The WAY to WOW Shows
Understanding the Importance of Grit
July 6, 2021
Automatically generated from YouTube captions; names and wording may contain errors.

[0:00] when i was 27 years old i left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding teaching at least during my lifetime i was told all these things are what really matter and it turns out that that's not probably not the the case who are you and where are you going what do you want together we'll find the ideal path

[0:35] on the way to wow show with your host kevin bell you may have noticed that we like to change things up a little bit here on the way to wow show so today we are going to do something a little bit different i'm going to show you a ted talk by one of my favorite thinkers and talk about her ideas a little bit and how we might apply them to our lives but first i'm going to mix myself up a cocktail so when i was the day i graduated from high school is a very very very hot day in santa barbara

[1:12] california and after the ceremony but before we were getting on the bus to go to grad night at disneyland which was a big new thing back then my mom took me to lunch and for the first time in my life i had something called a frozen margarita and so in honor of that auspicious occasion we're gonna mix one up now i have i'm lucky to have this uh this glass here from uh cantina and it has the measures for each of the ingredients but basically i'm going to use some

[1:47] milagro blanco tequila normally you would have about two parts of tequila i don't drop this bottle well a little bit more than two parts that's okay the crew won't mind if the margarita has a little bit extra keel in it well they no not at all okay good good and then some kind of orange liqueur um my orange liqueur of choice is cuantro uh mostly because they talk about it in casablanca one of my favorite movies let's see i've got a chuckle from the director of photography out of that

[2:22] and then the last ingredient is fresh lime i like fresh lime better than the mixes um just because it's like like in any cocktail the freshness of it really has a great impact so we're gonna squeeze that in there i think i'm probably gonna need more than one yep and you'll notice that it would seem like you'd put it in this way but you want to put it in the the flesh side down because that's really what will squeeze out the juice

[3:02] yeah that works out just right so juice of one lime and we're gonna i'm gonna pour this into my uh this is kind of like a single serving blender container which makes life easy and we'll fill that up with some ice okay so we're going to put in just a little bit more ice kind of fill it up there that should be good and we'll cap this off nice and tight

[3:39] yep there we go and we're gonna put it here in the blender hear that click in power all right and hopefully i'm not gonna have trouble getting this out like i did when i was testing it there we go and you know what i like a cocktail glass so we're gonna use that and then that way also my colleagues can share enjoy folks

[4:14] [Music] so as i mentioned in the intro we don't have a live guest today but i'm going to be talking about one of my favorite thinkers and authors professor angela lee duckworth she was a macarthur fellow and she's professor of psychology at the university of pennsylvania where she studies non-iq competencies including self-control and what she

[4:50] calls grit she's the founder and ceo of career lab a non-profit with the mission to help children thrive her best known accomplishment is the new york times selling book grit the power and passion of perseverance and and i have to tell you it is an absolutely marvelous book it was first published i believe in 2016. and her ideas are are really responsible for much of what you see us

[5:27] talking about here here on the show here on the way to wow show so we're going to watch a ted talk that professor duckworth gave and i'm just going i want to examine some of her ideas go into them a little bit more deeply [Applause] 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

[6:04] 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 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

[6:41] 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'm going to stop the video here because this is i i think this is her first crucial point

[7:16] and that is that this i we get i think we're very excited these days about the idea of smart people people with high iqs as if somehow that aspect of them alone makes them um a good leader or makes them a good manager or makes them innovative and i don't think that's the case and and i would ask you to think about your own experience and the people who have been most influential on you over the years

[7:54] one that always leaps to mind when i think about this is i was working at disneyland in the parking lot and a woman drove up she was in a big car she was very nicely dressed and she rolled down her window and and and she she kind of waved to me to come over and so i walked over to her car and and she said in the most pleasant voice i think i've ever heard would you help me out and i can tell you at that moment all i wanted to do was help this woman out

[8:29] and she said i'm trying to figure out where to park now given that we were in the midst of a humongous parking lot that was a very ridiculous question but what she was really after was parking in the vip parking for which she was not entitled because she didn't have the proper tag on her car but just her whole aura led me to pull a tag out of my pocket put it on her car and then say oh just park right over

[9:04] here ma'am and when she said thank you it was like i had just given her the crown jewels or something now maybe she was an inordin inordinately high high iq person but i couldn't have known that in that interaction she was tremendously charismatic though and i think we've all had um or hopefully we've all had interactions with tremendously charismatic people and then let's look at the other side of it how many people do we know that are very very successful who never even went to college

[9:39] or maybe they went to college but they never graduated from college right sort of the poster boy for that is um mark zuckerberg right he he founded facebook i think in his college dormitory isn't that the story but he never graduated from college and yet he completely changed the way people interact in the entire world i mean his one of his predecessors walt disney i don't think walt disney graduated from high school and yet he changed the entire nature of entertainment he basically created

[10:14] the modern day amusement park and so many other things that we just take for granted so i i think you know when when professor duckworth talks about there being other aspects of people that that help them make tremendous contributions to our society that help them gain success for themselves besides iq what she's really in some ways doing is talking to all of us and saying look you don't have to be a genius in order to succeed

[10:49] there are these other qualities that are at least equally if not perhaps more important and those those qualities are our passion and and and probably most important grit right there's the famous saying from uh thomas edison uh when someone asked him about all the number of times that he failed when he was trying to invent the light bulb he said i i didn't fail all those times i just found 10 000 ways you know that it didn't work but the 10 000th and first way uh that that was the

[11:24] one that did it it was the grit that got him through now i'm not you know he was also an intelligent guy of course but his intelligence would have meant for nothing if he hadn't had the stick-to-itiveness the the almost stubbornness to keep pursuing his vision and make it come into being all right so let's continue with the video now 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

[11:59] who is successful here and why my research team and i went to west point military academy we tried to predict which cadets 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

[12:34] students we partnered with private companies asking which of these sales people 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 predictor of success and it wasn't social intelligence it wasn't good looks physical health and it wasn't iq it was grit grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals grit is having stamina grit is sticking with your future

[13:09] day in day out not just for the week not just for the month but for years and working really hard to make that future a reality grit is living life like it's a marathon not a sprint okay so i'm again i'm going to stop the video here and and um i just want to repeat real quickly uh professor duckworth's uh definition of grit so passion and perseverance for a long-term goal measured in years i that that i think you look she's the

[13:44] expert in grit so i think we we take that as holy rit right but i'm gonna disagree with something the professor just said and that is she called life a marathon and and this is i think one of the mistakes that we make when we when we start using these kinds of of metaphors and we start trying to relate life to something else so i remember when i trained for the los angeles marathon a few years ago basically it was a matter of running starting i was thinking i was running 10 miles a day at that time

[14:21] so then the next week i ran 12 miles a day and then 14 miles a day and then i started doing 16 miles a couple times a week and then the rest of the time less and it and i kept building it up but i knew that if i kept increasing the amount of mileage that i ran i was going to be able to finish the marathon there was there was no question all right so let's let's continue a few years ago i started studying grit in the chicago public schools i asked thousands of high school juniors to take great questionnaires and then waited around more than a year

[14:56] to see who would graduate turns out that grittier kids were significantly more likely to graduate even when i matched them on every characteristic i could measure things like family income standardized achievement test scores even how safe kids felt when they were at school so it's not just at west point or the national spelling bee that grit matters it's also in school especially for kids at risk for dropping out to me the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know how little science

[15:32] knows about building it every day parents and teachers ask me how do i build grit in kids what do i do to teach kids a solid work ethic um family wealth standardized test scores feelings of security talent whatever that is don't predict success the way that grit does so all these things at least during my lifetime i was told all these things are what really matter and it turns out that that's not probably not the the case

[16:08] certainly according to professor duckworth's research that is not the case grit is what matters so as i was thinking about her statement here i recall when i was in high school um i had a friend who was i i did a lot of high school theater especially musical theater some of you may be able to relate to this and and i had a friend he was just amazing an amazing voice a presence he could dance he could act he could he could do it all

[16:44] and in fact it wasn't just his friends and and the the drama teacher who believed that shortly after high school he auditioned for a play on broadway and they not only cast him but they decided to revamp the show in order to take advantage of his talent i mean it's just amazing he was right out of high school and he's doing this broadway show basically for him i mean there's there's that's

[17:21] success on by any definition i would think the show closed after a week and he was devastated and and i can appreciate that i mean you get this huge build up and then it just fell flat people didn't want to watch the show and that's sad but what was more sad was he went back to his hometown and he never never auditioned for a show on broadway

[17:57] again never pursued a career as a performer after that he he basically gave up and i i i couldn't understand that with with all that talent all that acclaim behind him all right so the first one didn't work but what about the second one or the third one or the fourth one or maybe even the tenth one

[18:32] inevitably they would have worked he was too talented not to be a successful performer and we had other friends of ours who went on to become into performing and you if i told you their names believe me you would know them and they weren't as talented as he was but they stuck with it year after year after year and they became very very big in the business and it just it drives home that point what i think the missing ingredients was grit it's just that that first strikeout was

[19:08] was just too tough for him and unfortunately i think he didn't have the grit to overcome it now i'm not saying he didn't live a useful life he certainly did he he went into doing theater for children and he was a very beloved teacher of theater and children all that and that's and and i think that's terrific but it's a shame that the world didn't get to see um him get to see him as a performer as the talent that he was because i think i think we all lost something because of that and and and it's to really drive home

[19:43] this idea maybe you know someone like this or maybe you've struck out a few times or one time yourself and you felt like okay that's the game that's that's it i'm done we're never done there used to be a billboard down the street from where i lived for a uh i think was a kickboxing gym that said you can rest when you're dead and as morbid as that is i think it's it's true we're not done until we're really done

[20:18] and grit is what will keep us going to that point and now i i i think that professor duckworth would agree with that let's uh watch the last few minutes of her talk what do i do to teach kids a solid work ethic how do i keep them motivated for the long run the honest answer is i don't know what i do know is that talent doesn't make you gritty our data show very clearly that there are many talented individuals who simply do not follow through on their commitments in fact in our data grit is usually

[20:54] unrelated or even inversely related to measures of talent so far the best idea i've heard about building grit in kids is something called growth mindset this is an idea developed at stanford university by carol dweck and it is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed that it can change with your effort dr dweck has shown that when kids read and learn about the brain and how it changes and grows in response to challenge they're much more likely to persevere

[21:30] when they fail because they don't believe that failure is a permanent condition so growth mindset is a great idea for building grit but we need more and that's where i'm going to end my remarks because that's where we are that's the work that stands before us we need to take our best ideas our strongest intuitions and we need to test them we need to measure whether we've been successful and we have to be willing to fail to be wrong to start over again with lessons learned in other words we need to be gritty

[22:07] about getting our kids grittier thank you i think professor duckworth summed it up as well as it could possibly be for ourselves for our children for our friends we need to get grittier about helping us all be grittier wasn't professor duckworth just terrific such clarity in explaining her ideas her central theme grit perseverance

[22:44] and passion they'll get us most if not all of the way to wow they'll help us get our children to their own way to wow i encourage you to get her book wherever you get your books it's it's such a fun book to read and i think it will really have a significant impact on your life if you've got someone you think should be on the way to wow show drop a comment or go to the website the way to wow show dot com and send us a message

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