2 'Stubborn' Habits That Actually Predict Success

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We are living through a golden age of self-improvement advice. There are productivity systems, morning routines, habit stacks, and an entire genre of content devoted to the idea that success is one optimized workflow away. Most of it focuses on what to add — a new ritual, a new tool, a new mindset. What gets far less attention is what high achievers quietly refuse to give up.

Psychology research keeps arriving at a similar, unglamorous conclusion: the habits that best predict long-term success are not the flashy ones. They are the ones people rely on on days when motivation is low, and the feedback loop has slowed to a crawl. They are, in a word, stubborn.

Two of these habits, in particular, emerge with striking consistency from the psychological literature. Neither requires exceptional talent nor unusual circumstances. They do, however, require something increasingly rare: a willingness to stay uncomfortable for longer than feels reasonable.

Habit 1: Tolerating Boredom Without Abandoning the Task

Ask most people what separates high achievers from everyone else, and they will say things like passion, drive, or talent. Ask a psychologist, and the answer is often less inspiring: the ability to keep going through tedium.

A landmark series of six studies published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2007 introduced the construct of grit, defined as perseverance and passion for long-term goals.

Across a wide range of populations — including Ivy League undergraduates, West Point Military Academy cadets, and participants in the National Spelling Bee — grit consistently predicted achievement above and beyond IQ and talent. The finding that drew the most attention was not that gritty people were more talented. It was that they were more likely to keep showing up, especially after it stopped being exciting.

This connects to a body of research on what psychologists call distress tolerance, which is the capacity to sit with uncomfortable psychological states, including boredom, without reflexively escaping them. A 2022 study published in Mind, Brain, and Education found that distress tolerance is a critical academic skill because developing real expertise almost always involves long stretches of work that feel neither rewarding nor stimulating. The students who learn to tolerate those stretches outperform those who cannot, even when raw ability is comparable.

The implication is counterintuitive: the most productive people are not necessarily the most motivated. They are better at being bored.

This is not a minor distinction. Our current media environment is engineered for distraction, which means the gap between people who can sustain attention on tedious work and those who cannot grows wider—not narrower. Every time someone abandons a project because it is no longer interesting, they are conceding ground to anyone willing to stay. The habit of tolerating boredom and refusing to treat it as a signal to quit turns out to be a competitive advantage hiding in plain sight.

The writers who finish their manuscripts. The researchers who go deep on a single question for years. The engineers who debug the unglamorous code no one will ever see. They are not more passionate than their peers. They have built a higher threshold for staying when staying is hard.

Habit 2: Consistently Choosing the Harder Option When the Easier One Is Available

The second habit is closely related, but it operates in a different register. While the first is about endurance, this one is about choice architecture — specifically, the repeated, deliberate decision to delay a reward that is available right now in favor of something more meaningful later.

Most people encounter this concept through Walter Mischel's famous marshmallow experiments at Stanford University, which began in the late 1960s. Preschool children were offered a simple choice: eat one treat immediately, or wait a few minutes and receive two.

Mischel's longitudinal follow-up work suggested that the children who were able to wait tended to have better outcomes years later, across markers ranging from academic performance to social competence. The finding sparked decades of research into self-regulation and its role in achievement.

More recently, a large-scale 2019 study published in PLOS ONE examined over 2,200 employed adults and found that effortful persistence (what they measured as grit's perseverance dimension) was significantly associated with career success, including income, job satisfaction, job prestige, as well as career engagement behaviors like participation in continuing professional development and positive attitudes toward lifelong learning.

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Critically, these associations held even after controlling for cognitive ability and standard personality traits; the habit of choosing the harder, longer path predicted outcomes that intelligence alone could not explain.

What this research collectively reveals is that the capacity to delay gratification is not a trait you either have or do not have. It functions more like a practiced orientation: a value hierarchy that has been decided and then repeatedly acted upon until it becomes the default.

The entrepreneur who passes on social events for three years to build a company is not suffering through deprivation. They have decided what matters, and each consistent choice reinforces that decision until the difficult option no longer feels difficult.

This is the mechanism that makes the habit stubborn: repetition changes the calculus. What begins as an effortful act of self-denial gradually becomes an expression of identity. The person who consistently chooses the harder option is not white-knuckling their way through every decision. Over time, they have reoriented what feels natural.

A version of this post also appears on Forbes.