Grit: the power of passion and perseverance | Angela Lee Duckworth

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. 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. Some of my strongest performers did not have stratospheric IQ scores. Some of my smartest kids weren't doing so well. 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.

当我27岁时，我离开了一份要求很高的管理咨询工作，去做了一份要求更高的工作——教学。我到纽约市的公立学校教七年级的数学。像任何老师一样，我出测验和考试，布置家庭作业。作业交回来后，我计算分数。令我感到震惊的是，我最好的学生和最差的学生之间的差异不仅仅是智商。一些表现最好的学生智商并不高，一些最聪明的孩子成绩并不好。这让我开始思考。七年级数学需要学习的内容确实很难，比如比例、小数、平行四边形的面积等，但这些概念并不是无法掌握的。我坚信每个学生只要足够努力和坚持，都能够学会这些内容。

After several more years of teaching, I 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 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, 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 V 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 students?

经过多年的教学，我得出一个结论：在教育领域，我们需要从动机和心理的角度更好地理解学生和学习。在教育中，我们最擅长衡量的是智商，但如果在学校和生活中取得成功依赖的不仅是你快速和轻松学习的能力呢？所以我离开了教室，去了研究生院攻读心理学。我开始研究各种具有挑战性环境中的儿童和成人。在每一项研究中，我的问题是，谁在这里能够成功，为什么？我的研究团队和我去了西点军校，我们尝试预测哪些学员会坚持军事训练，哪些会放弃。我们去了全国拼字比赛，试图预测哪些孩子将在比赛中走得更远。我们还研究了在艰苦社区工作的新手教师，询问哪些教师将在学年结束时仍留在教学岗位上，以及这些教师中谁最能有效提高学生的学习成果。

We partnered with private companies asking which of these salespeople 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. 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. A few years ago, I started studying grit in the Chicago public schools. I asked thousands of high school juniors to take grit questionnaires and then waited around more than a year 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.

我们与私营公司合作，询问哪些销售人员会保住他们的工作，哪些人会赚到最多的钱。在所有这些不同的背景下，有一个特质成为成功的重要预测因素。而这并不是社交智商，不是外表、身体健康，也不是智商，而是毅力。毅力是对长期目标的激情和坚持。毅力是有耐力，是坚持自己的未来。每天如此，不只是一个星期或一个月，而是多年来不断努力，把未来变成现实。毅力是像跑马拉松一样生活，而不是短跑。 几年前，我开始在芝加哥的公立学校研究毅力。我让成千上万的高中三年级学生填写毅力问卷，然后等待一年多，看看谁能毕业。结果发现，毅力更强的孩子毕业的可能性显著更高。即便我在所有可以衡量的特征上进行匹配，比如家庭收入、标准化成绩测试分数，甚至孩子在学校的安全感，毅力仍然是关键因素。所以，不仅在西点军校或全国拼字比赛中毅力重要，在学校里，特别是对于有辍学风险的孩子，毅力同样至关重要。

To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science 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? 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 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.

对我来说，最令人震惊的事情是我们对"坚毅"的了解非常有限，科学对于如何培养"坚毅"也知之甚少。每天都有家长和老师问我，如何在孩子身上培养坚毅？我该如何教孩子们有坚定的职业道德？我该如何保持他们长久的动力？老实说，我不知道。我要说的是，天赋不会让你变得坚毅。我们的数据非常清楚地显示，有许多有天赋的人根本无法坚持到底。事实上，在我们的数据中，坚毅通常与天赋无关，甚至可能是负相关的。到目前为止，我听到的关于如何在孩子身上培养坚毅的最好方法是“成长型思维模式”。这是斯坦福大学的卡罗尔·德韦克提出的一个想法，即学习的能力并不是固定的，它可以通过努力而改变。

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 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 about getting our kids grittier. Thank you.

德韦克博士已经证明，当孩子们阅读和学习大脑如何在面对挑战时改变和成长，他们在失败时更有可能坚持下去，因为他们不认为失败是永远的状态。所以，拥有成长性思维是培养毅力的一个好方法，但我们还需要更多努力。因此，我将在这里结束我的讲话，因为这就是我们现在的处境。这是我们面前的工作。我们需要把最好的想法和最强的直觉付诸实验。我们需要衡量我们的成功与否，并且要有失败的勇气，愿意犯错，并从中汲取教训重新开始。换句话说，我们需要在让孩子们变得更有毅力这件事上保持毅力。谢谢大家。