Virtually all meaning and accomplishment lie in the other side of such times.
How do we sustain effort through challenges, and over a long period?
This is the land of grit, and the expertise of Dr. Angela Duckworth.
If you're a teacher, how do you know a kid has grit?
Like, what's it look like?
>> So what grit looks like in a school-age child, right,
say late elementary school, early middle school.
Is a kid who, when frustrations, when setbacks, when bad grades,
when screw ups, when missed assignments happen,
it's not that they're not disappointed, but they come back.
The other thing though is this idea of really having deepening consistent
interests over time.
So, if you have a gritty student, that's a student who gets very interested in,
you know, the arctic.
And it's not just that they're interested for that week or
that month, but you know, their interest deepens and matures.
And, and maybe a year later they're still interested in, in that direction.
And I think that is one of the goals of education, not just that our kids can do
well on standardized achievement tests and teach learn what we've taught them.
But that they develop their own particular interests.
The ones that they're going to then go on to specialize in later.
>> What does grit and self-control lead to?
>> Grit and self-control are things that I study, because they predict success.
So grit in particular, predicting success in very challenging circumstances.
Grit predicts making it out of West Point Military Academy in
not only the first very hard summer where there's a sizable attrition, but
also making it out all the way through the four years, right?
So a dropout at West Point is roughly, you know, 20 to 25%,
and the grittier cadets are more likely to, to make it through.
Grit predicts winning the National Spelling Bee.
Grit predicts keeping your job if you're in sales,
which has a turnover rate of about 50% in the first year.
In a sample of thousands of Chicago public high school juniors,
grit predicts graduating one year later as a senior.
Grit actually predicts things where I think the challenge is to stay in
the game, right?
As Woody Allen said, 80% of success in life is showing up.
And grit predicts showing up and, and trying hard when you're there.
>> Can anyone be successful without grit?
>> I don't know of any counterexamples to the idea that, you know,
accomplishing something very, very, very worthwhile could be
done without this kind of determination in the face of adversity.
And also, this ability or this disposition to pursue, single-mindedly, a very small
set of goals as opposed to, you know, kind of being a dilettante and being all over.
>> What is IQ good for predicting?
>> Mm-hm.
>> What about, do grit and self-control really predict things that IQ don't?
How does that really work?
>> In my research, grit is usually either completely unrelated to IQ.
Or, sometimes inversely related, meaning that individuals who
are a little higher in IQ, on average, are slightly lower in grit.
And so I worry, actually, about those kids who are,
you know, very able, but haven't yet developed these other capacities.
>> Dominic describes that often as the fragile thoroughbred.
>> Yeah and actually my expression for it is fragile perfects, right?
>> Yeah.
>> The kids who are unblemished, right?
They've never gotten less than an A plus in their life,
and at some point, you know, you're going to disappoint your supervisor.
And at some point, you're going to, you know, lose the Fellowship or get rejected.
Or, or really screw up, right?
I mean I've made tons of mistakes and
I, you know, need to figure out how to cry about them.
But then how eventually to learn from them, and how to get up the next day and
keep going.
And I do think that if you defer that learning experience too far in life,
it becomes very, very hard to do.
>> How do you teach it?
>> How do you teach grit?
>> Yeah, how do you teach grit?
>> We're working on it.
You know, we don't know yet, really.
You know, do we even know for sure that you can teach it?
No, we don't.
we, we know that, that character skills like grit and
self-control are not entirely genetic.
So that gives you some hope that you can teach it but
not all of experiences didactic direct teaching.
So, so, so, here, here's where we are.
This is what we're, we're hoping will, will prove to be true.
In particular we're walking on the idea that kids may not have accurate beliefs or
understanding about practice.
one, how, how much practice matters, right?
They might know that practice matters, but when they see the student get all A's in
the class or they watch television, they see some, you know, basketball player
that, you know, watched the footage of the Olympics, they may think oh, well when you
look at really good performance, practice matters a little bit.
Where we want to tell them, no, it matters a lot.
Second thing we want to show them, is that practice is actually not fun.
Not even for people who are really at the top of their game.
When experts are doing the kind of practice that makes them better,
they're frequently failing.
They're frequently confused.
Not even, necessarily, seeing gain for what will feel like a very long time.
So, teaching kids not to expect that they will be succeeding the whole time, and
feeling really great about themselves, actually to anticipate that, you know,
these emotions, these feelings can be pretty hard, right?
And actually to reward themselves, like oh, I, I just studied for half an hour and
I was totally confused.
Like, great, like, you know, I must be doing the hardest kind of practice.
The other, you know, thing that we want to make sure kids understand about
effective deliberate practice is that there needs to be feedback.
If they don't know whether they're doing the right thing or
the wrong thing, whether it's studying the right way,
studying the right material, they need to be proactive in the classroom.
Outside of the classroom.
Make sure they're getting, they're closing the feedback loop.