Grit (perseverance and passion towards long-term goals) has received growing attention from academia and the general public as a strong predictor of academic achievement. Yet current scholarship largely fails to consider structural and cultural contexts that may impact grit’s development. Bringing grit into sociological discussion of agency and stratification, I collect and analyze cross-cultural data (France, South Korea, Turkey and the U.S.) and provide evidence that grit operates in a fashion useful for understanding stratification, cross-culturally.