Transcript for:
Angela Duckworth's Lecture on Grit

we're here today to talk to Angela Duckworth whose book grit the power passion perseverance was today is the official publication date right the official publication date congrat congratulations um saw and incredibly gracious of her to fit time in at Google with a really really busy publicity tour um which I was getting exhausted just hearing about it a few minutes ago so um for those of you who aren't familiar with Angela Duckworth's work let me read on try to briefly read a biography um Angela Duckworth is professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and the founder and scientific director of the character lab a non-profit his mission is to advance the science and practice of character development in 2013 Angela was named a MacArthur Fellow and recognition of her research on grit self-control and other non IQ competencies that predict success in life uh it's a very impressive resume uh prior to her career research Angela founded a summer school for low-income children that was profiled as a Harvard Kennedy School case study um she's been McKinsey management consultant a math and science teacher in the public schools of New York City San Francisco and Philadelphia she has degrees from Harvard Oxford and the University of Pennsylvania in neuroscience and in psychology did I mention she's a MacArthur Fellow 2015 MacArthur Fellow um alright I'll stop there and grit is her first book it says so welcome again Angela thank you for coming you man thank you for having me unrelated um so let's get right into it if you're not familiar with her work the TED talk the uh the book um I guess is it maybe hopefully it's fair for me to summarize the thesis as that the power as you put it the power of passion and perseverance or Lisa strong indicators and contributors to success or achievement as things like IQ and talent which are I think what societally at least we've traditionally focused on and that resonated enormously for me because I think at Google we spend a lot of time thinking about talent IQ raw talent it's kind of baked into this crazy hiring process that we have and which brought me to the first question I had for you which was uh do you think that I mean from what you know about Google do you think that we or do you think that organizations in general select for the wrong things in the hiring process and would we be better off what organizations be better off if they looked for grit + fit as opposed to attempting to measure innate talent you know I think the interests that we all have in talent right and it's not just Google it's me - you know I I wish I were more talented talents great and if you could give me five more IQ points I take them's it's not that I don't think it's wrong to think about Talent I don't think it's wrong to think about potential I do think it's useful to think about what we really mean when we say the word Talent and if you force yourself to write down on a piece of paper in a sentence that ends with a period talent is it's really hard to actually feel it like what do I mean I'm potentially we start to use metaphors here's my definition of talent and I think it reveals that I do think it's important talent is the rate at which you increase in your skill with effort some people are going to increase their skills faster than others and I think it's legitimate to say those are the quick studies those are the talented people I think it's legitimate for Google to look for them right why not why not try to hire the more talented people but in my data I find two things one is that more talented individuals don't always keep showing up right Woody Allen famously once said 80% of success in life is just showing up he was later asked by William Safire of the New York Times how he got to the number 80 and Woody Allen who is not exactly a scientist said well you know I was going to say 70 but it had one extra syllable nevertheless you know 70 80 60 you know I think his point was is that it is his experience as a writer which was the context of the quote you know there are many people who could write a great book or who are talented in the sense that when they write they they get better faster but they'd never finish what they begin and so what I find in my data is that talent is no guarantee of actually showing up and finishing the things that you start the second thing is characteristic of high achievers really in any domain whether it's Google or outside Google is this kind of daily discipline of trying to get better right you know just you know in sometimes they don't microscopic infinitesimally trivial ways like all those little details add up to excellence and it's not always the people who are the quick studies who are willing to put in those hours and hours of behind-the-scenes unglamorous work so sure google should hire talented people but I do believe that you want people are going to stick with things when they're hard and who are going to daily submit themselves to the Japanese principle of Kaizen you know continuous improvement so on that subject can continuous improvement you talk in the book about practice and the difference between I think use the words directed practice versus a regular undirected practice and it reminded me of I think it's running there's a phrase jump miles which maybe indicate I've never actually been a runner so I can only hypothesize but what it means but I guess it means kind of running that doesn't really contribute to your improved conditioning and what is the difference between directed practice and undirected practice in the spirit of Kaizen and self-improvement so let's take running as actually the perfect example so when I started to try to understand you know the science of achievement right beyond bumper-sticker wisdom you know what do we really know as a science about experts and how they got that way I quickly found myself at the doorstep of Andres Erickson who's who's the world expert on world experts he studies what experts do that make them different from the rest of us right it's a great job he goes to like the Sudoku tournaments and he studies World Cup soccer players and and and he he refers to it actually as deliberate practice and he would like to say that we're delivering from anything else that we do in four important ways and I'm going to come back to running as an example but the first thing when you're doing truly deliberate practice is that it's extremely intentional it's problem-solving something in particular like not like I'm going to come into Google and be a better CEO whatever it is it's it's like you know I'm going to say that the first 15 seconds of my presentations are going to be a little sharper I mean it's extremely extremely precise that's the first thing I'm very big goal that you're working on and often it's a weakness not a strength second is 100% focus or as some coaches would say like Pete Carroll the Seahawks practicing with great effort right third is feedback ideally right away and ideally information-rich and fourth the kind of refinement that you reflect on you try the whole thing over again right in fact these four things are incredibly straightforward and you might wonder why only world-class experts do it but let's come back to running so when I heard about this research on deliver practice I asked Andres you know why is it that I have gone running pretty much every day for years and I'm not a second faster than I ever was right isn't that evidence that you're wrong that it's not thousands and thousands of hours of practice he started asking me questions like well when you go out for a run do you have a goal like a certain time right are you trying to run you know hills and said no no I'm taking the same route you know every every time I go out around my neighborhood and he said okay well that's great what do you do when you're when you're running I was like well I listen to NPR and you know any other podcast because I'm trying to distract myself and you said well that's interesting because people who are trying to improve their running or actually concentrating on their running and their strides and their breathing alright he said so um how are you getting feedback on your running I mean are you keeping your times are you measuring your heart rate you know do you have a coach who's looking at your form no no and no right and then he said are you going back every time when you run and thinking to yourself what can I refine here right before this next repetition what is there that I can do differently no and he said well then I can tell you why you're not getting any better at running and that is those thousands of hours are not thousands of hours of deliberate practice so I think this idea that you know we should be getting better at things you know we can unpack that a little it's not just going out and trying hard it's actually trying hard in those four very specific ways so on the subject of deliberate practice and coaching I thought it's an interesting question what um you know in the organization do you have theories about what roles managers can play and helping people develop in the same way is where do you have opinions on how professional development works in organizations versus how it should work you know one of the things that's really important to know about human beings is that it's not that we stopped growing up when we're 18 right and if you look at the etymology of the word parent the word parent really means to bring forth so after we leave our own parents right who have tried to bring forth our vet you know we we kind of like leap into other situations which frankly are parenting situations I mean I had teachers I had professors I still do you know mentors who in a very authentic way our parenting me all right now what does it really mean what does it look like I think that really really great leaders do a couple of things right one is they model the character that they want other people to emulate and there are two schools of thought about leadership some people say the leader doesn't really matter you know swap out one put in the next one really culture is going to happen without them I'm in the other school of thought I think that's absolutely wrong everybody watches the leader the leader sets the pace for the entire organization and when the leader is nice to other people you know when I go and visit famous people like you you know I watch them and I watch how they talk to the people who aren't famous you know I watch them like you know when they order their food you know do they look the person in the eye and all those little things are being watched by all the people who work for you no pressure and and and they're emulating you I mean and especially if they respect you and that brings me to next thing that leaders do I mean our leader is respected when they provide both the kind of demanding challenging it's not good enough it's still not good enough I need you to do this differently bring it back to me again it's that in combination with support and and it brings me all the way back to the parenting metaphor because that's what great parents do they're demanding their challenging it's not good enough I'm occasionally disappointing you but at the same time genuinely care about you I want you to be successful and I respect you on so on on the subject of mentoring and parenting I thought it was a I don't know where I read it but that you share your peer review of when you submit papers this year you share the negative peer used grant proposal rejections with the people in your lab and your students is that it's all true and here's the thing about it right when when you interview someone who's you know whatever they want an award right so like or you just you know you read off someone's resume and by the way you only usually read the good parts right like how about the time that you completely screw it up and you know made this wrong to say I didn't put that on my resume so you couldn't read it but you know I I think a lot of my work is about demystifying things like excellence right you know people who succeed fail all the time in fact I think they feel more than anyone else like that's what makes them so successful because failure provides an opportunity for information in academia when you submit an article even when you're very good odds are it's going to get rejected and in my world rejection comes with a 13 page single-spaced review letter about exactly how you suck right like I can't believe how badly written is like oh my god does this person not know the meta-analysis done in 2000 yeah and I send those letters out as soon as I get them to everybody who's working my lab so that they can see all the imperfection that eventually will lead to some kind of achievement I want them to know the truth as opposed to the you know shiny polished myth that I think is easy to to fall into which feeds into the myth of town right there's some people who are just so good they appear on stage one day never having thought about what they might say and you know and perform kingly or flawlessly or whatever the case may be right whereas in reality it was directing practice and failure and again that person may have been so take you know take your favorite actor actor you know duty Judi Dench I mean take whoever you want to think of as somebody who's like a paragon of masterful performance right it's not that you know I'm saying that anybody could have been that person I'm not saying that we call could have been Einstein but even Einstein wasn't born knowing anything about physics even Judi Dench had to learn how to be an actress I mean skills because we are human and we are not horses or other lower order animals who are born with a lot of stuff hardwired right horses don't really have to learn how to run hours after they're born they run right human beings are born knowing nothing the only thing that we're born knowing is how to learn and so skills are acquired over a lifetime sure the talented progress faster if they stay with things and if they continue to work at it hey on the subject of learning um I guess do you think that I I wonder is it do you think that the educational system is set up to support and recognize grit perseverance it seems like the academic cycle is short with immediate feedback and it's easy for example to move on from one subject to another after you know three or six months of study if things don't go well is is is academic are the standards we've set for academic success hurting our ability to develop grit and people obviously all of them could benefit well if you think about younger kids right the kids are still in elementary school or middle school in high school one way in which our system I think doesn't do a great job of encouraging grit is there's a kind of a narrowing of the focus on what it means to be successful to essentially mean what are your scores on the annual standardized tests of math and reading that's incredibly narrow but it not only leaves out a lot of things that I care about grit for example for something you find meaningful and I haven't yet met the sixteen-year-old who finds their standardized test scores you know a meaningful life goal right it also leaves out the kind of interest where a lot of us probably in this room would say that that's what they really did care about like you know their sports team you know being on the baseball team you know writing for the school paper you know the things that kids do outside of the classroom that are unmeasured that policymakers not only are they not measuring and caring about them these things are getting cut you know from from schools left and right then when you talk about university education right well you know you do have to have a major in most schools so that's gritty in the sense that grit means doing something in depth as opposed to being scattershot but I'll tell you a story I was once on a committee to decide who is going to be elected to Phi Beta Kappa and as you may recall this is you know the Honor Society that there are people like me you know faculty who say okay well this kids really extraordinary as a budding academic and this kid maybe not so so you know the first kid gets on Phi Beta Kappa and the second so I remember looking at this one kids record and it was very clear to me that it was grit and the passion for this kid was biochemistry right you could see in his transcript that like all of his classes were taken in bio account you know at the med school every summer he was doing internships even before he was going to graduate he was going to be a published author which is a very hard thing to do for any kind of scientific publication committee gets to discussion and people are like oh you know I don't really see much humanities here like oh you know this isn't a very good grade and his his writing class I was like look this kid's gonna win the Nobel Prize okay I exaggerate but this kid has a passion let's reward that and I argued hard enough that he did get Phi Beta Kappa but I I think that there is this kind of averaging you know people don't care about the average ability that you have across one thing most of us in life are going to become if we're lucky good at something and it's that one thing that actually matters and not the other things that you didn't invest in did I do you have a favorite grit story someone who even I mean your book is full of great stories of people who demonstrated so many facets of passion and perseverance and interest and and commitment over time is there a favorite one is there you know it's a great job that I have you know so like Andres Erickson I kind of go around studying experts and and you see it everywhere by the way it's not just that you have to go to the Olympics or to a chess tournament you know you go into a great restaurant and this is a very trivial example but I think it resonates for me you go into a restaurant you ever have like a great waiter or waitress I mean they're just so they're considerate and they and I was like you know that is a pro that is somebody who loves what they do and who seems to be trying to get better at it and and and that is great just as much as a famous story I do have a story that I've recently been rereading and that is Julia Child in her autobiography and and you may or may not know that Julia Child took until her late 30s to really figure out that she wanted to do anything at all related to food she grew up in a wealthy family that had a cook she said she had and I quote zero interest in the kitchen when she was a young woman going to college she thought she might want to be a writer a novelist then World War two happened so she sort of you know went away I mean this is not a story of grit so far she marries Paul Child and for his job not for her as they go to France and she has a really memorable meal it was Sol Meuniere in a little restaurant outside of Paris and that was the beginning of a journey right not by the way an epiphany that she knew that she was going to revolutionize the way Americans cook and introduce them to French cuisine but you know one step in a journey where you know in the next meal she noticed that was also different than anything she had ever eaten then there was a bistro they went to she started wandering around Paris and looking at this beautiful produce and this bread that she had never tasted you know she got more interested somebody gave her a cookbook her husband I think gave her her second French cookbook she found out that there were classes that she could walk to and learn French cooking what I want to say about these stories of grit is that one there that that is accessible when you actually dig down into the details of how people became great suddenly it becomes something that you know you might actually aspire to and it's never really a snapshot it's always a movie and it's a long movie and you might not want to see all of the scenes that you know could be edited out to make more drama but in a very real sense I think excellence is a long story that has um you know parts that are not suspenseful that parts are mundane yeah it's like practice that happens every day right you do it all the time it gets better um just so um I guess how measureable is great I mean you actually did a bunch of pioneering work to measure it in West Point cadets right but is I mean when we think about talent in IQ and so on there's a rich if somewhat colored history and the measurement of intelligence right is grit equally measurable and your in your opinion or I think scientists have a much better grip on how to measure intelligence than they do to measure grit or so many other things that you could say or this broad umbrella called character and you know we've had these IQ tests really for over a century continually being refined and in 45 minutes I can give you your IQ score well in two minutes I can give you your grit scale score right so what's the difference the difference is that my questionnaire is completely fake about my questionnaire I mean really like I am a hard worker like it's not you know it's not hard to you know think about what the answer is to that if you want a higher score in an IQ test you can't really fake it you can't say like I'm gonna guess see because I know it's the right hand but I don't really know but I'm fake you know that doesn't work right second thing is when you're taking an IQ test there's no subjectivity there's no judgment right you take the test you get a score with the grit scale if I gave it to you and you said to yourself am i a hard worker I can only imagine the people that you would be comparing yourself to right when I talk about finishing whatever I begin on the scale you're going to compare yourself to your peers who are all probably extremely gritty so in addition to faking there's what in science is called the frame of reference bias and that is your standard of comparison can vary and here's one concrete example in high performing charter schools like Kipp right and these are schools that are in New York but you know all over the country kids are like in in many other schools you know brought to a very high standard of excellence when kids rate themselves on items like I just read you their mental frame is different from kids who could be just down the block at a different school that doesn't have those standards so that distorts the scores to some extent as a researcher I know about that I know how to adjust for that when I run statistics and so forth I also know that there's there's error I know that there's the possibility of faking what I worry about is employers or schools or you know government agencies who make the mistake of thinking that you can take a grit scale score and make those high-stakes decisions that the current scale was never designed for like don't hire with the grit scale no I'm not proposing I'm not proposing that we want that to be the headline didn't think it was going to be but but I do wonder mean it it seems to me like we've perfected a lot of ways of measuring a bunch of talent let me tell you my best ideas yeah well please please yeah okay so I have one idea that has been tested when you look at the resumes of people who want to be Googlers which I can also tell you I think that's interesting that you use that term Googlers and I think I know why you do but that's me for another question I would love to know why why we tell you I'm going to tell you I think it's actually like yeah I think it's not trivial so I'll tell you but but when you look at the resume somebody who wants to get in here what I would look for is evidence of grit I'm not saying that it has to be in exactly this domain or even for the job that / ideally yes but sometimes it can be like wow this kid was on the tennis team for three or four years in college and went from A to B and their accomplishments like who this kid weren't you know I'll tell you about my own husband like this kid worked for Domino's Pizza as a delivery but like they got promoted right like they kept you know there's progression and there's continuity in a high grit resume conversely don't hire the people who have these sort of like dilettante resumes of sort of like a little bit here a little bit there you know where is the evidence of passion and perseverance applied to something before they got to my to my doorstep so I think you can look for the residue of grit as it were like in people's resumes what I don't think you should do is use the grit scale and also I don't think you can rely on interviews I am of the opinion that you can interview for charisma you can interview for social intelligence you can interview for confidence you can interview even for chemistry like am I going to like to sit next to this person and work with them but how are you going to interview for that quality of a person where the next day they're going to get up and they're going to be the first into the office or the last night you know you know when you give them the feedback that says this isn't good enough is that person going to genuinely reflect on that and try to improve that's really hard to get out of any kind of short interaction and my best idea which hasn't been tested right is if there is something that people are going to have to do at Google and it's particular to their job right that is really hard where you can set up a kind of mini grit experiment right where you're going to able you're going to let them perform write and learn get feedback see whether they take that feedback see whether they come back for a second try get more fat see whether they come back for a third try I think that would be fascinating so assessment is supposed to interview exactly but you know it's like you're piloting the person right I mean give them a chance to display their grit as opposed to tried to guess at it you want me to tell you why I think use the word Google yeah I would love to know what I use man so so my dad worked for DuPont his whole life right it was um you know yeah he actually retired with the gold watch I thought that was just like a metaphor or its he got one and it said DuPont better things for better living on it spent his entire adult life there in automotive refinishing products which was his passion by the way and you know my dad did not talk about you know working at DuPont he talked about being a DuPont ER really yeah and you know people who go to West Point graduate you know from West Point so they call themselves West pointers right kids who go to Kipp they're not students there are Kipp stirs at the Seattle Seahawks you're not just a football player you're a Seahawk right these are nouns they're not adjectives and when people have an extremely strong cultural identity they're usually able to express that as a noun you know I'm a Googler I'm not working for any other company there's a way that we do things here there's a language that we use here you probably don't use it where you are because you're not a Googler so you know we also have an adjective googly Oh what does that mean just in them in the spirit I'd be blind to spending eight years trying to figure out what it means personally but I think you should stick with Googler googly sounds like those little eyeballs like yeah yeah yeah Monica no no Brian on stage once made that combat legally yeah I don't think that's the am I look let the marketing department decide but oh that's what you're going for yeah so yet sadly googly is pretty baked in already but so much well that does happen with culture to it yeah but it probably you know but really these words that you I don't know how many vote capital because I'm not a Googler right so I wouldn't know but at West Point they have this entire glossary real and they're all these words that you wouldn't know unless you go to West Point so a plebe right I believe is like you know you know plebe and a firsty and a yearling and it's like what are those and booyah so at West Point they exclaimed booyah which doesn't have an easy translation like you say it when somebody does something really good it's like booyah and then you know the whole the whole crowd of Cadets that you're in will like erupt in these words that you've never heard in the English language and and that's very important because that's what it means to be a West pointer you know every company it has a culture and when that culture is really strong people identify with it in a noun form they speak the language they often wear the colors they follow the rituals you know it becomes part of your identity and when I heard about Googlers I thought immediately of all these other very strong cultures that are very I'm not saying intentional and that like one person's writing the handbook but it really is part of the you know it is part of what makes the company great now is there is there a connection between that kind of cultural identity and grit or and non IQ correlates with success I think so so you know you can identify with an organization or a culture that itself is gritty I'll give you a national example right country of Finland has actually fewer citizens than New York City has inhabitants it's small it's cold what is there to know about Finland that could be of interest to us there's a word in Finnish called Sisu which very roughly translates to grit but quite literally translates to your insides do your guts and if you're finished you have the identity of someone who when things are really hard and you've given all you can and you still are falling short you reach down inside and you use your Sisu and you do it anyway now it's anatomically impossible that the Finns are walking around with this like extra battery pack in them and and if they did have that why don't like the Swedes have that right because like not that far and it's you know Scandinavia and baby Finland I think but yeah they had this little bit of rivalry there yeah going back but you know I think what's important to learn there is that you have an identity as a finished person and Finnish people do things that are hard and we have Sisu and we and we we prevail and I think that when you are part of an organization like West Point or on a team like the Seahawks were the Celtics they're another very gritty team with another very gritty leader or you work at a company like Google that identity is very much part of why you often struggle through when in a different context with a different cultural identity you might not know are the I mean expanding it to national identities and national cultures is fascinating in itself are there you know are there particular cultures or immigrant groups that are grittier than others or I'm sure there are I'm sure there are right the lots of countries and cultures in the world trying to race bait you by the way you know well I haven't looked at the question directly but let me tell you why right first let me just acknowledge I mean anybody who wants to say that like all cultures are the same that's that's naive I don't have any impulse to say that but it's really hard to ask the question you know are the Americans grittier than the French and other French you know less gritty than the Japanese and here's why when I give my grit scale to you you're going to answer it as you would with your comparison group when I give it in Japan they're gonna answer it with those cultural standard not only of their company and their family and their neighborhood but but the coal country I want to tell you about a study that was done of over 60 countries where they asked people to fill out personality questionnaires they didn't give the grit scale but they gave a scale of conscientiousness right related it's in the family right dependability orderliness I'm punctual etc so now you have data on dozens of countries around the world and you can ask the question which countries are the most conscientious and which ones are the least I'll tell you what the findings are the three least gritty areas in the world were Japan this conscientiousness by the data right Japan Korea and China really really they're messy people they're not dependable they don't work hard there but really yeah so the researchers in that study concluded that perhaps these data were being influenced by the very high standard that exists cinderelly's that's why it's so so hard to make these comparisons because two things go into your score what you really are and then the frame of reference the standard to which you're holding yourself yeah we should probably try to open up to questions in the room and and on the dory I think it's given time we have about 15-20 minutes left I'd love that sense ters yeah uh we have live questions can you use peer assessments especially cross cultural or ethnic boundaries to then get a more baseline grit comparison so the problem with the peer assessments when you're talking about the cross-cultural it work in particular is that we know who are your peers like other people who also live in the same culture so I don't think peer ratings get you out of that but I do think that if you and you know I know Google is trying to hire better right you know triangulation is a great strategy in psychology we call it the principle of aggregation whenever you have imperfect data from one source and imperfect data from another so what you do is you put more and more imperfect data together the error cancels out right or the unsystematic variance there and you get a stronger signal so yeah I get a peer rating and a teacher rating and a performance task and look at their resumes you could even throw the grit scale in if you know it's only one thing among many and when you get a consistent signal that everybody thinks this person is gritty then you actually have a good bet that they are yeah thank you for coming first of all also I saw you have an audio book so props to you and also guys she read it herself I did which is really sweet yeah fine I'm gonna listen to it like sped up anyway but okay oh really like chipmunk yeah yeah three three times okay good uh no but um so my question is you talked about this example of the biochem kid who is really really really deep into biochem I would call him pointy so to speak like he dug into that thing really hard and you're talking about how you can use grit the grit property gets you to do that right the people who who can do that so I had a question that's maybe it's outside of the scope of the grit but my friends and I were actually very gritty people we we dig in things very very deeply but recently particularly after graduating college we had trouble figuring out what to actually be gritty like into right and comedy about yeah right in college it's very easy or even in school because you know it's kind of the metric is there you know you get good grades maybe you pick a major you do well in it fine but then in the real world I find that my friends in particular they have trouble being gritty not because they can't be gritty but because they they want to be point to you but they don't know what to pick and then you can be really pointy in like Russian literature and then it turns out you need to make money or something yeah yeah fence I don't I'm just you know your pledge to Russian leaders and there are any but yeah so how do you actually go about deciding what to be pointy and especially when the cost of picking incorrectly is can be high you know I think that one of the things that makes it so hard is that we know the cost is high right it can it can make us freeze up a little bit right I was at McKinsey and you know there are a lot of people McKinsey who like me had basically spent their entire life opening doors of opportunity right if I do this internship I can do anything and then if I go to McKinsey anybody will hire me well you know you get to a certain point in life where you realize that that's not the game anymore it's not opening doors of opportunity it's actually walking through right and it's walking through and hearing the other doors slam shut now that's even more paralyzing in terms of the anxiety that would produce when you don't have this really strong inner compass you're like okay follow my passion where do I get one right and and here's my advice about that you know I do think that really really gritty passionate people have two sources of motivation and this these are two questions to ask yourself when you're going to ask yourself what to do the rest of your life one is what are my real interests right and and they're still emerging you know they develop over years but for many of you there were things that you were interested in and things that you were less interested in that we're kind of boring for you around the time that you are hitting adolescence so many gritty people will remember that they started liking to do something you know at 12 or 13 there are exceptions like Julia Child right but interestingly her interest at that early adolescent stage was writing maybe think about who Julia Child really you know grew up to be it was not just a chef but equally if not more so a writer write of cookbooks so so first to kind of like think back down memory lane to when you are a young teenager what are things that you absolutely hated doing but what are things that you kind of started wanting to do spontaneously that's a clue right that's a thread the second major motivational Drive of passion is purpose you know importance it really is almost moral for something it's like what is the what is the greater mission that my work serves and if you think about your values right it can be you know I really want to help people become their best selves or you know I really care about the environment I mean whatever it is that is for you a value that you think is deeply meaningful and isn't going to change if you can follow that and figure out where it overlaps with interest you finally mentioned not becoming an impoverished you know professional russian literature critic right you know i don't have any jobs that are like that you probably do need a third circle which is reality right and trying to make a living but at least starting with the first two right my interests and my purpose or my values I think that's that's more helpful than just saying like Oh we'll go follow your passion because most of us don't know what that even means until we actually find one oh thanks thank you ah all right let me go okay great I certainly enjoyed the topic in the presentation clearly grit has a lot of value both in professional life and personal life a different podcast I've been listening to recently maybe you heard at one of your runs by the economics authors yeah about the power of quitting and failing fast we might say in engineering I was on that podcast oh I can't remember I remember maybe I don't really listen to them afterwards but go on yeah and I love that podcast it's a great one yeah yeah so I was trying to figure out how did I combine to make isn't a personal life on the sort of taking off that last question you can sort of try a lot of things until you find something you choose as a passion do you have any advice from the corporate world of how to combine choosing when to when to stick it stick to it you know let me use the metaphor of dating right because I am personally really happy that I did not end up marrying my first boyfriend and and so I quit on him right I mean every time you break up with someone you're quitting and and you know is that a good thing is it a bad thing you know I think that for me anyway you know I was dating to find my life partner right I guess people can date for other reasons but I was like oh we're not going to get married over and and it took a few dates and guys to kind of find the guy that I'm with is my husband but I think it's actually exactly what we do in our careers too I mean you're exploring right but there are some people who are exploring with intention and I was dating to get married right I mean I wasn't really ever intending to like stay dating forever I think that makes all the difference so sure quit but for me quitting the White House speech writing gig and McKinsey and being a teacher it was it was sort of a groping towards something that I wanted to stick with you know I was only quitting those things so that I could find something that I would never want to quit and when I was 32 finally after much you know exploration I I figured that out and it was to have the career I have but it's it's not a you know predictable efficient process so quitting in the service of not quitting is I guess my my answer thank you very much thanks Angela so much for coming yeah really great there's something about grit that seems very intrinsic or natural almost unlearn herbal give any recommendations for how people can increase their greediness so I want everybody in this room to watch their own language in the next day or so for the word just you know whenever we say they just have it oh they just are you know a natural or you know he's just extroverted you know like how does he do that he's just you know kind of a math guy you know we use that language I think when we can't explain something right I mean that's when we use the word just actually when Nancy Reagan said you know just don't do it or you know Nike says just do it I always find that like deeply unhelpful like could you please tell me how or you're just going to you know like so um so so this this idea that when we see someone do something fluently particularly when we can't do it I mean somebody who dances really well she we can't dance or plays music really willing it we start to use words like just and we say things like they're natural and I was actually giving a talk it was the pre book tour right today's the first day of book tour but you know I gave a talk and I give talks all the time sure you do too and you know you get practice you get feedback you make these little refinements tiny little ones like move that fourth slide I totally had to change the background-color I mean it's really that trivial I get off the stage and I'm talking to the person who's handling it she's like you are just a natural and I thought about the irony that I just wrote a book about you know I should say I recently wrote a book instead of I just wrote I recently wrote a book about about the fact that that is a you know such an attractive myth as like a seductive myth and I think the answer is this you know we can say that people you know Jerry Seinfeld would today that some people are born to be comedians and some people are not born I think there is a sense in which people are born with different inclinations things that they find fun to do things that hold their interest but if you ask the question of how they eventually became Jerry Seinfeld right if they eventually wrote a book that's halfway decent or they gave a talk that's reasonably fluent it's not just anything except if you want to say it is just hours and hours and hours of iteration with feedback to get better at something which maybe I did just like you know when I was a little kid my question is how do you what conditions do you for a child now you're talking about kids do you set in order to know breed grittiness so to give an example hmm yeah mom give kids I don't have kids yeah thinking about them though okay good so I'm uh I recommend them I'm a Colombian immigrant to the United States I came here when I was five years old eventually graduated West a low-income household in New York City four of us living in one bedroom mom dad sister etc so I don't know what can I still don't know what conditions were set for me to persevere because I could have been easily in that demographic of Hispanics that end up in jail or whatever it is actually in the city so what conditions what makes me different or people like me different than my peers that I went to high school with that perhaps did not you have any hypothesis you have any guesses I mean I think parent parenting definitely had a lot to do with it as an example of the hard-working you know immigrant parents etc but then outside of that you know in the classroom it may have been teachers but at the end of the day I still have to do the work and I just I don't know and you probably see people who grew up in maybe not identical but such similar circumstances and they didn't end up you know anywhere close to to where you are you know that is itself I think you know my life's work right is to answer your question and and I and I only have an incomplete answer but I will say this first of all you did inherit DNA from your mom and dad and so when you see gritty little kids who have gritty parents you know you have to at least pause and acknowledge the fact that you know half their genes came from on have to came from dad they got shuffled up and and in part we are like our parents because of our shared genetic heritage at the same time it's absolutely unequivocal that parents model certain behaviors it's usually the case not always there are exceptions but it's usually the case that kids are modeling the work ethic and the passion of their parents if it's not their parents often there's another strong role model like a particular teacher who had a big effect or a coach and so forth so that's maybe part of the equation I also think that a lot of great comes down to kind of these virtuous cycles you know you start to find that you have a thing for a certain sport that that becomes a source of pride and success people begin encouraging you it's an upward feedback cycle of motivation effort and achievement and it feeds itself I think there are people who then are on the opposite spiral which is they get a little down at about themselves they stop trying they prove themselves right because things don't go well and they kind of spiral in the opposite direction and Einstein is quoted and I am Not sure I can verify this but somebody at Google can as saying that compound interest is what we all really need to understand like that is the mystery of the universe and I think this compounding of you know a little bit of grit a little bit of effort you know a little bit of success a little more grit you know a little more effort a little more sex like if we could understand that compounding then maybe we could understand why you know kids like you ended up where you are but we could also maybe understand why so many other you know don't and I would like Google to help me figure that out by the way so it would be yeah great thank you I think we only have two want right fine words is Andale expected to sign books the end to know at the end okay all right so we have five more minutes should we do a question on the dory this is somewhat conversational I don't mean to oh that's okay it's all good yeah yeah nobody already good already to the hard one yeah yeah there was a study of 4000 UK students published back in February in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in which grit was not shown to be that predictive of academic success instead intelligence and conscientiousness were key do you do you have any thoughts on that study yes I do have thoughts on that study actually one of the co-authors of that study sent me the report before it was published and here's what I said to him so I'll tell you the full study so there are thousands of British kids about 16 year olds old I think who were going through the British school system and their grit scores on these kids and they're also their standardized math and reading scores on the UK test it's something like that I guess right yeah not British enough to know right but it's a standardized achievement tests and we've all taken them so we know what they are the finding is this grit does predict their standardized test scores but not quite as well as a measure of conscientiousness which we were already talking about you know dependability being able to control your impulses that sort of thing so yes it predicted but maybe not quite as as much and also intelligence was a better predictor in that study I don't find that all that surprising I also don't I mean I don't question those findings for one moment I think they're they're very real for me my complaint is that if you're going to equate your standardized test scores when you're 16 and things that frankly most 16 year-olds are not are not invested in right it's not a meaningful personal goal if you're going to equate that with success or even you know with academic achievement grades for example do not send all the same signal as your test scores grades are a better predictor of College persistence than your standardized test scores so they're not interchangeable there's information that's carried by you know grades it's not carried by test scores there's information carried by your extracurricular activities that's not embedded in your test scores my complaint is not with the finding itself but the the idea that that is everything that we would need to know about success for those kids so I guess that's the the major thing that I'll say about that study and I think that it's very important to recognize that grit isn't the only important thing in the world I study high achievement in challenging circumstances it's in those circumstances where the goal also matters to you that I think gritti merges as you know the most reliable predictor and not just a moderately predictive one we go back to a one line question yeah I got a live question um what if you're applying you're amazing good to the wrong thing let's say I wanted to be a film star that I have no grasp of what actually wants from a film star when should I just say I should probably stop trying to do that and apply my grit to something else where it might actually be more successful yeah so for example what if you're trying to be a film star and you're just disastrously untalented right there's like nothing that you could do would ever be right so that's one way that you could be wrong the other thing that you could be wrong in is that you're picking an industry that like is going to melt like you know like the polar icecaps right like the whole industry is going to go away and you know that happens these days right in ways that are faster than before so there's lots of ways that grit can get you into trouble right I think the question is this you know you got to take risks in life there's no getting away really for even if you thing you're taking a risk what grit means is to put your left foot in front of your right foot and then your left foot again and keep heading in a certain direction and you're absolutely right that you might end up somewhere that you didn't want to be but you can guarantee yourself that you'll never get anywhere by switching direction every few paces or not walking forward at all so yeah there's absolutely risk in being a paragon of grit but I'd say there's a guarantee of failure at not being passionate persevering so a related question to the one he just asked is is is grit in a continuum with obsession is there a bright line between grit and obsession or are they unrelated no I think there is actually a strong family resemblance between grit and obsession you know one of the individuals that I interviewed but I I didn't put her into the book partly because I forgot to push record when I was interviewing her was Temple Grandin and I don't know if you know her work but she's they you know famously autistic and she she writes about her autism and in her words a little bit of obsession gets a hell of a lot of work done and you know this idea that you wake up I mean I'm obsessive if you woke me up at 3:00 in the morning which sometimes just happens to me you know like you wake up and you have to go to the bathroom and you know what I'm thinking about thinking about grit I'm thinking about like why did that person do that you know it's so interesting like where did they get them but I think about it all the time I think about in the shower I think about it in yoga when I'm supposed to not be thinking about anything but I'm thinking about grit right like shavasana pose you're supposed to be doing nothing and I'm like I wonder where that you know is gonna you know it's it is an obsession the difference may be between the way most people think about obsessions and the way gritty people think about obsessions is you know when they say I love what I do they love that they love what they do there's no sense in which they would trade that life for for any other and that's how I feel about my own work I think we have time for one more question should we hi hi so a lot of your examples of people that have shown great grit like Julia Child she starts at 30 and then becomes this great success they also do be underdogs that then succeed do they have to be you know you don't have to be an underdog but I am fascinated by underdog psychology because in all say these words to you and I wonder if they'll resonate there is characteristic of many many grit Paragons that I've studied a sort of I'll show you rebelle you know like you know why I don't think you really cut out to be a programmer or you know just this like you know fear it's an aggression almost yeah and I felt that when I was you know failing my neurobiology class my freshman year of college and my very well-meaning teaching assistant my TA said you know you really should withdraw from this course because you're going to get an F on your transcript and you don't know this yet because you're 18 that's not a good thing to have right and I felt a kind of you know like a hot anger I mean I marched out of that office to the registrar's office and I not only didn't drop the course I declared my major in neurobiology that very day what the hell is that you know the I'll show you response I think is fascinating I don't fully understand it but it's fascinating that you know the same exact experience can either lead people to feel like I'm a loser I give up or the precisely opposite psychological reaction and I think it's not needing necessary but it's very very common to paragons of grit I think we're out of time hey Angela thank you so much that was fascinating phenomenal thank you