say goodbye to ‘grit’ 🎉

say goodbye to ‘grit’ 🎉

September 9, 2026 • Issue No. 44

Every so often, a psychology topic crosses over from the hallowed halls of science into the everyday discourse of the greater population. Recently: attachment styles, gaslighting, AuDHD. About 20 years ago, the hot topics came courtesy of Malcolm Gladwell’s pop-psych trifecta (Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers) and 10 years later, there was a new buzzy concept attributed to a woman researcher from Penn.

When Angela Duckworth released Grit in 2016, I was an early career teacher in an East Harlem charter school. There, the text was Bible — its ideas were constantly referenced, the title worked its way into nearly every meeting and conference. If I’m not mistaken, ‘grit’ even became a measure on our reports. But ‘grit’, excuse the pun, always rubbed me the wrong way and I have maintained a one-way vendetta.

The key premise of grit is that effort, not natural talent, is a greater predictor of success. It’s okay if you weren’t born with perfect pitch or long fingers, as long as you were willing to dedicate yourself to practice. This common sense idea sounded fine to me, but it was the school application where things went askew. In the new gritty paradigm, positive praise like “you’re good at that” and “you’ve got it!” were replaced with “I can see you’re really working hard” and “keep working”. It was a world where nothing was ever good enough and natural talents were ignored, just like environmental factors, structural -isms, and obstacles. Anything going on within you and around you was just another opportunity to bite down and press through. Perseverance, persistence, and an endless quest for improvement were the only things that mattered.

Now, Dr. Duckworth is back with a new idea that’s just as likely to cross over to popular discourse, and she admits that grit alone won’t take you to the top. Her new book, Situated, aims to help you find the people and places that bring out your best. The book’s big question: Is your situation serving you? Sparkle Gang, can I tell you how vindicated I’m feeling to hear Angela’s “new” approach?! Success has never been solely about individual effort; conditions matter, too.

This morning, I listened to Angela in discussion with Jeff Berman on the YouTube podcast Masters of Scale. For about 35 minutes, she outlines some of the big ideas from Situated. This time around, Angela encourages you to take note of how your environment may be sharpening or dulling your abilities. The seeds of Situated were planted in 2013, when a young man who’d watched Angela’s viral TEDTalk on perseverance (that would later become Grit) reached out to share his success story.

Cody Coleman, had been born in prison, attended MIT, interned at Google, and became only the 3rd Black person to earn a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford. Cody felt that he was the embodiment of grit and self-determination — my charter school leadership team would’ve agreed with him and salivated over this story — but Angela had a different takeaway altogether. She hypothesized that Cody’s success was impacted by his ability to navigate towards situations that brought out his greatness. Duckworth calls these situations “conglomerations”.

I don’t believe that Angela and I measure success in the same ways nor do I always love the words she chooses to get her points across, but finally she and I agree on something. Where you are and who you’re with matter; they actually matter a lot. Being the smartest person in the room is not as good for your growth as being in a room with smarter people. Completing tasks that you can do with your eyes closed is unlikely to expand your skill set. Sometimes it takes changing rooms, changing jobs, changing industries, and even changing cities to situate yourself for progress but in the moments where you can’t make big changes, Angela suggests “small steps and soft knees”.

If you can’t go to a conglomeration like Cody did at MIT and Stanford, Angela suggests making your own. She describes teaming up with fellow Penn researchers Adam Grant and Katy Milkman to make a mini-conglomeration. I don’t know how many of us can count NYT best-selling authors as coworkers, but she makes a fair point. Even when you can’t shift environments, you have some power to shape them into ones that support your progress. Something I found interesting: Angela says the impact of conglomerations is undermined in an age of remote work, and while she doesn’t suggest being in the office 5 days a week, she believes that you’ll stall your own intellectual, professional, and social growth by working in isolation from behind a screen.

I’ll leave you with some questions that came up for me while I was listening to Angela and Jeff’s discussion. I haven’t decided if I’ll read the book just yet, but I’m delighted to know that we might be moving away from the rugged individualism and dogged determination of the 10-year grit era towards a future where we reach out to and rely on others. 💎 

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