We’ve all seen the people who are so inherently athletic that they can pick up a new sport almost immediately and be perfect at it. We all know the people that never do homework, but get perfect grades anyway because taking tests for them is just too easy. Inherent talent is a real thing. There are real genetic or physiological differences between people that just make some people better at certain things than others.
But we also all know those people who work for hours every single day to train and learn a new sport, the people that stay at practice longer than they have to or do another workout when they get home. We know the people who are always going to office hours, who live in the library and only really take naps at home. We all know the people who work hard for everything that they have.
So there are people who have talent, there are people who try, there are people that have both, but which one matters more?
This semester, my group in Research Methods launched an experiment to find the answer to that question. After a lot of research, we found a scale that measures general “grit,” or ability to work hard toward long-term goals. We found a lot of experiments that measured how grit relates to success and overwhelming found the results to be that grit is more predictive of success than inherent physical or mental talents. This means that those with more grit, those willing to work hard and long, are more likely to be successful in the measured field (this varied from military to academic GPA).
However, none of these studies examined whether grit was a factor that could impact just one part of a person’s life or if it would be confined specifically to just one aspect of someone’s life. For instance, the studies that looked at academic success only looked at one measure of success (usually GPA) and that one part of a participant’s life. But could those people be as gritty and try as hard for success in all aspects of their lives, could they try hard not only in academics but also in their athletics and extracurriculars?
To measure this, we created three different surveys, each based off the main measure for grit, called the Short Grit Scale. We gave one for extracurricular involvement, one for academics, and one for athletics. Our participants took all three of these as well as the Short Grit Scale, and so we were able to measure and compare the general scores across these three different aspects of people’s lives.
All three scale measures were significantly correlated to the Short grit scale. They all contributed to the variance in the Short grit scores and we found to be predictive of the short grit score. This means that the more gritty someone is generally, the harder they work toward long-term goals, they are likely to be gritty in all aspects of their life. Someone willing to work hard in order to succeed is more likely to be able to work hard in many different domains. While talent and physical abilities are nothing to be admonished and can definitely contribute to someone’s success, they may often only help someone in a single aspect of their life. What our analysis of grit shows is that those who work harder are not only more likely to succeed, but are more likely to succeed in many different aspects of their lives, not just one in which they may be inherently talented.
