Experts Say ‘Grit’ More Important than ‘Genius’ for Success

Your child doesn’t have to be a genius to be successful. Being more like Rooster Cogburn than Albert Einstein may have a lot do with it.

In recent years, psychologists have come up with a term to describe this mental trait: grit. Although the idea itself isn’t new – “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration,” Thomas Edison famously remarked – the researchers are quick to point out that grit isn’t simply about the willingness to work hard. Instead, it’s about setting a specific long-term goal and doing whatever it takes until the goal has been reached. It’s always much easier to give up, but people with grit can keep going.

While stories of grit have long been associated with self-help manuals and life coaches – Samuel Smiles, the author of the influential Victorian text “Self-Help” preached the virtue of perseverance – these new scientific studies rely on new techniques for reliably measuring grit in individuals. As a result, they’re able to compare the relative importance of grit, intelligence, and innate talent when it comes to determining lifetime achievement. Although this field of study is only a few years old, it’s already made important progress toward identifying the mental traits that allow some people to accomplish their goals, while others struggle and quit. Grit, it turns out, is an essential (and often overlooked) component of success.

As parents of gifted children, we tend to lose on the idea that finishing a project is often more important than receiving an A+ for that project (or assignment). We tend to determine success by the number of A’s and B’s rather than by the amount of class assignments completed, or whether or not a self-directed project was complete.

The idea that grit is more important may change the point of view of some of our educators as well.

Read more about it at the Boston Globe.