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
鈥?/p>
t doing so well. And that got me thinking. The Kinds of things
that you need to learn in seventh grade math sure they
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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
鈥?/p>
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
鈥?/p>
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
鈥?/p>
t
social