Grit

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After years of studying high achievers across diverse fields, top psychologist Angela Duckworth has identified what she calls the most reliable predictor of success—and it challenges conventional wisdom about talent and intelligence. Author Mel Robbins, who has 4.6 million subscribers on YouTube, recently asked Duckworth about her findings during a recording of her podcast, released Monday.

“The common denominator of high achievers, no matter what they’re achieving, is this special combination of passion and perseverance for really long-term goals,” Duckworth explains. “And in a word, it’s grit.”

Duckworth, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and MacArthur Fellow, defines grit as two interconnected components that work together over time. “It’s these two parts, right? Passion for long-term goals, like loving something and staying in love with it. Not kind of wandering off and doing something else, and then something else again, and then something else again, but having a kind of North Star,” she said.​

The perseverance component is equally crucial, according to Duckworth. “Partly, it’s hard work, right? Partly it’s practicing what you can’t yet do, and partly it’s resilience. So part of perseverance is, on the really bad days, do you get up again?”

Despite ongoing scholarly debate about grit’s uniqueness as a construct, the core insight remains compelling: Sustained effort and commitment to long-term goals often matter more than natural ability alone. As Duckworth put it back in 2017, “Our potential is one thing. What we do with it is quite another.”