True Grit - Can Perseverance be Taught? - Angela Lee Duckworth at TEDxBlue

Dr. Angela Lee Duckworth studies non-IQ competencies that predict success both academically and professionally. Her research populations have included West Point cadets, National Spelling Bee finalists, novice teachers, salespeople, and students.

I'm a psychologist and I study achievement.

Most psychologists who study
achievement study intelligence.

And if the last talk didn't convince you

and I have a suspicion you didn't
need a whole lot of convincing,

intelligence is, there's only part of the story,

maybe a very small part of the story.

And it is, in fact possible that we even have

that small part of the story wrong.

In terms of intelligence being thought to be

something largely inherited and not developed.

Something that is relatively immutable
over the course of one's life.

But I came to a study of all the other
things that intelligence,

everything else, that made up achievement.

In kind of a circuitous route --
so I was 32 when I started graduate school.

You know, I turned to my left and to my right and

everybody else was drinking cappuccino and studying at

one in the morning because they were 22, not 32.

And so, I actually think my
life story is a great example

of actually not have grit,
not having enough grit.

Maybe some talent but not actually having --

What I now study is one of the key and

probably necessary ingredients of high achievement

in any field that you want to consider.

So, what I did between the age of 22 and 32 was many

different things all of which I think
sounded good on a resume.

I was a McKinsey Consultant, I went to Oxford

for a couple of years on a prestigious fellowship.

I was the COO of a non-profit website for parents

to get school information that sounds good,

that was good, sounds good and was good.

I taught in various schools in New York

and in Philadelphia and in San Francisco.

And all this added up to
a great person to have dinner with

because that person, had done
a lot of interesting things

and have done most of those
things actually relatively well.

But what I realized is that if you are a boat,

a really fast, shiny boat,
which is going quickly towards

one destination but then
tacks to another direction,

to go to another port, and then tacks again --

Essentially you end up being a really
shiny boat that goes fast nowhere.

And, so my own kind of personal experience

and probably my lack of grit, actually,

led me to study this quality in some detail.

And I'm gonna mention,
something that I'll get to

later in the talk but it's called the "10 year rule."

It turns out that there is really no domain of expertise

that has been studied where the world class performers

have put in fewer than 10 years of consistent,

deliberate practice to get to where they are.

So, I started graduate school in 2002 --

I have three more years on my clock -- which means

many things, among which means I can't give up until

I have at least put in my 10 years and see,

whether I've gotten anywhere.

Psychologist have been interested in the distinction

between talent and everything else for years.

Right? So, before we had words to describe it

we were also probably interested in it.

But here is a quote from Clark Hall, one of the eminent

American psychologist of the early 20th century.

He wrote a little review, he kind of reviewed the literature

that was out there, which was quite easy to do in 1928,

there was a whole lot less of it.

He said, you know there are really two things:

there's our talent and I would emphasize what

Chris said, talent is multifaceted, there's creativity,

there's visual creativity, that different from musical creativity,

there's analytical talent, there's athletic talent,

there is musical talent.

But let's put them all on one category.

There's intelligence as conventionally defined,

and then there are all those many things that are

so much worse understood in a way,

all the capacities that allow us to unlock our talents and

he would put those in the category of industry.

William James made the same distinction.

William James wrote a famous essay
in 1907 called, "The Energies of Men,"

and William James who arguably is the founder of

American psychology said there are our talents and

those things that unlock our talents and we could design

all of psychology to try to understand these two things.

I would argue that we've done
some amount of work on the

talents and almost nothing on the unlocking.

When I considered what is it that unlocks people's

potential, what enables people
to become a world class musician,

a world class teacher,
a world class performer.

I struggled with this word
to call what I was becoming

to understand was one of these key ingredients.

Eventually I called it grit, which I named in part after the

somewhat mediocre western John Wayne starred in;

I'll say a little more about that
but, the reason why I came

to this concept of grit was
I interviewed people that I knew

that were at the tops of their fields,

so it was relatively opportunistic.

I mean I interviewed my friend
who had won a MacArthur,

I interviewed investment bankers

who at least at that time were very successful.

I interviewed, musicians and professors, and alike.

And people would often say, the people who are

top in my field are the really talented ones.

But just as often, and in fact I would say more often,

people said that these individuals at the top of

their fields had this kind of tenacious, dogged

perseverance unlike anyone else that they knew and

it was actually that which
vaulted them to the to the top.

So I called it "true grit" after this movie which is

really about a young girl from Yale County, Arkansas

who like in typical western form,
her father is unjustly murdered,

she spends the rest of the movie avenging his death,

and Rooster Cogburn plays the one-eyed,

semi-alcoholic sheriff who follows her along.

And everyone thinks that true grit is really about

John Wayne, of course,
and it's really about this young

girl who against all odds
pursues a very long term,

almost impossible goal and eventually --

with the emphasis on eventually, succeeds in that goal.

And this is the quality that I study.

Charles Darwin had a half cousin named Francis Galton,

and they shared a correspondence.

I like to think that correspondence today is as rich and

personally reveling as it was
when you had to put a pen to paper.

So, maybe if they had emailed they would have shared

the same kinds of conversations.

This conversation, this quote, this is actually the letter on

the left and, maybe a little more legible on the right,

was Charles Darwin's response to Francis Galton

who had written a book called "Hereditary Genius."

Francis Galton made the claim that genius had 3 parts:

one part talent, one part passion
or zeal and one part hard work.

And Charles Darwin's response to that was,

"That's a really interesting idea,
I thought it was all

the hard work and the passion,
maybe there's a role for talent after all."

Charles Darwin himself didn't actually consider

his intellect to be at all special.

He thought he had a quite ordinary mind.

But a very specific interest and focus
and a lot of zeal and hard work.

Moving up a little closer to where we are in time,

there was a graduate student
at Stanford named Katherine Cox,

she was a graduate student of a professor
there named Lewis Termin,

he gave us, possibly the most widely used

intelligence test today, the Sanford-Binnet IQ test.

She was doing her graduate work in a lab where

everybody studied intelligence and how to measure it

and was it possible to measure it very early in life and

could we predict genius and so forth.

And Katherine took a very
different take on her own research,

she wanted to know what
are these other qualities that

make for genius, that make for realized genius,

people who are actually going to
do something in the world.

So she read the biographies of
300 well known geniuses

and she isolated a few qualities
which really distinguish

the geniuses who made a mark on the world.

One of them was the tendency not to abandon task

from mere changeability in her words.

In other words not being a dilettante, not being a flake,

not being me from the age of 22 to 32. Right?

Sort of from one award to another, from one career

to another, never actually setting sights on a port that

I was going to consistently work towards, right?

And I think we know many extremely bright people

who don't have the capacity to stay on task,

towards one goal and keep switching
from one to the other.

I teach at Penn, I see hundreds and thousands of

kids pass through Penn's, you know, Ivy League portals

and they have this conception
that essentially when they go off

into the world it will be an OK
and good strategy to go to

law school and if I don't like law, I filled my pre-med

requirements so I could always
go back and do medical school and

if I don't like that there's always
management consulting;

the fall back of any Ivy League graduate, right.

And what I want to tell them
is that history and psychology

tell us that changing around a lot is actually not

a good way to get anywhere.
The other quality that she

isolated in her work, in her sort of reading of biographies

was probably more predictable,
I think many teachers

and even many kids might recognize that

having perseverance in the face of adversity,

setbacks, failures, that is important.

And that it's the combination
of those things that I call grit.

So it's this stamina quality not just being passionate

but sustaining that passion for a long time.

And these are items that
I give in a questionnaire

when I try to measure this quality in studies.

Then the perseverance part as well, right.

Setbacks don't disappoint me,

I finish whatever I begin, I'm determined.

I'm going to walk you through a couple of studies,

and then I am going to speculate and it's only going to be

a speculation about what we could possibly do for

young people to cultivate this quality.

The first study I want to tell you about was done

at West Point Military Academy.

The first summer when you go to

West Point is called "Beast Barracks."

So you show up, they check you for tattoos,

can't have a tattoo if you go to West Point,

they shave your hair,
they sit you down and you take

a very long battery of psychological intelligence tests.

So I slipped in the grit scale, on this second day of

training for a group of cadets.

And like many other psychologist I had my battery of

measures kind of hoping that I would be able

to predict something over and beyond,

what else is being collected at West Point.

West Point has been collecting data for many years

on what predicts survival through "Beast Barracks."

So they lose a good number of their cadets every

summer that they do this, the first year of cadets

even though they try to select the sort of people that

are obviously not going to drop out.

So here are the results, grit is the dark blue line and

essentially how to read this graph is
on the left is the percentage of

the cadets, who actually retained through the summer,

the summer of "Beast Barracks."

And on the X axis is what quartile you're in.

So at the far right hand,
we have people in the top

quartile on grit scores --
96 percent of those cadets

actually stayed through the summer.

And you can see, essentially, that there's this

positive relationship -- more grit more likely to stay.

Here is the whole candidate score, this is a weighted

average of you SAT, your GPA,
how many push-ups you can do, literally.

You can see that, it's actually true
that if your in the bottom 25%

of their whole candidate score you are more likely to

drop out, but isn't it interesting that the top 25% of

people on this score, which West Point has spent many

years and lots of your tax dollars trying to figure out,

the best predictor of performance.

You know, the people in the top 25% were actually just

about as likely to drop out, and self-discipline which is

being able to resist temptation, it's also an important

quality, but not such an important quality

when it comes to high achievement.

Very good quality when it comes to staying on your diet

and doing your homework, not such a good quality,

in terms of predicting extremely
high challenge achievement.

That seem to be predictive as well,

not quite as predictive when you run the statistics as grit.

We replicated the study, every single year

in the last five years at West Point Academy

leading lots of military people to call me and

ask me how to increase grit in their cadets,

in their special forces officers or navy seals,

or in their air-force cadets.

But, the point here is that grit is predicting something,

people who stay in that very challenging environment

are not just the very talented ones, it's something else.

In fact this study, and in every study that

I've run since then, I was looking to see whether

the gritty people were the ones
who were the talented ones.

Maybe when you really good
at something it makes you stay in.

In fact we find quite the opposite,

at West Point and elsewhere we find that

the gritty people on measures of talent have less.

So it's by no means a guarantee of grit that

you actually start of as one of the gifted.

Here I am gonna run quickly through some other studies.

This is a grit measured by looking at peoples resumes

for consistency and follow through I would have gotten

a terrible grit score for my resume,

would have gotten grit for breath, low for grit.

This is actually looking at grit in college resumes

as a predictor of the teacher effectiveness in a teacher's

under resourced communities.

And we measured teacher effectiveness the way

it should be measured, which is the academic progress

of their kids. And no other thing, I think,

would substitute for that.

We did a great study, and I mean it was just fun,

of the National Spelling Bee kids.

I called up the director of the National Spelling Bee,

who herself was a National Spelling Bee champion,

she corrected the spelling on my email on her return,

and that was fine too.

And these kids are extraordinary children, and I think

many people have this stereotype that Spelling Bee kids

are verbal geniuses and the ones who win

the Spelling Bee are sort of more genius-like

than the ones who don't win the Spelling Bee.

So I asked the director if that were true and she said,

"I don't think so but I don't know what it is."

So we surveyed kids before they actually went to the Bee

and what we found is that,
again grit is the dark blue line,

so the kids who actually placed higher in the finals

of the National Spelling Bee
were higher in grit and

here is they verbal IQ, verbal IQ did predict,

but again, the kids who were really high in verbal IQ

tended to be lower in grit.

So they were not merit, they were inversely related

and self-discipline here,
being able to resist temptation,

stay on a diet, do you homework when you need to --

Interestingly, the kids who were very high in

self-discipline did do better.

But there was also the slacker group,

in a bottom 25% of self-discipline who also did quite well

but just about as well as the top.

So again self-discipline, great for doing homework,

terrific predictor of GPA, not such a great predictor

of are you gonna find a blue man
group and stay with it, etc.

In a follow-up study to this one we investigated why

is it that gritty kids are wining the Spelling Bee.

So we recruited another sample of kids from

the following year Spelling Bee, we sent them surveys,

we measured they grit on self-report questionnaires,

but then we asked them very detailed question about

what they did. So it turns out the kids who were in

the National Spelling Bee competition,

they're studying anywhere from an hour a week to

scarily 35 or 40 hours a week but what differentiate kids

who are gritty from kids how are not gritty

it's not just the hours of work that they are putting in

they're putting the hardest kind of work in.

They are not studying the words they are already know,

they're not sitting around being quizzed on

what's pretty much coming easily,

they isolate what they don't know, they identify their own

weaknesses and then they work just on that.

And that seems to characteristic of high achievement

and what grit enables you to do.

It's basically, being in a very uncomfortable place

for some part of your day
working extremely hard and then

to get up and do it all over again and again and again.

There is a graph that goes with this 10-year-old,

that I mentioned at the beginning of the talk,

this is the deliberate practice graph, this graph actually

accurately describes the rise of skill, the gain in skill

over time for really just about any
domain that's been studied.

Even Mozart, who some would argue
is proof of concept for genius --

Mozart must have been born as great as he was

because who else could have been composing

melodies that we're still listening to, at the age of 5 or 6.

It turns out that Mozart also fits this graph but he was

doing probably 8 hours of deliberate practice a day,

from as early as he could sit up,

whereas most of class performers only do 4.

But Mozart at very early age had already accumulated

basically 10,000 hours of deliberate practice.

Here is the interesting thing on the graph,

so it's really 10 years since you started discipline

till you get to world class peak performers.

And another interesting point about this which

you can't see from this graph is that

most people do this, they don't have the grit to

essentially sustain this deliberate practice over all

this time and they basically plato here.

I want to end with a couple of quotes.

If you look at early films of people that we all love --

maybe you love Will Smith -- I do --

maybe you love Matt Dillon or Rob Lowe,

take any Academy Award winning actor and

go watch one of their first films.

More likely than not it was terrible.

So the interesting thing is what makes somebody

have a terrible film, which is poorly reviewed,

and actually stay with it?

Whatever it is, I think Will Smith has got it,

and he was also very funny when he talks about it.

And I think Woody Allen has it.

And I think that essentially the question
for the Blue [unclear] School

and for the rest of us who are interested in children is

whatever that is, let's figure it out and then

through the art which is teaching and education

let's bring it to children.

Thank you very much.