Grit (25 page)

How do grit paragons think about setbacks? Overwhelmingly, I've found that they explain events optimistically. Journalist Hester Lacey finds the same striking pattern in her interviews with remarkably creative people. “What has been your greatest disappointment?” she asks each of them. Whether they're artists or entrepreneurs or community activists, their response is nearly identical. “Well, I don't really think in terms of disappointment. I tend to think that everything that happens is something I can learn from. I tend to think, ‘Well okay, that didn't go so well, but I guess
I will just carry on.' ”

Around the time Marty Seligman took his two-year hiatus from laboratory research, his new mentor Aaron Beck was questioning his own training in Freudian psychoanalysis. Like most psychiatrists at the time, Beck had been taught that all forms of mental illness were rooted in unconscious childhood conflicts.

Beck disagreed. He had the audacity to suggest that a psychiatrist could actually talk directly to patients about what was bothering them, and that the patients' thoughts—their self-talk—
could be the target of therapy. The foundational insight of Beck's new approach was that the
same objective event
—losing a job, getting into an argument with
a coworker, forgetting to call a friend—can lead to
very different subjective interpretations
. And it is those interpretations—rather than the objective events themselves—that can give rise to our feelings and our behavior.

Cognitive behavioral therapy—which aims to treat depression and other psychological maladies by helping patients think more objectively and behave in healthier ways—has shown that, whatever our childhood sufferings, we can generally learn to observe our negative self-talk and change our maladaptive behaviors. As with any other skill, we can practice interpreting what happens to us and responding as an optimist would. Cognitive behavioral therapy is now a widely practiced psychotherapeutic treatment for depression, and has proven
longer-lasting in its effects than antidepressant medication.

A few years after I'd gotten a toehold in grit research, Wendy Kopp, the founder and then CEO of Teach For America, came to visit Marty.

Then still his graduate student, I was eager to join their meeting for two reasons. First, Teach For America was sending hundreds of recent college graduates into disadvantaged school districts across the country. From personal experience, I knew teaching to be a grit-demanding profession, nowhere more so than in the urban and rural classrooms where TFA teachers are assigned. Second, Wendy was herself a paragon of grit. Famously, she'd conceived of TFA during her senior year at Princeton and, unlike so many idealists who eventually give up on their dream, she'd stuck with it, starting from nothing and creating one of the largest and most influential educational nonprofits in the country. “
Relentless pursuit” was both a core value of TFA and the phrase often used by friends and coworkers to describe Wendy's leadership style.

At that meeting, the three of us developed a hypothesis: Teachers who have an optimistic way of interpreting adversity have more grit than their more pessimistic counterparts, and grit, in turn, predicts
better teaching. For instance, an optimistic teacher might keep looking for ways to help an uncooperative student, whereas a pessimist might assume there was nothing more to be done. To test whether that was true, we decided to measure optimism and grit before teachers set foot in the classroom and, a year later, see how effectively teachers had advanced the academic progress of their students.

That August, four hundred TFA teachers completed the Grit Scale and, in addition, Marty's questionnaire assessing their optimism. To the extent they thought of temporary and specific causes for bad events, and permanent and pervasive causes of good events, we coded their responses as optimistic. To the extent they did the reverse, we coded their responses as pessimistic.

In the same survey, we measured one more thing: happiness. Why? For one thing, there was a small but growing body of scientific evidence that happiness wasn't just the
consequence
of performing well at work, it might also be an important
cause
. Also, we were curious about how happy the grittiest teachers were. Did single-minded passion and perseverance come at a cost? Or could you be gritty and happy at the same time?

One year later, when Teach For America had tabulated effectiveness ratings for each teacher based on the academic gains of their students, we analyzed our data. Just as we'd expected,
optimistic teachers were grittier and happier, and grit and happiness in turn explained why optimistic teachers got their students to achieve more during the school year.

After staring at these results for a while, I began reminiscing about my own experience of classroom teaching. I remembered the many afternoons I'd gone home exasperated and exhausted. I remembered battling catastrophic self-talk about my own capabilities—
Oh god, I really am an idiot!
—and those of my young charges—
She got it wrong again? She'll never learn this!
And I remembered the mornings I'd gotten up and decided, after all, that there was one more tactic worth trying:
Maybe if I bring in a Hershey bar and cut it into pieces, they'll get the idea of fractions. Maybe if I have everyone clean out their lockers on Mondays, they'll get in the habit of keeping their lockers clean.

The data from this study of young teachers, along with Wendy Kopp's intuitions, interviews with grit paragons, and a half century of psychological research all point to the same, commonsense conclusion: When you keep searching for ways to change your situation for the better, you stand a chance of finding them. When you stop searching, assuming they can't be found, you guarantee they won't.

Or as Henry Ford is often quoted as saying, “Whether you think you can, or think you can't—you're right.”

Around the time Marty Seligman and Steve Maier were linking hopelessness to a lack of perceived control, a young psychology major named Carol Dweck was making her way through college. Carol had always been intrigued that some people persevere while others in identical circumstances give up. Right after graduation, she enrolled in a doctoral program in psychology and pursued this question.

Marty and Steve's work had a profound influence on young Carol. She believed their findings but was unsatisfied. Sure, attributing your misery to causes beyond your control was debilitating, but where did these attributions come from in the first place? Why, she asked, did one person grow up to be an optimist and another a pessimist?

In
one of Carol's first studies, she worked with middle schools to identify boys and girls who, by consensus of their teachers, the school principal, and the school psychologist, were especially “helpless” when confronted by failure. Her hunch was that these children believed that a lack of intellectual ability led to mistakes, rather than a lack of effort. In other words, she suspected it wasn't
just
a long string of failures that made these children pessimistic, but rather their core beliefs about success and learning.

To test her idea, Carol divided the children into two groups. Half the children were assigned to a
success only
program. For several weeks, they solved math problems and, at the end of each session, no matter how many they'd completed, they received praise for doing well. The other half of the children in Carol's study were assigned to an
attribution retraining
program. These children also solved math problems, but were occasionally told that they hadn't solved enough problems during that particular session and, crucially, that they “should have tried harder.”

Afterward, all the children were given a combination of easy and very difficult problems to do.

Carol reasoned that, if prior failures were the root cause of helplessness, the
success only
program would boost motivation. If, on the other hand, the real problem was how children interpreted their failures, then the
attribution retraining
program would be more effective.

What Carol found is that the children in the
success only
program gave up just as easily after encountering very difficult problems as they had before training. In sharp contrast, children in the
attribution retraining
program tried harder after encountering difficulty. It seems as though they'd learned to interpret failure as a cue to try harder rather than as confirmation that they lacked the ability to succeed.

Over the next four decades, Carol probed deeper.

She soon discovered that people of all ages carry around in their minds private theories about how the world works. These points of view are conscious in that if Carol asks you questions about them, you have a ready answer. But like the thoughts you work on when you go to a cognitive behavioral therapist, you may not be aware of them until you're asked.

Here are four statements Carol uses to
assess a person's theory
of intelligence. Read them now and consider how much you agree or disagree with each:

Your intelligence is something very basic about you that you can't change very much.

You can learn new things, but you can't really change how intelligent you are.

No matter how much intelligence you have, you can always change it quite a bit.

You can always substantially change how intelligent you are.

If you found yourself nodding affirmatively to the first two statements but shaking your head in disagreement with the last two, then Carol would say you have more of a fixed mindset. If you had the opposite reaction, then Carol would say you tend toward a growth mindset.

I like to think of a growth mindset this way: Some of us believe, deep down, that people really
can
change. These growth-oriented people assume that it's possible, for example, to get smarter
if
you're given the right opportunities and support and
if
you try hard enough and
if
you believe you can do it. Conversely, some people think you can learn skills, like how to ride a bike or do a sales pitch, but your
capacity
to learn skills—your talent—can't be trained. The problem with holding the latter fixed-mindset view—and many people who consider themselves talented
do
—is that no road is without bumps. Eventually, you're going to hit one. At that point, having a fixed mind-set becomes a tremendous liability. This is when a C–, a rejection letter, a disappointing progress review at work, or any other setback can derail you. With a fixed mindset, you're likely to interpret these setbacks as evidence that, after all, you don't have “the right stuff”—you're not good enough. With a growth mindset, you believe you can learn to do better.

Mindsets have been shown to make a difference in all the same life domains as optimism. For instance, if you have a growth mindset, you're more likely to do well in school, enjoy better emotional and physical health, and have stronger, more
positive social relationships with other people.

A few years ago, Carol and I asked more than two thousand high school seniors to complete a growth-mindset questionnaire. We've found that students with a growth mindset are significantly grittier than students with a fixed mindset. What's more, grittier students earn higher report card grades and, after graduation, are more likely to enroll in and
persist through college. I've since measured growth mindset and grit in both younger children and older adults, and in every sample, I've found that growth mindset and grit go together.

When you ask Carol where our mindsets come from, she'll point to people's personal histories of success and failure and how the people around them, particularly those in a position of authority, have responded to these outcomes.

Consider, for example, what people said to you when, as a child, you did something really well. Were you praised for your talent? Or were you praised for your effort? Either way, chances are you use the same language today when evaluating victories and defeats.

Praising effort and learning over “natural talent” is an explicit target of teacher training in the
KIPP schools. KIPP stands for the Knowledge Is Power Program, and it was started in 1994 by Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, two gritty young Teach For America teachers. Today, KIPP schools serve seventy thousand elementary, middle, and high school students across the country. The vast majority of KIPPsters, as they proudly refer to themselves, come from low-income families. Against the odds, almost all graduate from high school, and more than 80 percent go on to college.

KIPP teachers get a little thesaurus during training. On one side, there are encouragements teachers often use with the best of intentions. On the other, there is language that subtly sends the message that life is about challenging yourself and learning to do what you couldn't do before. See below for examples appropriate for people of any age. Whether you're a parent, manager, coach, or any other type of mentor, I suggest you observe your own language over the next few days, listening for the beliefs your words may be reinforcing in yourself and others.