Angela Duckworth

The author, Angela Duckworth, figured out an equation that explains that success is more a feature of effort than of innate talent, and she calls people's ability to keep going after failures "grit." Duckworth puts a great deal of her personal story and her explorations into the story. She is a former McKinsey consultant who then became a New York City public school teacher. She began graduate studies in psychology with Martin Seligman, the founder of positive psychology and one of the developers of the idea of learned helplessness and its contribution to clinical depression. She became interested in the question of what makes people successful.

Francis Galton

Francis Galton was a scientist who studied the question of what makes people successful in the 1800s. He determined that successful people, such as his half-cousin Charles Darwin, combine "ability" with "zeal" (what the author would refer to...