Grit: The power of passion and perseverance

Leaving a high-flying job in consulting, Angela Lee Duckworth took a job teaching math to seventh graders in a New York public school. She quickly realized that IQ wasn’t the only thing separating the successful students from those who struggled. Here, she explains her theory of “grit” as a predictor of success.

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 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 I.Q. was not the only difference

between my best and my worst students.

Some of my strongest performers

did not have stratospheric I.Q. 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 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

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 I.Q., 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 I.Q.

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. (Laughter)

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.

Dr. 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.

(Applause)