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

Elise Hu (0:03)

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Huw, and today's episode of TED Talks Daily is presented by Walmart Business.

Think about the most successful person you know. Chances are, when you picture what got them there, talent often comes to mind, maybe ambition, maybe luck. But psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth spent years studying students, military cadets, and salespeople, and she kept finding the same thing. The quality that predicted who made it wasn't IQ, it wasn't social skills, it wasn't family income, it was grit.

Angela Lee Duckworth (0:43)

Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals.

Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years.

Elise Hu (0:59)

In her now-iconic talk from 2013, Angela shares why this idea, that sustained effort might matter more than raw talent, is actually quite simple, and yet why most of our systems for identifying and rewarding potential are built around opposite assumptions.

Angela Lee Duckworth (1:17)

To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows about building it.

Elise Hu (1:24)

Angela initially left a career in management consulting to teach 7th grade math in New York City public schools. What she observed there sent her back to school to study psychology, and she eventually reshaped how researchers think about achievement. Angela argues that if we want to help kids and ourselves stick with it through the hard things, we have to get serious about figuring out how grit is really built. And she offers the most promising lead she has found so far.

And now, our TED Talk of the day.

Angela Lee Duckworth (2:04)

When I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding, 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 me was that IQ was not the only difference between my best and my worst students. Some of my strongest performers 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 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, 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. 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 which cadets would stay in military training and which would drop out. We went to the National Spelling V 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 sales people is going to keep their jobs? And who's going to earn the most money? In all those very different contexts, one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success. And it wasn't social intelligence. It wasn't good looks, physical health, and it wasn't IQ. It was grit.

Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years. And working really hard to make that future a reality. Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint.

A few years ago, I started studying grit in the Chicago Public Schools. I asked thousands of high school juniors to take grit questionnaires, and then waited around more than a year to see who would graduate. Turns out that grittier kids were significantly more likely to graduate. Even when I matched them on every characteristic I could measure, things like family income, standardized achievement test scores, even how safe kids felt when they were at school. So it's not just at West Point or the National Spelling Bee that grit matters, it's also in school, especially for kids at risk for dropping out.