What Makes People Successful? | Angela Duckworth

I often set a goal but later choose to pursue a different one. Wouldn't it be a wonderful life to find some learning curve that you don't want to drop out of? The common denominator that I have discovered across achievement in every domain is something that is not correlated with your IQ or any other measure of talent, and that is grit. Before I tell you what I've discovered about grit, I just want to say grit is not the only thing that you care about. I know this. You have some infinite bookshelf in your head of all the things that you want to be, that you hope your workplace culture will exemplify and support, but I will take this book off the shelf, so to speak, because it is a common denominator and it is something I believe that we can all develop intentionally. Now I'm going to give you some items from the grit scale, so let's go. This is a questionnaire that I developed from interviewing high achievers, and when I assess grit, I ask you to reflect on, for example, whether if I talk to people who work closely with you, would they go out of their way to tell me that you're an especially hard worker? Here's another item. Rate yourself. Do you finish whatever you begin? This is my personally favorite item. It's the single most predictive item on the entire questionnaire. Of course, I'm sure you're wondering whether it's okay to quit things. Absolutely, I think it's important to quit things, but I think there is a bias in people with grit not to quit. They will quit, but they kind of hate to do it. These are two items from the perseverance subscale of the overall grit scale. You say yes, you get a higher perseverance score, you get a higher overall grit score. Now I'm going to show you two more items, and they are from the passion subscale. I have to warn you, they're reverse scored, so the more you say yes, the lower your passion subscore, the lower your grit score. For example, I have difficulty maintaining my focus on projects that take more than a few months to complete. Here's another reverse scored item. I often set a goal, but later choose to pursue a different one. This passion that I talk about, and since we're all here together in person, which I love, I want to explain that it's not so much intensity that I have found to be remarkable about high achievers in terms of their passion, it's interestingly, it's about their consistency. It's not like, oh, hey, I just pulled three all-nighters, to which I say, you should get more sleep. It's really about I get up again, and I get up again, and I get up again, and I get up again, and when I get up, I'm still devoted with enthusiasm, with real authenticity to this purpose, which I think is important enough for me to keep going. Not intensity, like fireworks, but stamina, like you're running a marathon. What is grit? Grit is perseverance and passion, for especially long-term goals. I think this is what's true about grit, and why I continue to admire people like Michael, who are grit paragons and grit fans. It's not that I think you should stick with anything that you've started, but it is this, and again, I tell my own daughters this, wouldn't it be a wonderful life to find some learning curve that you don't want to drop out of? Wouldn't it be a wonderful thing in your life, whether or not you win a Nobel Prize, to achieve excellence, to achieve your potential? And to do that, you need not only high quantity, but high quality practice. What is a growth mindset? A growth mindset is a theory. It's a theory about human nature. If you have a growth mindset, you believe that people in fundamental ways can change, that you can even get smarter. Now I'm going to confess to you that when I started to learn about growth mindset myself, it was, as I said, 20 plus years ago, I began collaborating with folks at Stanford, which is where Carol is now as a professor, and we would be having these meetings, and we'd be looking at a table from a paper, and my colleague James would say, oh, Angela, table two, I don't really understand that. Can you help me get smarter? And I would always just have to pause, and I'm like, did he just say get smarter? I'm like, oh, you want me to explain table two? Yeah, well, this is table two. And he would say it over and over again, and so would Carol. And then I figured out. They were trying to get me not to have a fixed mindset. What's a fixed mindset? A fixed mindset is someone who says, what? Did you just say you get smarter? Did you just say you could, like, fundamentally change? I mean, because either you're smart or you're not. You're a gifted public speaker or you're not. You're a natural athlete or you're not. A fixed mindset is also a theory. It is also a theory of human nature. And that theory says that in fundamental ways, people don't change. Now, something that Carol taught me early in our relationship is that, surprisingly to me, it doesn't really matter which one you have when everything's going great. Getting straight A's, you're the prom queen or the prom king. Everything's coming up roses. Fixed mindset's fine. But what happens on the bad days? What happens when you give a talk and it doesn't go well? What happens when you hold a meeting and nothing turned out the way you thought it would? On days of challenge, on days of setback, on days of failure, you have a rational reason to get up again if you have a growth mindset. Because a growth mindset tells you that whatever happened, you can learn from it. And you can grow from it. And you will be stronger for it. That's what a growth mindset is. That's why I think it's one of the most important discoveries in the history of psychology. Let me share with you a story of an Olympic swimmer. He was interviewed by scientists at the University of Chicago. It was a study of world-class achievers. He was one of 120 subjects. And he was already retired. He had already, you know, Olympic medals, et cetera. Here's a story he told. When I was 11, I wanted to bag it 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 workouts and force you to swim. And once you turn 12 and you're at the top of your age group, you'll start to do well. If you want to quit, then that's fine. Now, the scientists at the University of Chicago were a little freaked out by this part of the interview. They asked a ton of follow-up questions, like, so it sounds like your parents forced you to become a professional swimmer against your will when you were 11. And the swimmer said, no, no, no, you're not. I'm not communicating the context. My mom and my dad loved me so much. They just didn't want me to quit on a bad day. I have interviewed dozens, if not hundreds, of paragons of grit. Every single one of them has a story like this, and so do you. And what I want to share with you about what I've learned about grit is that it's not DIY. It's forged through relationships. Because frankly, everybody has bad days. We might not get into it, but I had a lot of bad days last year writing my second book. And I said out loud, I quit. I said it while sobbing, right? And my mentors, including my editor, but also my husband, said, if you want to quit on a good day, that's fine. But I care about you too much to let you quit on a bad one. And finally, let me open the aperture up to its widest diameter and say something about culture, something you know more about than I do. In the country of Finland, it's a very small country. There are fewer Finns than there are New Yorkers. Just to give you some context. In Finland, they have this word called sisu. And sisu translates directly to intestines, actually. But the symbolic meaning is fortitude or grit. And the Finns believe that only they have sisu. So when the French give up, and the Americans, of course, have given up, and the Japanese have given up, everyone's given up, the Finns are like, but we still stand strong, because we are Finns, and we have sisu. Now, I had a graduate student named Amelia who came to work with me for a year, and I said, Amelia, you cannot have something inside your intestines that makes you different from everyone else. And she said, Professor Duckworth, with respect, you're missing the point. It's about identity. What is culture, if not the way we do things around here? And she said, that's what makes us special. That's what gives us strength. And I could not agree more. I think workplace culture is one of the most important things that anybody could work on. Because I don't think you can express grit or develop grit if you don't have a great place to work.