Grit - the power of passion and perseverance _ Angela Lee Duckworth

When I was 27 years old , I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding , teaching .

I went to teach 7th 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 grades .

What struck me was that IQ was not the only difference between my best and my worst students .

Some of my strongest performers did not have stratospheric IQ scores .

Some of my smartest kids weren't doing so well .

And that got me thinking .

The kinds of things you need to learn in 7th grade math , sure , they're hard ratios , decimals , the area of a parallelogram but these concepts are not impossible , and I was firmly convinced that every one of my students could learn the material if they worked hard and long enough .

After several more years of teaching , I came to the conclusion that what we need in education is a much better understanding of 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 depends on much more than your ability to learn quickly and easily ?

So I left the classroom , and I went to 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 is successful here and why ?

My research team and I went to West Point Military Academy .

We tried to predict which cadets would stay in military training and which would drop out .

We went to the National Spelling Bee and tried to predict which children would advance farthest in competition .

We studied rookie teachers working in really tough neighborhoods asking , which teachers are still going to be here in teaching by the end of the school year ?

And of those , who will be the most effective at improving learning outcomes for their students ?

We partnered with private companies asking , which of these salespeople is 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 perseverance for very long term goals .

Grit is having stamina .

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 life like it's a marathon , not a sprint .

A few years ago , I started studying grit in the Chicago Public Schools .

I asked thousands of high school juniors to take grit questionnaires , and then waited around more than a year to see who would graduate .

Turns out that grittier kids were significantly more likely to graduate even when I matched them on every characteristic I could measure , Things like family income , standardized achievement test scores , even how safe kids felt when they were at school .

So it's not just at West Point or the National Spelling Bee that grit matters .

It's also in school , especially for kids at risk for dropping out .

To me , the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know , how little science knows about building it .

Every day , parents and teachers ask me , how do I build grit in kids ?

What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic ?

How do I keep them motivated for 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 , grit is usually unrelated or even inversely related to measures of talent .

So far , the best idea I've heard about building grit in kids is something called growth mindset .

This is an idea developed at Stanford University by Carol Dweck , and it is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed , that it can change with your effort .

Doctor Dweck has shown that when kids read and learn about the brain and how it changes and grows in response to challenge , they're much more likely to persevere when they fail because they don't believe that failure is a permanent condition .

So growth mindset is a great idea for building grit , but we need more .

And that's where I'm going to end my remarks because that's where we are .

That's the work 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've been successful and we have to be willing to fail , to be wrong , to start over again with lessons learned .

In other words , we need to be gritty about getting our kids grittier .

Thank you .