Angela Duckworth and Grit: From McKinsey to the Grit Scale and Situated

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Angela Duckworth was born in 1970 to Chinese immigrants and raised in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, where her father was a DuPont chemist who invented a lucite dispersion lacquer for cars. She studied neurobiology at Harvard, took a Marshall Scholarship to Oxford to study neuroscience, and joined McKinsey & Company, then quit after a year to teach high school math in San Francisco, including at Lowell High School. In the classroom she saw that raw talent did not predict who mastered the material. She earned a psychology PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in 2006 and defined grit as passion and perseverance toward long-term goals, measured with a Grit Scale that asks whether new projects distract people from old ones.

She won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2013 at age 43, and her 2016 book Grit spent 21 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. When the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act pushed schools to measure character, she warned against using her self-report scale for high-stakes evaluation. Critics argued grit ignored structural barriers, and a 2017 meta-analysis found it only moderately correlated with performance and hard to distinguish from conscientiousness. In 2021 she acknowledged misreading some psychometric properties of her scale, and in 2026 she published Situated, which shifts focus to environments.

• The hosts compare IQ to a car's top speed and grit to the size of its fuel tank.
• Duckworth founded the nonprofit Character Lab, focused on adolescent character development.
• Independent analyses found perseverance did most of the statistical work, while the passion component was weak and unstable.
• From 2020 to 2024 she co-hosted the Freakonomics Radio spin-off No Stupid Questions for 223 episodes.
• Situated draws on choice architecture, such as putting a phone in another room instead of relying on willpower.