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When I was 27 years old,
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I left a very demanding job in management consulting
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for a job that was even more demanding: teaching.
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I went to teach seventh graders math in the New York City public schools.
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And like any teacher, I made quizzes and tests.
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I gave out homework assignments.
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When the work came back, I calculated grades.
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What struck me was that I.Q. was not the only difference
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between my best and my worst students.
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Some of my strongest performers
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did not have stratospheric I.Q. scores.
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Some of my smartest kids weren't doing so well.
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And that got me thinking.
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The kinds of things you need to learn in seventh grade math,
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sure, they're hard: ratios, decimals,
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the area of a parallelogram.
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But these concepts are not impossible,
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and I was firmly convinced that every one of my students
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could learn the material
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if they worked hard and long enough.
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After several more years of teaching,
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I came to the conclusion that what we need in education
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is a much better understanding of students and learning from a motivational perspective,
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from a psychological perspective.
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In education, the one thing we know how to measure best is I.Q.,
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but what if doing well in school and in life
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depends on much more
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than your ability to learn quickly and easily?
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So I left the classroom,
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and I went to graduate school to become a psychologist.
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I started studying kids and adults
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in all kinds of super challenging settings,
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and in every study my question was,
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who is successful here and why?
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My research team and I went to West Point Military Academy.
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We tried to predict which cadets
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would stay in military training and which would drop out.
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We went to the National Spelling Bee
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and tried to predict which children would advance farthest in competition.
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We studied rookie teachers working in really tough neighborhoods,
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asking which teachers are still going to be here in teaching by the end of the school year,
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and of those, who will be the most effective
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at improving learning outcomes for their students?
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We partnered with private companies, asking,
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which of these salespeople is going to keep their jobs?
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And who's going to earn the most money?
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In all those very different contexts,
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one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success.
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And it wasn't social intelligence.
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It wasn't good looks, physical health, and it wasn't I.Q.
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It was grit.
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Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals.
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Grit is having stamina.
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Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out,
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not just for the week, not just for the month,
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but for years, and working really hard
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to make that future a reality.
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Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint.
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A few years ago, I started studying grit in the Chicago public schools.
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I asked thousands of high school juniors
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to take grit questionnaires,
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and then waited around more than a year
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to see who would graduate.
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Turns out that grittier kids
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were significantly more likely to graduate,
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even when I matched them on every characteristic I could measure,
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things like family income,
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standardized achievement test scores,
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even how safe kids felt when they were at school.
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So it's not just at West Point or the National Spelling Bee
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that grit matters. It's also in school,
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especially for kids at risk for dropping out.
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To me, the most shocking thing about grit
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is how little we know,
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how little science knows, about building it.
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Every day, parents and teachers ask me,
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"How do I build grit in kids?
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What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic?
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How do I keep them motivated for the long run?"
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The honest answer is, I don't know. (Laughter)
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What I do know is that talent doesn't make you gritty.
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Our data show very clearly
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that there are many talented individuals
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who simply do not follow through on their commitments.
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In fact, in our data, grit is usually unrelated or even inversely related to measures of talent.
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So far, the best idea I've heard about building grit in kids is something called "growth mindset."
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This is an idea developed at Stanford University by Carol Dweck,
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and it is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed, that it can change with your effort.
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Dr. Dweck has shown that when kids read and learn
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about the brain and how it changes and grows in response to challenge,
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they're much more likely to persevere when they fail,
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because they don't believe that failure is a permanent condition.
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So growth mindset is a great idea for building grit.
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But we need more.
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And that's where I'm going to end my remarks,
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because that's where we are.
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That's the work that stands before us.
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We need to take our best ideas, our strongest intuitions,
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and we need to test them.
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We need to measure whether we've been successful,
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and we have to be willing to fail, to be wrong,
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to start over again with lessons learned.
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In other words, we need to be gritty
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about getting our kids grittier.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)