WEBVTT

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Transcriber: Joseph Geni
Reviewer: Morton Bast

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When I was 27 years old, I left a very
demanding job in management consulting

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for a job that was even
more demanding: teaching.

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I went to teach seventh graders math
in the New York City public schools.

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And like any teacher,
I made quizzes and tests.

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I gave out homework assignments.

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When the work came back,
I calculated grades.

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What struck me was that IQ
was not the only difference

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between my best and my worst students.

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Some of my strongest performers did
not have stratospheric IQ scores.

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Some of my smartest kids
weren't doing so well.

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And that got me thinking.

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The kinds of things you need
to learn in seventh grade math,

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sure, they're hard: ratios,
decimals, the area of a parallelogram.

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But these concepts are not impossible,

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and I was firmly convinced that every one
of my students could learn the material

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if they worked hard and long enough.

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After several more years of teaching,

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I came to the conclusion
that what we need in education

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is a much better understanding
of students and learning

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from a motivational perspective,
from a psychological perspective.

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In education, the one thing we
know how to measure best is IQ.

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But what if doing well in school
and in life depends on much more

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than your ability to learn
quickly and easily?

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So I left the classroom, and I went to
graduate school to become a psychologist.

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I started studying kids and adults in all
kinds of super challenging settings,

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and in every study my question was,
who is successful here and why?

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My research team and I went
to West Point Military Academy.

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We tried to predict which cadets

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would stay in military training
and which would drop out.

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We went to the National Spelling Bee

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and tried to predict which children
would advance farthest in competition.

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We studied rookie teachers working
in really tough neighborhoods,

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asking which teachers are still
going to be here in teaching

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by the end of the school year, and of
those, who will be the most effective

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at improving learning
outcomes for their students?

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We partnered with private
companies, asking,

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which of these salespeople
is going to keep their jobs?

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And who's going to earn the most money?

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In all those very different contexts,

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one characteristic emerged as a
significant predictor of success.

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And it wasn't social intelligence.

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It wasn't good looks,
physical health, and it wasn't IQ.

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It was grit.

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

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Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking
with your future, day in, day out,

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not just for the week, not just
for the month, but for years,

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and working really hard
to make that future a reality.

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Grit is living life like
it's a marathon, not a sprint.

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A few years ago, I started studying
grit in the Chicago public schools.

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I asked thousands of high school
juniors to take grit questionnaires,

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and then waited around more than
a year to see who would graduate.

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Turns out that grittier kids were
significantly more likely to graduate,

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even when I matched them on every
characteristic I could measure,

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things like family income,
standardized achievement test scores,

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even how safe kids felt
when they were at school.

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So it's not just at West Point or the
National Spelling Bee that grit matters.

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It's also in school, especially
for kids at risk for dropping out.

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To me, the most shocking thing
about grit is how little we know,

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how little science knows,
about building it.

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Every day, parents and teachers ask me,
"How do I build grit in kids?

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What do I do to teach
kids a solid work ethic?

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How do I keep them
motivated for the long run?"

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The honest answer is, I don't know.

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(Laughter) What I do know is that
talent doesn't make you gritty.

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Our data show very clearly that there
are many talented individuals

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who simply do not follow
through on their commitments.

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In fact, in our data,
grit is usually unrelated

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or even inversely related
to measures of talent.

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So far, the best idea I've
heard about building grit in kids

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is something called "growth mindset."

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This is an idea developed
at Stanford University by Carol Dweck,

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and it is the belief that the
ability to learn is not fixed,

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that it can change with your effort.

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Dr. Dweck has shown that when
kids read and learn about the brain

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and how it changes and grows
in response to challenge,

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they're much more likely
to persevere when they fail,

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because they don't believe that
failure is a permanent condition.

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So growth mindset is a great
idea for building grit.

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But we need more. And that's
where I'm going to end my remarks,

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because that's where we are.
That's the work that stands before us.

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We need to take our best ideas,
our strongest intuitions,

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and we need to test them. We need
to measure whether we've been successful,

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and we have to be willing
to fail, to be wrong,

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to start over again with lessons learned.

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In other words, we need to be gritty
about getting our kids grittier.

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Thank you. (Applause)