Is Grit the answer?

I have been reading about grit. Extensively, recently, for a research assignment, and with increasing irritation. The premise is seductive: talent is not enough, and what separates those who succeed from those who don’t, even among the equally intelligent, is grit, defined as perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Angela Duckworth and her colleagues have built a substantial body of work on this foundation, and it has captured the public imagination in a way that few psychological constructs manage.

My irritation was immediate and personal. Because I work with women scientists who are gritty, ambitious, and smart, and still they are not having the impact they came here to have. So when the literature suggested that grit might be the missing ingredient for success, my first thought was: not for my clients. They have it, they could not have got here without it, they use it daily, and yet they are not having the impact they came here to have.

As I read further, my annoyance deepened and became more precise. Because nowhere in the grit literature is there a serious reckoning with what happens when grit gets conscripted. When it stops being directed toward a long-term goal of your own choosing and starts being spent on something else entirely.

Our Grit is conscripted

Here is what I see in my work. Women scientists arrive in their careers inspired, motivated by the science, by the possibility of impact, by the particular pleasure of a question worth pursuing. That ambition is real and it is fierce. But somewhere along the way, often so gradually it is almost invisible, the goal shifts. The daily grind of working in environments that were not designed with them in mind, the unspoken agreements about who leaders are made of, the relentless low-level pressure to justify their presence, all of it begins to redirect that fierce energy. They are no longer working toward something. They are playing the game to stay in the game, and that is something else entirely.

Duckworth defines grit as perseverance toward a long-term goal. But what happens when the long-term goal is no longer your own? When the persistence that looked like ambition has quietly become something closer to survival? The research doesn’t ask this question. It measures grit as a stable trait, points toward outcomes like retention and completion, and concludes that grittier people go further. What it cannot see is the direction of travel.

The cost of the conscripted passion

In my experience, and I hold this as a question rather than a conclusion, grit in women scientists is often real, often considerable, and often being spent in entirely the wrong direction. Not toward impact. Toward making everything unimpeachable, toward anticipating every criticism before it lands, toward performing a version of competence that might, finally, be beyond reproach. That is not passion for a long-term goal. That is the exhausting mathematics of not failing.

And the cost is not merely professional. It is personal, and it is cumulative. The grind takes her away from who she is. Her confidence erodes. Her optimism dims. Her authenticity, the quality that made her science interesting and her leadership worth following, gets quietly set aside in favour of whatever is required to remain acceptable. She is still gritty. But her grit is being used against her.

So what is really missing?

This is where I find myself sitting with a question I cannot yet fully answer. If grit is present, if intelligence is present, if commitment and expertise and decades of hard work are all present, what is the variable that is missing? I have some hypotheses. The shape we are in when we get back up after failure. The presence or absence of genuine optimism, not performed positivity, but the deep structural belief that effort connects to outcome. The capacity for adaptive flexibility, to read a situation freshly rather than through the lens of accumulated threat. These are worth examining. I am examining them.

But before any of that, I think there is a prior question. One worth sitting with, slowly, honestly, without rushing to an answer.

When did your ambition change from impact to survival?