Got grit?

A Penn researcher who studies high achievers says it isn't I.Q., grades, or leadership skills that leads to success. It's good, old-fashioned stick-to-itiveness.
By Virginia A. Smith
Inquirer Staff Writer

Young Tom Edison didn't start out a superstar. His early teachers called him "addled."

For decades, laws, governments, even popular will were stacked against the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela. No way, people thought, would they ever change the way things were.

And so it was for Sister Mary Scullion, the scrappy nun from Northeast Philly who had a radical idea 30 years ago. In a nation as prosperous as ours, she thought, it was unacceptable to have even one homeless person on the street. Today, the programs she developed are a national model.

Is it all-brains-all-the-time that separates these achievers from the pack? Or is something else at work?

The difference likely is something Angela Lee Duckworth calls "grit," which she defines as "tenaciously pursuing something over the long term."...

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