When I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job
that was even more demanding: teaching. I went to teach seventh graders math in the New
York City public schools. And like any teacher, I made quizzes and tests. I gave out
homework assignments. When the work came back, I calculated grades.
What struck me was that IQ was not the only difference between my best and my worst
students. Some of my strongest performers did not have stratospheric IQ scores. Some of my
smartest kids weren't doing so well. And that got me thinking. The kinds of things you
need to learn in seventh grade math, sure, they're hard: ratios, decimals, the area of a
parallelogram. But these concepts are not impossible, and I was firmly convinced that
every one of my students could learn the material if they worked hard and long enough.
After several more years of teaching, I came to the conclusion that what we need in
education is a much better understanding of students and learning from a motivational
perspective, from a psychological perspective. In education, the one thing we know how to
measure best is IQ. But what if doing well in school and in life depends on much more
than your ability to learn quickly and easily?
So I left the classroom, and I went to graduate school to become a psychologist. I started
studying kids and adults in all kinds of super challenging settings, and in every study my
question was, who is successful here and why? My research team and I went to West Point
Military Academy. We tried to predict which cades would stay in military training and
which would drop out. We went to the National Spelling Bee and tried to predict which
children would advance farthest in competition. We studied rookie teachers working in
really tough neighborhoods, asking which teachers are still going to be here in teaching
by the end of the school year, and of those, who will be the most effective at improving
learning outcomes for their students? We partnered with private companies, asking, which
of these salespeople is going to keep their jobs? And who's going to earn the most money?
In all those very different contexts, one characteristic emerged as a significant
predoctor of success. And it wan't social intelligence. It wasn't good looks, physical
health, and it wasn't IQ. It was grit.