Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast
I left a very demanding job in management 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 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.
The kinds of things you need to learn in seventh 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
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
than your ability to learn quickly and easily?
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,
Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals.
Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out,
not just for the week, not just for the month,
and working really hard to make that future a reality.
Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint.
I started studying grit in the Chicago public schools.
I asked thousands of high school juniors
and then waited around more than a year
were significantly more likely to graduate,
even when I matched them on every characteristic I could measure,
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
especially for kids at risk for dropping out.
To me, the most shocking thing about grit
how little science knows, about building it.
Every day, parents and teachers ask me,
What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic?
How do I keep them motivated for the long run?"
(Laughter)
What I do know is that talent doesn't make you gritty.
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.
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.
And that's where I'm going to end my remarks,
That's the work that stands before us.
We need to take our best ideas, our strongest intuitions,
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.
(Applause)