Transcriber : Joseph Geni Reviewer : Morton Bast When I was 27 years old , I left a very demanding Requiring a lot of effort or skill job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding Requiring a lot of effort or skill : teaching .
I went to teach seventh graders math in the New York City public schools .
And like any teacher , I made quizzes and tests .
I gave out homework assignments .
When the work came back , I calculated grades .
What struck To suddenly make someone think of something or to have a strong effect on someone's mind. me was that IQ was not the only difference between my best and my worst students .
Some of my strongest performers A person who performs an action or task did not have stratospheric IQ scores .
Some of my smartest kids weren't doing so well .
And that got me thinking .
The kinds of things you need to learn in seventh grade math , sure , they're hard : ratios , decimals , the area of a parallelogram .
But these concepts are not impossible , and I was firmly convinced Firmly believing that something is true. that every one of my students could learn the material if they worked hard and long enough .
After several more years of teaching , I came to the conclusion that what we need in education is a much better understanding of students and learning from a motivational perspective A particular attitude towards or way of regarding something , from a
psychological perspective .
In education , the one thing we know how to measure best is IQ .
But what if doing well in school and in life depends on much more than your ability to learn quickly and easily ?
So I left the classroom , and I went to graduate school to become a psychologist .
I started studying kids and adults in all kinds of super challenging settings The place , and in every study my question was , who is successful here and why ?
My research team and I went to West Point Military Academy .
We tried to predict To say that something will happen in the future. which cadets would stay in military training and which would drop out .
We went to the National Spelling Bee and tried to predict which children would advance farthest in competition .
We studied rookie teachers working in really tough neighborhoods , asking which teachers are still going to be here in teaching by the end of the school year , and of those , who will
be the most effective at improving learning outcomes for their students ?
We partnered with private companies , asking , which of these salespeople is going to keep their jobs ?
And who's going to earn the most money ?
In all those very different contexts , one characteristic emerged To become known as a significant predictor Something that indicates what will happen in the future. of success .
And it wasn't social intelligence .
It wasn't good looks , physical health , and it wasn't IQ .
It was grit Courage and resolve .
is passion and perseverance Continuing in a course of action despite difficulty or delay in achieving success. for very long - term goals .
Grit is having stamina The ability to sustain prolonged physical or mental effort. .
