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