Imagine that you attended a school reunion and ran into a lots of people that you hadn’t seen in years. During conversations with your old school mates, you could feel the friendly competition heating up. While comparing career and life accomplishments, you were shocked to learn that the child genius, the one all the teachers thought would be spectacularly successful, had struggled with their life post-school. How could this be, you wondered? This was the person everyone thought would invent something that would change the world or become the Prime Minister.
It turns out that intelligence might not be the best indicator of future success. According to psychologist Angela Duckworth, the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent, it’s a special blend of persistence and passion that she calls “grit.” Duckworth has spent years studying people, trying to understand what it is that makes high achievers so successful. And what she found surprised even her. It wasn’t exam results. It wasn’t IQ scores. It wasn’t even a degree from a top-ranking university that turned out to be the best predictor of success, it was a combination of passion and perseverance that made high achievers special. In short, they had ‘grit’.
Being gritty, according to Duckworth, is the ability to persevere. It’s about being unusually resilient and hardworking, so much so that you’re willing to continue on in the face of difficulties, obstacles and even failures. It’s about being constantly driven to improve. In addition to perseverance, being gritty is also about being passionate about something. For the highly successful, Duckworth found that the journey was just as important as the end result. Even if some of the things they had to do were boring, or frustrating, or even painful, they wouldn’t dream of giving up. For these people, their passion was enduring.
What her research demonstrated is that it wasn’t natural talent that made the biggest difference in who was highly successful and who wasn’t – it was more about effort than IQ. Duckworth has come up with two equations she uses to explain this concept:
• Talent x effort = skill
• Skill x effort = achievement
Talent is how quickly your skills improve when you invest effort. Achievement is what happens when you take your acquired skills and use them. As you can see from these equations, effort counts twice. That’s why IQ and exam results aren’t a good indicator of someone’s future success. It’s because those results are missing the most important part of the equation – the person’s effort level or what Duckworth calls their “grittiness” factor (their level of persistence and passion).
What does that mean for our students? It means that it’s OK if they aren’t the cleverest in the room or the smartest person in the job. It means the effort they expend toward their goals (perseverance) and their dedication throughout their career journey are what matter more than the results they got in their end of year exams. Why? Because grit will always win over talent. Our potential is one thing, what we do with it is quite another.
