Tired of all these he God, evolution, etc threads? This is really interesting. Kind of explains why a dumbass like me keeps going.
Is There Anything Grit Can’t Do?
Angela Lee Duckworth, the psychologist who champions ‘passion and perseverance,’ explains the power of ‘noncognitive skills.’
Kay S. Hymowitz
June 23, 2017 5:43 p.m. ET
New York
Angela Lee Duckworth has just returned from her 25th class reunion at Harvard. “People’s lives really do turn out differently,” she observes during an interview in a stylish boardroom. “And it certainly can’t be explained by how intelligent you remember them being when they were sitting next to you in organic chemistry class. Some of it is luck, some of it opportunity.” And some of it is “grit,” as Ms. Duckworth has told the world in articles, lectures and a 2016 bestselling book, “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.”
It’s no hyperbole to talk about the 47-year-old University of Pennsylvania professor in international terms. More than eight million people have watched her 2013 TED talk on grit. That same year she won the renowned MacArthur “Genius” grant. U.S. and foreign government officials, CEOs and ordinary helicopter parents, teachers of every stripe, world-class coaches and award-winning researchers line up outside her office to pick her brain about how to make their employees, students, children or competitive swimmers grittier.
She also runs a nonprofit, the Character Lab, with a staff of 12. Our interview took place immediately after the organization’s board meeting—hence the snazzy conference room. After 90 minutes of anecdotes, research citations and quotes—Aristotle, Nietzsche and, unexpectedly, US Weekly—my disarmingly laid-back but highly practiced interlocutor shows no signs of flagging.
So what is this thing called grit, and why should we believe it is a key to success? “I define grit as the tendency to pursue long-term goals with passion and persistence,” she explains, echoing her book’s subtitle. A close cousin of what personality psychologists call conscientiousness, grit deserves its own entry in the social-science lexicon, Ms. Duckworth insists: “Conscientiousness also includes self-control, orderliness, punctuality, responsibility.”
Photo: Ken Fallin
Ms. Duckworth has her own 10-question test called the Grit Scale. She asked West Point cadets to take the test; those who scored higher were likelier to make it through the notoriously grueling “Beast Barracks” training. She also tested salespeople at a time-share company, Chicago public-school students and National Spelling Bee competitors, among others. High grit scores had the same predictive power for all of them. Persistence driven by passionate interest, she concluded after testing the various likely alternatives, predicts achievement in ways that neither conscientiousness nor IQ nor talent does.
Ms. Duckworth came to her topic through a straightforward observation. “I left management consulting to teach at a school on the Lower East Side before it got hip,” she tells me. She then left New York and went on to a more affluent school in San Francisco. In the classroom, she noticed for the first time what she saw again at her Harvard reunion: The kids who seemed to have the greatest natural skill in, say, math, were often not the ones who aced the tests. Instead, the most dogged excelled. She wondered what makes resolute individuals tick—if that lightning could be bottled for the benefit of the less tenacious.
Those questions led her to graduate school in psychology at Penn and to a collector’s enthusiasm for personal stories that might flesh out her intuition. She has amassed a gallery of portraits of “paragons of grit—leaders in business, art, athletics, journalism, academia, medicine and law.” The list includes plenty of eye-catching luminaries: Jeff Bezos, Julia Child, swimming gold-medalist Rowdy Gaines, New York Timescrossword-puzzle master Will Shortz, Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll, novelist John Irving, and Francesca Martinez, a British stand-up comic who was born with cerebral palsy.
With its connotations of industriousness and can-do spirit, grit has an obvious American pedigree. Ms. Duckworth, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, grew up in Cherry Hill, N.J., a Philadelphia suburb. In graduate school, she came under the tutelage of the quintessentially American psychologist Martin Seligman. He is known as the father of positive psychology, the scientific study of human well-being, and the creator of “learned optimism,” the theory that people can learn to cultivate habits of happiness.
Like Mr. Seligman, Ms. Duckworth is committed to the idea of human malleability, though she tempers her hopefulness with scientific caution. “Both explanations could be right” and “We don’t know yet” are frequent asides in her writing and conversation.
Ms. Duckworth has several thoughts about why parents and educators in particular have seized on grit as an answer to some of life’s—and the schools’—problems. “It’s just speculation, but there may be a reaction to the focus on standardized tests, on ability and tests of ability and aptitude,” she says. Grit offers parents a different way of thinking about their children’s futures: “It’s not just about your talent and ability, it’s also about how much heart you put into it. Also, privileged parents worry their kids don’t have enough grit—the path has been smoothed for them.”
Grit also arrived at an opportune moment in American education. In the early 2000s, Ms. Duckworth was one of several researchers, among them the Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman, to find evidence that what have come to be known as “noncognitive skills” or “soft skills” could have a profound impact on children’s achievement.
In 2012 the journalist Paul Tough popularized the new thinking in “How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character.” That book’s immense success boosted Ms. Duckworth’s visibility. Around the same time, the rising charter-school movement was giving educators freedom to experiment with new ideas. Ms. Duckworth has worked closely over the years with Dave Levin, one of the founders of the celebrated KIPP schools and a co-founder of the Character Lab.
The lab is an ambitious expansion of Ms. Duckworth’s work on grit. Its mission is to “advance the science and the practice of character development.” Her team, she says, relies on an “inclusive definition of character from Aristotle: everything that allows a person to live a good life. Not just grit but gratitude; not just gratitude but curiosity, imagination, social and emotional intelligence, empathy, kindness, delayed gratification, self-control, growth mindset. The list is long.” The lab has produced an abundance of papers and is now set to release its first “Toolkit,” a collection of worksheets, lesson plans, research findings and videos on goal setting. Toolkits on other character traits are in the works.
Ms. Duckworth has her share of detractors. Some on the right object that her theory of grit understates the role of IQ and innate talent. Progressives say she downplays structural barriers. They hear familiar accusations that the less successful suffer from deficient character instead of the cruelties of racism and economic injustice. ‘‘The more we focus on whether people have or lack persistence (or self-discipline more generally), the less likely we’ll be to question larger policies,” the left-wing author Alfie Kohn wrote in the Washington Post.
The critique that hit Ms. Duckworth hardest was a meta-analysis by Iowa State University psychologist Marcus Crede and two coauthors. The team concluded that grit did not predict success nearly as well as other characteristics, such as cognitive ability and study habits, and called grit “old wine in new bottles,“ barely distinguishable in experiments from conscientiousness.
Worse, the researchers accused Ms. Duckworth of a “statistical misunderstanding” about the strength of effects she claimed to find. Though the paper didn’t seem to damage grit’s status in the general public, Ms. Duckworth reacted with characteristic determination. “After the Crede article came out, I wrote a letter to myself,” she says. “I never showed it to anyone or published it. It was just so I could sleep at night.”
She quickly offered to send it to me. The methodological disputes it outlines are best left to the experts, but its highly technical nature points to two related problems inherent in grit, and by extension in the practical ambitions of the Character Lab. First, character may well be malleable, but no one has discovered a formula for teaching grit, much less curiosity or imagination, in the classroom. And even if those traits were being taught, how would we know? Large education systems need accountability. Getting a precise measure of a student’s progress in math or reading comprehension is hard enough; a large testing industry is devoted to tweaking the problem. Imagine trying to measure empathy or self-control with scientific rigor.
The fundamental question for the Character Lab, and the soft-skills field more generally, is whether Aristotelian virtues can be dragged into the same intellectual arena as scientific surveys and regression analyses. Can social science and pop psychology fully embrace a tradition-soaked concept like character, grounded as it is in culture, history and custom? For that matter, can educators successfully cultivate self-control, resilience and curiosity in a culture of trigger warnings, social media and chaotic domestic lives? In other words, in a culture that nourishes precisely the opposite of character?
Ms. Duckworth appreciates at least some of these concerns. Fans frequently write her with ideas for teaching grit that she finds off the mark. There are some who get closer to the real thing: “I’ve met individual teachers and coaches, who write to me . . . and have translated the scientific research into practice in very beautiful and creative ways. What I haven’t found is a school or district that has figured out how to do that at scale.”
She is committed to scientific rigor yet impatient with contemporary academic specialization that gets bogged down in arcane turf distinctions. “We are all supposed to be studying human nature,” she observes. “Some teachers are more comfortable calling character ‘social-emotional learning,’ ” she acknowledges. “I like the word. I hope that—maybe this is immodest—Character Lab could help the American public to understand that the meaning is very broad and not religious in connotation, to carry no judgment, to connote something that is worth working for.”
Ms. Hymowitz is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author, most recently, of “The New Brooklyn: What It Takes to Bring a City Back.”
Appeared in the June 24, 2017, print edition.
Is There Anything Grit Can’t Do?
Angela Lee Duckworth, the psychologist who champions ‘passion and perseverance,’ explains the power of ‘noncognitive skills.’
Kay S. Hymowitz
June 23, 2017 5:43 p.m. ET
New York
Angela Lee Duckworth has just returned from her 25th class reunion at Harvard. “People’s lives really do turn out differently,” she observes during an interview in a stylish boardroom. “And it certainly can’t be explained by how intelligent you remember them being when they were sitting next to you in organic chemistry class. Some of it is luck, some of it opportunity.” And some of it is “grit,” as Ms. Duckworth has told the world in articles, lectures and a 2016 bestselling book, “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.”
It’s no hyperbole to talk about the 47-year-old University of Pennsylvania professor in international terms. More than eight million people have watched her 2013 TED talk on grit. That same year she won the renowned MacArthur “Genius” grant. U.S. and foreign government officials, CEOs and ordinary helicopter parents, teachers of every stripe, world-class coaches and award-winning researchers line up outside her office to pick her brain about how to make their employees, students, children or competitive swimmers grittier.
She also runs a nonprofit, the Character Lab, with a staff of 12. Our interview took place immediately after the organization’s board meeting—hence the snazzy conference room. After 90 minutes of anecdotes, research citations and quotes—Aristotle, Nietzsche and, unexpectedly, US Weekly—my disarmingly laid-back but highly practiced interlocutor shows no signs of flagging.
So what is this thing called grit, and why should we believe it is a key to success? “I define grit as the tendency to pursue long-term goals with passion and persistence,” she explains, echoing her book’s subtitle. A close cousin of what personality psychologists call conscientiousness, grit deserves its own entry in the social-science lexicon, Ms. Duckworth insists: “Conscientiousness also includes self-control, orderliness, punctuality, responsibility.”
Photo: Ken Fallin
Ms. Duckworth has her own 10-question test called the Grit Scale. She asked West Point cadets to take the test; those who scored higher were likelier to make it through the notoriously grueling “Beast Barracks” training. She also tested salespeople at a time-share company, Chicago public-school students and National Spelling Bee competitors, among others. High grit scores had the same predictive power for all of them. Persistence driven by passionate interest, she concluded after testing the various likely alternatives, predicts achievement in ways that neither conscientiousness nor IQ nor talent does.
Ms. Duckworth came to her topic through a straightforward observation. “I left management consulting to teach at a school on the Lower East Side before it got hip,” she tells me. She then left New York and went on to a more affluent school in San Francisco. In the classroom, she noticed for the first time what she saw again at her Harvard reunion: The kids who seemed to have the greatest natural skill in, say, math, were often not the ones who aced the tests. Instead, the most dogged excelled. She wondered what makes resolute individuals tick—if that lightning could be bottled for the benefit of the less tenacious.
Those questions led her to graduate school in psychology at Penn and to a collector’s enthusiasm for personal stories that might flesh out her intuition. She has amassed a gallery of portraits of “paragons of grit—leaders in business, art, athletics, journalism, academia, medicine and law.” The list includes plenty of eye-catching luminaries: Jeff Bezos, Julia Child, swimming gold-medalist Rowdy Gaines, New York Timescrossword-puzzle master Will Shortz, Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll, novelist John Irving, and Francesca Martinez, a British stand-up comic who was born with cerebral palsy.
With its connotations of industriousness and can-do spirit, grit has an obvious American pedigree. Ms. Duckworth, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, grew up in Cherry Hill, N.J., a Philadelphia suburb. In graduate school, she came under the tutelage of the quintessentially American psychologist Martin Seligman. He is known as the father of positive psychology, the scientific study of human well-being, and the creator of “learned optimism,” the theory that people can learn to cultivate habits of happiness.
Like Mr. Seligman, Ms. Duckworth is committed to the idea of human malleability, though she tempers her hopefulness with scientific caution. “Both explanations could be right” and “We don’t know yet” are frequent asides in her writing and conversation.
Ms. Duckworth has several thoughts about why parents and educators in particular have seized on grit as an answer to some of life’s—and the schools’—problems. “It’s just speculation, but there may be a reaction to the focus on standardized tests, on ability and tests of ability and aptitude,” she says. Grit offers parents a different way of thinking about their children’s futures: “It’s not just about your talent and ability, it’s also about how much heart you put into it. Also, privileged parents worry their kids don’t have enough grit—the path has been smoothed for them.”
Grit also arrived at an opportune moment in American education. In the early 2000s, Ms. Duckworth was one of several researchers, among them the Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman, to find evidence that what have come to be known as “noncognitive skills” or “soft skills” could have a profound impact on children’s achievement.
In 2012 the journalist Paul Tough popularized the new thinking in “How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character.” That book’s immense success boosted Ms. Duckworth’s visibility. Around the same time, the rising charter-school movement was giving educators freedom to experiment with new ideas. Ms. Duckworth has worked closely over the years with Dave Levin, one of the founders of the celebrated KIPP schools and a co-founder of the Character Lab.
The lab is an ambitious expansion of Ms. Duckworth’s work on grit. Its mission is to “advance the science and the practice of character development.” Her team, she says, relies on an “inclusive definition of character from Aristotle: everything that allows a person to live a good life. Not just grit but gratitude; not just gratitude but curiosity, imagination, social and emotional intelligence, empathy, kindness, delayed gratification, self-control, growth mindset. The list is long.” The lab has produced an abundance of papers and is now set to release its first “Toolkit,” a collection of worksheets, lesson plans, research findings and videos on goal setting. Toolkits on other character traits are in the works.
Ms. Duckworth has her share of detractors. Some on the right object that her theory of grit understates the role of IQ and innate talent. Progressives say she downplays structural barriers. They hear familiar accusations that the less successful suffer from deficient character instead of the cruelties of racism and economic injustice. ‘‘The more we focus on whether people have or lack persistence (or self-discipline more generally), the less likely we’ll be to question larger policies,” the left-wing author Alfie Kohn wrote in the Washington Post.
The critique that hit Ms. Duckworth hardest was a meta-analysis by Iowa State University psychologist Marcus Crede and two coauthors. The team concluded that grit did not predict success nearly as well as other characteristics, such as cognitive ability and study habits, and called grit “old wine in new bottles,“ barely distinguishable in experiments from conscientiousness.
Worse, the researchers accused Ms. Duckworth of a “statistical misunderstanding” about the strength of effects she claimed to find. Though the paper didn’t seem to damage grit’s status in the general public, Ms. Duckworth reacted with characteristic determination. “After the Crede article came out, I wrote a letter to myself,” she says. “I never showed it to anyone or published it. It was just so I could sleep at night.”
She quickly offered to send it to me. The methodological disputes it outlines are best left to the experts, but its highly technical nature points to two related problems inherent in grit, and by extension in the practical ambitions of the Character Lab. First, character may well be malleable, but no one has discovered a formula for teaching grit, much less curiosity or imagination, in the classroom. And even if those traits were being taught, how would we know? Large education systems need accountability. Getting a precise measure of a student’s progress in math or reading comprehension is hard enough; a large testing industry is devoted to tweaking the problem. Imagine trying to measure empathy or self-control with scientific rigor.
The fundamental question for the Character Lab, and the soft-skills field more generally, is whether Aristotelian virtues can be dragged into the same intellectual arena as scientific surveys and regression analyses. Can social science and pop psychology fully embrace a tradition-soaked concept like character, grounded as it is in culture, history and custom? For that matter, can educators successfully cultivate self-control, resilience and curiosity in a culture of trigger warnings, social media and chaotic domestic lives? In other words, in a culture that nourishes precisely the opposite of character?
Ms. Duckworth appreciates at least some of these concerns. Fans frequently write her with ideas for teaching grit that she finds off the mark. There are some who get closer to the real thing: “I’ve met individual teachers and coaches, who write to me . . . and have translated the scientific research into practice in very beautiful and creative ways. What I haven’t found is a school or district that has figured out how to do that at scale.”
She is committed to scientific rigor yet impatient with contemporary academic specialization that gets bogged down in arcane turf distinctions. “We are all supposed to be studying human nature,” she observes. “Some teachers are more comfortable calling character ‘social-emotional learning,’ ” she acknowledges. “I like the word. I hope that—maybe this is immodest—Character Lab could help the American public to understand that the meaning is very broad and not religious in connotation, to carry no judgment, to connote something that is worth working for.”
Ms. Hymowitz is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author, most recently, of “The New Brooklyn: What It Takes to Bring a City Back.”
Appeared in the June 24, 2017, print edition.
