Grit to Great

Linda Kaplan-Thaler and Robin Koval’s business self-help book, Grit to Great: How Perseverance, Passion, and Pluck Take You from Ordinary to Extraordinary (2015), explores the concept o “grit,” or perseverance in the face of setbacks and difficulties.

The authors – an advertising executive and the CEO of a health foundation – dive into the most recent research surrounding financial and career success to build a case that hard work and drive matters more than innate talent. Grit to Great identifies three components that a person has to have in order to display grit: power, perseverance, and pluck.

Power refers to motivation and is, perhaps, more easily understood as a passion for a career or to achieve a goal. It is essential to grit because it motivates us through all the hard work that is to come. Without passion, we are far more likely to give up when things get difficult because we lack sufficient motivation to continue.



Perseverance means continuing on in spite of difficulties and setbacks. Even very lucky and talented people will experience these from time to time, and cannot be successful unless they learn from mistakes, try again after failures, and accept rejection. Kaplan-Thaler and Koval identify becoming accustomed to rejection and learning to take it gracefully as important aspects of perseverance. They reference TED speaker Jia Jiang’s talks on deliberately performing minor social transgressions that you know will lead to rejection in order to get used to it.

Finally, pluck, which refers to thinking of creative or courageous solutions to difficult problems, is also identified as an important component of grit. It is related to perseverance because it provides us with the toolkit we need to face rejection, find answers to hard questions, and take an unpopular stance when necessary.

In addition to identifying these three key qualities, Kaplan-Thaler and Koval give three important lessons that we should take away from the book. The first of these is that hard work trumps natural talent in nearly all cases. Though this is a common piece of advice, many people do not believe it deep down. However, even those who are naturally talented will often be surpassed by someone who regularly and rigorously works harder than them.



To illustrate this, the authors point to a study by the psychologist Chia-Jung Tsay in which participants were given two fictional bios of musicians, one which described a musician with natural talent and the other which described a musician who had worked hard to achieve success. Researchers then played a piece of music which was, unknown to the study participants, the same in both instances. Most participants said the piece by the naturally talented musician was superior.

The second lesson the authors impart is that effort actually is more of a defining factor in success than talent. To prove this, they conducted interviews with a wide range of successful individuals in a number of different fields. What they discovered is that talent is important when it comes to building the skills necessary to succeed, but only effort can lead to achievement.

Talent, when combined with effort leads to skills, and skills combined with effort lead to achievement. This essentially means that effort counts twice as much as talent when it comes to achieving something. While talent plays a role, effort is exponentially more important.



Finally, in the third lesson, the authors discuss how to stay motivated to work hard over a long period of time. This includes intelligent goal setting and planning. Kaplan-Thaler and Koval advise setting a combination of short term and long term goals so that the road to a major success is signposted by multiple minor successes. While it’s important to keep the big goal in mind, those who want to be successful should also be consistently working towards a smaller goal that will help them achieve their dreams.

The book is illustrated with plenty of examples from successful people in a variety of fields. It includes personal statements from writers, athletes, businesspeople, and politicians, all of whom discuss their individual journeys to success.

Though its primary focus is on businesspeople who want to achieve success in their careers, Kaplan-Thaler and Koval also give advice for tailoring the advice in their book to teachers and students and those who are not in the traditional workforce but still want to achieve a concrete goal. The formula of finding a passion and pursuing it through hard work and determination applies to people from all walks of life and in all different living situations.