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

0:00 Transcriber: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast When I was 27 years old,

0:14 I left a very demanding job in management consulting

0:18 for a job that was even more demanding: teaching.

0:23 I went to teach seventh graders math in the New York City public schools.

0:28 And like any teacher, I made quizzes and tests.

0:31 I gave out homework assignments.

0:33 When the work came back, I calculated grades.

0:36 What struck me was that IQ was not

0:40 the only difference between my best and my worst students.

0:45 Some of my strongest performers did not have stratospheric IQ scores.

0:50 Some of my smartest kids weren't doing so well.

0:54 And that got me thinking.

0:56 The kinds of things you need to learn in seventh grade math,

0:59 sure, they're hard: ratios, decimals, the area of a parallelogram.

1:04 But these concepts are not impossible,

1:07 and I was firmly convinced that every one of my students

1:11 could learn the material if they worked hard and long enough.

1:16 After several more years of teaching,

1:19 I came to the conclusion that what we need in education is

1:23 a much better understanding of students

1:25 and learning from a motivational perspective, from a psychological perspective.

1:31 In education, the one thing we know how to measure best is IQ.

1:38 But what if doing well in school and in life depends

1:42 on much more than your ability to learn quickly and easily?

1:48 So I left the classroom, and I went to graduate school to become a psychologist.

1:53 I started studying kids and adults in all kinds of super challenging settings,

1:58 and in every study my question was, who is successful here and why?

2:04 My research team and I went to West Point Military Academy.

2:08 We tried to predict which cadets would stay

2:10 in military training and which would drop out.

2:14 We went to the National Spelling Bee and tried

2:17 to predict which children would advance farthest in competition.

2:21 We studied rookie teachers working in really tough neighborhoods,

2:25 asking which teachers are still going to be here

2:28 in teaching by the end of the school year, and of those, who will be the most

2:34 effective at improving learning outcomes for their students?

2:37 We partnered with private companies, asking,

2:39 which of these salespeople is going to keep their jobs?

2:42 And who's going to earn the most money?

2:44 In all those very different contexts,

2:47 one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success.

2:52 And it wasn't social intelligence.

2:54 It wasn't good looks, physical health, and it wasn't IQ.

2:59 It was grit.

3:01 Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals.

3:06 Grit is having stamina.

3:09 Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week,

3:15 not just for the month, but for years,

3:18 and working really hard to make that future a reality.

3:22 Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint.

3:28 A few years ago, I started studying grit in the Chicago public schools.

3:33 I asked thousands of high school juniors to take grit questionnaires,

3:37 and then waited around more than a year to see who would graduate.

3:41 Turns out that grittier kids were significantly more likely to graduate,

3:46 even when I matched them on every characteristic I could measure,

3:50 things like family income, standardized achievement test scores,

3:55 even how safe kids felt when they were at school.

3:59 So it's not just at West Point or the National Spelling Bee that grit matters.

4:03 It's also in school, especially for kids at risk for dropping out.

4:09 To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know,

4:14 how little science knows, about building it.

4:16 Every day, parents and teachers ask me, "How do I build grit in kids?

4:21 What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic?

4:24 How do I keep them motivated for the long

4:26 run?" The honest answer is, I don't know.

4:30 (Laughter) What I do know is that talent doesn't make you gritty.

4:35 Our data show very clearly that there are many talented

4:39 individuals who simply do not follow through on their commitments.

4:43 In fact, in our data,

4:46 grit is usually unrelated or even inversely related to measures of talent.

4:52 So far, the best idea I've heard about building grit in kids is something

4:57 called "growth mindset." This is an idea

5:00 developed at Stanford University by Carol Dweck,

5:03 and it is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed,

5:08 that it can change with your effort.

5:11 Dr.

5:11 Dweck has shown that when kids read and learn about

5:15 the brain and how it changes and grows in response to challenge,

5:19 they're much more likely to persevere when they fail,

5:23 because they don't believe that failure is a permanent condition.

5:29 So growth mindset is a great idea for building grit.

5:32 But we need more.

5:34 And that's where I'm going to end my remarks, because that's where we are.

5:38 That's the work that stands before us.

5:40 We need to take our best ideas,

5:43 our strongest intuitions, and we need to test them.

5:46 We need to measure whether we've been successful,

5:49 and we have to be willing to fail,

5:51 to be wrong, to start over again with lessons learned.

5:56 In other words, we need to be gritty about getting our kids grittier.

6:02 Thank you.

6:03 (Applause)