Grit(71)

In a sense, the Personal Qualities Project was a horse race. Each of the hundred-plus measures at the start of the study could have ended up as the strongest predictor of later success. It’s clear from reading the first report, completed several years before the final data were collected, that Willingham was entirely dispassionate on the issue. He methodically described each variable, its rationale for being included, how it was measured, and so on.

But when all the data were finally in, Willingham was unequivocal and emphatic about what he’d learned. One horse did win, and by a long stretch: follow-through.

This is how Willingham and his team put a number on it: “The follow-through rating involved evidence of purposeful, continuous commitment to certain types of activities (in high school) versus sporadic efforts in diverse areas.”

Students who earned a top follow-through rating participated in two different high school extracurricular activities for several years each and, in both of those activities, advanced significantly in some way (e.g., becoming editor of the newspaper, winning MVP for the volleyball team, winning a prize for artwork). As an example, Willingham described a student who was “on his school newspaper staff for three years and became managing editor, and was on the track team for three years and ended up winning an important meet.”

In contrast, students who hadn’t participated in a single multiyear activity earned the lowest possible follow-through rating. Some students in this category didn’t participate in any activities at all in high school. But many, many others were simply itinerant, joining a club or team one year but then, the following year, moving on to something entirely different.

The predictive power of follow-through was striking: After controlling for high school grades and SAT scores, follow-through in high school extracurriculars predicted graduating from college with academic honors better than any variable. Likewise, follow-through was the single best predictor of holding an appointed or elected leadership position in young adulthood. And, finally, better than any of the more than one hundred personal characteristics Willingham had measured, follow-through predicted notable accomplishments for a young adult in all domains, from the arts and writing to entrepreneurism and community service.

Notably, the particular pursuits to which students had devoted themselves in high school didn’t matter—whether it was tennis, student government, or debate team. The key was that students had signed up for something, signed up again the following year, and during that time had made some kind of progress.



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I learned about the Personal Qualities Project a few years after I started studying grit. When I got my hands on the original study report, I read it cover to cover, put it down for a moment, and then started again on page one.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. Instead, I lay awake thinking: Holy smokes! What Willingham calls “follow-through” sounds a lot like grit!

Immediately—desperately—I wanted to see if I could replicate his findings.

One motive was practical.

Like any self-report questionnaire, the Grit Scale is ridiculously fakeable. In research studies, participants have no real incentive to lie, but it’s hard to imagine using the Grit Scale in a high-stakes setting where, in fact, there’s something to gain by pretending that “I finish whatever I begin.” Quantifying grit as Willingham had done was a measurement strategy that could not easily be gamed. Not, at least, without outright lying. In Willingham’s own words: “Looking for clear signs of productive follow-through is a useful way to mine the student’s track record.”

But the more important goal was to see whether follow-through would predict the same showing-up-instead-of-dropping-out outcomes that are the hallmark of grit.

For the support of a new longitudinal study, I turned to the largest philanthropic funder in education: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

I soon learned that the foundation is especially interested in why college students drop out in such large numbers. At present, the dropout rate for two-and four-year colleges in the United States is among the highest in the world. Escalating tuitions and the byzantine labyrinth of financial aid in this country are two contributing factors. Woefully inadequate academic preparation is another. Still, students with similar financial circumstances and identical SAT scores drop out at very different rates. Predicting who will persist through college and earn their degree and who won’t is among the most stubborn problems in all of social science. Nobody has a very satisfying answer.

In a meeting with Bill and Melinda Gates, I had an opportunity to explain my perspective in person. Learning to follow through on something hard in high school, I said, seemed the best-possible preparation for doing the same thing later in life.

In that conversation, I learned that Bill himself has long appreciated the importance of competencies other than talent. Back in the days when he had a more direct role in hiring software programmers at Microsoft, for instance, he said he’d give applicants a programming task he knew would require hours and hours of tedious troubleshooting. This wasn’t an IQ test, or a test of programming skills. Rather, it was a test of a person’s ability to muscle through, press on, get to the finish line. Bill only hired programmers who finished what they began.



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With generous support from the Gates Foundation, I recruited 1,200 seniors and, just as Willingham had done, asked them to name their extracurricular activities (if they had any), when they’d participated in them, and how they’d distinguished themselves doing them, if at all. Around the lab, while we were doing this study, we began calling this measure what it looks like: the Grit Grid.