The mother of the movement says perseverance is only half of the equation
The scene opens with a young woman explaining that while she doesn’t have the classic qualifications a prospective employer may look for, she does have life experience that most candidates don’t. “I was living in a shelter, juggling three jobs. I had to be resilient. That’s something that you can’t teach.”
It’s part of an advertising campaign for Grads of Life, a nonprofit organization that connects employers with non-college graduate job candidates, many of whom have faced difficult life challenges.
Hiring for grit and unique life experience is a popular proposition in business circles. We heard it repeatedly when reporting for our January/February article on building a better hiring process for sales teams.
“I look for grit,” said Rob Danna, a senior vice president at ITA Group, a West Des Moines, Iowa, company that creates and manages incentive programs for several Fortune 500 companies.
“Many times, I gauge this based on what they do outside of work. Do they put themselves in tough situations (e.g., back-country skiing), or do they grind it out (e.g., CrossFit workouts at 5 a.m.), or are they constantly improving their personal/ professional life through adult education, volunteering, joining groups and certifications?”
At the same time our issue was hitting readers’ desks, the February issue of Fortune magazine landed in mailboxes with its cover exhortation to, “Show Your ‘Grit:’ Why Life Experience Is the New MBA.” (Sales is listed as one of the professions where grit matters most.) The article stated that forward-thinking companies are abandoning a check-the-boxes approach to sizing up job candidates and looking instead for “signs of potential that standard credentials don’t capture— and that transcend the lines of race, income and class.”
However, there are signs the grit movement, while still in its infancy, has gotten ahead of itself. The online news and culture website TheCut.com reports that school districts in the San Francisco area recently announced plans to begin testing students on grit and other forms of emotional intelligence; while other schools have instituted things like Grit Week, in which students set goals for their scores on upcoming standardized tests.
Angela Duckworth, a psychology professor who many credit with spawning the grit crusade with her 2016 bestseller “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance,” says too many grit groupies focus on perseverance and forget about the passion component. “If you are really, really tenacious and dogged about a goal that’s not meaningful to you, and not interesting to you—then that’s just drudgery. It’s not just determination— it’s having a direction that you care about,” Duckworth told The Cut.
Indeed, Duckworth says the early science on the subject indicates more people need help developing passion than perseverance. “One possibility is that people can learn to work hard and be resilient, but to find something that would make you say, ‘This is so interesting to me—I’m so committed to it that I’m going to stick with it over years’—that kind of passion may, in some ways, be harder to come by,” she says.
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