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Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.

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In her late 20s, Angela Lee Duckworth left a demanding job as a management consultant at McKinsey to teach math in public schools in San Francisco, Philadelphia and New York. After five years of teaching seventh graders, she went back to grad school to complete her Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is now an assistant professor in the psychology department. Her research subjects include students, West Point cadets, and corporate salespeople, all of whom she studies to determine how "grit" is a better indicator of success than factors such as IQ or family income.

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when I was 27 years old I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was Eve more demanding teaching  I went to teach 7th graders math in the New York City public schools and like any teacher play 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 or doing so well and that got me thinking kind of things you need to learn in 7th grade math where are there hard ratios decimals the area of a parallelogram with these concepts are not impossible and I was firmly convinced that one of my students learn the material if they worked hard and long enough  after several more years of teaching I came the conclusion that what we need in education is a much better understanding of students and learning from a motivational perspective from a cycle prospective the one thing we know how to measure best is IQ  but what if doing well and in life depends on much more than your ability to learn quickly and easily so I left the classroom and it went to graduate school to become a psychologist I started studying kids and adults in all kinds of super challenging settings and in every play 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 cats with stay in military training and which would drop out we went to the National Spelling Bee and try to predict which children would Advance far in competition we studied rookie teachers working and really tough neighborhoods asking which teachers are still going to be here in teaching by the when do the school year end of those who'll be the most effective and improving learning outcomes for their students we partnered with private companies asking which of these sales people is going to keep their jobs who's going to earn the most money and all those very different context one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success and it wasn't social intelligence wasn't good looks physical health and it wasn't IQ who was Grit fruit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals is having stamina cooking with your future not just for the week not just for the month but for years hard to make that future reality is living life like it's a marathon not a Sprint a few years ago what is studying in the Chicago public schools of high school juniors to take Britt questionnaires and then waited around more than a year to see who graduate  turns out that grittier kids were significantly more likely to graduate even when I match them on every characteristic good measure things like family income standardized achievement test scores even how Safe Kids felt when they were at school just at West Point or the National Spelling Bee that matters it's also in school especially for kids at risk for dropping out  to me the shocking thing about grit is how little we know how little science knows about building it everyday parents and teachers asked me play build Britain 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 I don't know  what I do know is that talent doesn't make you greedy our data show very clearly that there are many talented who simply do not follow through on their commitments in fact it is usually unrelated or even inversely related measures of talent  so far the best idea I've heard about building grit and kids is something called growth mindset this is my dad developed at Stanford University by Carol dweck and it is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed that it can change your effort shown that when kids read and learn about the brain and how it changes and grows in response to challenge their what's more likely took persevere when they feel because they don't believe that failure is a permanent condition  so broke set 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 word that stands before we need to take our best ideas are strongest intuitions and we need to test them we need some measure whether we've been successful and we have would be willing to fail to be wrong just start over again with Lessons Learned in other words we need to be gritty about when are kids Whittier thank you

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