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  • 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 I.Q. was not the only difference

  • between my best and my worst students.

  • Some of my strongest performers

  • did not have stratospheric I.Q. 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 I.Q.,

  • 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 I.Q.

  • 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)

When I was 27 years old,

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