Developing their interests, the first stage of grit development.
And my kids are 13 and 15, my job is to watch them and
to help them explore their interests.
To all of the Asian people watching this, I will say,
>> [LAUGH]
>> Right, I get these
dignitaries at my door.
And they're like, okay, so we have the hard work part prefigured out.
We also know how to fail and come back.
Right, we have all these expressions like fall seven, rise eight.
Okay, what is this you mean by passion, right?
>> [LAUGH] >> And
I think actually the seed of passion is being curious about something.
So I was telling you about this student that I was talking to this morning on
the phone before getting here.
And I asked him, what do you like?
And I was like, look, it doesn't have to be deep.
I'm just like, I like food, right, that's not that deep.
I'm not going to tell you about cooking.
And he was like, well, I like video games.
I like sports, right.
I like stories.
I'm really interested in the psychology of people.
And I was like, okay, great, those are your interests, right.
And your job when you're a parent, and your kids the age that my kids are,
is to watch them and to notice, right.
I notice that you spend more time reading this than that.
I notice that the things you talk about on Saturday morning are the following.
Because, interestingly, interests are not always things that you recognize.
I was telling the students that it took me a decade, between age 22 and 32,
o even realize I should be a psychologist, right.
When I was 22, 23, 24, I was like, well, I like this, I like that.
Only when I was 32 I was like, damn, I am really interested in psychology.
And then I remembered that when I was 16, and I went to summer school,
and I could pick anything in the catalog to take, because I paid for
it myself, so I could do anything I wanted, right,
no parental pressure, I picked nonfiction writing and psychology.
And that's pretty much what I do, right.
>> [LAUGH] >> Why didn't I know when I was 16?
I don't know.
But the job of a parent, or a teacher, or an uncle, or an aunt,
or a coach, is to say, hey, I notice that you seem to really love numbers.
You know?
I've noticed that you kind of like it when everybody's looking at you and
you're on stage, right.
That's interesting to me.
So the development of interest comes first.
Second is a period of sustained, deliberate practice.
And this is hard.
Now, remember the words of Martha Graham.
I don't know that kids who get really into football and are like, it's fun,
I like to throwing the ball around, are like, now I have to do drills, right.
Now, I have to memorize all these plays.
And now my coach is going to tell me all the things that I'm not quite doing as
well as I need to do.
And I need to work on them one at a time with focus and concentration.
That period, I think, should not be confused with the first one.
If the moment that your child is showing some interest in something, you're like,
boom, here's deliberate practice,
let's work on your weaknesses with complete effort and concentration,
it's like, I don't like baking so much, actually, right.
So, I think you need to have what some psychologists call a romance period,
right, where you're just flirting with it and it's fun.
And then you get married, and it's work, right.
>> [LAUGH]
>> [INAUDIBLE] So it is, right, it's just,
like we have to work on this as part of our communication, to really drive it.
>> It's like, yeah, it is.
Claire Robertson-Kraft, Ph.D.Director, ImpactED
Angela Duckworth, Ph.D.Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology
