Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance | Angela Lee Duckworth | TED

Summary

Angela Lee Duckworth recounts her journey from a demanding management consultant to a math teacher, where she discovered that grit, not just IQ, predicted student success. Intrigued by this, she pursued psychology to explore grit’s influence across various challenging settings. Duckworth’s research uncovered that grit—a blend of passion and perseverance for long-term goals—was a critical success predictor. Despite discovering the importance of grit, Duckworth highlights the challenge of instilling it, noting the promising 'growth mindset' concept from Stanford that fosters perseverance by viewing learning ability as adaptable. Duckworth emphasizes the need for continued research and innovation to effectively nurture grit in youth.

Highlights

• Angela Duckworth transitioned from consulting to teaching and observed that IQ alone wasn’t the key to student success, but grit was. 🎓
• Grit is about maintaining passion and perseverance for goals over the long term, beyond just months or years. 💫
• Studies showed that grittier kids had higher graduation rates, even controlling for other factors like income and test scores. 🎈
• Despite its importance, science still hasn’t pinpointed how to develop grit, though 'growth mindset' offers a promising start. 🌱
• Being gritty is about testing our best ideas, learning from failures, and constantly aiming to improve and impact youth positively. 📚

Key Takeaways

• Grit, a mix of passion and perseverance, is crucial for achieving long-term goals and is a stronger success predictor than IQ. 🏆
• Challenge yourself with the 'growth mindset' by embracing failures as opportunities for growth, which can help build grit. 💪
• Teachers and parents play a pivotal role in fostering grit by focusing on effort over talent and encouraging children to persist despite challenges. 👩‍🏫
• Continued research and testing can help develop better strategies for nurturing grit in kids. 🔬
• Living life like a marathon, not a sprint, is a valuable mindset to cultivate enduring perseverance. 🏃

Overview

Angela Lee Duckworth shares her enlightening journey from the corporate world of management consulting to the rewarding yet challenging realm of teaching seventh graders in New York City. This transition brought her face to face with a crucial insight: students' success wasn’t necessarily tied to their IQ scores. Instead, it depended significantly on their grit – a combination of passion and resilience for long-term goals.

Duckworth's curiosity about what makes individuals successful led her to pursue psychology and study grit across diverse environments, from military academies to public schools. Her research demonstrated that grit was a decisive factor in who persevered and excelled, regardless of background or innate intelligence. Students with more grit were more likely to graduate, showcasing grit’s far-reaching impact.

Despite the importance of grit, Duckworth highlights the gap in laying down concrete methods to cultivate it. The promising concept of 'growth mindset' from Stanford suggests that viewing intelligence as mutable can enhance grit by encouraging perseverance through challenges. Duckworth concludes by emphasizing the ongoing need for experimental efforts to successfully impart grit to future generations.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction: A Career Change to Teaching At 27, the speaker transitioned from a demanding management consulting job to an even more demanding teaching role, specifically teaching seventh-grade math in New York City's public schools. In this role, the speaker engaged in typical teaching activities, such as creating quizzes and tests.
• 00:30 - 01:00: Observations on IQ and Student Performance The chapter explores the relationship between IQ and student performance, highlighting that IQ is not the sole determinant of success in academic settings. Despite having varying IQ levels, some of the best students do not necessarily have the highest IQ scores, whereas some highly intelligent students struggle academically. This observation provokes a reflection on what truly contributes to learning success in subjects like seventh grade math, which involves challenging topics such as ratios, decimals, and calculating the area of parallelograms.
• 01:00 - 01:30: The Need for a Motivational Perspective in Education The chapter discusses the importance of understanding education from both motivational and psychological perspectives. It emphasizes that with hard work and perseverance, all students have the potential to learn. The author reflects on their teaching experience and concludes that a deeper insight into students' motivations can significantly enhance educational effectiveness.
• 01:30 - 02:00: Research on Success in Various Fields The chapter explores the limitations of IQ as a sole indicator of success in education and life. It posits that success encompasses more than just learning ability. The author shares their journey from teaching to psychology to study success determinants in challenging environments, focusing on factors beyond IQ.
• 02:00 - 02:30: Introduction of the Concept of Grit The chapter "Introduction of the Concept of Grit" investigates the factors that contribute to success. It focuses on research conducted by the author and their team at West Point Military Academy, as they attempt to predict which cadets will complete military training and which will not. Their work extends to the National Spelling Bee, where they try to foresee which children will excel the furthest in the competition. Additionally, the research covers rookie teachers working in challenging neighborhoods, questioning which of these teachers will continue to teach by the end of the school year. This chapter sets the stage for understanding the role of grit in achieving success across various fields.
• 02:30 - 03:00: Research on Grit in Education This chapter explores the concept of grit and its role as a predictor of success in various contexts, including education and sales. The chapter describes a study that partnered with private companies to identify which characteristics would lead to better learning outcomes for students and higher sales performance. The research found that grit, rather than social intelligence, physical appearance, health, or IQ, was the most significant factor in predicting success.
• 03:00 - 04:00: The Challenge of Building Grit Grit is defined as passion and perseverance for long-term goals, emphasizing the importance of stamina and consistency over years to achieve future aspirations. It advocates for a marathon-like approach to life rather than a sprint. The study of grit began in the Chicago public schools.
• 04:00 - 05:00: Growth Mindset as a Strategy to Build Grit The chapter explores the role of a growth mindset as a strategy to develop grit among individuals. The author conducted research involving thousands of high school juniors by administering grit questionnaires and tracking their progress over more than a year. The findings revealed that students with higher levels of grit were substantially more likely to graduate, even when accounting for factors such as family income, achievement test scores, and perceived safety at school. This emphasizes the importance of grit in personal development and success, extending beyond contexts like West Point and the National Spelling Bee.
• 05:00 - 06:00: Conclusion: The Need for Further Research The chapter titled "Conclusion: The Need for Further Research" discusses the importance of grit, particularly in educational settings where students may be at risk of dropping out. The surprising revelation is the limited scientific understanding and knowledge about effectively cultivating grit. Questions from parents and teachers about fostering grit and sustaining motivation in children remain largely unanswered, as the author admits to not having definitive solutions. This highlights a significant gap in research and underscores the necessity for further exploration in this area.

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance | Angela Lee Duckworth | TED Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 Transcriber: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast 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.
• 00:30 - 01:00 I gave out homework assignments. When the work came back, I calculated grades. What struck me was that IQ was not the only difference between my best and my worst students. Some of my strongest performers did not have stratospheric IQ 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.
• 01:00 - 01:30 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.
• 01:30 - 02:00 In education, the one thing we know how to measure best is IQ. 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,
• 02:00 - 02:30 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,
• 02:30 - 03:00 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 IQ. It was grit.
• 03:00 - 03:30 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.
• 03:30 - 04:00 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
• 04:00 - 04:30 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.
• 04:30 - 05:00 (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,
• 05:00 - 05:30 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.
• 05:30 - 06:00 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.
• 06:00 - 06:30 Thank you. (Applause)