Perseverance can be defined as the strength to go on when circumstances appear almost impossible. Everything had started off strenuously, the task just becomes more manageable when it had been done frequently, but there will still be obstacles in the way. Grit has a huge role play in perseverance as more and more students are enrolling in college but a very low amount of graduates with a diploma. Although, various well-known, successful, people now have gone through plenty of failure and judgment to reach where they are now.
As Angela Lee Duckworth, a psychologist, interpreted grit as a “passion and perseverance for very long-term goals” (Source 1).
Duckworth started off by comparing her students’ potential from their IQ scores and either if they are the stronger or the weaker performers in her class when she was a teacher. She had come to the conclusion of “what if doing well in school and in life depends on much more than your ability to learn quickly and easily?”(Source 1). Duckworth analyzed high school juniors to test how many would graduate the next year and discovered “that grittier kids were significantly more likely to graduate” (Source 1). Having a mindset built for grit is a great idea as much as it is known and still in need of more testing.
Many more students are applying and accepted into colleges, “but only 55 percent of them are getting out with diplomas” (Source 3) according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Posted news in media has stories “about students whose independence has been smothered by the ‘helicopter parenting’ phenomenon — too much help from home.” (Source 3) where the students depend on their parents to help them succeed. Whereas the opposite of the “helicopter parenting” is the students who are the first generation in the family enrolling in college. The parents of these students don’t have much knowledge as the other parents who have been college to encourage and support first-generation college students. But as for these well-known contributors who did not give up their goals and defeat the odds of other people’s thoughts, they forced themselves to succeed even with an abundance amount of failures.
Famous physicist, Albert Einstein, had thought to be slow and thought to be foolish for what he had dreamed. Winston Churchill, a once United Kingdom Prime Minister, was the lowest of the class and when he found his way to become the Prime Minister, he wrote “‘”Never give in, never give in…. in nothing, great or small, large or petty – never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.”’ (Source 2). As for sports, popular basketball player, Michael Jordan said, “‘”I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games…. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. That is why I succeed.”’ (Source 2). All of these successful people had become someone a lot of others look up too, they didn’t give. They ignored other people’s opinions and gave them an unexpected surprise.