Angela Duckworth argues that while talent matters, effort matters more — she summarizes this as “talent counts, but effort counts twice.” Using personal anecdotes (her daughter’s classmate, her own piano experience) and empirical work (her GRIT scale and Anders Ericsson’s research), she emphasizes that deliberate, high‑quality practice (not merely hours logged) produces expertise, and that grit—persistent, sustained interest and effort—keeps people on a continual learning curve rather than plateauing or exiting.
Chapters
My dad growing up used to talk about talents and IQ all the time. And I want to say that it does count. I've got an 18 year old at home named Amanda. Sometimes she comes home with stories about Eli. Eli's in her math class. Eli never works. Eli never does his homework. Eli seems to have invented calculus on his own because he still gets perfect scores on all the math exams. And my daughter's convinced that Eli is so prodigiously talented that it doesn't really matter in life whether Eli's going to work hard or not work hard, because he's obviously going to become super successful. But I think by now I have convinced my daughter that insofar as talent counts, effort counts twice. First, because no matter how talented you are, you have to multiply that talent by hours of effort to actually gain skill, to learn calculus, to know how to write a memo, know how to lead a team, know how to do all the things, frankly, that you have learned your many hard earned skills. But I like to say to my daughter, you know, talent counts, but effort counts twice. Because once you have a skill, you know how to lead a team, you know how to do calculus, you know how to act in a film, you have to actually apply that skill. It's effort applied to skill that creates human achievement. And so when Will Smith says, you may be more talented than me, but I will never get off this treadmill before you, I think what he's pointing to is that effort and talent are not the same thing. And in the long run, it may be just as Darwin intuited, that effort may matter more. In data that I've collected on the GRIT scale and measures of talent, whether physical talent or IQ cognitive ability, I find that measures of effort like grit, are not correlated with measures of talent like an IQ test. In some samples, they're inversely correlated weakly. All that means for you as leaders is that if you hire brilliant, talented, smart people, good for you. But it's no guarantee that you're hiring the most passionate, hardest working, resilient, growth oriented people. They're simply different human qualities. If I want to catch you all the way up to 2020 and what modern science knows about the super successful, I can do it with this one graph. This summarizes the research of my friend and my colleague, Anders Ericsson. Raise your hand for a moment if you've ever heard this expression. And I know we're a global audience, but this expression, 10,000 hours of practice, the 10,000 hour rule. Okay, that's many of us. If not most of us. If Anders Ericsson were here today, he's a cognitive scientist who studies the super successful, you know, World cup soccer players. He goes to tournaments like Sudoku tournaments, et cetera. We what he would say is that what he has observed across all fields, both mental and physical, is that it indeed takes thousands of hours of a special kind of practice to take you from an amateur who knows nothing to somebody who could be considered a world class expert. Now, what Anders Ericsson would want you to know, however, is that there's something missing in the popular understanding of 10,000 hours of practice. And that is that you can spend 10,000 hours of practice and just be fine, mediocre, nothing special. I mean, just think about it. Lots of people go to work for 40 hours a week and then if you count up the hours, I mean, pretty soon they're at 10,000. But they're not world class experts. Why? And the singular insight from his lifetime of research is that it is not just the quantity of practice that matters. It, it's the quality of practice. The way experts practice is different. And I think there are powerful lessons for all of us in this room because they apply not only to the individual, but they apply to the overall organization. Before I unpack for you what Anders has found about the way experts practice and how different it is qualitatively, let me suggest that life always presents us a multiple choice and, and there are more than two answers, you can become more and more expert at what you do. That's the red learning curve. You never stop learning. I think that is the culture of genpact and its valued clients. You can be like most organizations and most people, which is to say that you will put in hours and hours, but they're not the kind of practice that gets you better. You plateau on the, I like to call it the plateau of arrested development. But the third choice that anyone has at any time is to exit completely, to stop training at all. And it is the nature of human nature that we lose the skills that we have acquired when we are not practicing them. Let me use myself as a personal example. Being an Asian female in New Jersey, I had to play piano. It was part of my cultural destiny. So I did it. And I was never very good. I quit after some years. And what little skill I had in piano, I now have none at all. And if you used to practice a musical instrument or speak another language or play a sport and you are no longer actively doing that, then you know exactly what I mean. You don't get to hold on at the same level to all the human skills that you have acquired. So. So I study grit in part because it keeps people on this red learning curve to becoming more and more and more excellent at what they do. But I also study grit because it is those gritty individuals who prefer to finish things that they started and have interests that sustain themselves over years, if not decades, if not a lifetime, that keeps them from quitting one thing after another after another.
