Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance — Angela Duckworth

00:00Transcriber: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast

00:12When I was 27 years old,

00:14I left a very demanding job in management consulting

00:18for a job that was even more demanding: teaching.

00:23I went to teach seventh graders math

00:25in the New York City public schools.

00:28And like any teacher, I made quizzes and tests.

00:31I gave out homework assignments.

00:33When the work came back, I calculated grades.

00:36What struck me was that IQ was not the only difference

00:41between my best and my worst students.

00:45Some of my strongest performers did not have stratospheric IQ scores.

00:50Some of my smartest kids weren't doing so well.

00:54And that got me thinking.

00:56The kinds of things you need to learn in seventh grade math,

00:59sure, they're hard: ratios, decimals, the area of a parallelogram.

01:04But these concepts are not impossible,

01:07and I was firmly convinced that every one of my students

01:11could learn the material

01:14if they worked hard and long enough.

01:16After several more years of teaching,

01:19I came to the conclusion that what we need in education

01:23is a much better understanding of students and learning

01:26from a motivational perspective,

01:28from a psychological perspective.

01:31In education, the one thing we know how to measure best is IQ.

01:38But what if doing well in school and in life

01:42depends on much more

01:44than your ability to learn quickly and easily?

01:48So I left the classroom,

01:50and I went to graduate school to become a psychologist.

01:53I started studying kids and adults

01:56in all kinds of super challenging settings,

01:58and in every study my question was,

02:01who is successful here and why?

02:04My research team and I went to West Point Military Academy.

02:08We tried to predict which cadets

02:10would stay in military training and which would drop out.

02:14We went to the National Spelling Bee

02:16and tried to predict which children would advance farthest in competition.

02:21We studied rookie teachers working in really tough neighborhoods,

02:25asking which teachers are still going to be here in teaching

02:29by the end of the school year,

02:31and of those, who will be the most effective

02:34at improving learning outcomes for their students?

02:37We partnered with private companies, asking,

02:39which of these salespeople is going to keep their jobs?

02:42And who's going to earn the most money?

02:44In all those very different contexts,

02:47one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success.

02:52And it wasn't social intelligence.

02:54It wasn't good looks, physical health,

02:57and it wasn't IQ.

02:59It was grit.

03:01Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals.

03:06Grit is having stamina.

03:09Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out,

03:13not just for the week, not just for the month,

03:16but for years,

03:18and working really hard to make that future a reality.

03:22Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint.

03:28A few years ago,

03:29I started studying grit in the Chicago public schools.

03:33I asked thousands of high school juniors

03:35to take grit questionnaires,

03:37and then waited around more than a year

03:39to see who would graduate.

03:41Turns out that grittier kids

03:43were significantly more likely to graduate,

03:46even when I matched them on every characteristic I could measure,

03:50things like family income,

03:53standardized achievement test scores,

03:55even how safe kids felt when they were at school.

03:59So it's not just at West Point or the National Spelling Bee

04:02that grit matters.

04:03It's also in school,

04:05especially for kids at risk for dropping out.

04:09To me, the most shocking thing about grit

04:12is how little we know,

04:14how little science knows, about building it.

04:16Every day, parents and teachers ask me,

04:19"How do I build grit in kids?

04:21What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic?

04:24How do I keep them motivated for the long run?"

04:27The honest answer is,

04:29I don't know.

04:30(Laughter)

04:32What I do know is that talent doesn't make you gritty.

04:35Our data show very clearly

04:37that there are many talented individuals

04:40who simply do not follow through on their commitments.

04:43In fact, in our data, grit is usually unrelated

04:48or even inversely related to measures of talent.

04:52So far, the best idea I've heard about building grit in kids

04:56is something called "growth mindset."

04:59This is an idea developed at Stanford University by Carol Dweck,

05:03and it is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed,

05:08that it can change with your effort.

05:11Dr. Dweck has shown

05:12that when kids read and learn about the brain

05:15and how it changes and grows in response to challenge,

05:19they're much more likely to persevere when they fail,

05:23because they don't believe that failure is a permanent condition.

05:29So growth mindset is a great idea for building grit.

05:32But we need more.

05:34And that's where I'm going to end my remarks,

05:36because that's where we are.

05:38That's the work that stands before us.

05:40We need to take our best ideas, our strongest intuitions,

05:44and we need to test them.

05:46We need to measure whether we've been successful,

05:49and we have to be willing to fail, to be wrong,

05:52to start over again with lessons learned.

05:56In other words, we need to be gritty

05:59about getting our kids grittier.

06:02Thank you.

06:03(Applause)