Overcoming adversity towards academic success

[Music]

gandhi inspired us

by adopting nonviolent resistance

to change the world and he brought

independence to india

and he inspired martin luther king

who by the way told us that injustice

anywhere

is a threat to justice everywhere

and those words inspire maya angelou

who through her writing her prose her

verses

she re-energized the civil rights

movement

but it is not just about these thinkers

and philosophers

it’s also about the great people in

sports

who excel even with clear physical

limitations and tarana berkey who

overcame her own traumatic experiences

to advocate for women who have survived

sexual violence

and what about the asylum seekers who

left

everything behind and risked their own

lives

for a new life and not only for

themselves but also for their families

or what about stephen hawkings who at

the age of 21

he was diagnosed with this debilitating

lugaric disease

that would eventually paralyze his body

but not his mind or soul

and eventually he saw some of the

greatest questions in the universe

so these individuals have shaped the

world today

and we have to wonder what do they have

in common

and some of us would like to say oh they

were diligent and they had passion and

conviction and drive and guts

with a mechanical sense i think of them

as heat pumps

they’re able to pull out heat even from

the cold

to convert opportunities out of the

adversities

and then others say well and we heard

that a lot resilience

and determination and willpower and

perseverance and patience

the old philosophers used to talk about

fortitude that was in the the greeks

and fortitude was such a beautiful word

it was adopted by theologians

and in fact it became a cardinal virtue

and then we say about tenacity

psychology talk about hardiness

and nowadays we talk about grit

what angela dagworth says is that power

in passion and perseverance

but we have to wonder what triggers it

and how does it happen and to do that

let’s explore some of the lives of the

individuals we some of them we have

already mentioned

so let’s start i’m getting ahead of

myself

i just want to add one more thing before

i jump into their lives i want to say

that

individually they exhibit exceptional

grit but in so doing they were able to

catalyze the collective grit in all of

us

today we see examples of that in all

these emerging movements around the

world some of them

emerging in the us but they are rapidly

spreading around the world and like

black lives matter and the metoo

movement and the challenges of

immigration and all forms of inequality

let’s now explore the lives of some of

these great individuals and we can find

them in all sorts of life let’s

start for example with sports eliot

kipchoge

run all his life he went to school

running every day

and he ran almost three kilometers each

way and at the age of 16 he met

his neighbor who had actually been an

olympic medalist

he became the inspiration and the

trainer

and in so doing he continued running now

making

beating the world records in the 5000

meters and the 10 000 meters

however he did not manage to qualify to

represent kenya

for the olympics that was a huge blow

he had devoted his life to that

and so thanks with the inspiration of

his coach

and his own gods he began training for

the marathon

and he won several half marathons

creating world records

and within three years he won the berlin

marathon

and eventually he would win gold medal

in brazil

but that wasn’t enough and he went on

to be the first person ever to run a

marathon in less than two hours

the story of maya angelou is a more

difficult one

to tell at three she was abandoned by

her parents

and in fact at the age of three and her

brother four they were sent across the

u.s

by themselves to stay with grandma

in an area with lots of racial

challenges

with microaggressions of the racial

inequalities every day of her life

by eight she went back to her mom and

she was raped

and she stopped talking she stopped

talking became a mute

for several years of her life five or

six years

a family friend during that time

introduced her to the great books

great authors and in reading those

she found her soul and she regained her

voice

at 16 she was a mother

and through a very tumultuous life

eventually she would hear martin luther

king

and she was inspired by king’s vision

she came back from ghana

to help malcolm x with

the civil rights movement and soon

afterwards michael max was assassinated

she regained her energies and in so

doing she began contributing to martin

luther king’s

momentum soon afterwards martin luther

king was assassinated

and in the deep of these very traveling

and

consecutive events says maya you have

great stories to tell you should write a

book

and so she did and her first book

brought her incredible success i know

why the caged bird sings

and once again as i said earlier with

her words he re-energized the civil

rights movement

until the last days of her life

and for us in academia lantern is

clearly one of those geniuses who was a

genius from early age

even though he didn’t do very well at

school he did very well in math but

nothing

poorly in everything else because his

interests were very clear

earlier on in high school at 13 he met

we would become his intellectual

match and soul mate colin

and they began solving some fascinating

problems

unfortunately colin passed at 18

and it was a big depressing time for

alan turing

in fact he writes to colin’s mom and

says i promise

i will redouble my efforts to advance

the

topics that so fascinated us

and he did he solved some of the

greatest challenges in mathematics he

became the father of computer science

he broke the german enigma probably by

so doing

he shortened the world war by probably a

couple of years saving millions of lives

at the age of 40 he was convicted of

indecency

and the consequences of that he couldn’t

cope with

and he took his own life a year later

so those wiggles that i’ve been

sketching as we analyze their lives of

these individuals

try to capture the mood the energy level

our emotional response to

adversity to negative events

and we see that we can go in different

levels

of collapse

this reflects our sensitivity

and then it is a matter of how fast we

manage to recover

and some individuals in that rebound

they can overshoot they commit

themselves to being better than they

were

we also saw if you were attentive that i

had put some

green arrows those green arrows are the

individuals who touched our lives

kipchoge’s coach

picasso’s inspiring muse

maya angelou who spoke about the

rainbows in our clouds and for us in

academia those inspiring mentors

that push us to go beyond

and of course we are attempting to put

an exponential recovery curve and make

all the analysis but let’s just do it

schematically to see how life is all

about because

when we read the life of this great

individual which is

we just recover some few events but

out of our own lives we know that

we always have these events coming on

and off in our lives

and so it is a matter of how often they

come and how strong

can we recover how fast can we recover

if we do so eventually we become

stronger and stronger

the proof of our grid however sometimes

they come too often

or we don’t recover fast enough or we

overreact

to some of those events and then it is

very difficult to

dig ourselves out of the hole

covet was one of these experiments a

worldwide experiment earlier on in the

cove

pandem pandemic and gabby abelskam and

myself began collecting data from all

over the world we interviewed people

from

asia to america to europe even

here in the in the on campus and in

saudi arabia

and we noticed that there was about one

quarter of the population

this is all among academics graduate

students and professors

about one quarter of the population

managed to remain

positive in fact a quarter of the

population felt that this was an

opportunity

to grow even faster and better

and then we wonder what do they have in

common

and they have three key characteristics

one they set themselves daily goals

two they remain focused on their

personal and intellectual growth

three they made a commitment in the

middle of the quarantines and the

lockdowns

that they were going to dig deeper into

the concepts that we’re exploring

but this one this little sketch also

gives you some idea

of the political discourse that you hear

when you read the news those who believe

that individuals it is all up to the

individuals to

to to bootstrap to to to recover and be

strong

and others who say some individuals are

so

continuously bombarded with negative

feedback that it is our role in society

to give them a hand to come out

so now let’s begin conversing to our

lives as academicians graduate students

and faculty members

and i tried to remember my life as a

graduate student and there were plenty

of

negative spikes pushing down

the grade that didn’t turn out to be as

much as i expected

the research report that my advisor

necessarily

didn’t appreciate that much a paper that

got rejected going through

comprehensives

the final phd defense but i have to say

that throughout that period

and here i’m just trying to sketch one

year in our lives

throughout that period there were

amazing opportunities to meet

incredible minds those that have

inspired me the rest of my life

now as a more senior academician i’m

still

bombarded with negative events and maybe

you don’t realize that

but we submit many papers and

the likelihood is that we are going to

get lots of nasty reviewers

only a small percentage of proposals get

funded worldwide

our students are not necessarily that

complementary when they evaluate the

courses at the end of the semester

but throughout this period we gain great

strength probably in the intimate

isolation of working on our research

and that is what the blue segment tries

to represent

now the question is does this grit

really make a difference in the ultimate

success

of somebody in academia and so we

actually set ourselves to to find

to see if we could evaluate this we

created the scales and we asked

lots of people to evaluate individuals

they knew very well

in academic contexts we asked them to

tell us

what is their intellectual capacity

their grit

their dedication how successful have

they been

are they satisfied

we compile all these data that becomes

an inverse problem and i’m not going to

worry with details just to tell you that

these are the results

if you make a little bit of a mix

between intellectual capacity

grit and dedication you’re going to

very well predict the individual’s

success in the academic setting

an intellectual capacity does play a

significant role

even though by the fact that you’re here

on average we are

we are above the 110 115

in iq but still

there will be important differences that

will determine your ultimate success

but what is what is more important is

that you group

grit and dedication together they are

very difficult to

untangle by the way but if you bring

them together

they call the shot our ability

not to be put down by negative feedback

to recover

to commit ourselves to be even better

and the persistence

the dedication what kip shoghi calls

about persistence

and patience that will make a difference

there there are two data sets showing

the same story but let me now

re-plot with different colors exactly

the same data set

but i just i’m distinguishing here those

individuals with low grit

and dedication the red points

individuals who

react very deeply to negative feedback

and who have a low recovery time

compared to individuals with high grit

and dedication who are willing

to wake up the following day to give it

all their best to be even better

and who are willing to dedicate

themselves to make it happen

clearly those are determinant of success

but remember we ask another question are

those individuals

satisfied quite difficult to assess as

external because we don’t know the inner

emotions of others

but nevertheless so far the data shows

that satisfaction

no correlation with the intellectual

capacity satisfaction

no correlation with grid no correlation

with education no correlation with

success

in closing

academic success does depend on how we

react to negative feedback

we have to raise our threshold not to

sweat the the small stuff

we have to commit ourselves to wake up

the following day after a paper got

rejected and said i’m going to rewrite

and i’m going to send it to even better

journal

and i’m going to gain greater depth in

that

concept that i’m addressing

it also depends on the great individuals

we have come across in our lives who

have believed in us

and who have stimulated us to be all we

can be

the last part of the presentation showed

us that it is not the smartest

not the grittiest nor the most

successful that is satisfied

apparently satisfaction belongs to those

who find and embrace their calling

thank you