by Maria Popova
“Character is at least as important as intellect.”
Creative
history brims with embodied examples of why the secret of genius is
doggedness rather than “god”-given talent, from the case of
young Mozart’s upbringing to
E. B. White’s wisdom on writing to
Chuck Close’s assertion about art to
Tchaikovsky’s conviction about composition to
Neil Gaiman’s advice to aspiring writers.
But it takes a brilliant scholar of the psychology of achievement to
empirically prove these creative intuitions:
Math-teacher-turned-psychologist
Angela Duckworth, who began her graduate studies under
positive psychology godfather Martin Seligman
at my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, has done more than
anyone for advancing our understanding of how self-control and grit —
the relentless work ethic of sustaining your commitments toward a
long-term goal — impact success. So how heartening to hear that
Duckworth is the recipient of a
2013 MacArthur “genius” grant for her extraordinary endeavors, the implications of which span from education to employment to human happiness.
In this short video from the MacArthur Foundation, Duckworth traces her journey and explores the essence of her work:
We need more than the intuitions of educators to work on this problem. For sure
we need the educators, but in partnership I think we need scientists to
study this from different vantage points, and that actually inspired me
to move out of the classroom as a teacher and into the lab as a
research psychologist.
In the exceedingly excellent
How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character (
public library) — a necessary addition to these
fantastic reads on education —
Paul Tough writes of Duckworth’s work:
Duckworth had come to Penn in 2002, at the age of
thirty-two, later in life than a typical graduate student. The daughter
of Chinese immigrants, she had been a classic multitasking overachiever
in her teens and twenties. After completing her undergraduate degree at
Harvard (and starting a summer school for low-income kids in Cambridge
in her spare time), she had bounced from one station of the mid-nineties
meritocracy to the next: intern in the White House speechwriting
office, Marshall scholar at Oxford (where she studied neuroscience),
management consultant for McKinsey and Company, charter-school adviser.
Duckworth spent a number of years toying with the idea of starting
her own charter school, but eventually concluded that the model didn’t
hold much promise for changing the circumstances of children from
disadvantaged backgrounds, those whom the education system was failing
most tragically. Instead, she decided to pursue a PhD program at Penn.
In her application essay, she shared how profoundly the experience of
working in schools had changed her view of school reform and wrote:
The problem, I think, is not only the schools but also
the students themselves. Here’s why: learning is hard. True, learning is
fun, exhilarating and gratifying — but it is also often daunting,
exhausting and sometimes discouraging. . . . To help chronically
low-performing but intelligent students, educators and parents must
first recognize that character is at least as important as intellect.
Duckworth began her graduate work by studying self-discipline. But
when she completed her first-year thesis, based on a group of 164
eighth-graders from a Philadelphia middle school, she arrived at a
startling discovery that would shape the course of her career: She found
that the students’ self-discipline scores were far better predictors of
their academic performance than their IQ scores. So she became
intensely interested in what strategies and tricks we might develop to
maximize our self-control, and whether those strategies can be taught.
But self-control, it turned out, was only a good predictor when it came
to immediate, concrete goals — like, say, resisting a cookie. Tough
writes:
Duckworth finds it useful to divide the mechanics of
achievement into two separate dimensions: motivation and volition. Each
one, she says, is necessary to achieve long-term goals, but neither is
sufficient alone. Most of us are familiar with the experience of
possessing motivation but lacking volition: You can be extremely
motivated to lose weight, for example, but unless you have the volition —
the willpower, the self-control — to put down the cherry Danish and
pick up the free weights, you’re not going to succeed. If a child is
highly motivated, the self-control techniques and exercises Duckworth
tried to teach [the students in her study] might be very helpful. But
what if students just aren’t motivated to achieve the goals their
teachers or parents want them to achieve? Then, Duckworth acknowledges,
all the self-control tricks in the world aren’t going to help.
This is where grit comes in — the X-factor that helps us attain more
long-term, abstract goals. To address this, Duckworth and her colleague
Chris Peterson developed the Grit Scale — a deceptively simple test, on
which you evaluate how much twelve statements apply to you, from
“I am a hard worker” to
“New ideas and projects sometimes distract me from previous ones.”
The results are profoundly predictive of success at such wide-ranging
domains of achievement as the National Spelling Bee and the West Point
military academy. Tough describes the surprising power of this seemingly
mundane questionnaire:
For each statement, respondents score themselves on a
five-point scale, ranging from 5, “very much like me,” to 1, “not like
me at all.” The test takes about three minutes to complete, and it
relies entirely on self-report — and yet when Duckworth and Peterson
took it out into the field, they found it was remarkably predictive of
success. Grit, Duckworth discovered, is only faintly related to IQ —
there are smart gritty people and dumb gritty people — but at Penn, high
grit scores allowed students who had entered college with relatively
low college-board scores to nonetheless achieve high GPAs. At the
National Spelling Bee, Duckworth found that children with high grit
scores were more likely to survive to the later rounds. Most remarkable,
Duckworth and Peterson gave their grit test to more than twelve hundred
freshman cadets as they entered the military academy at West Point and
embarked on the grueling summer training course known as Beast Barracks.
The military has developed its own complex evaluation, called the whole
candidate score, to judge incoming cadets and predict which of them
will survive the demands of West Point; it includes academic grades, a
gauge of physical fitness, and a leadership potential score. But the
more accurate predictor of which cadets persisted in Beast Barracks and
which ones dropped out turned out to be Duckworth’s simple little
twelve-item grit questionnaire.
You can take the Grit Scale
here (registration is free). For more on the impact of Duckworth’s work, do treat yourself to the altogether indispensable
How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character.
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