The Weak Case for Grit


šŸ”— a linked post to nautil.us » — originally shared here on

Iā€™ve heard many interviews with Angela Ducksworth over the past few years, and Iā€™ve always felt bad after each one.

Grit, as a trait, is something I feel like I possess relatively little of.

Maybe reading this article is just feeding into my own confirmation bias a bit, but the reason I wanted to share it is because it introduced a different measure to me: conscientious.

Conscientiousness is a component of the popular ā€œOCEANā€ model of personality, according to which we all have ā€œbig fiveā€ rather self-explanatory measurable traits: openness (to experience), conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. This model has left a large mark on personality psychology, in part because it raises useful questions that researchers have subsequently investigated, ranging from the extent to which variation in these traits is caused by nature versus nurtureā€”one 2015 meta-analysis estimated the answer is about 40 percent genetics, 60 percent environment3ā€”to whether and to what extent various traits correlate with success in work, relationships, and other settings.

Again, maybe Iā€™m just hearing what I want to hear, but Iā€™m very interested in learning more about the OCEAN model of personality.

Update: I just spent nearly 90 minutes convincing my kids to each eat half a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Maybe I do have some grit after all...

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