Propounds the nature and virtue of tenacity, ‘grit’, illustrating with American sporting and other contemporary examples. Talent plus effort equals skill; skill plus effort equals achievement. Environment greatly determines one’s tendencies to meet challenges; yet one can learn to be optimistic. Once proficient, an individual’s deliberate practice propels advancement through demanding objectives and laborious work at isolated elements. Thus deliberate work is the opposite of ‘flow’, albeit complementary in that both produce satisfaction. Duckworth treats purpose as the outcome of cultivated interest, however, dismissing ethics (as well as hedonism) as biologically determined, baked into the cake, so to speak. The slight reveals the primary shortcoming of her work and psychology in general. As Collingwood observed in An Essay on Metaphysics, the ‘science of feeling’ lacks an intrinsic measure of right and wrong. It ‘wipe[s] out the old sciences of thought, logic and ethics, with their criteriological methods and their guiding notions of truth and error, good and evil. …The only difference between a logical and a psychological science of thought is that a logic of thought faces the fact that thought is self-critical and consequently attempts to give some account of the criteria used in this self-criticism, while a psychological science does not. …Psychology has always approached the study of thought with a perfectly clear and conscious determination to ignore one whole department of the truth, namely to ignore the self-critical function of thought and the criteria which that function implied’ (pp. 114-116). In fine, grit is valuable for those with well-defined teleology. All of Duckworth’s subjects are such paragons, but tenacity in pursuit of questionable ends is no benefit.