Successful people have this one habit in common

Leadership

September 8, 2026

Angela Duckworth, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is best known for her work on her best selling book GRIT. She covers the role that persistence and sustained effort play in long-term achievement. Her more recent argument adds an important qualification to that work; persistence matters. But persistence alone is insufficient, and one of the recurring characteristics she identifies among successful people is their willingness to ask for help.

The point is not that high performers are dependent on others. Rather, they are often highly resourceful in recognising when individual effort is no longer enough and when progress requires additional knowledge, capability or support. Much of the popular discussion about resilience tends to overemphasise individual effort, with the implication that better outcomes are available if people simply work harder, persist longer or become more mentally robust.

At some point additional effort produces diminishing returns and the more effective response is to change the conditions surrounding the problem, something I have experienced personally many time. That may involve seeking advice, bringing in specialist expertise, asking for coaching, changing the way work is structured or obtaining support from others with relevant experience.

Duckworth describes this through the experience of attempting to rescue her 86-year-old mother from dangerous water. Her initial response was to fight harder against the current, which is a fairly natural reaction when confronted by a difficult situation. What ultimately changed the outcome was recognising that she could not solve the problem through individual effort and calling for help.

Organisations often celebrate persistence while paying less attention to the systems in which that persistence is being applied. Employees are praised for working around broken processes, compensating for capability gaps or overcoming unclear priorities through personal effort. This may produce short-term results, but it is not necessarily evidence of a high-performing organisation. In some cases, it is evidence that the organisation has become reliant on individual resilience to compensate for structural weaknesses.

High Performance Is Contextual

The broader implication is that high performance should not be treated entirely as an individual characteristic. Performance is partly a function of capability and motivation, but it is also a function of context. People operate within systems, structures, teams and institutions that either support or inhibit their ability to perform.

Leaders need to define what good performance looks like and then create the conditions in which people can achieve it. Duckworth approaches essentially the same issue from the perspective of the individual. The individual needs to recognise when the current environment is insufficient and be willing to seek support, while leadership needs to create an environment in which seeking that support is normal, accessible and productive.

The two perspectives are closely related because a culture that encourages people to ask for help is not necessarily less resilient. It may simply be better at allocating knowledge and capability to the problems that need them. There is also an organisational design implication here. If employees are repeatedly forced to rely on exceptional effort to overcome structural problems, then resilience is being used as a substitute for management. That may be sustainable for a period, but it is unlikely to be sustainable indefinitely.

Duckworth’s argument is therefore less a rejection of grit than a refinement of it. Persistence and determination remain important, but effective performance also requires judgement: knowing when to continue, when to adapt and when to involve other people. That is a more useful conception of resourcefulness than the assumption that success is principally the product of individual endurance.