The strongest predictor for success Angela Lee Duckworth
What if doing well in school and in life
depends on much more than your ability to
learn quickly and easily?
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 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.
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.
Every day, parents and teachers ask me,
“How do I build grit in kids?”
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.
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.