Angela Duckworth: Psychology of Achievement - Grit and Self Control

I am thrilled to be here and thinking about what to do I was wondering whether I should give a talk on self-control which I study but nobody ever asked me to come talk to them about or grit which sounds better so other you know so there and I was I was thinking like well how could I possibly in you know fifty five minutes because we really wanted to reserve the last half hour for just you know whatever questions are on your mind how in fifty five minutes could I possibly communicate everything I know about grit self-control why they're important how they develop over the lifespan and what to do to build them so I decided to do it anyway and in part is because I have you know I don't know when the next time is that I'm gonna be in Houston to talk to you about what we're doing what we know what we don't know so I'm just gonna say I've been accused of speaking quickly and I'm gonna do it tonight I have a slide on almost everything that I've researched in self-control and grit and I might need to skip a few so I'll just apologize in advance for the you know the points that I don't cover as well as I should and then encourage you to you know ask me more in the Q&A but let's get started with grit and on your seats are as you are coming in really you have this questionnaire it's not a lot of time to take the questionnaire but there is enough time for you just to read the sentences on this page right so the idea of grit is not just perseverance and that half of the items on this questionnaire that we typically use in research studies are about perseverance dogged tenacity never giving up I finish whatever I begin I am diligent I never give up I had achieved a goal that took years of work that's half of grit that's perseverance but the other half of grit I think is just as important and maybe less obvious at least to the kids at Wharton whom I occasionally get to lecture to and that is the idea of having consistent interests over time in working not only really hard but working toward the same goals day after day week after week really year after year and I think some of the kid would run up to the podium after a talk at Wharton and want to tell me about how they didn't sleep for three days when they were fundraising for a new startup idea and aren't guys so gritty dr. Duckworth I would say well you're great love it it's terrific but you know the hard work part and the perseverance and the obstacles that you ever can scrape but but if you're working toward the same high level goal the same abstract goal over years and years you know I really want to become you know the person who introduces biotechnology to this country that's grit too so it's important to have perseverance but it's also important to have sustained passions deepening and consistent interest over time that's why you can see that half of the sentences on the page there in front of you really have to do with that aspect of grit okay so that's what grit is and let's you know very quickly listen to Wilson the only thing that I see that is distinctly different about me is I'm not afraid to die on a treadmill right I will run you would not be outworked I will not be be outworked right period you know you might have more talent than me you might be smarter than me you might be sexier than me you might be all of those things you got it on me in nine categories but if we get on the treadmill together right there's two things you're getting off first yeah or I'm gonna die it's really that simple right I love Will Smith so much I'm like married to the white Will Smith's like so anyway I just play this I never get sick of it but I think this idea that Will Smith is pointing to which is that the capacity to work really hard for a really long time towards these consistent goals or interests you know this is not the same exact thing as Talent right so the kids who are lucky enough to be extremely talented something maybe they they maybe they do or maybe they don't have this other capacity and just to go back to what I think is actually the very first scientific investigation of achievement we have to go all the way back to 1869 and Francis Galton studying the biographies of very eminent individuals across mathematics and music and law and sports said in summary that the truly eminent individuals in any society have not only talent but talent in combination with zeal and the capacity for hard labor I would argue translating this into 21st century English passion and perseverance the two elements of grit and in reading what Gault enroll about what makes for a success high success in life he's somewhat more famous half cousin Charles Darwin said in his letter back I have always maintained in fact that individuals did not differ much in their intellectual talent but only in their zeal and hard work interestingly elsewhere Darwin describes his own feats and science to be not attributed to you know effortless epiphanies that came to him but didn't come to other people but actually the fact that he really studied a small number of questions concerning nature and human nature for his entire life and actually was thereby through zeal and hard work able to make progress on them and I think it's a good way of actually organizing this very complex terrain to say look there are at least two things that are important to achievement in life this is true for a fourth grader this is true for a West Point cadet this is true for a CEO and that is that there is talent and there is effort and together they they multiply if you will to to make for achievement so many of us will remember in high school physics learning that distance equals rate times time I think it's not unlike this equation to achieve something to go some distance to get somewhere it matters how fast you go how quickly you learn how easy things are but also matters a lot how how long you're going for and my lab studies in particular effort it's not that we don't think talent exists that we think oh we're all equally talented I wish we were all equally talented we're not all equally talented but I think that in American culture there's such an emphasis on talent on SAT scores on your IQ on whether you're in the gifted and talented program or you're not in the gifted and talented program whether you qualify or you don't qualify for the challenge you know program at your school you have such an inordinate focus on talent that for that reason as a former teacher myself I wanted to study the mechanics of effort and there to me seems like a lot more slack in the system when it came to effort than there was to Talent and that's what I want to talk to you about tonight so what do we know about how kids get better at things well just to actually give you a the probably the best sense of what we know about getting better anything let me summarize the research of onder's Erickson honors Erickson is a psychologist at Florida State University originally from Sweden and he is the world expert on world experts so what Anders does is he studies World Cup soccer players Sudoku champions Olympic athletes virtuoso musicians in some of his studies the kind of kids who go to Julliard are in the control group for what he's really interested in which is world-class eminent performance so this is a little bit like Francis Galton's work in 1869 but now with the scientific method applied to it and when he does is when he studies these individuals he looks in particular and how they've acquired these world-class skills over time and this graph from his own work summarized what he found so when you hear this expression that there's a learning curve there really is a learning curve and this is a stylized version of it we all start roughly at zero not really knowing any complex human skill we're not like horses who are kind of born knowing how to run human beings as every parent and then room knows are born knowing almost nothing and we could have crawl up the skill curve but the thing is is really important about Andres work is that it's not just sort of years of experience that get us to crawl up the curve it's something that he calls deliberate practice and when I describe to you the features of deliberate practice it will become obvious to you why we're not all now at world-class levels at everything that we do so deliberate practice has the following features and they distinguish this from like everyday practice or just mere experience first thing is when you're doing deliberate practice and whatever it is that you do for a living whatever a student is doing in the classroom they actually have to have a very specific self conscious aspect of their performance in mind while they're practicing not oh yeah I'm here in math class and I'm doing math but you know what I've been having a problem with is long multiplication I'm just gonna work on that because that's that's the aspect of my math performance I really want to work on today so a specific not a general goal in mind the second thing is that goal is typically about a weakness not about a strength so when experts practice things I just watched because really I only think about achievement all the time so when I was on Netflix I saw that there was this biography sort of video biography of Usain Bolt fastest man in the world still and he has a weakness you might not think that he does but he does and that's his start so the very first few milliseconds of the 100-meter dash he actually is slower than many of the other runners on the field and given that that is his weakness that is what Usain Bolt spends most of his training regimen working on not the thing that he's already good at which is the middle to the end of the race and he works on that too but disproportionately he's working on weaknesses so drilling your weaknesses not doing the more comfortable thing which is relying on your strengths that's a second aspect of deliberate practice third when experts practice they proactively seek out feedback from their coach from times from like listening to what the music notes sound like but immediate and informative feedback is crucial for learning not only for human beings by the way but if you ever tried to train a dog and you never actually rewarded it for doing the behavior that was good then you wouldn't get anywhere I think a lot of K through 12 learning actually has that ridiculous feature which is that kids do stuff and then maybe four weeks later they get feedback on it maybe now in good schools I think it's much shorter than that but I even think in the best schools we can do more to actually close the feedback loop and in the Q&A we can talk about how that might be possible with technology that was never possible before but the third essential feature just to reiterate is that there is immediate constructive feedback that happens and that the learner that the the person who's actually you know getting better the skill actually proactively seeks out and forth and finally deliberate practice is done or and over and over and over and over and over again until mastery so experts do not move on from one skill to the next when there are kind of sort of got the first thing now I'll do the next thing they only move on when they can do things with such fluency with such automaticity that actually doesn't require a lot of cognitive effort anymore and so they work to perfection before moving on to another aspect of their performance as a former math teacher there were plenty of kids in my class who got B pluses or worse that I merrily moved on to the next topic but in doing so I was failing to meet one of the requirements of Tiller practice which is to make sure that what I had taught them was so solidly under their belt that they could move on with full focus to the next skill so it's a challenge I think actually to think about the way our kids are learning in the classroom and some of the structural features of what they need to do and how to manage and this big group setting but I think there are crucial lessons here from Olympic athletes and other world-class experts about what optimal learning really looks like having learned about deliberate practice myself I was left quite puzzled I sort of knew why I wasn't a world-class runner because I realized that though I had run for thousands of hours in my life I had never once actually tried to do something which was a specific goal about my running where I was training a weakness not a strength you know with feedback and then doing it over and over again so that was clear right but I also kind of wondered why you know at least in the things that we do for a living were not all world-class right and when I talked to Andres Eric's and he said well that little practices that with rare exceptions people hate it and I said well you know Olympic athletes probably don't hate doing practices like oh no if they hate it too right so they don't they don't hate every aspect of their sport obviously but when they have to do very effortful focused deliberate practice on their weaknesses that really makes them better and what they do is actually not fun and in fact in study after study it turns out that people can only sustain even at international levels of performance three maybe four hours of delirious on average per day even when you have the most motivated individuals so it is exhausting frustrating sometimes tedious and boring deliver practice and that got me thinking about Oh what would enable people to do more of this very good for you in the long run really not so fun in the short run kind of thing again and again again over the decades that real world class people actually operate and that links to my program on grit so coming back to perseverance and passion the bottom line is that we're finding that people who are able to sustain their interests and to sustain effort over years these are the people who do more deliberate practice and that is we think why they actually are more successful than others very quick tour because we want to get to the more interesting question of how to build grit at the National Spelling Bee we gave kids the same question there is that you have in your hand we ask them to fill it out several months before the finals we also gave them an IQ test over the phone because these kids are all over the country and it turns out that just like the equation says both effort or grit and talent independently predicted how far kids would get in the National Spelling Bee and what I want to say about this study that I found over and over again and data set after data set is that the relationship between grit and talent is either zero or in many cases slightly negative it doesn't mean that every talented kid is low in grit but what it does mean is that there's no guarantee that a child who's extremely gifted is necessarily going to be the one who works hard and mathematically it is a rare individual who really is an outlier in both talent and hard work and I think if you think of the most successful people in your own fields my guess is they're going to be extremely high in talent and extremely high in effort and because those things aren't very related there are very very rare individuals indeed the second year that we ran the study we asked kids to keep a diary of what they did to improve their spelling there's actually three things that you can do or you're advised to do it to win a spelling bee on the far left we have deliberate practice and kids actually had to rate these activities they're much more specific than this that you know like writing words on a page you know over and over again vertically but we grouped them into these three classifications deliberate practice being tested by mom or dad or someone else and then finally on the far right reading and other verbal leisure activities the kids wrote down how many hours they spent doing these activities and they also rated them on a scale from one to nine on enjoy ability and effort here's what they said deliberate practice is if you look at the dark gray bars the least enjoyable kind of practice there is and if you look at the light gray bars the most effort for the same thing that Olympic athletes and musicians tell us being tested by mom or dad is somewhere in the middle and what they really want to do is read all day so their ratings of the enjoyment and the effort of reading were comparable to we had an item on the questionnaire eating ice cream which was a little disturbing to me honestly but you know they are kids in the National Spelling Bee so they're unusual and anyway that's what they want to do right now when you look at the data and you watch ESPN you see who wins you can say that the hours of deliberate practice that these kids were doing when controlling for the other kinds of practice was the only kind of practice that actually predicted to their objective performance in the finals themselves and of the many traits that we studied grit was the strongest predictor of how many hours kids would do so consistent with this idea that grit enables you among other things to do deliberate practice and that seems to actually drive performance is born out in this data I'll say something about this variable down here called openness to experience that's the phrase that psychologists used for qualities like intellectual curiosity imagination you know learning just for its own sake which in this case was negatively correlated with final performance and was not related to any of the kinds of practice that I told you about now there's a bigger conversation to be had and I hope we didn't have that in the Q&A about well what's curiosity good for but I will say this you know kids who are intellectually curious don't necessarily do the work that actually translates curiosity into productivity and I think that might be the lesson you're not the curiosity is necessarily a bad thing but it's no guarantee of actually doing hard work at West Point we've been studying grit for over ten years and every year we go to West Point on day two of beast barracks this is the first summer at West Point transitioning you from being a mere civilian to a member of the military right so the US Army gets twenty five percent of its officers from West Point the West Point higher-ups are very interested in keeping the young men and women at West Point once they're admitted because they don't replace them so for for every cadet that drops out it's sort of a loss of roughly half a million dollars of taxpayer income and so forth and what do we find well every year we get a graph like this which is that grit tends to predict how likely it is that you will make it through not only the first summer which I have here on this graph does the first beast barracks summer but also all four years of West Point so you see grit they're in quartiles at the top in the fourth quartile the gritty individuals and then at the bottom the first quartile the less gritty now at West Point they measure something else and this is called the whole candidate score it's what I would call their rough approximation of talent it has a lot of SAT score loaded in there it has a physical talent measure based on push-ups and sit-ups and running it has a measure of your leadership potential based on experts to review your application as a little some of your high school rank in there as well what's fascinating to me is that this measure of talent actually is a terrific predictor of how well you'll do at West Point if you stay but it does not predict whether you will stay Woody Allen once when interviewed for the New York Times to say what what advice does he give to young writers this is years ago said well my first advice is to write the actual book because most young writers tell me that they're working on the book they want to know how to write the book but they never actually write the book 80 percent of success and wife Woody Allen is quipping here is just showing up right and I think what we're seeing here is that talent is no guarantee of card effort was also just no guarantee that you're even going to show up to be in the game at all we find the same pattern of showing up versus dropping out across other samples on the Left I have sales representatives the grit scores are higher for sales representatives who keep their jobs there's about a 50% turnover rate in sales in the first year the grittier sales representatives are more likely to keep their jobs than the sales representatives who drop out the Chicago public high school students we survey thousands of kids in their junior year in the Chicago Public Schools kids who will go on to graduate from high school are grittier than those who drop out and then finally in the Special Forces the most elite armed of the army which is an extremely high voluntary dropout rate of their extraordinarily difficult training the Special Forces officers who make it through our grittier than those who drop out before completion to give you an idea that this is not just coming out of my lab this is just a study done by the marketing Leadership Council it's kind of a consortium of marketing teams from very large fortune 500 companies and they ran an interesting study where their hypothesis I think at the beginning was in the 21st century things are changing all the time and maybe what you need to be a successful marketer or someone who is agile and flexible and really kind of a sort of interdisciplinary in their thinking but what they found was that the focused gritty marketers who persevere despite setbacks and who preferred depth over breadth were by far the most successful kind of marketer in their research study both on qualitative measures like supervisors of descriptions and on quantitative measures now I want to say something about assessing grit without this kind of a Keable ridiculous questionnaire you have in your hands because for obvious reasons you know you can't tell Harvard that they should be admitting students based on you know whether the student reports themselves that they are a diligent hard worker with consistent interests and I want to say in particular in the context of kids in education because what I'm really talking about here is looking at grit through the lens of their activities outside of their formal classes so what you have before you here is a rubric that we've developed we actually modified a rubric that was developed in 1985 by ETS your friendly neighborhood SAT prep we got an SAT company in 1985 they did a study called success in college and what they found that over a hundred variables that were measured in this study the best predictor of success in college after SAT score and high school rank was something they called follow through and they quantified it much like I have here which is to say that if a kid has demonstrated multi-year commitments to certain extracurricular activities and progression advancement with objective evidence thereof in those activities it doesn't matter if it's sports or music student government or even a paid job the more they've demonstrated multi-year commitments and follow-through an advancement the more likely they are to go on to be successful in college we use the same approach to actually quantify grit from looking either at kids high school you know on the common app there's actually a section for this or actually resumes of young adults and here a study of new teachers we found that if you quantify grit in this way from their resumes you can predict all the same outcomes that you can with questionnaires so for example teachers who persist through the end of the school year instead of dropping out are more gritty based on their resumes and also once the teachers have shown up and decided to stay the whole year we can quantify their effectiveness based on the academic gains of their own students and teachers who are grittier based on their resumes have kids who learn more in their classroom and the fascinating thing here is that it's not just grit in teaching its grit in anything right I have a strong bias towards hiring former athletes in my class because demonstrated grit over four years on a team with a coach who's yelling at you going to practice again and again again learning to lose some matches come back again and showing me that you've progressed through that shows me that you have the elements that you need also to work for me in this gritty way and this is what we're seeing in this study didn't really matter where the grit came from or was demonstrated and I think the lesson for educators is you know if that's true if this is a way that kids can exhibit grit is it also a way for them to develop it you know is is the place to develop grit not just in the academic work but also in all the other things that we hope kids are doing outside of the classroom now in a study that I just completed in his impressed we wanted to look at some of the underlying motivations of gritty people and I'll say something just very quickly about this there was a questionnaire that was developed that says look there are at least three different approaches to becoming a happy person in life one is pleasure right so some people are really oriented to you know ending life with the most toys eating the most sushi having the most back rubs then there's another route to happiness which is more Aristotelian and that is to be really engaged and absorbed in what you're doing and then finally maybe the most Aristotelian of all is you know the desire to achieve happiness through meaning and purpose through service to others being part of something and in service to something greater than yourself essentially a short description of your typical yes prep or Kipp teacher and you know if we I looked at this data and before I actually took this data where we assessed grit and we actually administered this questionnaire my hypothesis was that gritty people are really driven by meaning and purpose they get up in the morning again and again to do what they do because it's so meaningful to society and to people other than cells well that hypothesis was somewhat confirmed because the grittier you are the higher you are in desire for meaning and purpose however the strongest predictor of being ready was just thing you know someone who wants to be engaged and absorbed in what they do even if it's chess and it doesn't help anyone but just someone who just likes to be lost in what they're doing with complete concentration which actually by the way sounds a lot to me like deliberate practice so maybe it's no coincidence and finally here people were really wife-to-be bear in the moment and enjoy life just for its kind of hedonic pleasures are actually less likely that's negatively correlated with grit now I'm not sure what to do about that from an intervention point of view because I don't know how to change what deeply motivates people so let me just move on quickly to some ideas about building grit that I think are more tractable the first thing I'll say as a preface to my other comments is that it's not that I'm up here asking that every kid do just the hardest thing that they could possibly do all the time right on the contrary I think kids need to be taught that the first thing to do is to choose things that feel easy to them that they could just you know do all day long if nobody made them do right things that they're naturally inclined to do interests you might be interested to know are more stable over the life course than even your personality so you think back to what you kind of were spontaneously interested in when you are 12 or 13 years old my guess is that you still have those interests today right and I think it's important that kids actually plumb their own interests it's not just important that they do well in our reading in our math test but they develop things that they really really can sustain as passions for the rest of their life having done that it's time to do deliberate practice right so it's a phase one she was easy Phase two work really really hard kind of idea now the first thing I'll say about possibly of use to building grit is that at Westpoint two years ago we ran an extra study after doing all these questionnaires and grew it was not the only one it was just the most predictive one of whether they would stay at West Point we asked him to do a counterfactual exercise we asked them to quite simply well today's cade day two at West Point where would you be if you could be anywhere but if you weren't here what would be the best thing that you could think of right and the cadets filled in this little box and they wrote things like I would be the back at ASU or IBL studying history or I'd be helping on my dad's farm all very interesting and then they had to categorize these into one of four categories so we have Greek here on the y-axis and then the category into which their response fell of their own imagined other future or other other place that they could be now on the far left you have downward comparisons these are most of Cadets about 75% of Cadets name something but then when asked to rate this other scenario said it's decidedly worse than being at West Point which makes sense since they just showed up right now the second category is my favorite about seven or eight percent of Cadets simply could not imagine anywhere else they're like oh hmmm I don't know I hear you know this is where I actually think that that group which is just as gritty as the first group might in the long run end up being the grittiest group of all the third group here said you know and this is again seven or eight percent of Cadets it's about the same as being here at West Point and then finally about the same number of cadets said you know honestly this imagined scenario is better than being here when we ran the stats we found that this idea of thinking about where you are not where you're not so the first two groups of either thinking about something worse or not being able to imagine anything else at all this style of counterfactual ization is what explains perhaps why gritty people do things like show up right pretty people show up in part we think because they're focused on what they are doing not on all the opportunity costs not on all the things that they might have been doing if they weren't here now the second thing that we think is quite relevant and very tractable for developing grit is really not my idea at all but the work of my my heroine Carol Dweck at Stanford I we can now not be a more accomplished psychologist and you certainly not meet a kinder one and what Carol Dweck has taught us over the last 30 or so years of her work is that people walk around in the world with beliefs theories about how things work and one of the theories in particular is whether you think human nature is malleable and grows and changes over time or whether you're inclined to believe that you know people don't really change you know you really can't you know change fundamentally you know how quickly a child can learn and she's found that growth mindset about intelligence from particular predicts perseverance over adversity and we quite sensibly find in our recent work together that gritty individuals are more likely to have a growth versus a fixed mindset and this is good news because Carroll has figured out how to change fixed mindset and that is to show kids scientific evidence that in fact people do change which they do and to show them pictures of neurons making new connections and even growing well into adulthood so that's I think a very promising idea and I think our best schools including our Kipp schools in our yes schools have fully embraced this kids actually know what a growth mindset is in these schools and they know that people change over the life course they know what William James did not know William James once said you know William James when he was a professor of psychology at Harvard said that you know at a certain age human nature is set like plaster never to change again and a lot of us sort of think about things that way but if we do then we're wrong and so was William James because it's not true of human nature personality for example evolves and changes all throughout adulthood into your 60s and Beyond in particular I want to emphasize here something about teachers because I think that one of the clear cultural elements that really draws me to schools like yes and Kipp this idea that teachers not only need to teach character to their kids but they need to embody it right so not just do as I say not as I do but do as I do also and in this study we study something closely related to growth mindset and that is optimism optimism comes out of the clinical research on depression with the finding that optimistic individuals are the ones who focus on things that can change in their lives and pessimistic individuals who are more likely to become depressed focus and stir-fries about things that they can't change so something happens you don't know really why like you know you didn't get a good grade on a test and you're a little surprised an optimistic child will say you know I think the reason why is I didn't study the right things and I didn't study in advance far enough a pessimistic catastrophizing child be like oh the total idiots I screw up everything right and if you have an optimistic mindset quite sensibly you know you'll go and try to work harder the next time but if you're a pessimist you know you sort of give up because why would you work and in this study we find that optimistic teachers are more likely to be gritty and and this part of love they're also more likely to be happy with their own lives not actually about their work life with just overall satisfaction with their own life and both grit and happiness predict teaching performance one year later as measured by the academic gains of their kids so whatever emphasis were placing on teaching character to kids I think we have to place equal emphasis to making sure that the teachers have you know the relevant resources as well to grow their own characters now I'm going to show you this little video and I'll explain it right after that study first when I get home [Music] step one work on your weaknesses I know I will work on math since it's my weakest subject back there too many distractions here I can't concentrate [Music] step two concentrate 100% no one will bother me here [Music] I'm finished with all the practice problems but I wonder how well I did step 3 feedback I got all the additional subtraction problems correctly the multiplication problems run it seems like I really need to practice my multiplication not perfect but I'm getting better and remember to repeat repeat routine so this is a clip from an online intervention that we're developing for middle school students where essentially I'm giving this lecture but a little more jazzed up than just PowerPoint slides and there are some other tricks that we put in there too like if you really want to get someone to internalize a message you have them try to convince someone else so at the end they write a letter to another student summarizing what they've learned and how it could be applied and their own lives that sort of thing and very much actually by the way inspired by Carol Dweck's own intervention research on mindset and this is the idea that well in addition to optimism and mindset and focusing on what you are doing versus what you're not doing you know maybe just telling kids you know athletes musicians and world-class individuals if any other kind do this kind of practice and this is what it looks like and this is how we translate to you doing your homework tonight something that you might not see a natural bridge to yourself we're running random assignment placebo-controlled trials of this now and if I if I come back in a year I'll I'll tell you whether it worked and in the meanwhile we're sharing this freely and openly with all of our I guess cousins right and you know I don't know if I'm extended I'm probably in the extended family I'm like a second cousin to uh to Kip and to yes and and the teachers can do it everything fought with it they can show them they can not show them they can tweak them if they like now it was where I end with ideas on great I want to say think about the social context because I used to think where it was just about the individual the cowboy or the cowgirl who just did it and everything was on their own I think what we're learning is that when people persevere through things it's not only because of their own grit it's also because of people that they rely on to be gritty when they can't be so I'll just read you this quick anecdote from someone who was interviewed in a study at University Chicago which was called the developing talent in young people study and these are individuals who were interviewed in their 40s about their childhoods this is an Olympic swimmer who reflects back and says when I was 11 I wanted to because I was doing very badly my dad at that point did something that was very important he said if you want to quit that's fine but I don't want you to quit simply because you're losing so I'm going to continue to drive you to work out and force you to swim and when you turn 12 and are at the top of your age group you'll start to do well if you want to quit then that's fine I can speak for myself as a parent that I have been in this situation many times like is this the day to push the kid or is this the day not to push the kid and I don't have an easy answer for that but I think you know we are our kids conceal er E's in many ways we are their partners who have something that they don't have because nobody has this for their self that we have psychological distance from them when they come home and they've had a horrible day we feel very bad for them but we but it wasn't our day right and we need partners in life I would argue that we need spouses in life we need teachers in life we need coaches in life we need best friends in life and very often these are the people who are saying this is such a terrible day this is awful but we don't quit on a bad day if you're gonna quit quit on a good day when you have all your reason and faculties about you so that's one thing about I think grit it's not just growth mindset and optimism and you're focusing on what you're doing it's about the network that you develop your cousins and then finally at the school level I think there's the opportunity to build a culture of this right I just want to highlight here are three simple ideas one is that in Finland there is a word that roughly translates to grit not exact and the thing about Finland is that people talk out loud about their season first of all they think that it's a mark a finished character they are skeptical than anyone outside of Finland has this and that may say things like oh you know I did this really hard cross-country race it was five days it was bitterly cold but you know what I built my seas ooh young children talk about building their Cesar talk about baking in growth mindset from the beginning I think that is a sort of a trail of breadcrumbs that schools like yes and why Kipp should follow right and I think actually they're doing a lot of this already but I'll just emphasize it here on the bottom there there's a White House initiative and this very gritty and also adorable brown student has put up a website called this is grit and he's just collecting two minute stories where people you know you go to the website it turns on your webcam and you just tell your story about grit in your life so that's getting off the ground and I think it's a terrific initiative to change cultural attitudes to to demystify achievement to tell kids you know when when kids do well in life it's not like everything was easy for them they struggle they cried they felt disappointed they were embarrassed you know they wanted to give up also like you do too and then finally I want to encourage you to read this article from The New Yorker called get a coach by Atul Gawande who talks about the surgery room culture and how what they need is a big dose of growth mindset deliberate practice the idea that failure but learning and coaching and feedback are things that if you don't build it into the culture they won't be there by default and and and then people don't learn as much as they should so I'm gonna end my comments there you know you can read a little bit about you know what Will Smith is saying about treadmills and so forth he actually has an entire rap got the treadmill I don't think it hit the bestseller charts but I like it a lot and I'm gonna ask my friends to show the self-control sides and as if dude he's actually much more quickly in the interest of time and as a transition let me say this when Francis Galton in 1869 said that most eminent in the Jools have zeal and the capacity for hard work right with passion and perseverance he also said in the same breath that many of us are under the misimpression that high achievement in life comes from self-denial and then he goes on to say it is not the case that super achieving individuals the most eminent individuals have this kind of you know self-denial or self-control against the hourly temptations as he put it though that is important for navigating everyday life and I think that is the difference between grit and self-control grid is about staying committed to something the very long run that's especially challenging self-control is about in the moment being able to fend off these hourly temptations and distractions essentially to put it more succinctly self-control according to frog and toad is you know trying hard not to do something that you really in the moment want to do because it feels really good and here is the story cookies where they bake a bunch of cookies and like you know had lots of failures of self-control trying not to eat them and actually learn something about self-control along the way there's lots to be said about self-control it's a hot topic Stephen Colbert is talking about self-control Barack Obama is talking about self-control the marshmallow task in particular where kids are asked to delay the gratification of getting to marshmallows by waiting and not eating one right away has gotten so much press that my Vanguard newsletter is telling me about not eating marshmallows and and being self controlled and just to give you a quick sense of what this looks like in young children these are the questionnaire items that are used to assess self-control this is kids in in preschool and kindergarten and you can see the continuity here this is the questionnaire that's often used with school-aged children say late elementary school and maybe even middle school and then finally this is what self-control looks like in adults this is the most widely used self-control scale for adults so you can see that it you know the evolution of self-control over the life course really has its roots in in early childhood and I study it because as a teacher I believe as Aristotle has been paraphrased to say in some ways the roots of Education are bitter and only the far-off many years later fruit is sweet so if the roots are bitter but the fruit is sweet kids need self-control because Angry Birds or candy crush is more fun than doing your homework and to give you some data to back that up there's a Sloan study a study of over a thousand kids in Middle School in high school who wore wristwatches that beep them randomly 56 times over the course of a week during waking hours and every time it beep they filled out a long questionnaire about what they were doing and on 26 different items how it felts well if you ever wonder what a day in the life of a kid looks like this is it they actually spend more of their waking hours doing something related to academics than any other activity there's you know kind of passive leisure and socializing etc etc but the key feature of this data is the following across girls and boys rich kids and poor kids black kids Latino kids Asian kids you name it when asked how important is what you're doing right now to your future goals in yellow we coded all the academic activities in blue is everything else kids of all stripes say oh yeah what I'm doing right now is more important than anything else I do all day long when asked ok are you happy right now doing those academic activities it's typically below the mean and on other questions like is there anything else you'd rather be doing it's even starker than that so I think this sets up the sort of the story that Aristotle was right that there is a certain bitterness to doing things now even if the fruit is sweet later on I'm gonna skip a couple of slides in the interest of time but self-control predicts a lot of things like doing well in school and in a recent study that was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences self-control predicts everything else income employment physical health not going to jail relationship satisfaction and on and on I refer you to the article if you want to read about it I've been doing work using data that include Social Security and we find that self-control is the best personality predictor of whether you'll earn more in 25 years of Social Security earnings history and actually also whether you'll participate in the workforce as opposed to being unemployed and then finally it is the best predictor also of savings or wealth controlling for how much you earned relative to lots of other personality traits I'm gonna skip a few more slides and just say that when Walter Mischel was interviewed last year now Walter is the architect of the marshmallow task itself and now in his 80s when he can say whatever he wants Walter says the most important scientific discovery about self-control is that it can be taught and he says this because when he observe children this is actually slides from Walters own work these kids were sitting there and struggling and trying to resist the first marshmallow so they can actually wait and not long enough for the experimenter to come back in the room and give them to he observed that kids employed strategies even at age four kids have tricks and strategies that they use to make self-control easier and that he says is the secret to self-control not just you know growing your willpower muscle but learning the ways to make willpower easier versus harder and to organize this for you I'm gonna give you five kinds of strategies that kids could use to exert self-control in the moment even though there's something else that feels better the first strategy and I should say that I've done this work with my collaborators at Stanford James gross and Tamar Gendler who is not only a philosophy professor but a psychologist at Yale so part of my secret plan is to get every awesome psychologist to be working with Kip and yes and other schools and I think this is a small victory here that we were able to do that so the first class of self-control strategies is situation selection simply choosing where to be if you are an alcoholic don't go to a bar and if you are a kid sitting in lecture hall don't sit in the back any undergraduate Penn who works in my lab is required to promise that in all their lectures they will sit in the front and they asked me dr. Duckworth why do I have to sit in the front and I say because this is what it looks like from the front of the classroom it's a whole lot easier to pay attention to the professor when they're staring at you six feet away then when you're up here lost in the crowd right likewise you know choose your social situation carefully because it's going to have downstream effects on everything that you do so the earliest strategy to use in self control is situation social or physical selection having chosen where to be you can still modify your place change your you know I have a fifth grade teacher who told me that situation modification is not the sexiest way to sell things to a fifth grader so she said why don't you call it choose your place change your space so now we're on change your space how would you change your space well for example no matter where you sit in my lecture you could close your laptop I used to think they were all taking notes I wants to go bathroom break and I'm like coming back down the aisle is just like this I'm like eBay Facebook Gmail nobody was taking notes and I think you know the idea of closing your laptop is something that I've taken to heart I go to boring meetings to just like you do and if I have my laptop open and my wireless on I will check my gmail account it's inevitable but I can make physical modifications to my environment which make that actually hard or impossible to do relevant to kids and we're having a little conversation about this at the very beginning before I actually got started here you know kids can do things they can install apps that limit their time but you know what what's worked for my 10 year old is just powering off the phone as opposed to putting it to sleep has dramatically decreased her playing games or texting and I asked her why I was like well you know the phone is still there you can use it she's like oh yeah but you know it takes forever to warm up yeah like three seconds she's like yeah right forever okay so you know these are the clever things and wouldn't it be a fun thing right as opposed to a like an awful thing for kids to play psychologist in their own lives and to say like okay what tempts me like what tricks can i play on myself right how can I be clever here and outsmart myself in a way so that I actually do the thing that's gonna make me happier in the longer run there's a great study that was done at Cornell University by Brian Wansink recently he placed candy on secretaries desks and randomly assigned secretaries either to get the candy in a clear bowl or in a bowl that was painted so you couldn't actually see what was inside well as you would predict they the Secretary's a dramatically less candy when it was in the bowl where they couldn't actually see it out of sight is out of mine in Walters early marshmallow studies kids did the same thing if they cover the marshmallow they can wait two times maybe even three times as long because it's not as tempting when you can't see it right hi at the Halloween candy we all know that but what other distractions in your kids lives could they hide by simply putting them where they can't obviously see it I'll play this little clip if it's easy and short patience have been around forever but I would argue that they're getting they're getting worse they're getting more potent and algebra is never gonna be as fun as candy crush the one thing that kids I think can do to realize that they can actually change their physical situation how can they make resisting temptation easier for themselves so put the cell phone out of reach or you know make them homework the first thing that you see when you walk into your bedroom Anita what did you do you're basically made changes didn't you yeah in the school that I'm in now we actually board at that University and so we the previous year me and my roommate kept our room our bed beds kind of on the floor so that you know we could chill out when we wanted to this year we realized that the higher the bed the higher the GPA so is that I mean I think that'd be having your bed right there is a distraction in itself just like a cellphone and you can just walk down and it's comfortable and so when you raise it high then you have to get down in the morning to turn off your alarm you have to get up into bed if you want to go to sleep and so it actually keeps you at your desk it keeps you working love her and she's not where we started a student I met these kids both her and the high school seem next sort of like so I'm gonna start a Student Advisory Board today and are you gonna be on it and they're like sure so now we email our interventions to this panel of high school kids and they tell us that they suck so I you know I'm not gonna play a video of this but you know essentially we're using the same idea I'm like okay let's teach kids about research conducted at Cornell University you know give them the evidence don't just berate them and you know exhort them to do things give them the kind of evidence that they'll find persuasive and I actually think it's easier for me to do that then a parent to do that because finding me on YouTube telling them something is way more convincing than you telling them over and over again even when my kids find something else on YouTube it's more persuasive than when I tell them I'm like actually I'm an expert in this they're like oh yeah but I found this on YouTube and I was like okay great so anyway we do you is kind of YouTube style and this kind of you know light touch and in a recent random assignment test of this with 190 undergraduates at Penn when assigned to learn about situation modification versus the last kind of strategy which I'll talk about before we wrap up which is just response modulation just don't do it just use your willpower or a no treatment control students were able to accomplish their self set academic goals more days out of seven than in these other conditions and the key here is is that they didn't feel as bad doing it so the feeling of temptation and resisting temptation the distress of that was actually markedly lower having removed temptations entirely if I take my flight back tomorrow actually it's the day after tomorrow and I have Us Magazine with me and I have a manuscript I'm supposed to review it's going to be torture for three and a half but if I get on the flight and I don't have us weekly and it's just the manuscript or the US Airways magazine then I will be in a situation which just makes self control a lot easier and that's my intention so you can hold me down okay so the third class of strategies is selective attention so you chose your place you changed your space now where do you pay attention you know I think that this is the reason why Kipp the emphasizes tracking and slanting and it's because you know paying attention is hard but it's really hard to understand what the teacher is saying if you're looking at the window if you actually physically have your orientation toward that teacher and your eyeballs on the teacher it makes it all that much easier and there are other examples of selective attention all things you [Music] Sesame Street has chosen executive function and self-control to be the theme for the last year of programming so you can watch all kinds of video of you know Cookie Monster delaying gratification and learning strategies they consulted with Walter Mischel they consulted with me and my colleagues mostly my colleagues because I don't work with little little kids and in this little video what basically well Cookie Monster is learning is that resisting the chocolate chip cookies really hard but looking at the chocolate chip cookie and trying to resist it is even harder so he learns the strategy of selective attention see there he goes right not looking at okay so the last interesting strategy before we get to the one that is not so great its cognitive reappraisal right thinking differently about your situation perhaps Shakespeare said at best there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so you can change mental representations in the marshmallow task when kids were encouraged to if you want to when you want to you can think about the marshmallow like a fluffy white cloud miraculously they're able to wait twice or as long or longer right just because they thought about it in a different way and the idea here is can we think about in particular emotionally charged self-control situations in different ways in a random assignment study I did with my collaborators at University of Michigan we randomly assigned kids either to remember an angry memory in the first person playing it through their own eyes which they wrote about or in the third person observing their distant self writing about it as if they were watching the whole thing happen through a YouTube video and reappraising in that way taking a third-person perspective which by the way those of you who went to business school may recall from your negotiations class is one of the things they often tell you in a charge negotiation go to the balcony in other words watch the whole negotiation from a third-person perspective you will get regain your rational wits and in this study we found likewise that in the distance condition where you think about things at a third person you're able to regulate your anger towards the other person better and in particular in that study coded what kids wrote down they made more thoughtful considerations about this situation and fewer just blame attributions of like oh is their fault right so it actually has been recently followed up in studies of new couples when randomly assigned to have marital conflicts and write about them in the third person they actually stay married longer then when they are encouraged to write about them but through the first person wins so that's all well and good but I still think earlier in general is higher leverage than later the vacatur is really struggling and self-controlled rather they change their physical situation or select a different situation like over the library instead of going home where the TV is on then to wait all the way to the very end which is simply as the Buddhists would say crush mind with mind and it's really almost not a strategy at all is it right just do it like I know it sells sneakers but how helpful is it just associate we'll just do it just be more soft control or you know Nancy Reagan just don't do it right just say no like neither of those things works all that well I think we should equip kids with skills and strategies farther upstream than this you know confrontation with temptation at hand and then I will end here which is to say that I think kids need to plan ahead right so a lot of our work actually focuses on planning and without showing any more slides I will just tell you that when kids can locate in the future what they would like to do with specificity naming when and where they want to take what action they are dramatically more likely to actually do something and it goes for grownups too so I will tell you that I recently did this exercise of planning ahead and actually saying this is what I'm gonna do and this is when and where I'm gonna do it with my collaborator tomorrow Gendler who's at yale and a high-functioning individual i assure you but even with tomorrow it was clear that you know when it came down to how she was gonna make progress on her new book she hadn't actually specified what exactly she was gonna do next and when and where she was gonna do it so we teach kids these little tricks and I'll just show you some of the day go to question and answer which is that at Kip in New York we were able on a random assignment placebo-controlled study able to raise report card grades teacher ratings of classroom conduct or teachers who are blind to condition and school attendance over the subsequent semester so I think there's a real power here in particular because this is what teachers already do they help kids make plans they tell them to do their assignments they encourage them to remember to space out the work but this little twist right saying okay but you know we also have the scientific research primarily done by the way at NYU by my collaborators Gabrielle at engine and Peter gollwitzer so I want to give them the intellectual credit for this work it's really there's that this little tweak might actually dramatically improve upon what we're just doing in everyday practice so it was a lot I apologize but that is everything I know about grit and self-control and I'm happy to take any questions [Applause] as schools and and whole schools and teachers are started be more informed by the research that's where the coolest things you see that people are doing differently as a result once they're informed of the research so I think the idea that has caught on more than any other really is growth mindset so I like to say and I think I'm right that Carol Dweck is becoming more famous than Freud at least in K through 12 education I mean I go to visit schools that I've never been to before and I see these things on the wall like kids writing essays about you know how you can really grow you know your ability to learn etcetera etcetera so I think growth mindsets one thing the second thing is I think that we are starting a conversation here and I know that's cliche like starting a conversation is like building community it sounds good but it's also very cliche but I get countless emails every day from fourth grade teachers in Indianapolis and you know principals in Australia and ministers in the United Kingdom and I think it's a terrific pendulum swing back from you know standardized testing out the wazoo and focus on talent and you know should we advance you to the this track versus that track and I think a nice compensatory sort of swing back to by the way life is hard it takes a lot of hard work you're gonna screw up a lot you need other people you know here's a conversation that moves in that direction which i think is very healthy and then with the parent head on and you're a parent yourself so what what are the big how do you synthesize all this one of the biggest takeaways for what as parents what should we be starting to do and stopped to do as a result of being informed by this work so the first thing I should tell parents is that there is a genetic component to everything that I said right so just in case you were wondering in particular if you were like so I've got these two kids and they couldn't be more different well that is probably in large part because they don't have all the same genes right so siblings in the same family on average age share 50% of the genes but actually in terms of combinations of genes and the genetics work suggests that it's not just the genes you have but the combinations that you have the combination of cards in your deck that really matter well that you know siblings could really not necessarily have all the same combinations and so when kids are really different but they're raised under the same roof eating the same breakfast cereal and given the same lectures you know a lot of that is genetic I've got two kids they're 10 and 12 and one is a paragon of grit and we're working on her self-control and the other one is the exact opposite so that's one reason I know these things aren't exactly the same and I'll just say one thing that we do at home maybe two things well you know the first thing that I think is helpful is that we talk about psychology and they're interested in it kids are interested in how the brain works and you know and the marshmallow task and all that so I actually think I've done the sort of intervention that we're doing with these videos and things with them to their whole lives and it doesn't make it all completely easy but I think it actually equips them with tools that maybe other kids don't have the second thing is we do have one thing in our family to increase grit and that is the hard thing rule so I read Amy Chua's book Tiger mom I'm frequently confused with Amy Chua because and you know I study chief Manning up to girl Asian at weight you know so we are very similar but the thing that I didn't really love about Amy Chua's book there's this one phrase in there she says it's not enough to do what you love period most people stink at what they love right and I got our point you know I get it right you have to work hard etc but in our family what I didn't want to do is say you're playing piano and you're playing violin and I don't want to hear about it I wanted them to actually discover their own interests and then learn how to work hard at them so the hard thing rules this everybody in our family has to be doing a hard thing at all times right commitment right my job is really hard I assure you sir I'm off right my husband my husband is a real-estate developer he was like have you heard about the financial crisis I'm check like I am doing a really hard thing right and then my daughter's right so the one daughter chose ballet actually she chose ballet and of her own she said like I also want to do piano that's the pretty one and she's been doing them consistently and by the way hard thing has a definition and it has to require deliberate practice right so the younger one who's working on her grit said pottery I was like no that's not deliberate practice right you show up and you like do this for a while that's not Gloria's like you know sand craft studio no okay but she did and she cycled through I'll tell you more than one heart thing so she has done gymnastics piano ballet track and a few other things but she never broke the rule because the rule is this as long as you are engaged in something that you would say is a hard thing that I would say is a hard thing and as long as you only quit after the tuition payments are up then you know you're you're meeting the rule so she's not able to quit on bad days right so she's not able to come home be like well I really want to have a playdate with Ella and I had to go to this practice and then I want to quit right well she's able to say that she doesn't have neighborhood quick but you know the tuition payment comes up it's a random Thursday afternoon and I say hey by the way you know do you want to do gymnastics again or not she's an irrational frame of mind she has actually cycled through a lot of things but she is recently and not that recently for a few years been doing viola and so that's her hard thing so I like the hard thing role doesn't have a scientific basis for it but I think it gives you a little flexibility it puts the responsibility on the kid to identify what it is but it also imposes that structural discipline which I think most kids need you know they're not going to go out be like yeah I'm gonna do 45 minutes of dillard practice and not cry and not one of you know they do need that external I think reinforcement Thank You Angela when you're thinking about us is a bunch of us here are teachers in school elementary middle high school teachers what do you think should be the key focus areas for teachers to teach grit and to teach self-control at the elementary middle versus high school yeah so that's you know sixty million dollar question right so so what should we do and you know the short answer and the honest one is I really don't know yet I given you a sketch of some of these ideas but let me also say this I think teachers are already doing it right I guess is that here and there behind that classroom door or another you have teachers who are doing really terrific things either very didactically and specifically like teaching kids up or just implicitly by modeling or activities the way that they give kids feedback what they say to a kid when they don't get a good grade how they frame their feedback on an essay that are actually promoting grit and self-control what we need to do is to figure out I mean this is the problem with K through 12 education right innovation happens in these little pockets nobody knows about them the ideas don't spread and I never systematically measured and then you know disseminated so so my guess is that they're already doing some things and then beyond that I'll just refer to these slides which you know is exactly you know that's where our thinking is until we have a couple questions here about context and I think it's like tied to how does optimism affect grit either from the standpoint of low-income children in low-income communities that they're coming from families communities where there's things not to be optimistic about or in any in any socio-economic level if they're just elope that they're struggling in a low-performing kid and just at the bottom of their class what's the correlation there between optimism and grit yes you know I've been asked this question I've recently started working with Roland fryer who I will say even though I'm being taped he's a total trip but Roland fryer you may know is this very iconoclastic african-american professor of economics at Harvard and he asked me this question about every 24 hours actually about you know social class and and grit and you know and growth mindset and how all this fits together and and I say to him every 24 hours like I don't know still since yesterday when you asked me but but but here's what we do know right there have been studies of delay of gratification across very different socio-economic groups and what's generally found this is a research study by Gary Evans at Cornell is that in general there's a trend towards kids from more privileged educated families delaying gratification more than kids from disadvantaged families and recent work has highlighted that maybe what's going on here is trust maybe the kids who are not delaying gratification are actually being quite rational in the sense that if you live in a world where honestly you don't know what's going to happen next eat the marshmallow and get out of there in one study that was published in the last couple years right before the experimenter says oh you know here's how like this is gonna work I'm gonna leave the room and you can you know whatever if you wades like I'm back you can write before that they make a promise to the child and they break it right and you can get the delete gratification times to go down close to zero when you've done that and then you think about how that generalizes to kids lines if people are making promises to them and breaking them if they live in uncertainty and chaos well you know what do you expect I've done for longitudinal studies where I measured the number of negative life events that happen in school children's lives this is particularly true in early adolescence when sensitivity to life events is actually perhaps stronger than at other times on in life so early adolescence being around middle school transition to high school and the number of negative life events at time one predicts your subjective experience of being stressed out feeling lack of control anxious etc at time two and that actually predicts decreases in self-control compared to baseline at time three so I think there is a story here that if you live in chaos you will have a rational reaction to that right which is to act impulsively think short-sighted lis and to just say what you think and you know and that is actually gonna in the long run of course hurt you so there's a lot more to be said and then I guess I'll say this on grid neech a new chain before Kelley Clarkson DJ said that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger I'm not even sure that Kelly Clarkson knows that niche a said that but anyway let's not quibble over details that's an interesting hypothesis and I've actually heard many teachers say to me the the kids who actually don't necessarily do well in the class you know a lot of these kids from Memphis America they are gritty but they don't show it in conventional you know wings right they're really gritty taking care of their four-year-old sister while their mother is on another bet you know whatever it is right so whatever they're dealing with in their lives and so on that may be true Soni Jane may be right actually that the kids from adversity are getting stronger but remember Nietzsche also said if it doesn't kill you so the prescription certainly can't be like more trauma you know for kids so anyway all that to say is that we don't really know and it's something that we're investigating my intuition is that a little bit of adversity is necessary you know there are kids on the other end of the socio-economic spectrum and you know these include many of our kids I would say right and they're their parents are reading every book and you know kale is kale better than baby spinach you know like so you know those kids might in fact need a little more adversity right if we like shoe bin and solve every problem if we get the best possible tutor for every subject if we optimize everything in their life well it'll be like an arm in a cast right which quickly atrophies because it's not needed right to be strong so my guess is that um you know a lot of these kids are just under too much stress and there might be a smaller number of kids who don't have enough of the right kinds thank you one last question today we tend to compliment kids very frequently even when they're not that good with what is the effect of that so my daughter Lucy ran this race recently and and she comes back and she's got this pink ribbon it says 8th place I was like were there only eight people it's just like it's like a New Yorker cartoon I'm like you know Roz Chast doesn't even have to draw it it's like here I'm holding it's kind of so-so I do think that misplaced praise right plays are just like you know the kids that place anything and you're like oh that was so great you know can be detrimental now Carol Dweck would say that praise that emphasizes talent is itself you know regardless of the level or formants like that can be dangerous because particularly with perfectionistic kids like you know they'll get this growth mindset or so fixed mindset about it and they'll think oh it's all about talent and so well separate from that this kind of over praise right praise for anything there have been some research studies by a psychologist named Yong Kim who actually was a postdoc in our lab and now moved on back to Korea but actually interestingly possibly for his Asian heritage I think this may have influenced his worldview he thinks that in America the kids are just so over praised but actually it sets them up for self-handicapping and sort of like weird psychological downstream things that are just not healthy right so if somebody's praising you and you're not that good you might try to like fake it you know recovery things because you know you've sort of not never gotten adjusted to sort of telling you exactly the way it really is and of course they never get the information that deliberate practice says it's really important if you never get the feedback like know that sentence is too long you will never learn to write shorter sentences right so I think we over praise not everybody over praises but I think kids you know if they know that you love them right I mean I think a lot of schools like yes and and Kipp are tough love schools you know if these kids know that you love them you are in their corner you are waking up at five o'clock in the morning and standing up to 11 o'clock for them they can handle it when you say this essay is kind of a mess I don't understand what you're saying here it lacks structure there I said develop four ideas they're only two I'll meet you at four o'clock and work on it right so I think that's you know that's I think the ideal not praised without any criticism not criticism without any love but both so work hard be nice and thank you very much for your attention [Applause]

Channel: Nurafni Eka Agustina

Views: 17,163

Rating: 4.9148936 out of 5

Keywords: Talks, Angela Duckworth, Psychology, Psychology of Achievement, Grit, Self Control, Education, Success

Id: _k8VFv2YbkY

Length: 76min 23sec (4583 seconds)

Published: Mon May 25 2020