The Key to Success
When I was 27 years old, I left a very commanding job, a managing consulting, for a job that was even more demanding, teaching.
I went to teach seventh graders math in the New York City Public Schools. And like any teacher, I made quizzes and tests, I gave out homework assignments. When the work came back, I calculated rates.
What strike me was that, IQ was not the only difference between my best and my worst students. Some of my strongest performers did not have IQ scores. Some of my smartest kids weren’t doing so well. And that got me thinking. The Kinds of things that you need to learn in seventh grade math sure they’re hard. But these concepts are not impossible, and I was firmly convinced that every one of my students could learn material if they worked long and hard enough.
After several more years of teaching, I came to the conclusion that what we need in education is a much better understanding in students and learning from a motivational perspective, from a psychological perspective.
In education, the one thing we know how to measure best is IQ. But what if doing well in school and in life depend on much more that your ability to learn quickly and easily. So I left the classroom and went to a graduate school to become a psychologist. I started studying kids and adults in all kinds of super challenging settings. And in every study my question was who’s successful here and why. My research team and I went to West Point military catemy. We try to predict which cadets would stay in the military training, which would drop out. We went to the national spelling bee, we tried to predict which children would advance far this in the competition. We studied rocky teachers working in really tough neighborhoods, asking which teacher are still going to be there in teaching by the end of the school year, and of those, who would be the most effective at improving learning outcomes for their students. We partnered with private companies, asking which of these sales people are going to keep their jobs and who’s going to earn the most money. In all those very different contexts, one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success, and it wasn’t social
intelligence, it wasn’t good looks, physical health and it wasn’t IQ. It was grit. Grit is passion and for very long-term goals. Grit is having . Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working really hard to make that future a reality. Grit is living a life like it’s a marathon, not a .
A few years ago, I started studying grit in Chicago public schools. I asked thousands of high school juniors to take great questionnaires, and then waited around over a year to see who would graduate. Turns out that, grittier kids are significantly more likely to graduate, even when I matched them on every characteristic I could measure. Things like family income, standardized achievement tests scores even how save kids felt when they were at school. So it’s not that West Point or the national Spelling Bee that grit matters, it’s also in school, especially for kids at rates of dropping out. To me the most shocking thing about grit is that how little we know, how little science knows about building it. Every day parents and teachers asked me how do I build grit kids? What do I do to teach kid a solid work? How do I keep them motivated on the long run? The honest answer is, I don’t know. What I do know is that talent doesn’t make you gritty, our data show very clearly that there are many talented individuals who simply do not follow through on their commitments. In fact, in our data, girt is usually unrelated or even inversely related to measures of talent. So far the best answer of building grit in kids is something called growth mindset. This is an idea developed at Stanford University by, and it is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed, that it can change with your effort. Doctor shows that when kids read and learned about the brain and how it changes and grows in response to challenge, they’re much likely to persevere when they fail. Because they don’t believe failure is a permanent condition. So growth mind sit is a great idea for building grit, but we need more and that’s why I’m going to end my remarks, because that’s where we are and that’s the world that stands before us. We need to take our best ideas, our strongest intuitions and we need to test them, we need to measure whether we have been successful and we have to be willing to fail, to be wrong, to start over again with the lessons learnt. In other words we need to be gritty in
getting our kids grittier.