Podcast #210: Got Grit?

Why are some people more successful than others?

It’s a tough question to answer because it’s a mixture of a whole bunch of factors, many of which are out of our control like luck or even our genetics.

But there are a few factors that we have a say over and one of them is the ability to persevere, even in the face of setbacks. In other words, grit.

My guest today has spent her career researching what makes people gritty and how we can develop this trait in ourselves. Her name is Angela Duckworth. She’s a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. Today on the show we discuss her research on grit and insights on how we can develop this important trait ourselves based on her visits and interactions with poor, inner city students, West Point cadets, and Seattle Seahawks football players.

Show Highlights

• What grit is
• Why Angela started researching grit
• How the U.S. Army kickstarted grit research over 50 years ago
• Why grit is one of the deciding factors if a West Point cadet drops out or not
• Why we prefer natural talent to grit (and how that can lead you astray)
• Nietzsche on why genius is overrated
• The four factors of developing grit
• The influence of genetics on grit
• Why you should foster and not follow your passion (and how to foster your passions)
• What the process of deliberate practice looks like
• The difference between flow and deliberate practice
• How to stay motivated to keep going even when you don’t feel like going on
• How parents can develop grit in their kids
• The “One Hard Thing Rule” in Angela’s family
• What you can learn from Pete Caroll on developing grit in your organization

Resources/Studies/People Mentioned in Podcast

• The Grit Scale (take the test to see how gritty you are)
• Beast Barracks
• Talent Is Overrated
• Chia Jung Tsay
• Nietzsche’s quote on talent and genius being overrated
• Deliberate practice
• Podcast with Cal Newport on the myth of following your passion
• Marc Vetri
• Podcast with Steve Kotler on flow
• Rowdy Gaines
• The power of ritual
• How to create routines in your life
• Podcast with Joe De Sena, founder of the Spartan Race
• Parenting with intentionality 

If you’re looking to develop a bit more stick-to-itiveness in your life, pick up a copy of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. It’s filled with researched-back advice on becoming a grittier person.

Connect With Angela

• Tell Angela “Thanks!” for being on the Art of Manliness Podcast
• Angela’s website
• Angela on Twitter
• Watch Angela’s TED Talk on grit

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Why are some people more successful than others? This is a tough question to answer because it’s a mixture of a whole bunch of factors, many of which are out of our control. Things like just dumb luck or even our genetics but there are a few factors that we have a say over and one of them is the ability to persevere even in the face of set backs, in other words it’s grit.

My guest today has spent her career researching what makes people gritty and how we can develop this trait in ourselves. Her name is Angela Duckworth. She’s a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the book “Grit. The Power of Passion and Perseverance”. Today on the show, Angela and I discuss her research on grit and insights on how we can develop this important trait ourselves based on her visits and interactions with poor inner city students, West Point cadets and Seattle Seahawks football players. It’s a really great show. A lot of actionable steps you can start applying today to become a grittier man and if you want to check out our show notes after the show for links to resources that we mention throughout the show so you can delve deeper into this topic, visit aom.is/grit. Angela Duckworth, welcome to the show.

Duckworth: Thank you for having me.

Brett McKay: I’ve been a fan of your work for awhile now because I’ve read stuff that you’ve been putting out about grit and the grit scale and your ted talk of course. You finally got your book out, “Grit. The Power of Passion and Perseverance”, before we talk more about your research into the characteristic of grit, let’s define it first. What do you mean by grit or what is grit?

Duckworth: I define grit as both perseverance and passion for especially challenging long term goals.

Brett McKay: It’s passion and perseverance. What got you interested in studying or researching grit?

Duckworth: It all started actually being a teacher in the classroom, trying to teach kids, who are going through puberty, how to solve an Algebraic equation. That normally takes grit but I think the more important thing was that I was struck by how differently some kids turned out at the end of the year. Some kids got higher grades than I expected them too frankly, given how hard it was for them to learn the material and other kids that I expected to do straight A work all year, ended up doing far from that and it was largely because they didn’t try harder long enough. I wanted to understand that a little better. Like any well meaning teacher, I told my kids to work harder and I lectured them about the importance of their future but as a psychologist it’s been my mission, my calling, to understand why some kids keep trying and why kids don’t. To understand, to unpack the psychology of things like grit.

Brett McKay: I think it’s interesting in your book you talk about that you weren’t the first psychologist to research something similar to grit. You talk about how the US army decades before were trying to figure out why some soldiers did well at West Point or made it all the way through the initial few weeks of West Point while others, who on the paper looked extremely talented, they had a lot of potential, and they just faltered. Can you tell us a little bit about what the US army was doing with this grit psychology before you got on to it?

Duckworth: Well what West Point wanted to know was why some of the cadets who had been recruited through this extreme, famously rigorous admission procedure that requires a congressional nomination and a physical fitness test of your aptitude in various areas, why is it that all of that including Valedictorians and varsity sport team captions, why is it that so many of these young women and men these days, of course originally it was just men, why do they drop out? Why do they drop out even before they’ve even begun really seriously?

For example, the first summer of training at West Point is called Beast Barracks. Even officially it’s called Beast Barrack or some time they just call it Beast for short and in those first 2 months, many young men and women who everyone would have thought would’ve been there at the end, they’re not there anymore. For decades West Point had been trying to figure this out, doing various kind of test and in 2004 when I came along with the grit scale, which is just a questionnaire that captures the qualities of passion and perseverance, I was talking about grit scale turned out to be astoundingly predictive. The higher you grit score, the more likely you are to make it through Beast.

Brett McKay: What you found too was interesting is that before they go in … People need to understand, when people are accepted to West Point, they’ve gone through this filtering process, this winnowing process, this is the best of the best. It’s not just academic, you have to have extra curricular, fitness, and I guess the students are given a rating, right? They thought that this rating on paper would predict how well people would do at West Point but when you applied the grit scale or the grit test to these students, you found that some of these students who look good on this other assessment, didn’t do while. While others who performed … The grit scale is what predicted success getting past Beast week.

Duckworth: Exactly. The whole candidate score, which is the official term that West Point uses for this composite of your SAT score, your high school rank, your leadership potential as evidence by your extra curricular activities and finally your physical aptitude measured by objective test like the 2 mile run. You role all that into the whole candidate score. I’ll tell you what it does predict but it’s true that it doesn’t predict finishing Beast. What it does predict is this, if you stay at West Point, if you do hang around for those 4 years of training and you graduate, your whole candidate score is a tremendously reliable predictor of how well you’ll do but as Woody Allen, the great philosopher also comedian said, “80% of success in life is showing up and talent is no guarantee that you’ll be the person who continues to show up.”

Brett McKay: You talk about that in your book. I think everyone … We have this appreciation for grit in our heads. We tell our kids “You got to work hard, stick to it, do it even if you don’t feel like it because you’ll get better at it.” Then you argue in your book that when it comes to how we actually behave, we prefer talent. We want to go with the natural. Why is there this disconnect where we say one thing but do another?

Duckworth: That’s a great question. I think there really is a deep ambivalence. I love naturals too in a sense. I love to be dazzled. There’s something very romantic about the idea of somebody just having a special “it” factor and we’ve all experienced this. Maybe it depends on what you like to watch, but if you’ll watch certain athletes perform or certain musicians and they really do have this other worldly magical quality or it seems like we like to think about that about them. On the other hand, we really value effort and hard work and being resilient and earning your achievements, being a striver. I think that ambivalence is what is at the heart of experiments.

For example, my colleagues and my friend, she has run experiments where you get to see 2 performers. They’re actually equal in performance, she can even play you the same music for example and have you judge how able they are, how skilled they are, how good of a musician. If she described that musician to you as somebody who is a natural, who is gifted, then you’re more likely to think that person is going to be successful and accomplish later on. Then, if she gives you the same exact music but she describes the person as a hard working striver. She’s kind of uncovered a biased, a maybe slightly bias, that is never the less real, that in some ways it’s like when you go dating and you’re like “Oh really, I want to date the nice guy.” But you end up picking the cute one.

Brett McKay: Right. I guess you talk about … You quote Nietzsche. Nietzsche, a hundred years ago for a hundred years, had that insight that we prefer natural talent but you should ignore that because if you just focus on talent, you do so at your detriment.

Duckworth: Yeah and Nietzsche’s insight here comes from a debate that he was having with his sometime thought partner Wagner, right? They were talking about great accomplishment and Nietzsche says, “Speak not to me of genius and speak not to me of inborn talents.” Then, he describes what he saw as the reality of excellence, which is a dedication to your craft, a relentless commitment to self improvement. Never being satisfied with where you are and he said the patients to work on all the little small things that do end up to being someone who we can laud now as a great artist, as a great performer. Wagner took the opposite view, which is that some people are born a certain way and some people aren’t.

I take the Nietzsche view and I think Nietzsche was also right when he tried to understand the psychology. Why do you keep doing this? Why do we love to call someone a genius and somebody else not a genius? He said that when we don’t believe that we are in the same class as someone, when we feel like they are a different species than us, then here we do not have to compete. It let’s us off the hook. Why try to run really hard when you’re never going to be Usain Bolt. It’s a way of just relaxing into this comfortable identity as somebody who will never achieve the kind of greatness that we really admire and therefore can accept the status quo.

Brett McKay: You argue in the book that there are 4 factors of developing grit. Can you share what those factors are?

Duckworth: Yeah, when I study paragon’s of great, people who really exemplify passion and perseverance for something that they deeply care about, I find that they have 4 psychological assets as it were. I think they’re each acquirable really. The first one is they had deep interest. They have figured out how to stay interested in one thing and to make that one thing new again, right? You do anything for awhile, the natural thing is to get bored, but what happens with experts is that they find differences to still attend to, they find nuances. My guess is about you, is that in someways you’ve been interviewing people about similar topics for a long long time and yet I think there’s always a newness, something yet to be discovered, a nuance or a depth that you haven’t yet reached. At least that’s the way I feel about my work.

Second, is a capacity for practice. A capacity to practice your weaknesses, to get feedback from a coach, from a peer, to really reflect on that feedback and make a refinement and to start all over again in that continuous improvement cycle that I mentioned earlier.

Third, a sense of purpose. Here I really mean other centered purpose. A sense of what you do is not just for yourself but for your team, for your company, for your country, for your family, for the sport. I have not interviewed a paragon of grit who doesn’t have a sense that … It’s almost like they’re always on a mission and the mission involves the well being of other people.

Fourth and finally, there’s hope. Learning to focus on what you can control and what you can change when things are not going well.

Brett McKay: There’s a lot to unpack there but before we get there, you said that you can develop these psychological traits but I’m curious, what does the research say? There’s all this research coming out about genetics and even influencing temperament and things like that, is there any research about whether grit is inborn or if it’s a mixture of social upbringing or your environment?

Duckworth: There was actually recently a study of twins in the United Kingdom, I think it was 2,000 pairs of twins, and these studies basically go like this, you have twins by knowing their relatedness to each other and often times the twins are raised apart so they’re in different families, twins raised together, you can kind of back into how much is nature and how much is nurture in traits like grit. In this recent study, there was an estimate for how heritable, how genetic grit is and the estimates came in as about 20% or so for passion, and about 40% or so for perseverance. When I read that study I actually was a little bit surprised, not to find that there was a genetic component to how gritty we might end up being but actually that the estimates weren’t higher than that because in many studies traits like grit end up being more heritable, 40, 50% of the variation attributal to our DNA.

The bottom line, I think, is this, like any other thing that you might care about, how shy you are, how tall you are, how smart you are, whether you’re going to get skin cancer, how likely you are to be over weight or not over weight, there is definitely a genetic component but it’s not 100%, it’s a fraction of that. For all the things that I mentioned, including grit, your experiences and your environment really matter.

Brett McKay: Okay. Work with what you got, basically.

Duckworth: I think so. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my genes because I can’t do anything about them.

Brett McKay: Right, exactly. Let’s go back to this idea of this factor of interest. It seems that this is where passion is connected. If you interested in something, you’re passionate in it. How do you … We got a lot of young guys who listen to this podcast, they’re in their late teens, early 20s, they’re trying to figure out what they’re going to do with their lives and you often hear this refrain that you should follow your passion but how do you figure out what your passion is or your interest is, if you don’t have one at the moment?

Duckworth: I have always wondered why commencement speakers keep exhorting everyone to follow their passion when most people in the audience don’t have one yet just like you said. I would follow it if someone could tell me what it was. Maybe it’s a little more helpful to think about fostering a passion because it really is an active process when people become interested in things, that happens not necessarily all at a moment in time. If you try to date back your interest in something like a particular sport or something that will eventually become your job, your profession, it’s true that there are these memorable experiences like the first time I got to work with a great coach or, the first time I realized that writing could be something that I could do for a living, but invariably there are subsequent experience, sometimes interest researchers like to call this triggering and re-triggering where that interest gets deeper and deeper. That requires, typically, supportive around you, like other athletes on your team who make it an overall positive experience.

One paragon of grit that I’ve closely studied is Mark Vettry, he’s a world class chef, he’s my favorite chef in Philadelphia and when he remembers his boy hood, it’s not that he knew when he was a kid that he was going to grow up to be a chef, he actually thought that he’d become a musician but if you look at his trajectory, he started a cooking a little bit with his grandmother, that was a very positive emotional experience. He started hanging around in restaurants, he washed dishes to make money because teenage boys like making money for good reason as well and the people in the kitchen were nice to him. He had a stutter and he was a little bit of an outcast in high school and when he went to the kitchen he washed dishes, they gave him food to eat, it was delish and people were nice. He started going to kitchens more and more.

It’s a messy process. It doesn’t happen at a moment in time. It often takes years to really grow into an interest and I think for the young people that are worried that they don’t have a passion, it’s absolutely normal when you are exploring things to not yet have a passion. What I would urge them to do, is to keep trying to foster one because if you don’t look for it, if you don’t try, you’re certainly less likely to cultivate one than if you.

Brett McKay: I think your story is also a great example of how you find your interest or your passion. You started off as a business consultant, then you went to go teach at a lower income school. Then you found out I want to figure out why some kids stick with it and some kids don’t, so you got your PhD in psychology. This took several years to finally get to the point where you’re the grit lady.

Duckworth: I became the grit lady. Yeah, exactly. There was even more skipping around than that because I was a consultant in my late 20s but there was some skipping around that I could tell you about but the point is is that there was a lot of exploration before I figured out what I really wanted to do. It’s a little bit like dating, right? I mean, I’m pretty glad, frankly, that I didn’t marry the first guy that I went out with and each time that I broke up with someone or I they broke up with me, I think it was because one of us realized that this isn’t … We weren’t going to do this for life. That for one reason or another, there’s somebody else that we could have been with and been happier. It’s not that dating is a bad thing but I think that if you are not at least trying to figure out something that eventually you will stick with, then again, you’re not going to likely find that thing.

I’m so much more gratified by my life now that I have an expertise. I wake up every day thinking about a fairly small set of scientific questions all related to the psychology of achievement and I’ll never get bored of those questions. That’s something I couldn’t say to you when I was 22 or 25 or probably even 31. It was not until my 4th decade of life that I really started to hone in one what would make me so passionate and persevering in the way that I feel like I am today.

Brett McKay: Your interest, I think a lot of people is, it’s kind of the fun part, you’re exploring, figuring out what you like but the hard part about grit, the thing I found hard with it and when I look at my life, is the practice part. It’s not just … I think a lot of people have not a good idea of what practice actually is. You focus a lot on deliberate practice. For our listeners who aren’t familiar with this concept, what is deliberate practice?

Duckworth: Deliberate practice is very methodically and initially working on very specific aspects of your overall performance, then trying with complete effort to re-mediate those weaknesses, getting feedback, largely own what you’re doing wrong of course because you’re trying to do something you can’t yet do. Then, reflecting, making a small refinement and repeating the process all over again. It is complete common sense. What else would you do? Of course you would do that. If you asked the question, how many people are really doing that, really honing in on something that they can’t yet do that would make them better, trying with full effort and concentration, seeking out the feedback about what they should do differently, making a refinement and starting all over again? I think a lot of people are frankly going through life without doing any of that and they’re just sort of doing the same thing that they did yesterday in a pretty unthoughtful or in a way mechanistic manner.

Deliberate practice, most people experience as highly effortful and not very fun. There are exceptions and I think those exceptions are interesting but I think the first lesson is that practice isn’t supposed to be like performance which can be flow like and delightful. Practice is, for most people, really really hard.

Brett McKay: Yeah, so how do you … In your research and the people you’ve talked to, what do these individuals who are consistent with their practice? It’s very hard, how do they keep themselves motivated to keep practicing the violin? You talk about spelling b champions and the amount of hours they spend practicing spelling, how do they stay motivated for that? When they’re like “Man I don’t want to do this anymore.”

Duckworth: We should forgive our selves for having those thoughts. I interviewed Routy Gains, who was the 1984 gold medalist in the 100 meter free style and he also, I think, set the world record in that same event. He said that, he hated getting up at 4:30 in the morning in the middle of the darkness of night, getting into a bathing suit, walking to the pool, jumping in, and not taking the leazurly lap or 2, like pushing his body to it’s very limits and sometimes painful, often tedious. He didn’t love practice.

We shouldn’t beat our selves up too much about the fact that we can sometimes get that feeling of “God, what am I even doing here?” Everybody does occasional, at least, experience that. I think one thing that makes it easier is to make it a habit. When something happens when we do something at the same time and the same place in a ritualistic routine way and one of the things that happens is to some it becomes a little bit automatic. Many people have an exercise routine that look, it’s not that it doesn’t take any effort but it makes it a little easier that “Oh, it’s just what I do. I get up at 6 o’clock in the morning and I put on my sneakers and I’m out the door.”

Routine and habit are one recommendation. The other recommendation is to go and hang out with a lot of people who are doing the same thing. If you’re going to try to do something like begin running as apart of your life, can you join another group of people who are all going to be doing the same thing because really human beings, by their nature, are conformist to a lot of things. We do what the herd does. It makes it easier if the heard is doing something gritty, if of course, being gritty is something that we aspire to ourselves.

Brett McKay: I guess imagine having a purpose helps in that too because you can always connect the tedium to that higher purpose.

Duckworth: Exactly. It’s not always easy to see but when you ask Routy Gains, why did you swim so hard in practice? He laughed a little and he said “You know, I think I actually swam around the globe. The equivalent of it, if you add up all the … Each in 50 meter increments, right?” He knew, even when he was doing it, it’s not just in retrospect, because of course older know, he knew even at that moment that he had an overall passion for the sport. The hours of practice put into the pool were part of something larger. I think that perspective that this is not just sitting here … It is part of a bigger picture, I think that really does help.

Brett McKay: I’m a parent and I’m sure a lot of people who are listening are parents, and this is a trait I want to instill in my kids, to keep working at it even if they don’t succeed the first time and persevere. Are there any tips from your research that parents can do to help encourage or foster grit in their own children?

Duckworth: One of the parent that I interviewed, because he himself is a paragon of grit, but like you, had a really deep desire to instill grit in his kids, is Joe De Sena who founded the Spartan race and he told me  a story about a day where he was … They live near mountains. His son was on the ski team and one day Joe was surprised because he knew because of the time of day, that it was the middle of ski practice and his son comes in and he’s taking off his gloves and Joe says, “What’s up? Aren’t you supposed to be out there?” His son said, “It’s too cold.” Joe said, “You better out your gloves back on because we’re going back up that mountain and we’re going to ski down it.”

I think they walked up the mountain actually and they skied down it. I ask him what was the lesson that you were trying to teach your son? He said, “I think kids are always learning and it’s not just when we think they’re learning and I didn’t want my son to learn to quit, so I took him up there and I showed him that he could do it. I showed him that it wasn’t as bad as he thought, right? That it wasn’t impossible to do something like that. I also made him realize that you should keep going to ski practice because if he comes in before it’s over, his dad’s going to take him out and make it even harder.”

I think the lesson is that the kids really are learning all the time and we do have an opportunity as parents to show them what they won’t come to on their own. I’m a parent of a 13 and 14 year old girl, both of them are girls, and I thought when they were younger I modeled grit for them, they’ll just do what I do. I don’t think that’s enough, I think that’s helpful but to expect kids to practice their piano when they’d rather go out on a play date, or to always be resilient when they lose a race or to know what to do when they screw up or do badly in a class. They really need parents to say things to them like it’s natural to want to quit on a hard day but I’m not going to let you.

Brett McKay: Right, so you got to be intentional about it?

Duckworth: I think so. It is very hard isn’t it?

Brett McKay: It is. You don’t want to think about it right?

Duckworth: Yeah, but yes I think it being intentional absolutely.

Brett McKay: One of the things that I like, the suggestions that you do in your own family, is the hard thing rule.

Duckworth: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Can say more about that.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I would love to hear more about that.

Duckworth: As a parent, and as a psychologist, I was trying to navigate in the sense that I knew that on the one hand my kids needed me to help discipline them, right? Kids are 5, 6, 7, again, they invariably need a parent to tell them occasionally that no, you absolutely have to do your practice before you can go out and do this other fun thing outside or what ever. On the other hand, I knew that they needed autonomy because human beings do not pursue things with passion that they have not chosen for themselves to do.

Here’s how we managed that. In our family, even since our kids were very little, 5 years old I think, my husband and I said that in the Duckworth family everyone has to do a hard thing, that’s that first part of the hard thing rule, that you have to have a hard thing. For my daughters, piano for one and the other would eventually viola, but the point was by is that by hard I meant requiring that deliberate practice, where you are initially trying to re-mediate some kind of weakness, problem solve, and get feedback and get better and better.

Secondly, they have to finish what they begin. It was very important to my husband and myself, just like Joe De Seno, we didn’t want our kids to learn to quit in the middle of things. They were not allowed to quit in track when they weren’t doing well and told me they wanted to quit. They weren’t allowed to quit in the middle of ballet before the tuition payment was up. They weren’t allowed to quit their instrument because they didn’t feel like practicing for a recital. They were allowed to quit but not until they finished the commitment that they had already made. That was the second part of the hard thing rule. They had to finish to the natural end point, the natural interval.

Then, they could pick another hard thing but this brings me to the third part of the hard thing rule and it’s the last part and just as important as the first 2. That is, that nobody gets to pick your hard thing but you. I didn’t tell my kids “you have to play viola and you have to play piano.” They chose these things on their own and I don’t think we have to give kids every choice but we do have to give them some choice because that autonomy is crucial for fostering passion.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I love that. Love creating that culture of grit in your family. Speaking of culture, since your initial research has come out, it seems like there’s a lot of business organizations that have been implementing some of these ideas and trying to develop a culture of grit in their business or organization. You talk about the Seattle Seahawk’s head coach, Pete Carroll. What is Pete doing with his team to develop this idea of grit there?

Duckworth: Pete Carroll is working on grit long before he watched my ted talk and called me up. I don’t know whether he used the word grit. It really captures, I think, for him the quality of competitor that he’s looking for. Every coach is trying to select for the qualities that they want, that’s why they care so much about scouting and recruitment, but every coach is also interested in cultivating those same qualities once those players get there. Pete’s no exception.

For Pete, what he’s trying to do, is model a commitment that I would describe as passion and perseverance. He has what I find is true of paragons of grit, which is a top level goal, really really gritty people, are usually able to articulate in a single sentence that ends with a period. The top level goal that motivates everything that they do. For Pete it’s only 2 words, always compete. You have to unpack that, he means compete in a very- Basically, he means always striving to be your best. He left out the part that obviously he’s doing that through coaching and football but never the less it’s kind of a compass for him that everything in his life is in service to that top level goal. He’s trying to get his players to realize that that is possible for them as well. He does it in part through modeling but in part through rituals. There’s a tell the truth Monday tradition at the Seahawk’s. Where when we talked about deliberate practice as working on your relative weaknesses and getting feedback. Well the tell your truth Monday tradition is that the guys watch their film and they watch the things that they did right and they watch the things that they did wrong and in a dispassionate way, analyze it. It’s like, “Okay, I should do this differently. Okay let me try it again.” I think that kind of ritualizing is crucial to culture.

The last thing I’ll just say is that language is really important. The words that we use I think are symbolic of the values that we hold. When I was at the Seahawk’s it was almost like being in a foreign country. Somebody said to me while I was there, “I speak fluent Carroll.” I think what he meant was that these phrases that are very much part of being a Seahawk, finish strong, be early, no whining, no excuses, always compete. You talk to anybody in the Seahawk organization, they know exactly what you mean. You talk to people out side the organization and they may or may not know because of course, outside you’re not a Seahawk.

Brett McKay: Right. Well Angela, we literally scratched the surface about your research and your book. Where can people go to learn more about your work as well as the book?

Duckworth: I guess they can learn about my work primarily through the book but also at my website which is angleaduckworth.com

Brett McKay: Well Angela Duckworth, thank you so much for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Duckworth: Thank you. I’ve really enjoyed it.

Brett McKay: My guest was Angela Duckworth, she’s the author of “Grit. The Power of Passion and Perseverance” and it’s available on Amazon.com and book stores everywhere. You can find more information about her book at angeladuckworth.com and while you’re there, you can even take the grit scale test to see how gritty you are.

Also, make sure to check out the show notes at AOM.IS/grit for more information about the topic we discussed today.

Well that wraps up another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. For more manly tips and advise, make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com and if you enjoyed the show and got something out of it, I’d appreciate it if you’d give us a review on Itunes. That’d really help us out a lot in spreading the word about the show. As always, I appreciate your continued support and until next, this is Brett McKay telling you to stay manly.