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GRIT: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth New York, USA: Scribner, 2016, 329 pages ISBN: 9-781501-111105 (hardcover)
Do you have what it takes to be successful? Can you help your students develop passion and perseverance? What's more important: talent and ability or hard work and stickto-itivenesss? Angela Duckworth argues effectively that what you need to succeed is a passion for what you do and the perseverance to stick with it. These characteristics she defines as "grit."
Duckworth is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2013 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (the so-called Genius Award) in part for her work on grit. It is perhaps the research she conducted at West Point and reported in the magazine section of the Sunday New York Times that first caught the attention of much of the general public (Tough, 2011). The West Point study "showed that grittier cadets were more likely to complete their first summer of training" (Duckworth, et al., 2007, p. 1096).
Duckworth's approach to telling the story of grit is best described in her own words. She concludes the book by telling the reader that this book may be thought of as a conversation over coffee. A conversation over coffee is, in fact, a good metaphor for the style of the book. To extend the metaphor she has coffee with two distinct but overlapping types of readers. One of her coffee partners is an academic (student or professor) who is knowledgeable in a general way about the field of psychology but is not...