By Dr. Tresia Eaves
May 28, 2026
Introduction
The arc of a meaningful career in project management is rarely a smooth, uninterrupted line of success. It is, far more often, a winding path punctuated by setbacks, pivots, moments of profound uncertainty, and hard-won victories. What separates the professionals who endure and grow from those who stagnate or abandon the field altogether is not simply intelligence, technical expertise, or even formal training. A career in project management is a constellation of deeply human qualities that, when taken together, constitute what psychologist Angela Duckworth famously defines as grit, the passion and perseverance for long-term goals in the face of adversity.
In her landmark research from 2016, Duckworth defines grit as a “combination of sustained effort and consistent interest over time”, a disposition that predicts achievement across domains far more reliably than talent or IQ alone.
For project managers who routinely navigate ambiguity, competing stakeholder interests, shrinking budgets, scope creep, and team conflict, grit becomes a professional survival skill. Grit is the internal resource that allows a project manager to absorb failure on Monday, extract its lessons by Wednesday, and deliver a revised plan by Friday.
This paper explores the key components of grit as they manifest in a project management career, drawing on classical philosophical traditions, contemporary psychological research, and practical professional wisdom. The traits examined—resilience rooted in negative capability, resourcefulness, flexibility and adaptability, and curiosity—together form a framework for understanding how lasting professional grit is cultivated.
The Nature of Grit: More than Passion for Work
A common misconception holds that grit flows naturally and automatically from doing work you love. While passion is undeniably an important fuel, it is an insufficient engine on its own.
In his foundational book on optimal experience, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, author Mihaly Csikszentmihaly argues that intrinsic motivation, the joy derived from the work itself, is a powerful driver of sustained engagement. But flow must be paired with the discipline to push through the inevitable plateaus and frustrations that accompany mastery in any field.
As Duckworth notes, grit is not about clinging to a specific goal, but about maintaining commitment to a higher-order purpose even when the specific pathway must change. The ability to grieve a lost path and simultaneously discover a new one is itself a demonstration of the resilience that grit requires.
Not everyone has the economic privilege of pursuing work that aligns perfectly with personal passion. For many project managers who work in industries they did not initially choose, grit must be cultivated deliberately, through the discovery of meaning in the craft of project delivery itself, the intellectual satisfaction of solving complex problems, and the relational rewards of leading teams toward shared goals.
This thought reminds us of a seminal book, Man’s Search for Meaning, in which author Viktor Frankl in 1959 stated that human beings can endure almost any hardship when they are anchored to a sense of purpose, however small or situational.
Project managers who develop this capacity for purpose-finding, even in unglamorous or challenging work environments, are precisely those who build the deepest professional grit over time.
Negative Capability: The Philosophical Foundation of Resilience
At the intellectual heart of professional grit lies a concept that predates modern psychology by nearly two centuries: “negative capability”. First articulated by the Romantic poet John Keats in a letter to his brothers George and Tom in 1817, negative capability describes the capacity to remain in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. Keats observed this quality in Shakespeare and identified it as the essential characteristic of genuine achievement.
Nearly a century later, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke echoed and deepened this idea in *Letters to a Young Poet (1903), Rilke counseled his readers to “be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves”. Rilke’s advice, to leave the questions rather than demand premature answers, is remarkably applicable to the practice of project management, a discipline in which ambiguity is not an aberration but a constant condition.
In modern psychological terms, negative capability maps closely onto what scholars call “tolerance for ambiguity”, or the ability to function effectively and make sound decisions even in the absence of complete information.
In his research article, “Intolerance of Ambiguity as a Personality Variable” (1962), Stanley Budner defines intolerance of ambiguity as the tendency to perceive ambiguous situations as threatening. Research consistently shows that higher tolerance for ambiguity is associated with greater creativity, better decision-making under uncertainty, and more effective leadership.
For project managers who must frequently launch a project before all requirements are known, negotiate scope changes mid-execution, and manage stakeholders whose expectations evolve over time, this tolerance is not merely desirable; it is operationally essential.
Developing negative capability is difficult precisely because it runs counter to the instinct for control that often draws individuals to project management in the first place. Project managers are, by professional orientation, planners and problem-solvers. The discipline therefore demands what might be called a productive paradox: the ability to plan rigorously while simultaneously holding those plans loosely, ready to adapt when reality diverges from the project schedule. Those who can sit with that paradox, who can maintain clarity of purpose while accepting uncertainty of method, are demonstrating negative capability in action.
Resourcefulness: Grit in Action
If negative capability is the philosophical disposition that allows a project manager to tolerate uncertainty, resourcefulness is the behavioral expression of that tolerance. Resourcefulness is the practical capacity to find solutions when standard approaches fail. Resourcefulness means asking better questions, seeking information from unconventional sources, leveraging relationships creatively, and refusing to accept “it can’t be done” as a final answer.
In the context of project management, resourcefulness frequently manifests in moments of crisis. When a key vendor misses a critical delivery, or a technical dependency reveals itself to be more complex than anticipated, or when a team member departs mid-project, the resourceful project manager does not freeze or escalate prematurely. They problem-solve. They draw on their network, their historical project knowledge, their understanding of the organization’s political landscape, and their technical fluency to construct a path forward that may look nothing like the original plan but nonetheless serves the project’s core objectives.
The PMBOK Guide (7th Edition) emphasizes that modern project management is increasingly principle-based rather than process-based. Project managers are expected to apply judgment, adapt frameworks, and exercise creative problem-solving rather than simply following prescriptive steps. This shift in the profession’s own self-understanding reflects a growing recognition that resourcefulness, the ability to think, not just execute, is a defining competency of the effective project manager.
Resourcefulness also includes intellectual humility to recognize the boundaries of one’s own knowledge and to actively seek expertise from others. The project manager who admits they do not know something and immediately sets about learning it, whether through research, consultation with subject matter experts, or direct experimentation, is practicing the kind of grit that compounds over time into genuine mastery.
As the author of this paper notes, pushing oneself to learn about something unfamiliar in order to do better work in a familiar domain is itself a skill embedded within negative capability.
Flexibility and Adaptability: Responding to Change with Positive Force
Few professional environments test flexibility as consistently and ruthlessly as project management. Scope changes, stakeholder realignment, budget revisions, technology failures, regulatory shifts, and global disruptions (as the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated with brutal clarity) are intrinsic features of any project. The project manager who responds to change with rigidity, resentment, or paralysis is not simply ineffective; they become a liability to the teams and organizations they are entrusted to lead.
Flexibility in this context means more than willingness to change plans. It means the capacity to see change not as a threat to be resisted but as information to be integrated. In his book, Leading Change, John P. Kotter argues that the organizations, and by extension, the individuals who thrive in volatile environments are those who treat change as a natural, ongoing condition rather than an emergency to be managed and resolved. This orientation transforms the project manager’s relationship to uncertainty from adversarial to collaborative.
Adaptability extends flexibility into the dimension of behavior: not only accepting that change is necessary, but actively reconfiguring one’s approach, methods, and even identity in response to new conditions. Research by Pulakos et al. identifies adaptive performance as a distinct and measurable competency, encompassing the ability to handle emergencies, manage work stress, solve problems creatively, and learn new tasks and technologies. Each of these dimensions is directly relevant to the project management role.
The authors’ framing of adaptability as a means of “seeing another way of getting to done” is a particularly useful articulation. It centers the project manager’s attention on the outcome, rather than on the preservation of a particular method or process. This outcome-orientation allows flexibility to operate as a positive force rather than a reluctant concession.
Curiosity: The Sustaining Force of a Project Management Career
If resilience, resourcefulness, and flexibility are the structural elements of grit, curiosity is its animating spirit. Project managers who remains genuinely curious about new methodologies, emerging technologies, human behavior, organizational dynamics, and the industries they serve, never stop growing.
In his book, Curious? Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life, Todd B. Kashdan opines that curiosity is a fundamental driver of psychological well-being and professional performance. Curiosity motivates exploration, sustains engagement during difficult periods. Curiosity generates the kind of intrinsic interest in one’s work that Duckworth identifies as one of the two pillars of grit, alongside perseverance.
For project managers, curiosity manifests in many forms: the desire to understand why a project failed, not just that it failed; the interest in learning a new framework even when the current one is adequate; and the genuine engagement with stakeholders’ goals and concerns that distinguishes a trusted advisor from a mere task-tracker. Curiosity drives project managers to ask “why” before asking “how”, and to treat each new project as a distinct puzzle with its own logic and lessons.
The relationship between curiosity and grit is not merely correlational; it is transformative. The project manager who is curious about their own failures is more likely to extract the learning that makes the next effort more successful. Those who are curious about their team members’ motivations and challenges will be better positioned to build the trust and cohesion that sustain performance through adversity. Curiosity, in other words, is the mechanism by which grit renews and replenishes itself over the course of a long career.
Conclusion: Cultivating Grit as a Professional Practice
The development of grit in a project management career is an ongoing practice. It requires the courage to sit with uncertainty, as Keats and Rilke both understood centuries ago. It demands the practical ingenuity to find solutions when no obvious path exists. It calls for the flexibility to release attachment to methods when the mission requires adaptation. It is sustained, ultimately, by the curiosity that keeps the work perpetually interesting and the professional perpetually growing.
Duckworth reminds us that talent without effort counts once, but effort counts twice — in the building of skill and in the application of that skill toward achievement.
The project managers who build the most durable, impactful careers are rarely those who found everything easy. They are those who found everything meaningful — meaningful enough to persist through the moments when nothing was working, when stakeholders were unhappy, when the project was behind schedule, and when the path forward was genuinely unclear.
Grit, in the end, is about the deep, quiet conviction that work matters, that the challenges are instructive, and that the capacity to deliver, even imperfectly, or under pressure, or even after failure, is worth developing and protecting with every project you touch.
References
“Intolerance of Ambiguity as a Personality Variable” article, Journal of Personality, Stanley Budner, 1962
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Harper & Row, 1990
Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, Angela Duckworth, Scriber, 2016
Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor E Frankl, Beacon Press,1959
Curious? Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life, Todd B. Kashdan, T. William Morrow, 2009
Letter to George and Thomas Keats, December 21, 1817, John Keats (1817), in “The Letters of John Keats”, H. E. Rollins (Ed.), Harvard University Press
Leading Change, Second Edition, John P. Kotter, Harvard Business Review Press, 2012
A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, PMBOK® Guide, Seventh Edition, Project Management Institute, 2021
“Adaptability in the Workplace: Development of a Taxonomy of Adaptive Performance”, Journal of Applied Psychology, E.D. Pulakos, S. Arad, M.A. Donovan, and K.E. Plamondon, 2000, 85(4), 612–624
Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maris Rilke (author), Stephen Mitchell (translator), Random House, 1903/1984
Dr. Tresia D. Eaves
Dr. Tresia Eaves, PMP, SAFe Agilist, CSM, has 30 years of technology consulting and information technology leadership experience. She is also an author, adjunct professor, public speaker, and proud veteran of the US Air Force. She earned her doctorate from the University of North Texas, and her area of study was Information Science. Dr. Eaves is a published author with her book, “Above and Beyond: The Secrets of Outstanding Project Leadership” published in 2014 by IIL and multiple other articles in professional and academic journals. She is the founder and owner of Variant Enterprises, LLC where she consults with commercial and government organizations using her world class project management skills.
Reach out to Dr. Eaves at DrTresiaEaves@variantenterprisesllc.com, or connect with her on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tresia-eaves-phd-agilist-pmp/
