"Grit" means passion and hard work for long-term goals. It became famous through a best-selling book and a TED talk. But is it a special power? A large study looked at data from about 67,000 people.

Grit was only moderately linked to success. It was also very similar to being careful and hard-working, a trait psychologists call conscientiousness. Working steadily is still important. It is just not magic.

In 2007, psychologist Duckworth and her colleagues defined grit as "passion and perseverance for long-term goals." They reported that grit predicted which cadets completed tough summer training at a U.S. military academy and how far children advanced in a national spelling contest. The idea became hugely popular.

However, a 2017 meta-analysis of about 67,000 people found that grit was only moderately related to performance. It also overlapped heavily with conscientiousness, one of the Big Five personality traits. A British study of about 2,300 pairs of 16-year-old twins found that adding grit hardly improved predictions of exam results beyond personality. Even so, the perseverance part of grit still seemed to matter, so steady effort is worth building.

Duckworth and colleagues defined grit in 2007 as passion and perseverance for long-term goals, and the idea spread with unusual speed. Early studies suggested that grit predicted which cadets would finish demanding summer training at West Point and how far children would get in the National Spelling Bee. When Credé and colleagues pooled 88 samples covering roughly 67,000 people, though, the results looked more modest.

Grit was only moderately correlated with performance and retention. It also overlapped so heavily with conscientiousness, a long-established Big Five trait, that researchers questioned whether it was really a separate construct. Of its two parts, perseverance of effort was more closely tied to performance than consistency of interest. A study of about 2,300 pairs of British twins aged 16 pointed the same way.

Personality, mainly conscientiousness, explained around 6 percent of the variation in national exam results, and adding grit barely improved the prediction. Grit is not meaningless, because perseverance kept some predictive value even after conscientiousness was taken into account. But it is not a new substitute for talent, and programs designed to raise grit may do little for grades.