grit and therefore imply that
it's their fault they don't. Which then create weird myths like the poor
people are just lazy and don't have enough grit etc.

This is a lie with enough evidence to contradict. The fact that much of
success is due to circumstances has been proven again and again. That does not
mean that those that were successful din't also have grit. They did, they were
also just the lucky ones with grit.

~~~
notduncansmith
> you are basically saying that those that don't have success don't have grit

I don't remember saying that - please point out where I did.

Thinking about your success in terms of factors you can control can improve
your chances of success if you draw confidence from that philosophy, and lots
of people do. The appearance of confidence (and the correlation between
confidence and appearing confident) has been shown to improve chances of
success in various situations.

~~~
ThomPete
You are saying that by trying to force it into being a thing you can control.

And again many people have confidence that doesn't mean they all have success.

Keep in mind this article was trying to find the most encompassing reason for
success.

There is none as encompassing as luck. All the others are a subset.

~~~
notduncansmith
I said originally that luck is just the set of things you don't know about. By
definition, it thusly can't be an "encompassing reason" (implied singular) -
it's a name that refers to a collection of reasons (a subset of all possible
reasons).

The discussions of confidence mindset and one's control over "success" are
orthogonal, but I'm happy to discuss them.

~~~
ThomPete
Of course it can be an encompassing reason if that is the one that is to find
in every case. Grit isn't, some are successful without grit, confidence isn't
either some are successful while not confident.

But luck, luck you find in every single case.

The reason of success is luck luck in chance encounters which then leads to
unpredictable outcomes amongst others success.

~~~
mindcrime
Sounds like a post-hoc fallacy to me. Or maybe a "just so story". You can
always unwind somebody's story and find some point in the story where
something happened that they could not necessarily have predicted, and cry
"see, this person only succeeded because of luck". But we can't evaluate all
the branches in the tree of outcomes that _didn 't happen_ exactly because
they didn't happen.

If you believe that people, _to some extent_ "make their own luck" via their
choices and actions, then you could just as easily speculate that if "lucky
event A" didn't happen, then something else "lucky" would have happened
anyway.

~~~
ThomPete
And so your argument against what I am saying is that you don't like it to be
that way.

Thats not an argument against what I am saying, that's just an opinion about
the consequences of my argument.

~~~
mindcrime
What?!??? What you just said has nothing to do with what I wrote above.

~~~
ThomPete
Yes it does.

You don't like the idea that luck could be the actual all embedding factor of
success.

"If you believe that people, to some extent "make their own luck" via their
choices and actions, then you could just as easily speculate that if "lucky
event A" didn't happen, then something else "lucky" would have happened
anyway."

No you can't speculate that at all. But I would like to see you try.

You are just trying to insist that there is this path to success that can be
taken without luck being involved which just isn't the case.

The question that was asked is whether grit is the one factor to become
successful.

It's not, it can't be because if it was everyone who had grit would be
successful they are not and so something else is needed. That thing is luck.
Whether lucky that you were born with better of parents, higher IQ, extreme
talent, went to the right school, meet the right people at the right time,
have the right idea at the right time and so on.

Grit is only there to make you stay in the game long enough that you might end
up being successful but it can never be the all encompassing factor that
explains it all. Only luck can.

~~~
mindcrime
I really don't know what you're talking about. You're putting words in my
mouth that I never said, and/or apparently intentionally misinterpreting my
words. So with all due respect, I'm going to just drop out of this
"discussion".

------
parenthephobia
A paper by the author in "Journal of Personality and Social Psychology":
[https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~duckwort/images/Grit%20JPSP.pdf](https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~duckwort/images/Grit%20JPSP.pdf)

There is some misinterpretation of what Duckworth is claiming. Her paper
doesn't examine whether success is due to intrinsic or extrinsic aspects -
whether luck is more important than grit - nor does it _really_ examine the
causes of success.

Her conclusion is "successful people have grit". Not that unsuccessful people
don't have grit. Not that all people with grit are successful. Not that grit
is the sole determining factor in success. Just that of the intrinsic
attributes of successful people she examined, grit was common to all of them.

i.e. Some successful people are intelligent, but many aren't. Some successful
people have an innate talent for the thing they are doing (however we define
that), but many don't. All of them have grit.

Grit, here, is defined as "perseverance and passion for long-term goals". It
borders on the obvious that people who are successful have perseverance and
passion. But it also borders on the obvious that merely having perseverance
and passion isn't enough to guarantee success.

------
awinter-py
the hole in this argument is that you need to know what to work hard on. the
psych studies about 'praise kids for their work not their brains' seem legit
as a way to improve test performance but school is scripted. In the real world
success is based on how you navigate without a script, and persistence matters
there but correct choices also matter.

Given an oracle that gives perfect advice of course hard work is the largest
factor. That's the experiment being done in the test performance psych
studies.

The 'deliberate practice' papers capture this best. The 'practice' half is
hard work, but the 'deliberate' half is the ability to plan and analyze your
training to advance your skills. With music or sports a coach can help you.
With product, business or war (fields requiring strategy because the rules are
ever-changing) not so much.

~~~
awinter-py
My favorite research on this topic is the 'fewer rules' study. I think it
claims that families average 6 rules for children (bedtime etc) and having 2
or less is predictive for the children doing creative work as adults.

Cited here: [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/opinion/sunday/how-to-
rais...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/opinion/sunday/how-to-raise-a-
creative-child-step-one-back-off.html?_r=0)

Paywalled article here:
[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/j.2162-6057.1989....](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/j.2162-6057.1989.tb00700.x/abstract)

~~~
visarga
That's interesting. I have a daughter like that, she practically raises
herself. On the other hand, I have another daughter who is extremely
problematic and not even 1000 rules will suffice for her to behave.

------
Futurebot
The much touted ‘character hypothesis’ (which has become a staple of a lot of
modern intellectual discourse around success, often heard from writers like
Malcolm Gladwell and Paul Tough) is very useful, and speaks to an
understanding of the greatly changed nature of success in the post-Industrial
era. However, I think the qualities associated with that hypothesis should
only be considered necessary, but not sufficient. To review, here is a list of
qualities generally associated with it:

persistence determination self-control / the ability to delay gratification
abstention from substance use curiosity conscientiousness self-confidence
(occasionally) emotional intelligence good communication skills and a
willingness to listen grit

I’d personally add to the list ‘the willingness to always learn’ (i.e., be a
dedicated autodidact for life.)

Based on what we’ve seen over the past ten years, especially with things like
‘the gig economy’ and our ‘free agent nation’, this hypothesis (perhaps model)
holds up well. So what else is necessary? One or more of the following:

a strong personal safety net (savings and/or relatives and friends to fall
back on) good credentials a strong personal / professional network

These last three are exactly the ones that are generally not available to
those who need them most, even if they have all the qualities of the first
list (you could also substitute ‘incredible luck’ for these three.) The idea
that “men of enterprise are practically assured of success” is the kind of
beautiful, romantic notion that periodically gets revived in America; the
reality is different. We should remind ourselves that character alone may not
be enough for success in today’s world for the even the most determined,
confident, and gritty of people.

------
Balgair
The rule of headlines aside, a lot of commenters are talking about
survivorship bias with this. I think the best example of luck and grit is the
Hass Avocado:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hass_avocado#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hass_avocado#History)

Hass was _incredibly_ lucky to get that cultivar. From the seed growing at
all, to being told to leave it be, to his children liking the taste, etc. Many
many other growers at the Model Grocery Store were just as gritty and saw no
real success in the Depression. He played his cards pretty well, all things
considered, yet still died of a heart attack in 1952, the year his patent on
the tree ran out. He was very very lucky, was pretty gritty, and still was a
postman his whole life mostly by his own choice. He wanted a simple life and
got one. I doubt he would have been so fortunate if lady luck had not smiled
upon him.

------
DenisM
This has completely closed the question for me:
[http://dilbert.com/strip/2012-11-20](http://dilbert.com/strip/2012-11-20)

~~~
77pt77
It's almost as if all these articles boil down to:

"They key to success is being successful but in other words."

------
paublyrne
Of course. Being born in a country with economic and educational advantages
helps though. Being born into a family whose socio economic circumstances
means you grow up expecting to be successful helps even more.

~~~
Havoc
> Being born in a country with economic and educational advantages helps
> though.

Helps, but not necessary. Hell I've got a decent number of Zimbabweans on my
team at work.

~~~
SEJeff
And let me guess, each of them demonstrates "grit" and is extremely hard
working/driven?

~~~
Havoc
>And let me guess, each of them demonstrates "grit" and is extremely hard
working/driven?

Not particularly so. Seems to me that there is a threshold of grit needed -
that opens a lot of doors (incl 3rd world > 1st world moves) but beyond that
its got diminishing returns.

My point is that the lottery of birthplace does matter but its not an
automatic show-stopper.

------
davekinkead
What ever happened to the 7 habits?

[http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/7-habits-of-highly-
succes...](http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/7-habits-of-highly-successful-
people)

~~~
visarga
That's wrong. Anyone knows that internet lists have to be 10 items long. Three
qualities are missing.

------
unabst
Traits such as grit, hard work, determination, and luck are not the secret.
They are the obvious ingredients.

But grit, hard work, and determination are also redundant for someone who
possesses immense passion. Passion will make you gritty, hard working, and
determined. It will keep you focused, and keep your mind on topic.

Luck is also redundant because it is unscientific and untraceable (it is
metaphysical). In hindsight we love to say the stars aligned or that miracles
happened, but from the perspective of the do-er, none of it really matters
because you never count on luck. As an entrepreneur, you pay to roll the dice,
and you simply continue to roll it until you get what you need, praying you'll
get enough tries. An outsider may say you were determined and that you got
lucky, but no. You were passionate, and just kept trying because you had no
other choice. If anything, to not have a choice is the secret to success.
Determined as in determinism, not emotion. Successful people were bound to be
successful.

My father used to administer for a school which he was no longer proud to be a
part of. He had a proposal for a new school and sent it to some people.
Miraculously, he finds a sponsor, and his dream comes true. He tells me how
lucky he was and how that event saved his life. But to that I say, "Well, who
else was able to build a school from scratch, let alone an international
school in Tokyo?" He may have been lucky, but he was also probably the only
person standing on Earth that could have done what he could. He is passionate
about education. Needless to say, he succeeded.
[http://newis.ed.jp/](http://newis.ed.jp/)

My father is not an entrepreneur. But he had what it took to make things
happen. And that's the secret to success. It's the ability to make things
happen.

------
iofj
Success imho is the art of not fucking up any single aspect of what you're
doing, plus doing some aspect really well. You can have a "lifestyle" (meaning
you do pretty well, but not exceptional) job/business/... by simply not
fucking up any of it.

Grit is like this : fuck it up and you're dead in the water, but you'll be
fine at "normal" grit if you excel somewhere else. Exceptional grit is
useless, counterproductive even, when for example market fit is not there at
all. Or when the required knowledge simply isn't there.

The one exception I've seen in practice is that on rare occasions a particular
combination of skills was a necessity to achieve exceptional success. But it
sort of looks like equivalent to winning the lottery. It's never an obvious
combination of skills that works like this, it's something stupid that you
wouldn't normally combine, and that's exactly why it works. But there are a
huge number of possible combinations, most are not worth anything exceptional.

------
mwfunk
I've always thought of it more like, there are some qualities that are
conducive to success (like not giving up when things don't go your way), and
there are qualities that make success less likely (illiteracy, poverty,
geography, etc.), and of course there's an element of luck (the effect of
which can be minimized with perseverance and continuous personal growth, but
never fully eliminated). But in general, the only people who claim to have a
secret to success are those selling books about it. :)

In fairness, the preceding paragraph would make a terrible name for a self-
help book, so I can't really blame publishers either, which is why it's nice
to have places like HN to talk about stuff like this.

~~~
mwfunk
...and it goes without saying that the word "success" is being used here as
shorthand for "making lots of money", which is only one form of success and
not the most important one in the grand scheme of things.

------
yason
The secret of success could very well be first defining success.

~~~
visarga
How many pop psychology article authors are millionaires?

If the writer of the article actually had the "secret to success" they would
have been doing that instead of writing pop-psychology articles. There are
even those who write articles titled "How to become rich like Mark Zuckeberg"
or "How to raise the next M Z" ([http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-raise-the-
next-mark-zucke...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-raise-the-next-mark-
zuckerberg-1462155391))

------
damptowel
Most of my 'succesful' peers seem to take the path of least resistance. I
never feel fulfilled unless I'm doing things the hard way, to the point of
self-sabotage.

------
jrbapna
Grit is just one quality of a good executer. Grit with poor execution doesn't
yield results. Grit is not the secret to success, execution is.

~~~
AstralStorm
And even ability to execute won't help you without the right social network.

It is extremely rare to see an actual individual being really successful. Most
of the time, they are or were part of a company. This is because a person can
only devote so much time and skill into anything.

And making the right connection is a matter of place (Ivy League anyone?),
time (gold rush is good, recession is bad), interpersonal skills and finally
luck.

~~~
jrbapna
Good executors do whatever it takes to get them where they need to go. If the
right social network is important to their success they make it happen.

There are many exceptions to this rule that make this difficult (born into
poverty or third world country, etc) but the great majority of people who
complain, at least in the US, spend their evenings at happy hours and their
weekends at the football game. You can't do that and then blame it on luck or
bad circumstance. I work with hundreds of "entreprneurs" that spend weeks and
months obsessing over logo design and color and UX, when they have zero
customers at their door. Execution is a skill, it can be learned, and 99% of
people just don't have it.

------
mrmondo
Interesting write up, to me clearly 'grit' is not 'the' answer but it
certainly is either a component or proponent for at least some people.

------
votr
My anecdata across about a dozen points suggests it's network.

------
pcmaffey
TLDR; Our ability to not give up is the key to not giving up.

------
visarga
Grit + Smarts + Luck

------
Madmallard
The most successful are generally the most resilient genetically. Nothing
unreasonable about that. They also generally are the most intelligent or at
least capable of problem solving and have symmetrical faces. Nothing really
wrong with this except we're all lied to saying when someone is pretty they're
usually crazy and things like that. It's all bullshit!

~~~
KhalilK
Although you're not the first to offer a (not-so-eloquent) genetic explanation
of economic success, you are definitely the first person I came across being
told "when someone is pretty they're usually crazy" which makes it a moot
point.

