Grit: The power of passion and perseverance

TED Talks - Most Popular

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.

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.

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.

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,

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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

(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,

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.

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.

Thank you.

(Applause)