get up and go

The state or quality of having a given amount of positivity, energy, ambition, or determination. That new intern we hired sure has a lot of get-up-and-go! You're going to need more get-up-and-go if you want to succeed in this business! I used to have get-up-and-go, I think—but then I became a sleep deprived mom of twins.

Vital energy, enthusiasm. The Random House Unabridged Dictionary (1987) hyphenates this term and lists it as a noun, originating in the United States in the early years of this century. However, it has numerous precedents, the most common of which was get up and get, still used in some parts of the United States (President Lyndon Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird, was quoted as saying it in the early 1960s). The OED gives a 1907 use of the current cliché: “I wish . . . folk here had a little git-up-and-go to them” (N. Munro, Daft Days).