Jane Porter, writer for Help Scout, has a story about achieving your goals.

When Angela Duckworth was 27, she left her high-pressure management-consulting job for an even tougher gig: teaching seventh grade math at a New York City public school.

Duckworth quickly learned it wasn't smarts that determined whether her students accomplished their goals and got good grades--not by a long shot. "I was convinced every one of my students could learn the material if they worked long and hard enough," she says in her popular TED talk.

After a few years of teaching, Duckworth found herself asking the question, "What if doing well in school and in life depends on much more than your ability to learn quickly and easily?" She's made a career of that question, becoming a psychologist who has studied how and why people set and--most important--achieve their goals. A key quality she's found that separates the winners from the losers? Grit.

Grit is stamina. Grit is sticking with your future day in and day out--not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years. Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint.

Even the least seasoned of runners knows that the key to making it through a marathon is pacing yourself--not pushing too hard or too fast and exhausting your energy while also not backing down when it gets tough. But how does that marathon-mentality resonate in regard to setting and achieving goals in our work lives and careers?

Find the details of the following 5 tips here.

1. Have a growth mindset.

2. Set meaningful goals.

3. Build accountability into your life.

4. Don't fill yourself with false hope.

5. Never underestimate the power of positivity.

A goal defines an outcome you want to achieve; an area of focus establishes activities you want to spend your time doing," Bregman writes in Harvard Business Review. "A goal points to a future you intend to reach; an area of focus settles you into the present."