Best of Series: The Power of Passion and Perseverance With Angela Duckworth

attributes that predict success in life. A twenty thirteen MacArthur Genius Fellow, Angel has advised the White House, the World Bank, NBA and NFL teams, and Fortune five hundred CEOs. Angela has received numerous awards for her contributions to K twelve education, including a Beyond Z Award from the Kit Foundation. Her first book, Grit, The Power of Passion and Perseverance, will be published May third, and I can honestly say that it is wonderful. Thank you for being on the podcast, Angla.

And the second thing I realized, maybe a little more at an intellectual level, was that if you're really going to try to help people in a meaningful way, kids are great because they are at the beginning of their life with just the math of it right like that, you could potentially have a greater impact on kids' lives. And by the time that I was ready to graduate from college, I knew that I wanted to start a summer school for kids who wouldn't be able to Afford

Academic and Richmond otherwise. And I modeled the program after a program that used to be called summer Bridge and is now called Breakthrough Collaborative. There's now many of these programs throughout the world. I think, actually I was going to say the United States, but I think it's international now. So I did that, and I, as you mentioned, you know, did a bunch of other things. I think at the time that most people go to graduate school, it's around

twenty two to twenty four. But for me, I spent those years in my twenties teaching, I was management consultant. I did a degree in neuroscience at Oxford. I mean, I don't know that this was all planned. In fact,

I know that it wasn't planned. But through those experiences I came to the realization by the time I was thirty two, which is when I did enter a PhD in psychology, that there was a problem that needed to be solved with kids and education that I didn't think would be solved without actually a benefit of psychological science, and that is to understand why it is that children are sometimes able to bring forth great effort and concentration

to learning and to doing well. You know, when I say learning, I mean, you know, both inside and outside the classroom, right, Learning is also something that happens when you're you know, doing a sport, or learning to get along with people in your family, or you know, really learning broadly construed that we needed to understand the origins of effort toward learning, and that if we could understand that, we would be able to make a huge difference in kids' lives.

And I felt that by going into psychology as an academic as you are as well, that we would be able to make greater strides than the kind of you know, the wisdom that got handed down to us from generation to general. We should work hard, you know, discipline is really important, but I felt like we need to go beyond that.

I knew he'd be the perfect fit. It was actually that I happened to be in Philadelphia when I realized that I want to do a PhD in psychology, and I looked around at the programs it would be very easily commutable, and there aren't that many, And then I went to the faculty list in alphabetical order, and when I got to s on the University of Pennsylvania Psychology website and I started clicking around and reading things that Marty had written, I felt like he would be a

good match for me in terms of his well he had done research on helplessness, which in a way is the opposite of sustaining effort on things that are hard, and that also that he clearly had a pragmatic or

practical bent. I think he's one of the psychologists, and he's not the only one, but it's a bit more of an exception than a rule that really thinks about on a daily kind of like, how is this going to actually change people's lives and not just be interesting from a kind of purely you know, scholarly perspective.

everything else that I had seen. But I didn't come into graduate school saying I'm going to study grit, which I watch I define as passion and perseverance for long term goals. Really, that idea emerged from interviewing people who are really high achieving and as many domains as I could think of. And that's a technique, a sort of like, well, okay, let's look at high achievement, and let's look at achievement across as many domains as possible. That's a time honored technique.

You know. The logic of it is that if you only study world class soccer players, you might figure out something that's just very particular to soccer, you know, like having really good calves or something. You know, so you try to look for what's common across different domains. And many other psychologists had done that before me, and I'm sure many will do it afterwards as well, because it's just common sense that that would give you a clue

to sort of what the active ingredients might be. And so when I talked to high achievers, I asked them, I asked them about themselves. But I quickly found out that it's hard for people to talk about themselves, you know, we're all programmed to be self effacing, and so I started asking them about the people they most admired. So even if they were a MacArthur fellow, I might ask them, you know, who they most admired in their field other

than themselves, and to just tell me about them. And I think, in addition to luck, which came up a lot, you know, this person's just really lucky to have this happen at this time. In addition to talent, you know, this person has an ability to you know, to get better, to you know, see things that other people don't necessarily

see or learn as well. That there were these descriptions that eventually became the Grit scale, and the two dimensions that emerge in those interviews are the same two dimensions that are in the Grit scale, which is to say that people who are very high achieving tend to bring forth great effort in a consistent and enduring way toward a goal. And the second thing is that the goal

does itself doesn't change. This kind of thing that that people are working on doesn't morph and change much over time. That doesn't mean that their tactics aren't different, but the sort of like the big thing that they're working on tends to be the same, not different over time.

the service of superordinate goals. So say that ten times real quick.

progress as somebod who's trying to understand grit. But I think in important ways, this jargoning definition that was recently. You know something that I've written in an article, in very meaningful ways like the same thing as what I started out, you know, those intuitions from those interviews. So first, let me just say what I mean by a superordinate goal.

One thing that is clear to me about GRIT is that it's not just that your interests are consistent in some like very trivial way, like oh, I still like doubt nad be, you know, like, oh, it's you know, I really enjoy the New York Times Sunday magazine. And yep, sure enough, four or five years later, I still enjoy the New York Times Sunday magazine. Those are sort of lower level interests or goals that I don't think that that's the locus of consistency that really matters for GRIT.

What really is striking about people who are gritty is that their interests at the most abstract and general level are consistent. So, for example, I would expect that ten twenty thirty years from now, Scott Kaufman and Angela Duckworth will still be deeply interested in human behavior, human motivation, you know, psychology, right, and that I would still be interested in kids, which has been you know, as you pointed out, like a very true of me since I

was a teenager. So it's at that level that I find consistency in really gritty individuals, not at these sort of lower level, more tactical kinds of things. And I think by invoking this kind of superordinate thing, what I'm also suggesting is that it's certainly not my own you know work, it's really building upon decades of research and psychology,

is that human beings are goal directed. And furthermore, we can say that we have a hierarchy of sorts where there's certain goals that we have, like have a cup of coffee this morning, that are really really low level, specific concrete.

It's like, well, I you know, really want to well, you know, first I might enjoy it, but you know, another why is that, like I want to actually be alert for like the next six hours while I'm doing something like writing a manuscript, It's like, well, why do you care about that? Well, you know, this manuscript actually matters to me because it's you know, part of you know project that of like trying to understand the measures

of grit. Okay, well why does that matter? So I think that human beings not only are goal directed, we have goals that are nested in these hierarchies where every time you ask why why do you have that goal? You shoort of go up a level at the very very top of this like Christmas tree like hierarchy, you have this you know, superordinate goal. And for me, it is to help kids thrive using insights from psychological science.

And that's what I you know, what I find, you know, most interesting about the consistency of interest in gritty peoples that at this abstract level, you know, there's a lot of stability, there's a lot of stubbornness, and there's also not just having that goal, because human beings are very capable of having goals that they don't actually do anything about, but there's also this you know, active effort toward accomplishing that goal. So yes, it is perseverance and passion for

long term goals. But it's particularly long term goals that are superordinate in nature. And you know that passion and perseverance is really you know that it's describing the active pursuit of those super goals more than it's describing you know, these very very low level tactical objectives, right, And I.

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Could you tell me a little bit what what an equal finality I don't even know how to pronounce it ecofinality set is and how that relates to Over time, you start to substitute things that are not going towards your superordentical they're kind of getting the way with you, kind of maybe get more coherence in the structure. Is that one way of looking at it.

many ways, certainly more than one, that you could reach that. So, for example, you know, you might have the academic ambition to you know, publish research and be a professor, right, that might not be your superordinate goal because that sort of it could be you know that there's an even more like why you could ask a why question, you could go up even more level, like you know, I want to be somebody who contributes to knowledge, you know.

But you know still this professor goal is not the lowest level goal either, right, because there are definitely if every time you ask how, you go down a level, every time you ask why, you go up a level.

are other ways to contribute to knowledge. You know, you could be part of an education technology startup, or you could become a writer. I mean, there's lots of things that you could do to contribute to knowledge, not just being a professor. And that exactly is the heart of the idea of equifinality. That the idea is that you know there are substitute paths, you know that would get

you to the same destination. And in fact, you know, and I won't pretend that the grid scale does a great job of distinguishing between these lower level paths that are interchangeable to some extent, substitutable and then these higher level things like the farther you go up in the goal tree, the more you should be stubborn and sticky and kind of, you know, unwilling to substitute. The grid

scale itself doesn't do a great job of that. But what I do find, particularly when you interview gritty individuals, that they're really able to distinguish between the higher and the lower level goals that they have, and at the lower level goals, they're extraordinarily flexible and creative. You know,

I'm like anybody else. Just to use this personal example, like I get rejected a lot, right, you know, from journals, and you know, you get the twelve page, single space rejection letter telling you in excruciating detail why your article is bad. And then you know, what do you do. Well, it's a lower level goal to get this particular article into this particular journal this particular year. So you know, if you're gritty, you know you're not. It doesn't mean

that you're stubborn about this like low level thing. It's like, oh, I'm just going to keep rewriting this article and you know, stalking the editor. That would be not grit. That would be a kind of a stubborness that I would not call grit, And I think a gritty person would say like, okay, well, how else can I achieve the higher level goal, which

is to get this finding out? Okay, I'll submit to another journal or you know, I'll revise it and you know, split it up into two articles, and you know, I'll peel to the editor. There are all kinds of things that you would do that would be I mean that's the idea of equifinality, all kinds of things that you would do to get to some higher level goal about which you're a little more stubborn than the lower level ones.

And when you get to the very top, you know, that's where I find that really greedy people are at the most abstract level, the kind of the life organizing ultimate concern, as Bob Emmons would say, as sort of the life organizing goal like that, you know, there's almost nothing that could make them give up on that. Right.

it's like your organizing passion. So what is the difference then, between self control and grit?

So at the heart of this definition is that you have a conflict between something which is going to feel good right away and is easy in some sense, and another thing which you think you'll actually find more satisfaction out of, but not easily and not right away. So, for example, if you're sitting in a lecture and you think you know if you upon reflection, you think, if I really paid attention for the next hour and twenty minutes, I think I'd overall be better off. It's just better

for Angela if she does that. Alternatively, you know, I could click around on my Facebook page during this lecture and that would bemediately more pleasurable. That's the kind of conflict that human beings of all ages face all the time, and so that kind of asymmetric conflict good for me in the long run versus good for me Now, I think that's at the heart of it. The second part

of my definition. When I said, you know, your ability to adjudicate between those two choices, what I mean is that your ability as a person to make those choices in your own best interest and to carry those out. So I don't mean compliance, right, which is to say that somebody, for you know, and your parents take away your cell phone because they want you to do your homework.

That's not self control. That's rental control. But if you say, as my fourteen year old said to my husband last week, Dad, I want you to take away my cell phone because I have a big test coming up and I need to study for it, that is self initiated. You know. That was you know, her having some insight into this conflict and her asking somebody else to like help her get through it. That's the sort of self initiated part of self control is really important. Now, that's what self

control is. Like, how is that different from grit? My perspective on this is that, you know, anytime you have any kind of conflict between two goals, when one of which is you know, better for me, even if it's only a little bit better for you versus something that's going to be more immediately awarding, you know, you have to use self control. And that happens all the time.

You know, It's like I don't really feel like working on my taxes, but I really should because I don't want to be there on April fourteenth, like you know, scrambling around. You know, I shouldn't have a second cup of coffee. I should really just have one because tonight I'm going to like not sleep well. I mean, all the time people are trying to deal with these conflicts. It's like the nature of you know, human existence. I

think where grit is different is the following. Yes, you know, grit often entails, you know, choosing to do something versus something else, something that's hard versus something that's easy. So there's some overlap there, But grit only pertains to those goals that are in that hierarchy that you would say like, oh yeah, but that's part of my goal hierarchy for my life defining these are all goals I have to do with that superordinate thing that really makes me tick

and gives my life meaning. So you know, unless that that's how you feel about your taxes or that's how you feel about your weight, you know, those would be like, oh yeah, that's a self control conflict, but it's not really grit related. So for me, if I have to, you know, work hard on a manuscript because this manuscript is part of a research program that I really think is going to ultimately help kids thrive, well then that's

about grit. But if it's just me, you know, trying to manage other goals that I have that are not part of that subordinate hierarchy, then it's not right.

clearly loading on that. And I would say that, like, if you consider conscientious to be this like really broad you know family of personality traits that also includes orderliness and traditionalism and respect for other people's you know, interests. Yeah, absolutely, I think that that's definitely what we see empirically. And also it makes sense when you think about it.

with you know, the bigger family of conscientiousness. You know, for sure, I would like you said, you know, say, look, you know, you can understand grit and self control as being facets of this bigger, bigger family, right, like family members of this bigger family. They could be a little bit related to other families of personality, but maybe that's

a nuance that's not important. So absolutely, and so as you would expect to find, you know, there's been a lot of research on facets versus like these big you know, very general personality domains like conscientiousness. And what's often found, as we find for grit as well, is that for certain outcomes that are more aligned to the facet, you know, you find stronger or incremental correlations. So we try to

say that in English. So for example, with grit, you know, maybe you don't find that grit is like the single best predictor of you know, all goals that are related to being a conscientious person, Like, it may not be you know, as related to well and I said this in an article of Jamscros, like it may not be you know, the single best conscientiousness facet predicting grade point

average or weight gain. Right, so those are better predicted actually by self control or the lack thereof right weight loss,

I guess would be the way that phrase it. So it's not that you would expect this one facet to outpredict every other facet for every other outcome, but for the outcomes that really make sense when you think about that facet, and for GRIT, I think about, you know, where the whole research program got started, which is, you know, GRIT should predict outcomes that are really you know, really challenging and that really do you know, chief and outcomes

that really do require a kind of stick to itdinous or endurance, and not all chief and outcomes are equally you know, described by that. So yes, you know, like graduating from something like college when a lot of other people are not graduating in your coport, or you know, finishing West Point, showing up the spelling bee again even though you lost again last year. Those are the kinds of things that I would expect and have found GRIT to be very predictive of. So yeah, it's part of

this bigger family. I think if I have felt that conscientious was identical to GRIT, I wouldn't have gone and you know, labeled it this way and I think the other thing that makes me think it's you know, not the same thing as you know, being orderly, being organized, being self controlled, is that in conscientiousness, you don't really have a lot of the sort of like I'm passionate about a lot of conscientiousness facets are about volition, like

being able to carry out things that you really, you know, want to do at some level, but they don't describe this kind of passion to do. So you wouldn't say, like somebody who's really conscientious is necessarily somebody who's like super passionate about something, thinks about it all the time. It gives their life meaning and purpose, and that's the you know, as you mentioned the passion side of grit, which I think is an important part of it.

kind of fireworks passion about what they do. It's not that they didn't, But what was more remarkable about the individuals they most admired was the consistency of that passion over time. And as somebody who's taught undergraduates for you know, some time, I have to say that the kind of you know, the ability to get just really excited about something, I mean kind of like swept up and in love

with something that is of course a wonderful thing. And I won't say that there aren't high achievers who you know, who don't have that quality. But it's more remarkable to me when you know two years later that kid is still really engaged in the same general project that's the rarity, right, So yeah, yeah, that's right, And so I think there is you know, it depends on how you use the

word passion. And I'm not here to tell people how the should or shouldn't use the word passion, but at least the way I'm using the word passion, I really do mean that remarkable endurance of you know, when Darwin wrote his autobiography towards the end of his life and the end of his scientific career, you know, and he talked about, you know, his abiding love for the topics

that he studied. I think it really was the kind of you know, fact that it was a constant occupation for not necessarily that on any given day, you know, he had more intense love than another person. But you know, ten twenty thirty years later, you know, the other scientists might be onto different things or off of science altogether. And what struck Darwin as remarkable about himself was that he really did have an abiding interest in what he was studying.

so that's a little bit harder. I think that that would absolutely be the exception and not the rule of the people that I have studied. Sometimes I find people who have a vocational supordinate goal, like this is what I do for a living and for a profession, and it's a very stable supordinate goal, like I'm a venture capitalist or i am an education, technology entrepreneur, and like

I want to help kids learn through better technology. I mean that kind of thing, and that's their supordinate professional goal, and that occasionally I'll find that people have an avocational goal that is a lot like I'm also a you know, fourth degree black belt in a kido and I you know, that's the way I pursue. And it's not like I

have nine hobbies. I have that one. Or Will Schwartz, the New York Times Crossword puzzle editor, for whom puzzles are his vocational subordinate goal, which is a goal that he developed I guess you could easily say by twelve or thirteen, because I think he was already asking other puzzle makers how he could become a professional puzzle maker in middle school. But even before that. I think he submitted his first puzzle for publication when he was younger

than that. So that's his vocational goal. But then he has an avocational subordinate goal which has been abiding for his whole life, when that's table tennis. So I think you occasionally will find that kind of a vocational and an avocational pursuit. I mean, for me, my vocational pursuit is psychology, and I have this like much less important avocational thing that I've been interested in for a long time,

which is cooking and food. So you know, when I go to bed, you know, and I read books, it's like about you know, chefs and food and I, you know, read recipe books and so forth. I think that's often the case, right, But it's also clear to me that, you know, my avocation is my avocation, right, like it's you know, it's it's something that I do that's I enjoy and I want to get better at it, but it's not as important to me as my vocational goal. And I don't really believe in poly maths, I think,

especially nowadays. Like I was just talking to an economist who's, you know, very prominent in his field, and he said to me that it took him thirty five years of working you know, really actively, right, like eighty hour weeks and economics to understand what he wanted to study. And

I said, why did it take you so long? He's like, well, it takes a really long time to know what's known and then be able to say what's not known, and further to say why it is that what remains to be known remains to be known, like why it hasn't been solved already, And he just can't imagine that as a young economist as smart as he was, and he probably he thinks he's probably you know, less smart than he used to be because he's getting older. That it just took a really long And that's why I don't

believe in poly maths. It's just really hard to kind of like pick up basketball and you know, outperform Kobe Bryant or you know, pick up painting and kind of like do much that's like meaningfully valuable compared to the other people who've been working on it for much longer, you know, in very short amounts of time. So I don't think you can have a lot of things simultaneously. It is possible, I think, to have them in sequence, but then again, you know, you just run up into

the constraint of, like people don't live that long. So maybe you could do, you know, two things in sequence in your lifetime or three things in sequence, but I can't imagine. And it's rarely the case that people do many, many things in sequence and become world class in all of them.

things like luck and opportunity constant. Of course those things matter, but like, assuming you're in the same situation you have the same amount of luck, then it's the people who have really high skill and really high cumulative effort that are going to actually produce the most, you know, the most beautiful and the best and the highest number of pots. You know, if you're a potter, that kind of thing.

Now that only has effort in the equation once. So you think, like, okay, well, what do you mean by effort counting twice. Here's what I mean. You can then ask the question like, okay, that's an interesting thing about skill. You know, we're not all equally skilled. Where does skill come from? I think skill is developed and where skill is developed is, you know, with effort. So I have a second equation, which is say like, well, if you really want to know what skill is, skill is equal

to talent times effort. So if you ask the question, well, who's going to become the most skilled person here, it's going to be the person who has the highest amount of talent and who puts the most cumulative effort toward it. Right, So something who works really hard for a long time but has a high rate of learning, which is how I define talent. So if you just use a little algebra, you find that achievement is therefore talent times effort times effort,

so talent times effort squared. And then it's just a little thought experiment if you change, if you wiggle effort a little bit, and you say, well, what happens if you increase effort by just a little bit, what happens to achievement versus increasing talent a little bit? And what happens to achievement. It's only by virtue of the fact that the effort variable happens twice in the equation that you get a bigger return on that increase in effort

because it does count twice. It helps you build skill, but it also helps make that skill productive.

you know, productivity. So then you know, absolutely, you know, then you would sort of like, you know, it doesn't matter how much effort you would put in, And so I think that's true. I mean, one position that I would like to clarify not that everybody has to worry about like Angela Duckworth and what she thinks about things.

But I think the research that I've done by focusing on the psychology of effort and the psychology of like sticking with things, you know, I think there's an easy mistake to be made, which is to think that I don't believe that human beings differ much in their ability to improve in skill that I don't believe in talent. I do believe in talent. I think that we differ in all kinds of ways, including the rate at which

we improve in things. And I would further say that grit and talent and everything else about human beings is partly, although not entirely, a function of our gene.

talk about. You know, it's not the fault of people who you know, don't like immerse themselves in the research literature, like you know, I don't fault human beings for sort of like having a kind of sometimes a misunderstanding of genes, like why should they I have misunderstandings of lots of things that I don't spend time thinking about, but I do think it's really important to acknowledge that really every aspect of human behavior, including your intelligence, including your preference

for broccoli or you know, your likelihood to vote for you know, one presidential candidate this fall versus another. You know, they all have some genetic influence. It's not like there's a single grit gene. I think it's really really well established that even for very simple characteristics like eye color

or height, there's not an a gene. There are many genes, dozens hundreds that interact with each other in mind bogglingly complex ways, and that there's nothing that has been studied where you could say there's really no influence of environment at all, in the sense that like the genes are just your destiny, right height, yeah, yeah, and even height right right. So you know, human beings have been getting

taller and taller. When you go to museums and you look at these costumes from like the sixteenth century, and they're really small and You're like, oh, why are these systems because people are bigger, And that is not because our genes have changed in that very short time period historically, it's because our environments have become you know, we eat a lot more, right, you know, we're also fatter. By

the way, the gene thing doesn't scare me. I mean, I was a neurobioso my you know, I think my undergraduate degree is technically biology with a neurobiology concentration, and then you know, I have a degree in neuroscience. I'm like, I'm not afraid of biology, and I'm not afraid of genetics.

I think that these things seem to people to be like, oh well, then therefore it's not malleable, like oh therefore we shouldn't have, you know, schools devote attention to like I think that that's the wrong question even, you know, if you think about like eyesight, like myopia, right, like you could be near sighted. Of course, that's very much a function of your genes, right, that really runs in families.

But you know that doesn't mean that like we couldn't have invented eyeglasses and contact ones is to change, you know, effectively people's visions. So I find it a very understandable but it's a very misguided kind of way of thinking about all of this. You know, does grit matter? I think so, does talent matter? I think so.

they are. That could be true as well. You know, there's both sides of that coin.

me the manuscript, so I ran into him. We were on a panel together, and the manuscript is still being reviewed, and you know, he emailed me afterwards and said like, oh, well, you know, I have this manuscript that's under review, and I read it and I emailed him back and I said, of course, I'm not surprised, right that you're getting heritability estimates of between twenty and thirty seven percent for GRIT, depending on which facet you're looking at, like which aspect

of great you know, perseverance being thirty seven percent heritable, twenty percent heritable for consistency of interest. Because that is in line with like every other study that's ever been

done on personality traits. There's a second part of that article where he says in the article he and his co authors he's not the first author that GRIT is like shockingly like, yes, it predicts outcomes, particularly perseverance, you know, predicting changes in test scores over or just standardized test scores, I think for this British sample, but not as well as conscientiousness, which we were talking about a few minutes ago.

And I said in my email back to him, you know, I'm not surprised about that either, because I've published and you know, here's the link to the article that I don't think that grit should predict like all aspects of achievement equally, and in fact, in my own work, I mean, I've said that, like, for example, self control should predict your grades better than your grit, because grit is about like really personally meaningful, hard to achieve long term goals,

and self control is just about anything that you and anyone who's ever taught a kid knows that like doing their homework at night and doing well on the test on Fridays, less about their personally meaningful, passion driven goals than just sort of like not watching TV, which is

a little bit more fun than studying for history. So I was a little disappointed to find that like none of my comments made into the you know, helped you know, inform the final article, but you know that's science and they have the right to write whatever they want to write.

But my own feeling and for my own other research, standardized test scores are you know, they're used in that article to just be like, oh, standwri's test scores equals turnemic achievement, and I think there are many other things. Santai's testcores are not perfectly correlated with your grades. They're not perfectly correlated with your school tendents. They're absolutely not

perfectly correlated with graduations. Standarized test scores are a weaker predictor of whether you will graduate from college, for example, than your GPA.

and test scores. But if you look at grade point average, right, which you know we we I mean as a former teacher, I'll tell you it's like, if you have our kid who really tries hard to learn in your class, they're going to move their grades more than they're going to move their test scores, in part because they are given the opportunity to learn the things that are going into their grades, whereas test scores are not, you know, they're

not perfectly aligned with what you're doing in school. So there's always an amount of kind of like, all right, I'm going to give you this problem you've never seen before, Like go to it, and it's a longer conversation and maybe one we don't have time for this podcast. But you know what these intelligence tests are really assessing. I mean, because people just take it as m as like, oh, well, they're assessing intelligence. I don't know that people are stopping

to ask themselves like, well what is that? And you know, if the general public could actually look at these IQ tests, you know, like if they would actually ever be printed, which they so often aren't because you know, the publisher doesn't want to keep them secret because they don't want anyone to be able to cheat on them. Or but if you actually look at a lot of IQ tests, they are strikingly similar or to standardized tests. So it sort of like you look at the question and it's like,

you know, what is an armadillo? And armadillo is a you know kind of animal, and armadillo is a kind of you know, army, and you're like, Okay, now I have to guess whether that is from an IQ test or from a standardized achievement test. You often can't even tell the difference.

a whole lot to change, right epigenetics socide. So I'm not saying any of these things aren't true. Like I'm not saying IQ.

genetic contribution has been found with other traits. I'm also not surprised that on test scores alone, yes it predicts, but maybe not as well as you know Big five conscientiousness as a whole, which is the major, second major

finding of that publication. What I don't want readers to come away from, at least what I don't come with is that, like a human beings, achievement in academics can be perfectly summarized and completely summarized by how they do on a standardized achievement test that takes a few hours.

you about in a moment. You know, we don't know whether we want to say, oh, this person is definitely grittier, but we do want to say that, you know, when we measure deliberate practice, we can get people to do a little more of it over a certain you know, short time period, which is about as far as we've gotten. So this student is named Lauren s Chris Winkler. She

came to me. She was a very very serious pianist during her whole childhood and adolescence, and she really had a very strong interest in the kind of hard practice that she had to do to become a skill that she did because she's really, really good. I think she's considered actually becoming a professional musician, but then decided to go,

you know, the liberal arts route. And you know, she had this observation that after recitals, for example, people would you know, invariably come up to her and say, gosh, Lauren, you're so talented. You're just you have such a gift for music, and she tried to explain to them that she's practiced hours a day at the very limit of

her ability. That's what deliberate practice is. To practice beyond where your current skills are, to get feedback on it, on what you've done, on what you've done wrong of course, right, how you've deviated from what you really want to do, and then to like reflect on that and experiment a little bit, and then you know, try practicing that whole piece over again, or just that passage, and then you're doing it over and over and over again for hours

a day when you're really at the peak of your training, and to do that every day, and I mean, it's almost hard to explain in words like what that means it's like, you know, really imagine for yourself, sitting at the piano bend for hours a day doing what you cannot do, struggling with complete concentration, and then doing it again, you know, on Tuesday, and then doing it again on Wednesday, and for years. And that's what she did, and so

she was really interested in that. Her intervention research, which she gets, you know, really the credit for not me is one of the studies that she going to publish very soon in JPSP is showing that if you teach non experts, in this case, you know, middle school kids, and she has some other samples too, but they're not selective,

they're not like Olympic athletes. If you just teach them like what deliberate practice is and give them the evidence that you know, most people who do deliberate practice don't find it fun. They find that it's actually very frustrating because they're doing things and getting a lot of failure feedback.

If they just knew that that, they might actually do more of it right, because it might make them feel that when they're confused and the way I think is really hard, well, that that's normal, not a sign that they can't learn, And so she's found in random assignment, placebo controlled longitudinal studies that she's able to increase the amount of deliberate practice and actually objective measures of achievement, especially among those who are sort of below the median,

below average in their achievement or their skill coming into the experiment. Now she finds this effect, you know, is there, it's visible, it's reliable. You know, a month later, you know, if you go out and ask yourself, four months later, do these middle school kids continue to you know, work harder? The effect is now no longer reliable, So it's in

the right direction, but it's not statistically significant. That makes us think that, like, yes, there's some psychological slack in the system, that you can get kids to work harder than they did and do better than they've done, But it's naive to think that a little intervention is going to change their beliefs and change the way they work forever.

So we're not selling this as kind of like a thirty minute cure for a low grit personality, but we are saying that, like, wow, there might be potential in people that they're not realizing, and that if we had you know, a lot of reinforcement of these beliefs and practices, like if teachers knew this and you know, regularly reinforced it in the language that they used when they assigned, you know, homework, when they gave back pests to kids, that maybe that that effect would actually be able to

be sustained. So that's one thing she's doing. And you had mentioned some other things that you know she's like about identity and so forth. Those are other directions that you know, we're also taking a happiness say more about those.

that people can get a better picture. So I want to thank you so much for talking to me today, Angela, and I consider you a friend as well as a colleague, and I really value the work you do. And I think you know you're going to be on book tour soon and you're going to blow up even more than you already have. I hope this was helpful as practice a little bit as well for the kind of criticisms

you might get. And I hope I highlighted that your work does show a level of nuance that people might not be aware of.