> Grit gained a great deal of attention thanks to Dr. Duckworth’s provocative claims that it "beats the pants off I.Q., SAT scores," and other traditional measures of potential in determining "which individuals will be successful in some situations." Subsequent research has showed this to be an undeniable overstatement, in some cases a massive one. While some studies have found that grit might be useful for predicting achievement in certain narrow contexts, the first grit study conducted on a large, representative sample of Americans, published last year, found that "intelligence contributes 48-90 times more than grit to educational success and 13 times more to job-market success."

Source [0].

I've recently been reading the book that the author of this article wrote, called The Quick Fix, which looks to debunk popular psychology concepts such as grit. Companies may want gritty people but if the underlying concept is false, they're not going to get the kinds of people they want. But perhaps they use "gritty" as simply a marketing term for "persevering."

Aside, I see you also saw the Flexport ad asking for "gritty" people to apply. I was a bit turned off the company as well once I started reading the book above.

[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-false-promise-of-quick-fix-...