Grit

by Angela Duckworth

  “That coach had a fixed mindset—he just couldn’t believe that I’d improved as much as I did.”

  There were more ups and downs, but Bill’s growth mindset kept getting affirmed. “Because I’d come so damn close to quitting and yet hung in there, and because things eventually did work out, I learned a lesson I’d never forget. The lesson was that, when you have setbacks and failures, you can’t overreact to them. You need to step back, analyze them, and learn from them. But you also need to stay optimistic.”

  How did that lesson help Bill later in life? “There have been times in my career where I felt discouraged. I’d watch someone else get promoted before me. I’d want things to go a certain way, and they’d go the opposite. At those points, I’d say to myself, ‘Just keep working hard and learning, and it will all work out.’ ”

  * * *

  “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” Nietzsche once said. Kanye West and Kelly Clarkson echo the same sentiment, and there’s a reason we keep repeating it. Many of us can remember a time when, like Bill McNabb, we were confronted with challenge and yet emerged on the other side more confident than when we began.

  Consider, for example, the Outward Bound program, which sends adolescents or adults into the wilderness with experienced leaders, usually for a few weeks. From its inception a half century ago, the premise of Outward Bound—so named for the moment a ship leaves harbor for the open seas—has been that challenging outdoor situations develop “tenacity in pursuit” and “undefeatable spirit.” In fact, across dozens of studies, the program has been shown to increase independence, confidence, assertiveness, and the belief that what happens in life is largely under your control. What’s more, these benefits tend to increase, rather than diminish, in the six months following participation in the program.

  All the same, it’s undeniable that what doesn’t kill us sometimes makes us weaker. Consider the dogs who were shocked repeatedly with no control. A third of the dogs were resilient to this adversity, but there was no evidence that any of the dogs in the uncontrollable stress condition benefited from the experience in any way. On the contrary, most were much more vulnerable to suffering in the immediate aftermath.

  So, it appears that sometimes what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and sometimes it does the opposite. The urgent question becomes: When? When does struggle lead to hope, and when does struggle lead to hopelessness?

  A few years ago, Steve Maier and his students designed an experiment nearly identical to the one he and Marty Seligman had conducted forty years earlier: One group of rats received electric shocks, but if they turned a small wheel with their front paws, they could turn off the shock until the next trial. A second group received the exact same dose of electric shocks as the first but had no control over their duration.

  One crucial difference was that, in the new experiment, the rats were only five weeks old—that’s adolescence in the rat life cycle. A second difference was that the effects of this experience were assessed five weeks later, when the rats were fully mature adults. At that point, both groups of rats were subjected to uncontrollable electric shocks and, the next day, observed in a social exploration test.

  Here’s what Steve learned. Adolescent rats who experienced stress they could not control grew up to be adult rats who, after being subjected to uncontrollable shocks a second time, behaved timidly. This was not unusual—they learned to be helpless in the same way that any other rat would. In contrast, adolescent rats who experienced stress they could control grew up to be more adventurous and, most astounding, appeared to be inoculated against learned helplessness in adulthood. That’s right—when these “resilient rats” grew up, the usual uncontrollable shock procedures no longer made them helpless.

  In other words, what didn’t kill the young rats, when by their own efforts they could control what was happening, made them stronger for life.

  * * *

  When I learned about Steve Maier’s new experimental work, I just had to talk to him in person. I got on a plane to Colorado.

  Steve walked me around his laboratory and showed me the special cages equipped with little wheels that, when turned, cut off the current to the electric shock. Afterward, the graduate student who ran the experiment on adolescent rats that I just described gave a talk on the brain circuits and neurotransmitters involved. Finally, when Steve and I sat down together, I asked him to explain, from this experiment and everything else he’d done in his long and distinguished career, the neurobiology of hope.

  Steve thought for a moment. “Here’s the deal in a few sentences. You’ve got lots of places in the brain that respond to aversive experiences. Like the amygdala. In fact, there are a whole bunch of limbic areas that respond to stress.”

  I nodded.

  “Now what happens is that these limbic structures are regulated by higher-order brain areas, like the prefrontal cortex. And so, if you have an appraisal, a thought, a belief—whatever you want to call it—that says, ‘Wait a minute, I can do something about this!’ or ‘This really isn’t so bad!’ or whatever, then these inhibitory structures in the cortex are activated. They send a message: ‘Cool it down there! Don’t get so activated. There’s something we can do.’ ”

  I got it. But I still didn’t understand, fully, why Steve had gone to the trouble of experimenting with adolescent rats.

  “The long-term story needs some more explanation,” he continued. “We think there is plasticity in that circuitry. If you experience adversity—something pretty potent—that you overcome on your own during your youth, you develop a different way of dealing with adversity later on. It’s important that the adversity be pretty potent. Because these brain areas really have to wire together in some fashion, and that doesn’t happen with just minor inconveniences.”

  So you can’t just talk someone into believing they can master challenges?

  “That’s right. Just telling somebody they can overcome adversity isn’t enough. For the rewiring to happen, you have to activate the control circuitry at the same time as those low-level areas. That happens when you experience mastery at the same time as adversity.”

  And what about a life history of challenge without control?

  “I worry a lot about kids in poverty,” Steve said. “They’re getting a lot of helplessness experiences. They’re not getting enough mastery experiences. They’re not learning: ‘I can do this. I can succeed in that.’ My speculation is that those earlier experiences can have really enduring effects. You need to learn that there’s a contingency between your actions and what happens to you: ‘If I do something, then something will happen.’ ”

  * * *

  The scientific research is very clear that experiencing trauma without control can be debilitating. But I also worry about people who cruise through life, friction-free, for a long, long time before encountering their first real failure. They have so little practice falling and getting up again. They have so many reasons to stick with a fixed mindset.

  I see a lot of invisibly vulnerable high-achievers stumble in young adulthood and struggle to get up again. I call them the “fragile perfects.” Sometimes I meet fragile perfects in my office after a midterm or a final. Very quickly, it becomes clear that these bright and wonderful people know how to succeed but not how to fail.

  Last year, I kept in touch with a freshman at Penn named Kayvon Asemani. Kayvon has the sort of résumé that might make you worry he’s a fragile perfect: valedictorian of his high school class, student body president, star athlete . . . the list goes on.

  But I assure you that Kayvon is the very embodiment of growth mindset and optimism. We met when he was a senior at the Milton Hershey School, a tuition-free boarding school originally established by chocolatier Milton Hershey for orphan boys and, to this day, a haven for children from severely disadvantaged backgrounds. Kayvon and his siblings ended up at Hershey just before Kayvon entered the fifth grade—one year after his father nearly strangled his mother to death, leavin
g her in a permanent coma.

  At Hershey, Kayvon thrived. He discovered a passion for music, playing the trombone in two school bands. And he discovered leadership, giving speeches to state politicians, creating a student-run school news website, chairing committees that raised tens of thousands of dollars for charity, and in his senior year, serving as student body president.

  In January, Kayvon emailed to let me know how his first semester had gone. “I finished the first semester with a 3.5,” he wrote. “Three A’s and one C. I’m not completely satisfied with it. I know what I did right to get the A’s and I know what I did wrong to get the C.”

  As for his poorest grade? “That C in Economics caught up to me because I was in a hole from my conflicted thoughts about this place and whether I fit in. . . . I can definitely do better than a 3.5, and a 4.0 is not out of the question. My first semester mentality was that I have a lot to learn from these kids. My new mentality is that I have a lot to teach them.”

  The spring semester wasn’t exactly smooth sailing, either. Kayvon earned a bunch of A’s but didn’t do nearly as well as he’d hoped in his two quantitative courses. We talked, briefly, about the option of transferring out of Wharton, Penn’s highly competitive business school, and I pointed out that there was no shame in switching into a different major. Kayvon was having none of it.

  Here’s an excerpt from his email to me in June: “Numbers and executing quantitative concepts have always been difficult for me. But I embrace the challenge, and I’m going to apply all the grit I have to improving myself and making myself better, even if it means graduating with a GPA less than what I would have earned if I just majored in something that didn’t require me to manipulate numbers.”

  I have no doubt that Kayvon will keep getting up, time and again, always learning and growing.

  * * *

  Collectively, the evidence I’ve presented tells the following story: A fixed mindset about ability leads to pessimistic explanations of adversity, and that, in turn, leads to both giving up on challenges and avoiding them in the first place. In contrast, a growth mindset leads to optimistic ways of explaining adversity, and that, in turn, leads to perseverance and seeking out new challenges that will ultimately make you even stronger.

  My recommendation for teaching yourself hope is to take each step in the sequence above and ask, What can I do to boost this one?

  My first suggestion in that regard is to update your beliefs about intelligence and talent.

  When Carol and her collaborators try to convince people that intelligence, or any other talent, can improve with effort, she starts by explaining the brain. For instance, she recounts a study published in the top scientific journal Nature that tracked adolescent brain development. Many of the adolescents in this study increased their IQ scores from age fourteen, when the study started, to age eighteen, when it concluded. This fact—that IQ scores are not entirely fixed over a person’s life span—usually comes as a surprise. What’s more, Carol continues, these same adolescents showed sizable changes in brain structure: “Those who got better at math skills strengthened the areas of the brain related to math, and the same was true for English skills.”

  Carol also explains that the brain is remarkably adaptive. Like a muscle that gets stronger with use, the brain changes itself when you struggle to master a new challenge. In fact, there’s never a time in life when the brain is completely “fixed.” Instead, all our lives, our neurons retain the potential to grow new connections with one another and to strengthen the ones we already have. What’s more, throughout adulthood, we maintain the ability to grow myelin, a sort of insulating sheath that protects neurons and speeds signals traveling between them.

  My next suggestion is to practice optimistic self-talk.

  The link between cognitive behavioral therapy and learned helplessness led to the development of “resilience training.” In essence, this interactive curriculum is a preventative dose of cognitive behavioral therapy. In one study, children who completed this training showed lower levels of pessimism and developed fewer symptoms of depression over the next two years. In a similar study, pessimistic college students demonstrated less anxiety over the subsequent two years and less depression over three years.

  If, reading this chapter, you recognize yourself as an extreme pessimist, my advice is to find a cognitive behavioral therapist. I know how unsatisfying this recommendation might sound. Many years ago, as a teenager, I wrote to Dear Abby about a problem I was having. “Go see a therapist,” she wrote back. I recall tearing up her letter, angry she didn’t propose a neater, faster, more straightforward solution. Nevertheless, suggesting that reading twenty pages about the science of hope is enough to remove an ingrained pessimistic bias would be naive. There’s much more to say about cognitive behavioral therapy and resilience training than I can summarize here.

  The point is that you can, in fact, modify your self-talk, and you can learn to not let it interfere with you moving toward your goals. With practice and guidance, you can change the way you think, feel, and, most important, act when the going gets rough.

  As a transition to the final section of this book, “Growing Grit from the Outside In,” let me offer one final suggestion for teaching yourself hope: Ask for a helping hand.

  A few years ago, I met a retired mathematician named Rhonda Hughes. Nobody in Rhonda’s family had gone to college, but as a girl, she liked math a whole lot more than stenography. Rhonda eventually earned a PhD in mathematics and, after seventy-nine of her eighty applications for a faculty position were rejected, she took a job at the single university that made her an offer.

  One reason Rhonda got in touch was to tell me that she had an issue with an item on the Grit Scale. “I don’t like that item that says, ‘Setbacks don’t discourage me.’ That makes no sense. I mean, who doesn’t get discouraged by setbacks? I certainly do. I think it should say, ‘Setbacks don’t discourage me for long. I get back on my feet.’ ”

  Of course, Rhonda was right, and in so many words, I changed the item accordingly.

  But the most important thing about Rhonda’s story is that she almost never got back up all by herself. Instead, she figured out that asking for help was a good way to hold on to hope.

  Here’s just one of the stories she told me: “I had this mentor who knew, even before I did, that I was going to be a mathematician. It all started when I’d done very poorly on one of his tests, and I went to his office and cried. All of a sudden, he jumped up out of his chair and, without a word, ran out of the room. When, finally, he came back he said, ‘Young lady, you should go to graduate school in mathematics. But you’re taking all of the wrong courses.’ And he had all of the courses I should have been taking mapped out, and the personal promises of other faculty that they’d help.”

  About twenty years ago, Rhonda cofounded the EDGE Program with Sylvia Bozeman, a fellow mathematician. EDGE stands for Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education, and its mission is to support women and minority students pursuing doctoral training in mathematics. “People assume you have to have some special talent to do mathematics,” Sylvia has said. “They think you’re either born with it, or you’re not. But Rhonda and I keep saying, ‘You actually develop the ability to do mathematics. Don’t give up!’ ”

  “There have been so many times in my career when I wanted to pack it in, when I wanted to give up and do something easier,” Rhonda told me. “But there was always someone who, in one way or another, told me to keep going. I think everyone needs somebody like that. Don’t you?”

  * * *

  I. There’s an expression in sports: “Race your strengths and train your weaknesses.” I agree with the wisdom of this adage, but I also think it’s important that people recognize that skills improve with practice.

  Part III

  GROWING GRIT FROM THE OUTSIDE IN

  Chapter 10

  PARENTING FOR GRIT

  What can I do to encourage grit in the people I care for?
>
  I’m asked this question at least once a day.

  Sometimes it’s a coach who asks; sometimes it’s an entrepreneur or a CEO. Last week, it was a fourth-grade teacher, and the week before, a math professor at a community college. I’ve had army generals and navy admirals toss me this question, too, but most often it’s a mother or father who worries that their child isn’t close to realizing their potential.

  All the people quizzing me are thinking as parents would, of course—even if they’re not parents. The word parenting derives from Latin and means “to bring forth.” You’re acting in a parentlike way if you’re asking for guidance on how to best bring forth interest, practice, purpose, and hope in the people you care for.

  * * *

  When I turn the tables and ask people for their own intuitions on how to “parent for grit,” I get different answers.

  Some believe grit is forged in the crucible of adversity. Others are quick to paraphrase Nietzsche: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”I Such invocations conjure an image of scowling mothers and fathers dispensing endless criticism on the sidelines of games that had better be victories, or chaining their children to the piano bench or violin stand, or grounding them for the sin of an A–.

  This perspective assumes that offering loving support and demanding high standards are two ends of a continuum, with the authoritarian parents of the gritty far to the right of center.