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Assertion: Creativity Requires Growth Mindset

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Assertion: Creativity Requires Growth Mindset

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Angela acknowledges that she does not have all the answers, but is always willing to learn. In fact, she cites this willingness to learn as a key factor in grit-- that in brain plasticity and the ability to grow, we "rise to the occasion" which leads to longer-term achievement. In her TED Talk, she acknowledges that she is building on the research of the guru of growth mindset, Carol Dweck. Others in psychology and education continue to build on their research (see "5+ Ways to Develop a Growth Mindset Using Grit and Resilience" at https://positivepsychology.com/5-ways-develop-grit-resilience/).

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Angela Duckworth - A growth mindset is the right mindset - Insights for Entrepreneurs - Amazon

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Assertion: Creativity Requires Risk Taking

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Assertion: Creativity Requires Risk Taking

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Getting to where she ended up meant accepting professional risk.
"Having original ideas is, by definition, going against convention and opening oneself up to rejection or ridicule." (Starko, 2018, p.112)

As opportunities arose, she needed to choose to embrace them. Angela "kept reminding herself, 'If you give a TED talk, write a book, do an interview—then you have signed a contract to take the good with the bad, and take the bad with as much grace as you can.'"-- see article below

As risk taker Debbie Meier points out, "'I'm willing to take on risk because I'm invested in the project and because I believe in what we are doing here and want to succeed. The drive is toward that, toward the goal, not the problems. Of course I don't like to fail. I don't like to make mistakes. I'm afraid of looking foolish. I'm afraid of dying. But I'm not afraid of risk because risk is a part of change, and change is what new ideas are all about.'" (Shekerjian, 1991, p. 24).

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By all accounts, Angela Duckworth' s career has been an unmitigated success. She graduated with a neurobiology degree from Harvard and a doctorate in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book, " ," became a nation al best-seller. Her on this topic has been viewed by over a million people. She received a so-called "genius grant" from the and remains one of the most coveted speakers in her field.

But her pathway to fame wasn't linear or easy. Recently I sat down with Angela for a far-reaching and candid chat about her car eer and her personal journey-and the tough lessons she's learned along the way.

Angela, like all of the other leaders I have interv , described a slow process to finding herself in front of the camera. Her journey included many "tear-filled, soul-searching" conversations with her husband and a careful analysis of what she was best at and enjoyed the most.

Like the CEO of the American Civil War Museum, Christy Coleman, who I recently interviewed , Angela wasn't seeking press. "I was doing work in areas of intrinsic interest to me...I was not trying to get media." Eventually, som eone asked her to give a talk at a TEDx event. She agreed and delivered the summary of her work on grit and its implications for education, without ever rehearsing it. The producers of the TED event saw it and invited her to give a talk at the premier annu al conference. This time, she was somewhat hesitant.

"Oh no, the spotlight is on me, is that OK?" she wondered. I told her I'd felt the same way at the press conference when Mayor Cory Booker and Gov. Chris Christie announced as superinte ndent of Newark in front of dozens of flashing bulbs and reporters.

She made a conscious choice that she would "not whine, except in private, about how it feels to be misinterpreted or be used out of context to make a point." We bonded about how hard it is for women to respond to public criticism. If you don't respond, you are considered weak. If you do respond, you are considered defensive or unable to take the heat. I asked her if she thinks the calculus is th e same for men who are public figures. She replied, "No."

Ever the psychologist, she explained to me, "Anger comes from the response that 'my rights have been violated...Guilt comes from the feeling that you did something In my experience, w are much more conditioned to think: 'I didn't do well on the article' versus 'they didn't do their job when reviewing it.'"

She believes her nuclear family is living proof of generational change. "There's been a lot of learning on everyone' ...Society is changing, but we are also changing as individuals." She pauses and continues, "I am still the daughter whose mother said that to her when she was 22. It was hard to go from that mental model about what success looks like, to now."

She is glad cultural norms are changing-and thatadmitting challenges and publicly owning strugglesis seen more and more as a sign of strength. "I make a point to tell undergraduates that I go to therapy, was lonely, cried a river," she laughs.

Sage advice from a trailblazer.

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The Fierce Vulnerability of Angela Duckworth, Bestselling Author of 'Grit'

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We now know her as the guru of "grit," but Angela Duckworth was once a 32-year-old with a mid-life crisis. She spoke with me candidly about the cultural and gender stereotypes she overcame to succeed and shared her hopes about what women can do to support each other to break through barriers.

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While this bizarre-looking creature has nothing to do with her work, it is a Philadelphia mascot and she works at the University of Pennsylvania in that wonderful city, so I feel like they are still inextricably linked.

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Assertion: Creativity Requires Growth Mindset

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Assertion: Creativity Requires Growth Mindset

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Her work has become so important that it has spawned further researchers. One chose to do his Ph.D. work attempting to dismantle some of her findings. Instead of lashing out, she "offered to serve on the student’s dissertation committee, to gain a deeper understanding of his criticisms."

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Angela Duckworth's research on encouraging "grit" in students has been hailed as groundbreaking, popularized in bestselling books and TED talks. It has also been called problematic, and some have criticized the work for essentially blaming students for their circumstances.

Duckworth has faced the backlash by practicing a bit of grit herself. Take her reaction when a PhD candidate emailed her explaining that he was doing his dissertation about how the grit narrative ignored systemic barriers that may keep some students from persisting, no matter their character. She offered to serve on the student's dissertation committee, to gain a deeper understanding of his criticisms.

More recently Duckworth is leading an effort to create materials for teachers based on her research, so that, as she says, her work around grit is more than just a slogan on an inspirational poster or a Pinterest card.

EdSurge sat down with Duckworth this week just after her keynote at the ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego, to talk about her work and what's next for the nonprofit she created to translate her research into advice for teachers. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. You can listen to a complete version below, or on your favorite podcast app (like iTunes or Stitcher).
EdSurge: What do you think people most misunderstand about your well-known research on "grit"?
Duckworth: Sometimes, I think people believe that I or others see grit as the only thing kids need to be successful and happy. In fact, I think character is a very long list of things that kids need to be happy and productive. It's not just grit. It's also curiosity. It's not just curiosity. It's also gratitude and kindness. It's not just that. It's emotional and social intelligence. It's not just that. It's open-mindedness. It's not just that. It's honestly. It's not just that. It's humility.

I think when we are talking about what kids need to grow up to live lives that are happy and healthy and good for other people, it's a long list of things. Grit is on that list, but it is not the only thing on the list. I'll tell you, as a mother, but also as a scientist and as a former teacher, that it's not the first thing on the list either.
Do you worry that things may have happened in the name of grit and your research that you didn't intend? Do you have any concern about that?
I probably don't know enough about the misapplication of the idea of grit. I think the more I know, the more I worry. This may be true of any idea, by the way, in education and in any other sector, that something has value and then it becomes like a Rorschach blot and people project onto whatever they want to see in that inkblot. I think grit in some ways has become that. You're going to use grit to justify and to promote the thing that you already believed anyway before you heard about grit and Angela Duckworth.

I do think that kids need to learn to work hard. I don't think we're born knowing how to work hard. I don't think it's automatic that we know how to work on our weaknesses with a certain discipline and to accept feedback on what we could do better. I think those are hard things to learn. I think schools should be a place where kids develop that. I have no problem with schools taking it as a responsibility to develop the capacity for perseverance and also passion-loving something enough to stay committed to it.

The question is, what does that exactly look like? I don't think it's exhortations of "you should be gritty" or "we'll shame you if you're not gritty."

It is a natural human instinct to shy away from mistake-making, from confusion, from challenge. And it is therefore the responsibility of the classroom teacher or the school and the community to make sure that kids understand that when they don't want to do something that's hard, when they don't want to do something that will maybe not work out, and when they do want to quit things, that the first and most important thing is to start from understanding and accepting that that is part of the struggle, as opposed to this ham-fisted, "Well, you should just be gritty. Around here, we have no excuses for not doing well." I think growth always starts with understanding.
I understand a person wrote to you critiquing your grit narrative, and that you actually are now helping to advise their dissertation. Can you say more about the debate you're having with that student?
There was a student who introduced himself having written a critical essay about the narrative of grit. His major point was that when we talk about grit as a kind of 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps,' personal strength, it leaves in the shadows structural poverty and racism and other things that make it impossible, frankly, for some kids to do what we would expect them to do. When he sent me that essay, of course, I wanted to know more. I joined his [dissertation] committee because I don't know much about sociology, and I don't know much about this criticism.

I learned a lot from him over the years. I think the lesson for me is that when someone criticizes you, when someone criticized me, the natural thing is to be defensive and to reflexively make more clear your case and why you're right, but I've always learned more from just listening. When I have the courage to just say, "Well, maybe there's a point here that I hadn't thought of," and in this case the Grit narrative and what Grit has become is something that he really brought to me and my awareness in a way that I was oblivious to before.
It seems like people at this point are hungry to know what to do with this idea of grit? Do you have anything you could tell a teacher, whether it's a college or a K12 teacher, to actually take action to help a student in their classroom?
I have a nonprofit called CharacterLab.org. Just this week, we released a playbook on the science of how true experts practice. It talks about what it looks like when you're a student, because you're not yet, or maybe you'll never be an Olympic athlete, so how do you translate this into being an eighth grader and doing your homework.

We tried in that playbook to work with both scientists and teachers side-by-side for months to craft what we think are useful activities. Like, "Here, try this classroom activity. Watch this 60 second video narrated by Wynton Marsalis, who learned a lot about practice himself the hard way." I'm trying to do more of that work because I have realized that popularizing an idea or even drawing attention to something that has some truth to it is, it's really not enough. I really don't think it's fair for me to, or anyone else to expect teachers to implement ideas from watching a TED Talk and reading a book. I think we need to go much further than that in supporting things that we want to see happen.

I thought writing a book and doing a TED Talk was enough. I was wrong. I think that it's far from enough. CharacterLab is one step in that direction.

"I thought writing a book and doing a TED Talk was enough. I was wrong. I think that it's far from enough."

-Angela Duckworth

I've definitely heard a backlash in higher education against people getting up onstage and shouting their ideas. In a way, are you finding that some of those concerns are right?
I think the goal that I have, one of the goals I have in my life, is to not get cranky. I literally say out loud to myself, "Don't get cranky." Because one could get cranky about, for example, someone getting up on a TED stage and saying something in 18 minutes and not getting all the nuance and not getting all the detail. I think that is one of the complaints of academics, that in 18 minutes you're not able to people all the footnotes. I think there is some concern there for myself, too, and I had some hesitation about writing a book even, which is much longer than a TED Talk, or frankly saying anything. Because whatever you say is going to be incomplete and potentially misleading.

I don't want to get cranky because, look, I think there is a role for journalists, for writers, for podcasts. We are all just trying, aren't we? We're all just trying to actually move the ball forward. I think it's not a great thing when people get cranky about the way somebody else is trying to move the ball forward. Unless there's really a motive which is questionable, which I don't think there is. When I read things and it slightly mischaracterizes my work or I would love to be right there with my rebuttal, I try to not be cranky about it because the person who wrote that blog post or had that complaint, they are also trying to move the ball forward.
What would you do differently if you taught in a K-12 classroom, now that you know what you know from your research?
One thing I would do differently is provide a ritual and an opportunity. A ritual in my classroom where, instead of just pushing forward in the curriculum, I would actually make it much more mastery-oriented. I would make it possible for kids to catch up and to really work on the things that they didn't quite get.

One of the teachers that I most admire is this guy named Anthony [Yon]. His students just call him Yon for short. He teaches in LA Unified school district in East LA. He has this binder of the kids' tests, and it's not like you have to ask for whether you can retake the test and correct your mistakes and learn from them and get some credit for it. It's actually just set up in the classroom routine that every time he gives a quiz or a test, there's an opportunity to get your test out of the binder and rework the problems that you got wrong and try to figure out what you didn't do right and what the insight was and then move forward. I would take a page out of Mr. Yon.

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Angela Duckworth Says Grit Is Not Enough. She's Building Tools to Boost Student Character. - EdSurge News

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Angela Duckworth's research on encouraging "grit" in students has been hailed as groundbreaking, popularized in bestselling books and TED talks. It has also been called problematic, and some have criticized the work for essentially blaming students for their circumstances. Duckworth has faced the backlash by practicing a bit of grit herself.

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Assertion: Creativity Requires Risk Taking

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Assertion: Creativity Requires Risk Taking

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Her work has also created a lot of push back, especially in how it is being used to try to boost standardized test scores. She has responded by saying that there may be flaws in her work-- science is only as good as the evidence we have until newer, better science trumps it.

'“As a human, the criticism doesn’t feel good,” Duckworth said. “I wish I had gotten everything right. But I’m also a scientist and this is what science is. A field can never be one person’s work and scientists should disagree.”'-- see article below

This does not dissuade her from her research; rather, she is delving deeper into the interrelated topic of passion.

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The Hechinger Report is a national nonprofit newsroom that reports on one topic: education. Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get stories like this delivered directly to your inbox.

"Grit," a best-selling book by University of Pennsylvania professor Angela Duckworth, may have swept parenting and education pop culture but research scholars say they are finding mounting evidence that it doesn't add up.

At least five studies published in peer-reviewed journals in the past two years have identified problems with the notion of grit, which Duckworth defines as a combination of perseverance and passion, and how important it is for academic success. The criticisms range widely, from statistical and methodological errors to bad survey questions. More importantly, researchers are finding that grit isn't strongly associated with academic achievement and that other soft skills are far more powerful than grit.

Martin Credé, a social psychologist at Iowa State University, has been particularly outspoken. "Grit is probably not where schools should be spending their money and time," he said, "because it's not strongly related to academic success and because it's unlikely to respond well to intervention."

Credé first published his analysis of all the grit studies he could find and laid out the problems in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2017. To make sure education experts saw it, he wrote a critical review of grit in the December 2018 issue of Educational Researcher.

Other grit skeptics will be publicly presenting their criticisms at a symposium, " Co-Evolution of Substantive and Methodological Research: The Case of Grit, Self-Regulation, and Motivation," scheduled for April 8, 2019, during the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in Toronto.

I spoke with Duckworth at length about the academic backlash to her work.

"As a human, the criticism doesn't feel good," Duckworth said. "I wish I had gotten everything right. But I'm also a scientist and this is what science is. A field can never be one person's work and scientists should disagree."

Duckworth concedes there are problems with the survey questions that she used to measure grit in people. Her surveys don't ask respondents about their passions or ability to have a sustained interest in something over a long period of time. Credé found that her actual questions end up measuring how conscientious a person is. In retrospect, Duckworth said, she wishes she had included more questions about the "long term."

Duckworth was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania and new to research methods when she developed her theory of grit. (She published her first paper on grit in 2007, a year after she received her PhD.) She also admits that it was a mistake to design a survey where respondents had to agree to all of her statements about perseverance, but disagree with all of the statements that purported to be about passion in order to rate highly on her grit scale. For example, a student would have to answer "very much like me" to the statement "Setbacks don't discourage me," but "not like me at all" to the statement "New ideas and projects sometimes distract me from previous ones." One of the papers to be presented at the April 2019 symposium shows that when you rewrite Duckworth's survey questions so that pro-grit answers are all the same, either "very much like me" or "not like me at all," you get very different results. That casts further doubts on how Duckworth is measuring grit and, thus, her claims about its power.
Related: Grit under attack
But Duckworth says her critics are missing her point about the power of grit when they compare students' grit scores with grades and test scores.

"Grit is something I think young people need to grow toward," said Duckworth. "By definition, grit is passion for something that takes a long time to complete and perseverance. And I don't think that your report card grades in elementary school, middle school and high school are, for most students at that age, the prime source of their passion. It's not where they would apply their grit anyway."

In Duckworth's research, she showed how people with high grit scores succeeded in difficult activities such as Beast Barracks, the arduous cadet training at West Point, or a spelling bee.

Duckworth said she wouldn't expect grit to be the most important factor in determining a student's grades or test scores. "There ought to be other predictors, like self-control, that should be more predictive of grades than grit," Duckworth said.

In a 2018 study, Allan Wigfield, a professor at University of Maryland's College of Education, found that self-efficacy, or confidence in one's ability to accomplish something, was far more strongly correlated with grades than grit.

Wigfield also found that perseverance alone, which is only one of grit's two components, was correlated more with academic achievement than perseverance plus passion together.

Iowa State's Credé discovered the same problem, finding not only a very weak association between passion and achievement but also that passion weakens the association between perseverance and achievement.

"All of us, whether we're kids or grownups, have a tendency to give up too soon, when we hit adversity, to throw in the towel," Credé said. "So I think perseverance, that's worthwhile pursuing. But on the passion side, the idea that we can only be good at things if we are passionate for them and also that we don't change our passions. I find that especially concerning when it comes to younger kids. I have two daughters. Part of their life, as I see it, is trying out things. We don't want them to give up immediately but changing your interests and exploring things, that's part of life."

Duckworth's "Grit" has sold more than a million copies worldwide since it was published in 2016. And many schools have embraced it. Some include grit ratings on report cards (though Duckworth has concerns about grading kids on grit.) It's not uncommon to see grit posters festooned across classroom walls and hallways. In 2013, Duckworth founded a nonprofit organization to spread character training in schools, including ways to make students grittier.
Related: Should taxpayers and schools invest in 'growth mindset' programs?
Duckworth is dismayed when she hears about schools holding grit pep rallies to boost standardized test scores. "That's not a good idea," she said. Her hope is that kids can develop true interests that they can be passionate about their whole lives. Duckworth's own research is currently delving deeper into passion, trying to understand how people develop it.

Duckworth has no immediate plans for revising her grit scales. But another researcher, Rick Hoyle, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, recently created a new grit scale, fixing the drafting errors that Duckworth made. He has administered it to research subjects and told me by email that he now has enough data to start writing a paper and that the results are "strong."

However, he cautioned that even an improved grit scale isn't going to show a strong correlation with everyday academic achievement. When grit is used to predict performing well in activities that take place over a long period of time and present obstacles and challenges, he said, then it emerges as the most important psychological trait. "I don't see test scores fitting into that category," Hoyle said. "Grades might, for some people, but not many." For these outcomes, he explained, other psychological attributes, such as self-control and conscientiousness, out-predict grit.

While it remains unclear whether grit can be taught, educators should be aware that even if it is possible to teach perseverance and passion, it's unlikely to translate into things that schools can measure and take credit for.

This story about grit in schools was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn't mean it's free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
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Research scholars to air problems with using 'grit' at school - The Hechinger Report

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"Grit," a best-selling book by University of Pennsylvania professor Angela Duckworth, may have swept parenting and education pop culture but research scholars say they are finding mounting evidence that it doesn't add up. At least five studies published in peer-reviewed journals in the past two years have identified problems with the notion of grit, which ...

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"Duckworth theorized that talent and potential must be multiplied by effort to transform into skill, and skill multiplied by effort then equals achievement. In both equations, effort is the driving factor."
"The insight is that excellence is not magical, instantaneous or talent. It’s this mundane cycle: set a goal, focus 100 percent, get feedback, make variations and then do it again.”

Article:

"Talent Counts, But Effort Counts Twice"

Article URL, since it won't attach right:
https://www.hamilton.edu/news/story/university-pennsylvania-psychology-professor-grit-author-macarthur-genius-angela-duckworth-lectures-on-grit-perseverance-references-dan-chambliss-research-on-passion-and-perseverance-in-mundanity-of-excellence-book-1

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"Endurance counts for a lot in cultivating talent to the point of being able to do creative things with it-- endurance and a concentration of effort to a specific sphere of activity." (Shekerjian, 1991, p. 7)

From her website:
"What is Grit?
Grit is passion and perseverance for long-term goals.

One way to think about grit is to consider what grit isn’t.

Grit isn’t talent. Grit isn’t luck. Grit isn’t how intensely, for the moment, you want something.

Instead, grit is about having what some researchers call an”ultimate concern”–a goal you care about so much that it organizes and gives meaning to almost everything you do. And grit is holding steadfast to that goal. Even when you fall down. Even when you screw up. Even when progress toward that goal is halting or slow.

Talent and luck matter to success. But talent and luck are no guarantee of grit. And in the very long run, I think grit may matter as least as much, if not more."

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FAQ

1. What is grit?

2. What can I use the Grit Scale for?

3. If I’m gritty about one thing, will I be gritty about other things?

4. When does grit matter most?

5. Is grit the same as self-control or conscientiousness?

6. Can you be too gritty?

7. Are women grittier than men? Or are men grittier than women?

8. Does the message of grit imply that poverty and inequality don’t matter?

9. I don’t understand what you mean by “talent”?

10. Is grit more important than honesty and kindness?

11. Isn’t grit, like everything else, in your genes? So why write a book about how to grow grit?

12. Isn’t it more important to be happy than successful?

13. There is a chapter in “Grit” on parenting. Where is the chapter on teaching grit in schools?

What is grit?

Grit is passion and perseverance for long-term goals.

One way to think about grit is to consider what grit isn’t.

Grit isn’t talent. Grit isn’t luck. Grit isn’t how intensely, for the moment, you want something.

Instead, grit is about having what some researchers call an”ultimate concern”–a goal you care about so much that it organizes and gives meaning to almost everything you do. And grit is holding steadfast to that goal. Even when you fall down. Even when you screw up. Even when progress toward that goal is halting or slow.

Talent and luck matter to success. But talent and luck are no guarantee of grit. And in the very long run, I think grit may matter as least as much, if not more.

What can I use the Grit Scale for?

I created the Grit Scale so that I could study grit as a scientist.  Why? Because you cannot study what you cannot measure.

I also think this questionnaire is useful as a prompt for self-reflection. For example, some of the most effective coaches and teachers I know give this questionnaire to their players and students in order to prompt a conversation about their evolving passion and perseverance.

However, I hasten to point out that all psychological measures, including the Grit Scale, have limitations. You can fake a higher grit score without much effort, for example. Another very serious but not-so-obvious limitation of questionnaires is called “reference bias.” This distortion of scores comes from people holding different standards by which they judge behavior. So, your score not only reflects how gritty you are but also the standards to which you hold yourself. I talk about this limitation, among others, in this article on measurement which I co-authored with my friend and colleague David Yeager.

In sum, I think the Grit Scale can be used for research and for self-reflection, but its limitations make it inappropriate for many other uses, including selecting employees, admitting students to college, gauging the performance of teachers, or comparing schools or countries to each other.

If I’m gritty about one thing, will I be gritty about other things?

Not necessarily. To be gritty, in my view, is to have passion and perseverance about something in your life. This doesn’t mean that you necessarily engage in all possible pursuits with equivalent passion and perseverance. And indeed, the limits of time and energy suggest that focusing on one thing means focusing less on others. You can’t pursue becoming a great pianist and at the same time a great mathematician, and a great sprinter and chef and philosopher…But it’s also true, I think, that to be gritty means to pursue something with consistency of interest and effort. Some people choose not to pursue anything in a committed way, and that, to me, is lack of grit.

When does grit matter most?

I study grit because it predicts achieving goals, but I want to point out that grit is more relevant to some goals than others. In particular, grit predicts achievement in really challenging and personally meaningful contexts. Graduating from high school or college rather than dropping out is one example. Returning to the National Spelling Bee with hopes of doing better than you did last year is another.  But there are other goals for which enduring passion and perseverance are less relevant. Getting started on your taxes before April 15 takes self-control more than grit, for instance. Ditto for studying for a history test on Friday when you’d rather be on Instagram.

Here is an article that describes in more detail how grit and self-control differ, and here is another explaining how grit is really about sticking with what are called “superordinate goals.”

Finally, here is an article about how standardized test scores are not the only way to assess what a student knows and can do. For the record, I believe grit will for many adolescents be more evident in activities pursued outside of the classroom–in the school play, on the football field, in the school orchestra, in community service, and so on. This is what educational psychologist Warren Willingham found in 1985, and it is also what I find in my more recent research.

Is grit the same as self-control or conscientiousness?

As I and others have suggested, grit is related to two other characteristics: self-control and conscientiousness. Someone demonstrating high self-control or high conscientiousness is also likely to score high in grit. But are they so similar that they actually measure of the same underlying personality trait? I don’t think so. I have found that grit predicts achieving challenging goals even when these other characteristics are held constant. For instance, grit is a more reliable predictor of making it through the first, tough summer of West Point military training than either self-control or conscientiousness.

Can you be too gritty?

I don’t have any data that suggests there are drawbacks to being extremely gritty. Indeed, at the very top of the Grit Scale, I typically find individuals who are tremendously successful and also satisfied with their lives.  However, as I mention in the concluding chapter of the book, this doesn’t mean we should entirely dismiss the possibility of “too much grit.” In particular, I think you can be too stubborn about mid-level and low-level goals. You can throw good money after bad on particular projects that will never make sense. You can be blind to possibilities that you hadn’t originally anticipated. Still, I think these problems are mostly about lower-level goals that are in service of your high-level goals—those abstract and enduring concerns that I discuss in Chapter Four. For me, my very highest-level goal is to use psychological science to help kids thrive. That’s my mission statement, and I can’t think of anything that would make me give up on it.

Are women grittier than men? Or are men grittier than women?

In some samples, I’ve found that women score slightly higher on the Grit Scale than men. However, it’s not always the case. In sum, the data aren’t solid enough to claim that there is a reliable difference in grit between men and women.

Does the message of grit imply that poverty and inequality don’t matter?

At a recent conference, I sat down next to a sociologist. She knew my work, and it didn’t take long for her to express extreme disdain—even anger—for what she called the grit message. “What’s that,” I asked? “Well, put it this way,” she said. “I happen to think that poverty and inequality matter a heck of a lot more than grit.” I thought for a moment. Then I said, “I see your point.”

If you pit grit against structural barriers to achievement, you may well decide that grit is less worthy of our attention. But I think that’s the right answer to the wrong question.

Caring about how to grow grit in our young people—no matter their socioeconomic background—doesn’t preclude concern for things other than grit. For example, I’ve spent a lot of my life in urban classrooms, both as a teacher and as a researcher. I know how much the expertise and care of the adult at the front of the room matter. And I know that a child who comes to school hungry, or scared, or without glasses to see the chalkboard, is not ready to learn. Grit alone is not going to save anyone.

But the importance of the environment is two-fold. It’s not just that you need opportunity in order to benefit from grit. It’s also that the environments our children grow up in profoundly influence their grit and every other aspect of their character.

This is the grit message in my words: Grit may not be sufficient for success, but it sure is necessary. If we want our children to have a shot at a productive and satisfying life, we adults should make it our concern to provide them with the two things all children deserve: challenges to exceed what they were able to do yesterday and the support that makes that growth possible.

So, the question is not whether we should concern ourselves with grit or structural barriers to achievement. In the most profound sense, both are important, and more than that, they are intertwined.

I don’t understand what you mean by “talent”?

I was reading Warren Buffett’s annual shareholder letter the other day. He uses the word “talent” differently than I do, and indeed, I think he uses it in a way that a lot of people do: to mean the sum of a person’s capabilities, including their current skills. When I say “talent,” I mean specifically the rate at which a person improves in skill. So, if you’re a really talented basketball player, you improve very quickly when compared to less talented players with equivalent practice and opportunity. Like the award-winning actor and musician Will Smith, I think it’s useful to distinguish between skill and talent. See Chapter Two and Three in the book for a longer discussion.

Is grit more important than honesty and kindness?

If I had to choose between my daughters growing up honest or gritty, I’d choose honest. If I had to choose between kindness and grit, I’d choose kindness. Grit is only one aspect of character, and for me, personally, it’s not the most important aspect. Fortunately, I don’t see any necessary trade-off between goodness and greatness. I am encouraging my girls to cultivate their interests and a sense of purpose, because I want them to have a passion that guides them for their entire lives. I am also helping them learn perseverance. With guidance, they are learning to practice hard things every day, and to interpret failure and adversity as necessities of learning. My ultimate hope is that they lead honest, kind, and gritty lives.

Isn’t grit, like everything else, in your genes? So why write a book about how to grow grit?

The nature versus nurture question is as old as time. Here’s the answer from contemporary science: Yes, grit and everything else is influenced by genes. But grit and everything else is also influenced by experience. In Chapter 5, I lay out a simple argument for believing that grit can grow.

Isn’t it more important to be happy than successful?

I can’t tell you whether happiness or achievement is more important. That’s a question of values, not science. I can say that when you measure both, you find they tend to go together more than they split apart. In other words, while we can all think of someone we know who is happy but not successful, or successful but unhappy, these are exceptions. The grit paragons I’ve interviewed over the years are on the whole quite happy and successful. While I would not call them “carefree” or “laid back,” I would say that they are tremendously satisfied with their lives—even if that includes never being satisfied with their level of skill or achievement. I myself think, daily, about what I could do better. And yet I’m happy.

There is a chapter in “Grit” on parenting. Where is the chapter on teaching grit in schools?

The entire book is about teaching grit. Before I became a psychologist, I was a classroom teacher. It was as a teacher that I discovered how important psychology was to a child’s achievement. It’s not an exaggeration to say that every chapter in this book has special relevance to teachers. Chapters Two and Three might be especially useful when explaining the importance of effort (versus talent) to students. Chapters Six, Seven, Eight, and Nine on interest, practice, purpose, and hope are where I define the four psychological assets that lead to grit. In Chapter Nine, I talk about parenting for grit—but the same dynamics play out in the classroom. In Chapter Ten, I explain why Harvard and other colleges are eager to see students cultivate their grit in extracurricular activities. Finally, a teacher who wants the classroom culture to support grit will find Chapter Twelve full of examples of how to do that.

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Grit is passion and perseverance for long-term goals.

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Not only does Duckworth preach persistence, she exhibits it herself, after a lifetime of put downs. In her own words:

"For example, because I know the psychology of failure, and I’m able to quickly recognize when I fall victim to the unproductive self-talk people engage in after something doesn’t work out. When I find myself saying things like, 'Oh my god, I’m never going to be able to do that, no one will ever give us money for our nonprofit,' it’s very helpful to have the metacognitive understanding that this self-talk is normal to experience, and that it’s not going to last forever.
[...]
My father would literally say things like 'you’re no genius,' to me. (There was, in fact, a great irony and redemption to the MacArthur Fellowship.)" -- see article below

"The hope of discovering something useful is only one of the many possible impulses that might cause a person to seize upon a set of issues intriguing enough to occupy his or her attention for a sustained period of time. [...] It almost doesn't matter what the impetus is as long as the context one chooses gives wings to one's particular talent." (Shekerjian, 1991, p. 10-11)

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Angela Duckworth is the world's leading expert on "grit," the much-hyped ingredient in personal success. As Duckworth defines it, grit is passion and sustained persistence applied toward long-term achievement, with no particular concern for rewards or recognition along the way. It combines resilience, ambition, and self-control in the pursuit of goals that take months, years, or even decades.

The University of Pennsylvania psychologist's studies of grit began when she was teaching math to seventh graders. She realized IQ wasn't the only factor separating successful students from those who struggled, and that grit-holding steadfast to a goal through time-was highly predictive of success. She then spent years analyzing the short- and long term effects of grit on people's performance in school, at work, and in personal relationships, and published her research in Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, a New York Times bestseller documenting how grit predicts long-term success in nearly every realm of life (a theory also explained in her viral TED Talk).

Today Duckworth is a sought-after speaker on human behavior and the founder and CEO of Character Lab, a nonprofit whose mission is to advance the science and practice of character development (including, but not limited to grit). Quartz caught up with her after her keynote address at the Qualtrics X4 Experience Management Summit, a conference about brand experience, held in March in Salt Lake City, Utah. The following transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Quartz: What's your own "grit" story? How did you personally develop your grit?
Angela Duckworth: So, my dad definitely looms large in my biography, as I think dads do for a lot of people. Growing up I had a family headed by a father who was singularly obsessed with achievement-his own, and that of others. He was always asking: Who is the bigger genius, Mozart or Beethoven? Matisse or Picasso? These are the type of debates we would have over dinner.

So I did grow up to be someone who is ambitious, but also someone who never had the self-concept of being a genius or someone who is gifted. I think the way he regarded me did actually raise the question in my mind of, "So, if you're not especially gifted, and you're ambitious to do something-great, how are you going to do it?"
QZ: Can you unpack the psychology behind "I'll show you" self-talk?
I don't think it was conscious, but I've always had the identity of someone who is, you know, "I'll show you." These are the words that go through my head when people tell me I can't do something, which is signature self-talk to the kind of people I study.

AD: It's typically in response to "you cannot," when someone says you're not on the team, you didn't make the cut, or you're not good enough. "I'll show you" is essentially "I'll prove you wrong."
QZ: Is the underdog mentality natural, and something that manifests at a young age, or can it can be developed?
Bill McRaven, the retired United States Navy admiral, in his book Make Your Bed, explains how he had one officer who he really believed in, and when he was going through weed-out challenges, he leaned over and whispered in his ear "prove me wrong." These words are in the same vein as "I'll show you"-McRaven was giving that officer encouragement. Many gritty people have the underdog mentality, and I think I've always had that, given the way I was raised.

AD: Most of the research and psychology says that people change much more after childhood than you first would think. There are all these Biblical phrases like "show me the child at seven, and I'll show you the man," or Freud, who thought everything interesting happened in childhood, that there was no growth after that. But neuroscience and longitudinal research on people suggests that people change a lot actually, and they change sometimes in dramatic ways.

If you look at the data on personality change, the first thing you note is that people's personalities change in every dimension, but what that data obscures is that if you gather 100 people's personality change, and you take their average, what the data looks like is gradual growth. For instance, most people become more conscientious, more dependable, more agreeable, more wise, and more emotionally stable as they mature.
QZ: Do you think knowing about grit as a concept, and its benefits, makes you grittier?
But what those averages obscure is that really what's going on is some people are not changing nearly at all, while some people are making dramatic changes. For example, psychotherapy has enormous effects that are lasting beyond the last therapy session, and that is proof that people can change the way they interact with the world. So I believe in change, and I think I was pretty gritty as a child, but I know I've gotten grittier as I've gotten older, and I don't think my grit was welded in place when I was seven.

AD: I don't actually think it's a panacea-so I don't think if you know about grit, like you read a book about grit or understand it, that you automatically become grittier, but I think it can help.

For example, because I know the psychology of failure, and I'm able to quickly recognize when I fall victim to the unproductive self-talk people engage in after something doesn't work out. When I find myself saying things like, "Oh my god, I'm never going to be able to do that, no one will ever give us money for our nonprofit," it's very helpful to have the metacognitive understanding that this self-talk is normal to experience, and that it's not going to last forever.

The first time I was on Freakonomics, the podcast, Steven Dubner got me to tell him what I really thought-and I don't have data on it-but what I really thought about people who are successful and happy. I said to him people who have some metacognitive understanding of themselves-like they can look at themselves and honestly understand like what they're doing well and what they're not doing well-eventually they will heal themselves.
QZ: So back to your life a bit. You grew up in household where it was really encouraged to be hyper-successful, and yet you didn't think of yourself as a genius. Which is ironic, given you're literally a MacArthur Genius. What made you think that you weren't extremely intelligent then, and how did that change as you got older?
Eventually, they will mediate their weaknesses and raise their strengths. People who have no self-awareness, they're the ones you really worry about; they may be okay on certain dimensions, but they're never going to grow. So yeah, I'm a big fan of metacognitive awareness.

My father would literally say things like "you're no genius," to me. (There was, in fact, a great irony and redemption to the MacArthur Fellowship.) But he would also say things to my mother, who was an amateur painter, like "you're no Picasso." He would say to my sister and me, "you're never going to win a beauty pageant." He would say these things, and it makes him sound like a horrible person, but I think really what was going on is that people often talk to themselves while they're talking to you. So I think he was not measuring up to his own aspirations, and it was just leaking out of him.

The blessing of all this is that I never did think I was a genius. I've never been that kind of fragile person who felt like everything was supposed to be perfect and that I was supposed to be the smartest person in the room. I think some people are brought up with their parents saying, "you're perfect," you know, "everything you do is right." And then as life happens, it's not that way, and it's really harder for them than for people who got that dosage all along.

Small wins are enormously important. We look at people and we say, "Oh, they have this outside confidence," but really one of the things that builds confidence is actual evidence that you're on the right path.
QZ: How do you set up situations that will facilitate small wins? Say you have an employee who is mediocre, not great, doesn't make more money for the company than anyone else, but isn't an abject failure. How do you steer them, as a manager, into a world in which they can have a small win?
For example, when I was a graduate student in psychology I submitted my first paper to a top-tier journal-and it got in. I mean, yes, it had to be revised. But that victory fueled my confidence, and gave me the chutzpah to try the next thing. So if you're trying to motivate yourself, or a team member, or kid, you can't just talk people into confidence. If they have a track record of failure after failure, then you do need to figure out, how do I make it possible for this person to have a small win?

AD: You need to break down big goals into smaller and smaller parts, and then you need to give them the part that they're almost able to do, and with support can do. Actually, that's a lesson from child psychology. If you look at little kids who are learning to walk or learning to read, they might not be able to take the next developmental step on their own, but with a little support this next step becomes just within their reach.

It's called the zone of proximal development-you're supposed to have kids just proximal to what they can do, just proximal to the next frontier.
QZ: How does feedback play into small wins-is it important to call out, praise, or reinforce each small win?
And if you're a good manager or a good coach, that's what you do, too. Great coaches can take a back handspring and fractionate it into tiny parts. If you're a great manager, you will give somebody something that they're just able to do with support, then once they're able to do that [on their own], you give them the next thing they're just able to do, and that's how they grow.

I think, personally, that people need to be praised. Human beings don't learn very well when there's no feedback. It's the job of the manager to give both praise and critique.

For example on my team, after everything we do, we give two pieces of feedback-one positive, one critical. For critical feedback we do an "NTT" which stands for "Next Time Try." So if I was up on stage giving a presentation, the next day my team will give me my "next time tries": Next time try to use the left side of stage, next time speak slower, or speak faster. Then we do an "IWEW," which stands for "It Was Effective When," like, it was effective when you said this anecdote, or when you asked this question.

NTTs and IWEWs are particularly helpful because they're action-oriented-after saying "it was effective when you," you have to say a verb, and you have to be specific. In general feedback is much better when it's specific, and when it's really direct.

I have a colleague whose done studies of expert tutors. He looks at the top 1% of tutors, and what he finds is that they don't waste a lot of time saying like, "You're smart," or "You're great at math," or "You're bad at math." They spend 99% of their attention on the actual work - so their feedback is very specific, it's like, "Oh no, don't divide by seven," or, "You have to divide on both sides."
QZ: What does grit look like when you're already successful? What do you envision your own sense of grit looking like 10 years from now?
I think that's a good lesson for managers-you have to take a big goal, fraction it in tiny parts, and realize that whoever it is that you're mentoring, they're going to be where they are. You can't give them something to do that they can't yet do. And then your feedback should be very specific, even if it sounds overly simplistic. Like: "It was really great that you wrote that memo. I liked that it had a really strong executive summary, and it was spell-checked, awesome job." That enforces the small win. Then you can say, "Ok, what's the next challenge?"

AD: Like everyone I study, as soon as I'm in a comfortable place, I make myself uncomfortable again. If you asked me how was last week, I would not say, "Oh, it was great, it was easy." I would tell you about how I had a meeting with a funder who I thought was going to give me $1.5 million, and it looks like she's going to pass this year. I would tell you that I did a meeting with a team, which I thought could've been more effective, and I could have been more supportive. I'm constantly thinking about what I haven't done.

It's often said of people who write books that there's a mini-depression after you write it. And I think it's because human beings are actually happiest in the pursuit of goals; maybe that's why our founding fathers said the "pursuit of happiness," not the obtaining of happiness.
This story is part of How We'll Win, a project exploring the fight for gender equality at work. Read more stories here.
When you have that small depression after you write a story, or after you write a book, or after you win some prize, the antidote is to set another goal. So my sights are now set on trying to understand character-which is not just grit, it's a lot of things that I don't know very much about, like curiosity, empathy, gratitude, and generosity. That's the next goal.

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"You're no genius": Her father's shutdowns made Angela Duckworth a world expert on grit

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Angela Duckworth is the world's leading expert on "grit," the much-hyped ingredient in personal success. As Duckworth defines it, grit is passion and sustained persistence applied toward long-term achievement, with no particular concern for rewards or recognition along the way. It combines resilience, ambition, and self-control in the pursuit of goals that take months, years, or even decades.

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She is considered the world's foremost expert on grit. In fact, she wrote an entire book about it.

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A management consultant who became a classroom teacher , she noticed a gap in education-- strong performers who were only moderately intelligent, and highly intelligent students who struggled. So Angela became a psychologist and researcher to try to fill that void. Her work resulted in the book Grit, The Power of Passion and Perseverance.

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High-resolution photos of MacArthur Fellows are available for download (right click and save), including use by media, in accordance with this copyright policy.

Please credit: John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

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High-resolution photos of MacArthur Fellows are available for download (right click and save), including use by media, in accordance with this copyright policy. Please credit: John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

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Here, Angela explains the theory of "grit" which she says can predict success in schools (and has been extrapolated to business and other areas of life). I first learned about her work from watching this video after a Gifted Education conference.

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Angela Lee Duckworth: Grit: The power of passion and perseverance

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Leaving a high-flying job in consulting, Angela Lee Duckworth took a job teaching math to seventh graders in a New York public school. She quickly realized that IQ wasn't the only thing separating the successful students from those who struggled. Here, she explains her theory of "grit" as a predictor of success.

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Angela studies core concepts that apply to creativity: persistence, risk taking, and growth mindset. Not only does she study these interrelated topics; she embodies them.

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Philadelphians are known for their grit. A city of neighborhoods, largely built by poor immigrants, they are passionate about many topics. Though largely blue-collar, they do not let the lack of resources or prestige get in their way-- they keep striving, they take risks, they never stop looking for the next opportunity, and in so have found tremendous success as a city (and, occasionally, in sports).  This lines up with her central theory-- maybe this city has an unconscious (subconscious) effect on her thinking, or influenced her behavior, per several of our theorists!