Passion and grit in the pursuit of long-term personal goals in college students

Abstract

Passions are strong motivational forces that influence the direction, intensity, and quality of long-term goal-pursuit. Passionate individuals thus have the potential to display high levels of perseverance of effort and consistency toward their interests – that is, to be gritty – with regard to the personal goals they set for themselves. The present research investigated whether passion in students was related to perseverance of effort and maintenance of interests toward the personal goals that students had set for themselves at the beginning of an academic semester. This study also investigated if the facets of grit were related to progress on personal goals, as well as to changes in subjective well-being and symptoms of depression over the semester in a sample of university students (N = 425). Results showed that harmonious passion was only positively associated with the facet of perseverance of effort. In contrast, obsessive passion was negatively associated with both perseverance and consistency of interests facets of grit. In turn, only perseverance of effort was associated with progress on personal goals and with changes in well-being over the semester. The implications of these findings for long-term goal pursuit in an educational setting are discussed in light of the passion and grit literatures.