The Significance of Grit: A Conversation with Angela Lee Duckworth
Deborah Perkins-Gough
People who can set long-term goals and stick to them have a leg up on success in school and life.
For the last 11 years, Angela Lee Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania has been conducting groundbreaking studies on grit—the quality that enables individuals to work hard and stick to their long-term passions and goals. In this interview with Educational Leadership, Duckworth
describes what her research has shown about the relationship between
grit and achievement, and she reflects on the importance of helping
students develop grit and other noncognitive traits.
The theme of this issue, as you know, is "Resilience and
Learning." How are grit and resilience related? Is there a difference
between the two?
The word
resilience
is used differently by different people. And to add to the confusion,
the ways people use it often have a lot of overlap. To give you an
example, Martin Seligman, my advisor and now my colleague here at Penn,
has a program called the "Penn Resiliency Program." It's all about one
specific definition of resilience, which is optimism—appraising
situations without distorting them, thinking about changes that are
possible to make in your life. But I've heard other people use
resilience to mean bouncing back from adversity, cognitive or otherwise. And some people use
resilient specifically to refer to kids who come from at-risk environments who thrive nevertheless.
What all those definitions of resilience have in common is the idea
of a positive response to failure or adversity. Grit is related because
part of what it means to be gritty is to be resilient in the face of
failure or adversity. But that's not the only trait you need to be
gritty.
In the scale that we developed in research studies to
measure grit,
only half of the questions are about responding resiliently to
situations of failure and adversity or being a hard worker. The other
half of the questionnaire is about having consistent interests—focused
passions—over a long time. That doesn't have anything to do with failure
and adversity. It means that you choose to do a particular thing in
life and choose to give up a lot of other things in order to do it. And
you stick with those interests and goals over the long term.
So grit is not just having resilience in the face of failure, but
also having deep commitments that you remain loyal to over many years.
Tell us about one of your studies that showed the relationship between grit and high achievement.
One of the first studies that we did was at West Point Military
Academy, which graduates about 25 percent of the officers in the U.S.
Army. Admission to West Point depends heavily on the Whole Candidate
Score, which includes SAT scores, class rank, demonstrated leadership
ability, and physical aptitude. Even with such a rigorous admissions
process, about 1 in 20 cadets drops out during the summer of training
before their first academic year.
We were interested in how well grit would predict who would stay. So
we had cadets take a very short grit questionnaire in the first two or
three days of the summer, along with all the other psychological tests
that West Point gives them. And then we waited around until the end of
the summer.
Of all the variables measured, grit was the best predictor of which
cadets would stick around through that first difficult summer. In fact,
it was a much better predictor than the Whole Candidate Score, which
West Point at that time thought was their best predictor of success. The
Whole Candidate Score actually had no predictive relationship with
whether you would drop out that summer (although it was the best
predictor of later grades, military performance, and physical
performance).
Woody Allen once quipped that 80 percent of success in life is just
showing up. Well, it looks like grit is one thing that determines who
shows up.
We've seen echoes of our West Point findings in studies of many other
groups, such as National Spelling Bee contestants and first-year
teachers in tough schools. Grit predicts success over and beyond talent.
When you consider individuals of equal talent, the grittier ones do
better.
What research finding on grit has been most surprising to you?
Probably the finding that most surprised me was that in the West
Point data set, as well as other data sets, grit and talent either
aren't related at all or are actually inversely related.
That was surprising because rationally speaking, if you're good at
things, one would think that you would invest more time in them. You're
basically getting more return on your investment per hour than someone
who's struggling. If every time you practice piano you improve a lot,
wouldn't you be more likely to practice a lot?
We've found that that's not necessarily true. It reminds me of a study done of taxi drivers in 1997.
1
When it's raining, everybody wants a taxi, and taxi drivers pick up a
lot of fares. So if you're a taxi driver, the rational thing to do is to
work more hours on a rainy day than on a sunny day because you're
always busy so you're making more money per hour. But it turns out that
on rainy days, taxi drivers work the fewest hours. They seem to have
some figure in their head—"OK, every day I need to make $1,000"—and
after they reach that goal, they go home. And on a rainy day, they get
to that figure really quickly.
It's a similar thing with grit and talent. In terms of academics, if you're just trying to get an
A or an
A−,
just trying to make it to some threshold, and you're a really talented
kid, you may do your homework in a few minutes, whereas other kids might
take much longer. You get to a certain level of proficiency, and then
you stop. So you actually work less hard.
If, on the other hand, you are not just trying to reach a certain cut
point but are trying to maximize your outcomes—you want to do as well
as you possibly can—then there's no limit, ceiling, or threshold. Your
goal is, "How can I get the most out of my day?" Then you're like the
taxi driver who drives all day whether it's rainy or not.
When I look at people whom I really respect and admire, like psychology professor
Walter Mischel or economist
Jim Heckman,
these people are extremely talented. For every hour that they put into
research, they're getting a lot out of it. Still, they work 17 hours a
day. Jim Heckman won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2000, and
if he were working to get to a cut point, he should now be coasting. But
he's not. I think he wants to win another Nobel!
The people who are, for lack of a better word, "ambitious"—the kids who are not satisfied with an
A or even an
A+, who have no limit to how much they want to understand, learn, or succeed—those are the people who are both talented
and gritty.
So the inverse relationship between talent and grit that we've found
in some of our studies doesn't mean that all talented people are
un-gritty. That's certainly not true. The most successful people in life
are both talented and gritty in whatever they've chosen to do. But on
average—and I think many teachers would resonate with this—there are a
lot of fragile gifted and talented kids who don't know how to fail. They
don't know how to struggle, and they don't have a lot of practice with
it. Being gifted is no guarantee of being hardworking or passionate
about something.
Earlier, you said that grit depends on having focused, long-term passions. In a 2009 TED Talk,
you
spoke about how you moved frequently from job to job during your 20s,
even though you were successful in each one, before you finally
committed to your passion for education research. How did that
transformation happen?
Several things happened. One was that I had this realization—a
reflective, midlife crisis moment of, "Gee, let me take stock here." I
realized that I wasn't actually going to be really good at anything
unless I stuck with one thing for a long time, and I had never done
that.
I was a good fourth-year math teacher relative to other fourth-year
math teachers. But I was not nearly as good as the master teachers who
had been doing it for 25 years. And I would never be that good, unless I
decided to spend 20 more years working really hard at it. I realized
that just shifting, shifting, shifting every two or three years was not
going to add up to what I wanted. I thought, "I'm very ambitious. I want
to be world-class at something. And this is not a recipe for it."
The second thing that happened was not so much finding my passion as
recognizing or rediscovering my passion. When I looked at my interests
and what I had been involved in since high school, I saw two themes:
education and children. I thought, "I've spent a lot of time thinking
about children and learning. Maybe there's a theme there."
I also recognized that psychology had been a long-standing interest.
In my family, my dad didn't let us do anything unless we could pay for
it ourselves. When I was 16, I had saved enough money to pay for a
summer activity. The first time I was able to afford anything, I went to
Yale summer school. I remember looking at the course catalog, and it
was like a candy shop. I thought, "OK. I could take philosophy. I could
take chemistry. It's my money; I can do whatever I want." And I chose
psychology and nonfiction writing. Rhetorical writing is essentially
what you do in research, right? You're arguing something: "Here's my
evidence. And here are the counterarguments." So interest in research
and psychology were there very early in my life.
Third, I took an inventory of what I was good at. I thought to
myself, "Well, I write pretty well, and I learn well. I can read things.
And I have that kind of analytic bent." So I wondered what field I
could use those abilities in. That drove me to thinking about research
as a career and wondering how to marry that with my interest in children
and psychology.
And that's what I do today. I had actually already identified my
interests when I was 16. I got lost a little bit. But now, 11 years
after I started graduate school, I'm on this path. I have the pleasure
of being reasonably good at something and getting deeper and deeper into
it.
A lot of young people never get to experience that—being into
something for enough years with enough depth so that they really know
it. Master teachers know what I'm talking about. So do people who are
seriously committed to whatever vocation they have, even people who have
a really serious hobby that they've worked at for years. They reach a
level of appreciation and experience that novices can never understand.
Students need to hear that message, because so much of today's
conversation is about the changing economy—how you're going to have all
these different jobs and you have to be flexible. But you know, you also
have to be good at something.
Your research on grit seems to be related to Carol Dweck's work
on a growth mind-set. She has studied the benefits of teaching kids
that intelligence is not fixed, but is something that they can grow. Do
you think the same is true of grit? And should we help young people see
that they can develop grit, that it's not just something you're born
with?
Carol Dweck, more than anyone else, is a role model for me. We're
collaborating with her on a couple of projects. One thing we've found is
that children who have more of a growth mind-set tend to be grittier.
The correlation isn't perfect, but this suggests to me that one of the
things that makes you gritty is having a growth mind-set. The attitude
"I can get better if I try harder" should help make you a tenacious,
determined, hard-working person.
In theory, the work that Carol has done to show that you can change
your mind-set would also be relevant to changing your grit. We're
developing an intervention, inspired by her work, to look at making
students aware of the value of deliberate practice, the kind of
effortful practice that really improves skills. In Carol's work, she
shows kids scientific evidence of brain plasticity—the fact that
peoples' brains change with experience. Although at first they might
respond to frustration and failure by thinking, "I should just give up; I
can't do this," Carol uses testimonials from other students to show
kids that those feelings and beliefs, as strong as they are, can change.
We're using the same kind of format to try to communicate information to students about
deliberate practice,
which is very effortful practice on things you can't yet do. We're
actually developing an intervention and testing it in middle schools
right now. We tell kids that deliberate practice is not easy. You are
going to be confused. You are going to be frustrated. When you're
learning, you have to make mistakes. You need to do things over and over
again, and that can be boring. In theory, this intervention can change
students' grit levels by changing their beliefs. I say "in theory,"
because we haven't shown it yet.
Teachers have so many good intuitions about this. They work on this
every day: How do I get my kids to try harder? How do I get them to be
determined, to stick with things? I'm really excited about starting a
conversation to bring more people's ideas into the dialogue because I am
guessing that some terrific teachers, basketball coaches, and guidance
counselors have their own theories that need to be tested. There are
probably going to be more ideas coming out of educators than out of
scientists on how to help students develop grit.
Do you agree with Paul Tough's thesis in his book How Children Succeed that noncognitive character traits are more important to success, or at least as important, as cognitive abilities?
I would probably say "
as important," just to be a little
conservative. I think there's been a pendulum swing toward the
importance of noncognitive traits.
Recently I was reading
The Big Test by Nicholas Lemann
(Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999), which is the story of how the SAT
came to be so dominant in college admissions and how standardized
testing became so prominent. He walks you through what happened in
20th-century America—there was a very well-intentioned shift toward a
meritocracy and a desire to admit people to the most elite schools on
the basis of what they could do, not on the basis of family lineage,
last name, or color of skin. Around the same time, these reliable,
easy-to-administer standardized tests became available. So there was a
pendulum swing toward an emphasis on cognitive aptitude, IQ, and so
forth.
What we're seeing now is a swing back toward a recognition that these
standardized tests, although they serve an important function, are
limited in their ability to pick up things like grit and self-control—as
well as many other traits that I don't study—gratitude, honesty,
generosity, empathy for the suffering of others, social intelligence,
tact, charisma. These are qualities I want my daughters, who are 10 and
11, to have. Another important quality is being proactive—when a kid
thinks, "I care about the whales, and I'm going to start an
organization," and then actually goes out and does that. Then there's
honesty, kindness, and so forth.
None of those qualities is picked up by a standardized test. We're
now seeing a pendulum swing away from the single-minded focus on
standardized testing and toward a broader view of the whole child. And
our research just happens to be in the swinging pendulum's path, which
keeps us very busy.
So you believe that schools are generally moving in this direction?
I think so. We get a fair amount of correspondence from schools, and
we also talk with teachers and parents. We always get the same
reaction—they really do care about these things. They recognize that gym
is important, that music is important, that empathy is important. These
are qualities that policymakers are less concerned about. But this
message really resonates with most people who are in close contact with
children.
From your observations in schools, are there programs that are
ahead of the curve in developing important character qualities,
including grit? Are programs like the KIPP schools effective?
Some of the high-performing charter schools—for example, YES Prep and
Aspire—are on the cutting edge in recognizing the power of character.
KIPP is the one I know best. From day one, they have said "character and
academics for success in college and in life." It was never an
either/or question—either we can emphasize math, or kids could be
self-controlled. Instead it was, if we emphasize self-control, students
will be successful in math.
A lot of independent schools have never lost their emphasis on
character. The elite independent schools in the United States have
maintained fidelity to character as part of their mission from the early
days. Unfortunately, public schools are besieged by budget cuts and
reporting requirements and No Child Left Behind–type demands. They have
to meet all the standards for the district, for the state, and for the
federal government. And they have the fewest resources for incorporating
character education. They're not like these wealthy private schools
that have so much a year to spend on kids and have relatively few
problematic children.
But despite those disincentives, Upper Darby School District, a large
urban public school district near the University of Pennsylvania, has
partnered with us. We've had a wonderful relationship with them for the
last year. They've really embraced character education. They haven't
figured out all of the answers, but they're asking all the right
questions.
What I'm saying is that there is interest in developing traits like
resilience and grit across K–12 education. Some of the schools that have
the most freedom to work on this are making the most headway. But a lot
of the others are trying to catch up.
