If Books Could Kill - Grit | The Good Janets

00:00:00.000 um all right i have i'm not kidding when i say i know nothing about this book and i've never heard

00:00:04.480 of it once in my life that's good you're going in fresh it's called grit i'm gonna assume this

00:00:08.580 is about the the grit as like a personal characteristic right it's like uh a grit the

00:00:15.380 power of persevering or something yeah literally peter what is that it's literally grit colon the

00:00:23.060 power of passion and perseverance dude i'm so fucking good now you've done this show for too 0.83

00:00:28.600 long oh my god brosley you're not gonna do the obvious zinger what's the obvious zinger isn't 0.99

00:00:36.180 the title missing an f what grift oh my i'm so stupid i was like what the fuck's the grit 0.98

00:00:43.100 all right let's just let's just go yeah yeah okay peter michael what do you know about grit 0.97

00:00:50.720 all i know is that that title is one f short of being accurate

00:00:56.200 so the full title of this book is grit colon the power of passion and perseverance by angela duckworth

00:01:16.180 and we will not be talking about it for at least 45 minutes because first you're gonna you're gonna

00:01:21.600 talk about the history of grit the history of grittiness well we do actually have to talk about

00:01:25.680 the history of the concept because this episode is really about the rise and fall of an idea.

00:01:30.940 It's also less of a if books could kill episode and more of a if TED Talks could kill episode.

00:01:39.120 Angela Duckworth, the person who writes the book, is extremely influential in education

00:01:43.200 policy circles. So her work has been cited 80,000 times. She has the 16th most viewed

00:01:50.680 TED Talk of all time. That's pretty cool. Although I bet the like number 15 is just like

00:01:54.640 a guy who fell into a tractor and survived or something and after the ted talk comes out this

00:02:00.280 is a massive idea in like education reform circles so they're talking about giving kids

00:02:06.520 grit report cards in schools at a certain point there are numerous schools that are holding

00:02:11.440 grit pep rallies yeah i got i got f's in math science reading but b plus and grit baby so

00:02:20.320 because we're going to kind of do this chronologically, and she is so central to the

00:02:24.220 rise and fall of this idea, we have to go through her biography. So Angela Duckworth is born in 1970

00:02:30.400 to Chinese immigrant parents in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, Peter, neighbor? Not really, but

00:02:36.360 I know it. She gets a BA in neurobiology from Harvard. She gets her master's from Oxford.

00:02:44.060 After she finishes graduate school, she kind of bounces around. She's an intern in the White 0.95

00:02:47.880 House speech writing department. She eventually lands at McKinsey as a management consultant.

00:02:54.500 It's so it's so funny to have a like a resume that's like you're at like the top schools in

00:02:59.500 the world. You're getting fucking genius grants or whatever and running around doing outstanding. 0.92

00:03:05.020 And then you just you just just slither your way into McKinsey at the end. 0.97

00:03:10.200 She did literally get a genius grant in 2013. This is like the MacArthur grant.

00:03:14.560 Yeah, the actual official Genius Grant.

00:03:16.160 She got one.

00:03:17.120 Yes.

00:03:17.420 I'm like foreseeing this episode in a weird way.

00:03:20.120 It's Chekhov's.

00:03:21.020 It's Chekhov's McKinsey consultant career.

00:03:24.560 So in her late 20s, she's 27.

00:03:27.200 She leaves McKinsey, like high salary McKinsey job, to become a public school math teacher in New York City.

00:03:33.100 This is in the part of Manhattan that's near the sort of the alphabet area where all those like big public housing blocks are.

00:03:39.400 The alphabet area. 1.00

00:03:40.100 And so it's a lot of like poor kids, like non-white kids.

00:03:42.660 It's kids that are really struggling. 1.00

00:03:43.600 This is such classic overeducated person life crisis where they have this big fancy career

00:03:51.320 and they're like, no, this is too abstract.

00:03:54.100 I want to go help people.

00:03:55.220 And then she's going to like go become a teacher so that she can help kids directly.

00:03:59.080 And then she's like, I'm not doing enough.

00:04:00.920 I need to do something bigger.

00:04:02.400 And then she's like, I have to give a TED talk about this, right?

00:04:05.060 This is a type of person who teaches for like a year and a half.

00:04:09.800 and then they're like, well, I'm never doing this again, but I am going to talk about it for the

00:04:14.360 rest of my life. So basically the core insight from her time as a teacher is something I think

00:04:19.820 most of us remember from school is like at the social level, like there's smart kids and there's 0.98

00:04:24.520 kind of dumb kids. Like there's kids that get it the first time you explain a concept. And there's 0.85

00:04:28.560 kids that like struggle to really grasp it or like never really grasp it right. But then at the end

00:04:32.880 of the semester, when she's doing the grading, she's like, wait a minute, the smart kids are not

00:04:37.140 the ones getting the best grades, right? There's something different that is motivating the kids

00:04:42.680 who are getting good grades. Time to isolate the X factor. Exactly. This is like the core insight

00:04:49.480 of her time as a teacher. And she gets really, really interested in this problem. So after four

00:04:54.480 years as a teacher in 2002, she is 32 years old. She joins the psychology grad school at the

00:05:00.820 University of Pennsylvania, where she wants to explore this problem. Like, why can't we predict

00:05:06.440 who is going to do well in school? Why are grades separate from these kind of cognitive skills or

00:05:11.040 kind of book smarts, right? So this is an excerpt from a book called How Children Succeed.

00:05:19.240 When she applied to the PhD program at Penn, she wrote in her application essay that her

00:05:23.060 experiences working in schools had given her a distinctly different view of school reform

00:05:27.880 than the one she had started out with in her 20s. The problem, I think, is not only the schools,

00:05:33.000 but also the students themselves, she wrote.

00:05:35.240 Here's why.

00:05:36.240 Learning is hard.

00:05:37.440 True, learning is fun, exhilarating, and gratifying,

00:05:40.280 but it is also often daunting, exhausting, and sometimes discouraging.

00:05:44.280 To help chronically low-performing but intelligent students,

00:05:47.460 educators and parents must first recognize that character

00:05:50.240 is at least as important as intellect.

00:05:53.080 Not just intellect.

00:05:53.760 There's something more going on.

00:05:55.200 Why do I feel like this leads to, like, uniforms in schools or something?

00:05:58.460 So in the first few years of her time as a graduate student,

00:06:01.020 She's really interested in this metric of self-control.

00:06:04.480 There's all of these like kind of well-established psychological concepts that are good predictors

00:06:09.260 of academic performance.

00:06:10.660 One of them is self-control.

00:06:12.480 It's basically the ability to resist immediate temptation, right?

00:06:17.140 You're working on your laptop and your phone is like next to your laptop and you're like,

00:06:20.840 do I reach for it?

00:06:21.500 Do I not reach for it?

00:06:22.520 You're having an immediate impulse and you're able to say, ah, no, I'm going to keep working

00:06:26.440 on my homework.

00:06:27.040 Yeah, I will say that is something I do not have at all. 0.98

00:06:29.020 I probably shouldn't be talking too much shit this episode. 0.93

00:06:31.260 She publishes a couple of studies on self-control, but eventually she lands on this concept of grit. 0.96

00:06:37.060 And in 2007, in a paper called Grit, Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals, she defines what it is.

00:06:45.640 So I'm going to send this to you.

00:06:49.140 It's just the least amount of ADHD.

00:06:52.460 Attention surplus disorder.

00:06:53.740 i love the idea of like you take a you take a type of neurodivergence and then you just sort

00:07:01.740 of like flip it and instead of talking about children who have the neurodivergence you talk

00:07:05.800 about the how the kids who don't have it rock like those are the best kids all right read it

00:07:10.780 why do some individuals accomplish more than others of equal intelligence in addition to

00:07:15.500 cognitive ability a list of attributes of high achieving individuals would likely include

00:07:19.380 creativity vigor emotional intelligence i was trying to hobbs it people are uh listening to

00:07:24.740 this at 1.5 speed glass houses here all right let's let's settle down i will not be i will

00:07:31.380 not be chided for reading too fast i'm like tone it down peter peter peter peter haven't you ever 0.86

00:07:38.380 haven't you ever fucking podcasted before you have to go slow have you seen did you see someone 0.92

00:07:42.480 emailed us and said i'm the only podcaster that she listens to at 0.5 speed 0.5 i was like first 0.99

00:07:47.860 of all mission accomplished and then and now you know what it's like i talk like you for 10 seconds

00:07:52.340 and you're like can you chill the fuck out all right go go in addition to cognitive ability

00:08:00.020 a list of attributes of high achieving individuals would likely include creativity 0.56

00:08:03.960 vigor emotional intelligence charisma self-confidence emotional stability physical

00:08:09.260 attractiveness and other positive qualities a priori some traits seem more crucial than others

00:08:14.720 for particular vocations.

00:08:16.380 Extroversion may be fundamental to a career in sales, for instance, but irrelevant to

00:08:20.160 a career in creative writing.

00:08:21.960 However, some traits might be essential to success no matter the domain.

00:08:25.280 We suggest that one personal quality is shared by the most prominent leaders in every field,

00:08:30.880 grit.

00:08:31.980 We define grit as perseverance and passion for long-term goals.

00:08:36.700 Grit entails working strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years

00:08:41.840 despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress.

00:08:45.340 The gritty individual approaches achievement as a marathon.

00:08:48.180 His or her advantage is stamina.

00:08:50.100 Whereas disappointment or boredom signals to others

00:08:52.780 that it is time to change trajectory and cut losses,

00:08:55.920 the gritty individual stays the course.

00:08:58.300 I do think it's a real concept, right?

00:08:59.880 People who are able to stick with something in the long term

00:09:02.000 is something that is a real thing, but I also do not have it.

00:09:04.900 I also think that the types of people that do have it

00:09:07.640 are the airport book readers, right?

00:09:09.760 Because by the time you're picking up your third Gladwell book, what do you think is going to happen?

00:09:15.640 The rest of the study is these very short descriptions of six studies that she's carried out to basically explore, like, is this a real thing?

00:09:24.000 So she has a sample of just kind of a bunch of adults.

00:09:27.080 There's like a web portal that she's set up where people can log on and be like, how gritty are you?

00:09:32.260 She finds that like people who are college graduates are higher in grit than like high school graduates, etc.

00:09:37.400 Sort of basic descriptive statistics.

00:09:39.760 She also surveys undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania.

00:09:43.900 The only kind of interesting finding of that is that grit is associated with lower SAT scores,

00:09:50.640 indicating that, like, if you're not as smart, you might compensate for that by being grittier.

00:09:55.660 Maybe that's why I have no grit, because I'm so naturally smart.

00:09:58.460 Well, we're about to find out, actually, for you, Peter, because after this kind of basic

00:10:02.800 descriptive study, it's only 15 pages long, she then, in 2009, she publishes an article called

00:10:08.120 development and validation of the short grit scale, where she proposes a way of measuring this

00:10:14.280 and a way of like tallying it up. And she's also tested it on various populations. So instead of

00:10:19.580 me walking you through it in general, I'm just going to send it to you and we're going to do

00:10:23.140 it together. Okay. What would you say? Okay. Just eyeballing it from what you know about grit on a

00:10:27.260 scale of one to five. Yeah. Where, where do you think you fall? I don't want to get too weird

00:10:32.120 with it. I'm going to say three, three. Okay. I'm going to read the, I'll read the questions and

00:10:35.760 then you tell me what you think and then i have to do the math okay so okay all right new ideas

00:10:40.520 and projects sometimes distract me from previous ones i'm gonna say mostly like me setbacks don't

00:10:46.320 discourage me i don't give up easily i'm gonna say somewhat like me i often set a goal but later

00:10:51.340 choose to pursue a different one it's tricky because i don't really set goals at all not

00:10:57.220 applicable i'm gonna say somewhat again i am a hard worker uh my i have some bosses who would

00:11:01.680 strongly disagree but i'm gonna say mostly i have difficulty maintaining my focus on projects that

00:11:06.100 take more than a few months to complete not entirely sure that i've ever had a project that

00:11:09.480 took more than a few months to complete really not in corporate america you never had like a

00:11:13.540 year-long project or something the thing about projects that take more than a few months to

00:11:17.280 complete is that they're all fake i'm just gonna say that this is very very much like me

00:11:23.140 yeah that means you're giving up on them after a couple months basically you wait at the nine

00:11:28.380 month mark, someone within the corporation who you've never met before and whose name you've

00:11:33.140 never seen will email you being like, hey, would love to touch base on this. And then you have a

00:11:37.480 call with them where you pretend that you've done some stuff, but you're quietly trying to figure

00:11:41.720 out what it is you need to do in the next week. I've heard enough, Peter. I'm giving you one

00:11:45.420 point on this. I'm giving you I'm giving you very much like me. I agree. I just don't think I just

00:11:49.840 don't think this is real. I finish whatever I begin. Not much like me. My interests change

00:11:55.020 from year to year i feel like this is everyone i feel like this is a bad question for some things

00:11:59.700 it's very true and yeah and for other things it's not at all true yeah i'm just gonna go in the

00:12:04.180 middle i'll go somewhat i am diligent i never give up i would never even like the fact that

00:12:09.120 this doesn't resonate with me at all i'd be like i never give up what are you talking i'm

00:12:13.880 i make podcasts for a living you know what i mean the fact that you like every question you're like

00:12:17.420 what uh i have been obsessed with a certain idea or project for a short time but later lost interest

00:12:26.240 i'm just i'm gonna pop myself in the middle again i'm sorry for hedging on everyone but

00:12:29.800 that's what i'm doing all right last one i have overcome setbacks to conquer an important

00:12:33.980 challenge sure if you put a month long or so thing in front of me i'm like highly capable

00:12:40.760 like extremely good at that like this is why i'm good at like standardized tests or whatever because

00:12:44.360 And if you want someone to do Adderall every day and figure out the LSATs, I'm your man.

00:12:51.400 Right.

00:12:51.800 But you're not like playing the violin or something that takes like years and years and years of practice.

00:12:55.320 Right.

00:12:55.520 Right.

00:12:55.860 But yeah, that's like super long-term focus.

00:12:58.500 I'm not entirely sure that I would say that I have that.

00:13:00.400 Right.

00:13:00.520 So you said your eyeballing at grit score was three.

00:13:03.780 Your official grit score, Peter, is 2.6.

00:13:06.520 Okay.

00:13:06.960 So you were pretty close.

00:13:07.880 Now, what's the word for someone who knows their grit score in advance?

00:13:11.520 That's me.

00:13:12.520 So you may not have caught this, but the grit scale consists of two different measures.

00:13:17.740 There is passion and there is perseverance.

00:13:20.860 When you hear passion, you think that's something that like somebody's interested in.

00:13:23.860 Like I love chess, so I play chess a lot.

00:13:25.880 But that's not actually what she's talking about.

00:13:27.760 Passion here, she's defined as consistency of interest, meaning do you do the same thing

00:13:33.400 for like years and years and years?

00:13:34.900 It's not actually about how interested you are in it.

00:13:37.420 perseverance is the ability to push through like difficulties or plateaus it's not just do you do

00:13:44.340 the same thing for many years so that study comes out in 2009 with the validation of the short grit

00:13:50.620 scale again there's like very short descriptions of six different studies some of it is the same

00:13:56.420 samples as the last study some of it is new but it's mostly just kind of descriptive statistics

00:14:01.300 of like okay we got this sample and we gave them the grit score and here's what it's correlated

00:14:05.080 with, right? So like, this one's only 10 pages long. You know, these two studies come out,

00:14:09.040 they don't like set the world on fire particularly. But the concept of grit and Angela Duckworth's

00:14:15.580 work specifically are massively popularized in 2012 through another airport book. So this is

00:14:22.600 like a little airport book turducken this episode. The overall context of this, the sort of early 2010s

00:14:28.320 is there's a growing backlash to the No Child Left Behind Act. You remember this, I'm sure,

00:14:33.220 over the course of the 2000s, there's more and more concern about like teaching to the test. 0.98

00:14:39.140 And this idea that kids are just like fucking doing standardized tests all the time. Nobody 0.95

00:14:43.640 defines education or what you need to be a functioning adult as just like you can regurgitate

00:14:48.560 things on multiple choice tests. It's like, we should be talking about morality and character,

00:14:52.660 and you should like know things. And that's not the same thing as standardized tests, right?

00:14:56.520 And so right around now, right when Duckworth is doing these studies,

00:14:59.600 the pendulum is swinging away from No Child Left Behind, but it's not clear what it's swinging

00:15:04.440 toward yet. People are like pissed off with standardized tests and stuff, but like they

00:15:08.420 don't really have like a new paradigm that they can apply, right? This is also the Waiting for

00:15:13.320 Superman era. Yeah. Like we will not find solutions in public schools. We need to look

00:15:20.800 outside of them and think creatively and that's the future. This is the other thing I was just

00:15:24.120 about to mention is like it's also a time of a ton of hype around these no excuses charter schools

00:15:29.060 and specifically KIPP, this thing, knowledge is power program, right?

00:15:33.060 That do have uniforms and a much more kind of military kind of paradigm.

00:15:36.780 And like every student who gets a B minus is expelled.

00:15:39.220 And everyone's like, how are their kids performing so well?

00:15:42.300 Yeah, they all go to college.

00:15:43.700 It's like, well, we expelled everyone who won't go to college.

00:15:45.980 Yeah.

00:15:46.800 There's tons of hype around like we need this new paradigm and especially around like character

00:15:51.040 education, right?

00:15:51.820 Because a lot of what they're doing is like these external markers of like good behavior,

00:15:56.020 right?

00:15:56.340 It's not just standardized tests.

00:15:57.600 It's also like you need to show up on time.

00:15:59.540 You need to show respect.

00:16:00.420 You have all these kind of like values and character things that you're also being judged

00:16:04.300 on and being like accountable to, right?

00:16:06.400 So it's like these two things are sort of both brewing at the same time.

00:16:10.160 And so in 2012, we get a book called How Children Succeed, colon, Grit, Curiosity,

00:16:16.360 and the Hidden Power of Character by a New York Times writer named Paul Tuff.

00:16:22.100 And I'm going to send you the sort of nut graph of the book.

00:16:25.340 In the past decade, and especially in the past few years, a disparate congregation of economists, educators, psychologists, and neuroscientists have begun to produce evidence that calls into question many of the assumptions behind the cognitive hypothesis.

00:16:39.220 What matters most in a child's development, they say, is not how much information we can stuff into her brain in the first few years.

00:16:44.920 What matters instead is whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit, and self-confidence.

00:16:55.600 Economists refer to these as non-cognitive skills.

00:16:58.620 Psychologists call them personality traits, and the rest of us sometimes think of them as character.

00:17:03.480 The book spends a lot of time profiling Angela Duckworth and other researchers who are sort of exploring, like, what are actually the characteristics, right?

00:17:12.080 We know that there's, like, moral character.

00:17:13.700 We know that character matters.

00:17:14.720 There's more than IQ, but like what specifically is it, right?

00:17:18.000 And how do we measure it?

00:17:19.000 There's something I haven't pinned that doesn't, that isn't adding up to me here. 0.98

00:17:22.920 Maybe, and maybe it's just the fact that I refuse to believe that that dumb little questionnaire

00:17:26.760 is capable of providing an insight into someone that cuts through all of these different dynamics.

00:17:34.340 I think, I also think, you know, the premise of this podcast and you know, all the foreshadowing

00:17:38.860 that I've given you.

00:17:39.860 It's a little one weird trick.

00:17:41.060 Yeah.

00:17:41.200 Yeah. So this book spends 49 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It results in an episode of This American Life dedicated to this. It is based on a very popular, very influential New York Times Magazine cover story about this idea, this kind of character education idea. And after all of this hype, in 2013, we finally get Angela Duckworth's TED Talk.

00:18:03.960 Okay.

00:18:04.320 So I'm sending this to you. You are about to experience TED Talk royalty.

00:18:08.620 So I left the classroom, and I went to graduate school to become a psychologist.

00:18:16.060 I started studying kids and adults in all kinds of super challenging settings.

00:18:21.520 And in every study, my question was, who is successful here and why?

00:18:26.800 My research team and I went to West Point Military Academy.

00:18:30.840 We tried to predict which cadets would stay in military training and which would drop out.

00:18:36.680 We went to the National Spelling Bee and tried to predict which children would advance farthest in competition.

00:18:44.060 We studied rookie teachers working in really tough neighborhoods,

00:18:48.580 asking which teachers are still going to be here in teaching by the end of the school year.

00:18:53.900 And of those, who will be the most effective at improving learning outcomes for their students?

00:18:59.740 We partnered with private companies asking which of these salespeople is going to keep their jobs

00:19:04.600 and who's going to earn the most money.

00:19:07.060 In all those very different contexts,

00:19:10.100 one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success.

00:19:14.800 And it wasn't social intelligence,

00:19:17.080 it wasn't good looks, physical health,

00:19:20.060 and it wasn't IQ.

00:19:22.240 It was grit.

00:19:23.860 Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals.

00:19:29.120 Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint.

00:19:32.860 A few years ago, I started studying grit in the Chicago public schools.

00:19:39.000 I asked thousands of high school juniors to take grit questionnaires, and then waited around more than a year to see who would graduate.

00:19:47.460 Turns out that grittier kids were significantly more likely to graduate, even when I matched them on every characteristic I could measure.

00:19:56.860 Things like family income, standardized achievement test scores,

00:20:01.880 even how safe kids felt when they were at school.

00:20:05.320 So it's not just at West Point or the National Spelling Bee that grit matters.

00:20:09.300 It's also in school, especially for kids at risk for dropping out.

00:20:15.320 It's a very convincing case, I think.

00:20:17.360 If you knew nothing else about this, you'd be like,

00:20:18.720 Dan, there's like study after study showing the same thing predicts success, right?

00:20:22.320 What if we did a sort of affirmative action where we give poor kids more grit and rich kids less grit until they're equal?

00:20:29.860 The idea here that there is like something that cuts across all other variables is very appealing to people, especially because you can see the gears working in people's brains where it's like, oh, my God, racial and class disparities will disappear if we simply prioritize our focus on grit.

00:20:50.640 And this works for poor kids, right? This could be a really exciting idea to like help

00:20:54.360 poor non-white kids in public education. I'm reading the YouTube comments on the

00:21:00.220 Grit TED Talk. Oh, yeah. They're all about assignment.

00:21:03.400 Yeah. Thumbs up if you're here because of a school assignment, LOL. 13,000 thumbs up.

00:21:08.700 Damn. I didn't know everyone had the same assignment I did. 4,000 thumbs up. And then 0.98

00:21:14.500 there's one person with fewer thumbs up that says, I'm glad that I'm here, not because of 0.99

00:21:18.860 an assignment but because i want to be the best version of myself whatever you fucking loser dude 0.97

00:21:23.520 you're here because you had an assignment i'm here because i want to be a better version of 0.99

00:21:28.400 myself we're not the same she gives this talk in 2013 this explodes immediately she's all of a

00:21:34.200 sudden like a massive academic celebrity this also gets very quickly taken up by education reformers

00:21:40.860 and like policy so in 2013 the department of education produces a report that emphasizes

00:21:47.480 non-cognitive skills. It's called Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance, Critical

00:21:52.540 Factors for Success in the 21st Century. And the number one recommendation, if you read the

00:21:57.340 executive summary, is educators, administrators, policymakers, parents, and researchers should

00:22:02.440 consider how to give priority to grit, tenacity, and perseverance in curriculum, teaching practices,

00:22:08.040 professional development, and out-of-school support. Gotta prioritize grit. I'm relatively

00:22:12.320 far into this episode. I don't have the slightest idea of what that would mean.

00:22:15.680 There's a huge wave of white papers.

00:22:17.540 The Economic Policy Institute published one in 2014 called The Need to Address Non-Cognitive Skills in the Education Policy Agenda.

00:22:25.060 Dude, I love that you can – it's so funny how many policy ideas that like all research shows would be effective if you put more money into them.

00:22:35.420 Yeah, I know. 0.81

00:22:35.780 just languish forever but then someone comes up with like some fucking catchy little idea 0.95

00:22:42.860 and all of a sudden every fucking economist on earth is like oh this also gets taken up by the 0.97

00:22:48.100 Obama administration so in 2015 they reauthorize no doubt dude no doubt no child left behind act 0.97

00:22:54.280 and they they change the name of it they change the focus of it they they solve a lot of its

00:22:58.600 problems basically it's called the every student succeeds act and that includes for school

00:23:03.280 assessment, if you're going to assess the quality of one school versus another, states have to

00:23:07.460 include at least one non-academic outcome. So something like grit, something that is not just

00:23:13.840 test scores, right? And then the following year in 2016, there are eight California districts say

00:23:18.920 that they're also testing non-academic performance. So this is from an NPR article. It says,

00:23:24.620 in a few short weeks, students in California will be taking high stakes tests, but the tests won't

00:23:29.000 just cover math, reading, and science. Students will also be responding to survey statements like

00:23:33.360 I usually finish what I start or I can do anything if I try. A group of big city districts is among

00:23:38.840 the first to try to measure students' self-control, empathy, and other social and emotional skills,

00:23:43.620 and to hold schools accountable for the answers. It's important if a kid says I can do anything

00:23:48.680 if I try, you have to realize that kid is dumb as shit. No, you can't. What are you talking about? 1.00

00:23:53.800 So as all this hype cycle is happening, there's, you know, schools are starting to implement this

00:23:58.180 idea. Finally, in 2016, Angela Duckworth releases her book, Grit. Okay. So we're going to spend the

00:24:04.680 next little section of the episode talking about the book. We're probably going to talk less about

00:24:08.760 the book in this episode than like almost any other episode of the show for reasons that will

00:24:13.320 become clear soon. Okay. But for now, we are going to start with the introduction. She starts by

00:24:21.680 describing this West Point study. The admissions process for West Point is at least as rigorous as

00:24:27.560 for the most selective universities.

00:24:29.700 Each year in their junior year of high school,

00:24:31.620 more than 14,000 applicants begin the admissions process.

00:24:34.880 This pool is winnowed to just 4,000

00:24:36.780 who succeed in getting the required nomination.

00:24:39.200 Slightly more than half of those applicants,

00:24:40.860 about 2,500, meet West Point's rigorous

00:24:43.340 academic and physical standards.

00:24:45.480 And from that select group,

00:24:47.000 just 1,200 are admitted and enrolled.

00:24:49.260 Nearly all the men and women who come to West Point

00:24:51.360 were varsity athletes, most were team captains.

00:24:54.920 And yet one in five cadets will drop out

00:24:57.400 before graduation. What's more remarkable is that historically, a substantial fraction of

00:25:01.760 dropouts leave in their very first summer during an intensive seven-week training program named

00:25:06.860 even in official literature Beast Barracks. She then describes like how intense this Beast

00:25:11.820 Barracks is. It's, you know, kind of classic military thing. You're waking up at five,

00:25:15.640 you're like marching around, you're hoisting flags, etc. I guess she's saying that she can

00:25:19.440 predict this, but I am sort of wondering why this is presented as if it's a mystery.

00:25:24.640 for some reason a large number of people are dropping out from this like hyper intensive

00:25:30.460 program like yeah this book is like very glad willie and she's like it's actually a fairly

00:25:35.020 like readable book she's like good at storytelling she's like really builds us up as like nobody can

00:25:39.900 explain this right yeah yeah it's like it's actually it's really physically taxing and

00:25:44.700 people are like oh this sucks ass i'm gonna go to a regular college it's like 16 hours of like 0.94

00:25:49.140 push-ups a day yeah yeah this is cool i'll go to ruckers that's fine she also talks about how 0.99

00:25:54.620 the school itself has created their own bespoke measurement to grade candidates. It's called the

00:26:01.520 whole candidate score. It's a mixture of your academics, your like extracurriculars, your

00:26:07.280 physical fitness. It's this thing that they've come up with to try to predict who is going to

00:26:11.780 drop out. She has this whole kind of yarn about her, like the head of the school brings her in

00:26:16.920 and it's like, we're going to give all the kids this like grit scale on the second day of school

00:26:22.080 when they're doing all this other like personality testing and then we're going to follow up with

00:26:25.800 them to find out who drops out okay this is one of the studies included in her 2009 study that

00:26:30.580 we talked about it says the grit scale predicted completion of the rigorous summer training program

00:26:35.760 better than the whole candidate score cadets who scored a standard deviation higher than average

00:26:40.360 on the grit scale were 99 percent more likely to complete summer training that's sort of the

00:26:46.880 academic version i'll send you this from her book so what matters for making it through beast

00:26:53.640 not your sat scores not your high school rank not your leadership experience not your athletic

00:26:58.720 ability not your whole candidate score what matters is grit so her little tool predicted

00:27:06.100 who was going to drop out of beast barracks peter thoughts well this makes sense uh there's no need

00:27:12.800 for Beast Barracks at all. Simply give them the grit questionnaire. Don't go through the formality

00:27:17.980 of doing a bunch of pushups and getting up early. We already know. You can envision a world where

00:27:21.920 this is correct. Yeah. But I'm just not seeing it. I just have an ambient skepticism. That's

00:27:26.960 how I'm feeling about this right now. There are so many problems with this study. The first is

00:27:33.680 that she mentions in the text that I had you read. She says one in five cadets will drop out before

00:27:39.540 graduation, which makes you think that Beast Barracks is like really elite and really punitive.

00:27:45.520 And so all of the students are dropping out in Beast Barracks. That's not true. One in five

00:27:49.960 students drop out over the course of the entire four years. In this Beast Barracks, this first 0.97

00:27:54.400 seven weeks thing, only 6% of the students are dropping out. So out of a class of 1,200,

00:27:59.720 only 71 dropped out. She said a substantial fraction or someone said it. Who said it?

00:28:04.240 She said substantial fraction. Okay. So that's not a substantial fraction.

00:28:06.860 All she is trying to do is predict this beast barracks component.

00:28:10.820 And it makes it very difficult to draw any large conclusions when basically it's a fairly rare event for people to drop out, right?

00:28:18.000 Because like 94% of students are completing beast barracks.

00:28:22.140 The other huge problem is that like aren't all of these kids really, really high in grit?

00:28:27.720 Like these are elite students.

00:28:29.600 Like they're team captains.

00:28:31.780 Like it's – because this is included as like one of six studies in this like 15-page larger study that is attempting to confirm the concept of grit, she doesn't go into like any detail about like basic descriptive statistics.

00:28:45.240 I'm actually fairly skeptical that like there's actually all that much of a spread among West Point cadets, right?

00:28:50.900 You're looking at people who are like at best high in grit versus very high in grit.

00:28:55.220 Yeah. And I mean, if you've ever met someone who wants to go to West Point, it requires a certain type of like, it's hard to explain, but like they're, they're super type A. They're not cool.

00:29:07.960 I don't want to say that. I think they're very disciplined. I think these are people who already are very disciplined.

00:29:13.520 No, no. It's not about being disciplined. It's about wanting to lead a life of discipline.

00:29:17.820 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 0.97

00:29:18.540 That is close to a mental disorder. The fun part of your life is about to begin, unless you do this. 0.81

00:29:25.220 peter.shamshiri at gmail.com to let everybody know any correspondence any complaints about this

00:29:32.460 i don't see why if you disagree with me and therefore support the war with iran

00:29:38.420 then feel free to speak up the other problem with the study that she kind of skips over in her ted

00:29:44.660 talk is that grit does not predict overall graduation rate it only predicts people who

00:29:51.700 complete the first seven weeks of school. Grit does not predict GPA. It does not predict something

00:29:58.100 called the military performance score, which is like a more holistic assessment of like leadership

00:30:02.340 potential, et cetera. So the only thing it predicts is do you make it through this first

00:30:09.000 seven weeks? Okay. We're okay. Then we're moving into like statistical anomaly territory here.

00:30:14.400 Well, also speaking of statistical stuff, Peter, she's also making a mathematical 0.99

00:30:18.280 slash linguistic error in the way that she is presenting the findings. She says cadets who

00:30:23.720 scored a standard deviation higher than average on the grit scale were 99% more likely to complete

00:30:28.860 summer training. Yeah. Right. So if you're high in grit, you're twice as likely to complete the

00:30:33.260 summer program. Right. I am going to send you the results from her study. Okay. Yeah. This is a

00:30:43.600 chart of grit score as well as whole candidate score the the west point score against retention

00:30:50.960 rate over the course of the beast barracks which shows that for the highest performing grit scores

00:30:59.500 you have a 98 retention rate for the second quartile of grit scores you have maybe one

00:31:07.960 point lower. Yeah, kind of also a 98%. Yeah. But then even the lowest grit score have an 88%

00:31:15.480 retention rate. Yeah. So the lowest it gets is 88%. Yeah. Right. So 10 points down, which is

00:31:20.200 not nothing, but still quite a high retention rate. And she's talking here about one standard

00:31:23.740 deviation. She doesn't, again, include like all that many descriptive statistics. But if we're

00:31:28.140 talking about like around the mean, right, if we compare the second quartile to the third quartile,

00:31:32.980 like a little bit above average, a little bit below average, it's a 4% difference. 94% of kids

00:31:38.200 graduate versus 98% of kids graduate. Right. You would not describe that as twice as likely to

00:31:43.900 graduate. Right. Right. If somebody says, if you smoke, you're twice as likely to get cancer,

00:31:48.840 you assume I have a 2% chance or I have a 4% chance, right? I have a 5% chance. I have a 10%

00:31:53.300 chance. You don't assume I have a 94% or a 98% chance. This is incorrect. She's apologized for

00:31:59.700 this wording since okay okay you're four percent more likely to graduate you're not 99 more likely

00:32:04.220 to graduate so grit predicts nothing except for whether you make it through the beast games or

00:32:09.960 whatever and the effect is really small so i'm i'm gonna be honest i'm starting to sound pretty

00:32:17.280 fucking fake starting to sound not real so now they they eventually published in 2019 a 10-year

00:32:22.500 follow-up study with like much more data they've tracked these kids for a longer period of time 0.98

00:32:26.020 So it turns out grit is still the best predictor of completing the beast barracks thing, the first seven weeks.

00:32:32.060 However, among everything else they measured, grit is tied as the worst predictor of GPA.

00:32:38.480 It's tied with physical fitness.

00:32:40.160 This military performance score thing, this sort of holistic assessment of your leadership performance, grit is the worst predictor of everything they measured.

00:32:48.080 And when you look at the dropout rate over the course of the entire four years, this

00:32:52.000 whole candidate score thing is a significantly better predictor than grit.

00:32:56.620 And grit is also tied with physical fitness for predicting the overall dropout rate.

00:33:02.560 So you might as well just be like, how many pushups can you do?

00:33:04.620 That's just as good of a predictor.

00:33:05.780 And also, it's not even clear that they wanted this whole candidate score thing to predict

00:33:09.800 who gets through beast barracks, right?

00:33:11.360 It's probably like, who's going to get a good GPA?

00:33:13.780 Who's going to complete all four years of school?

00:33:15.880 And, like, it's still better than grit for that.

00:33:18.720 Obviously, if they have, like, a holistic rating, a holistic score that's meant to measure you across, like, 10 different categories, like, you can come up with a metric that outperforms it for any given category.

00:33:30.760 Yeah, exactly.

00:33:31.420 That's not the hard part.

00:33:32.840 The hard part is the holistic score.

00:33:34.500 That's why they have it, right?

00:33:36.300 It makes sense that if you were going to come up with a metric to figure out who's going to survive this very physically grueling ordeal, that maybe like a physical fitness, a physical fitness adjacent metric might make sense there.

00:33:52.900 Or like extroversion, potential for homesickness, right?

00:33:55.540 It's the first summer that you're away from home for a lot of these like 18-year-old kids.

00:33:59.540 These kids all went to weird camps.

00:34:01.420 so this problem with sort of overhyping studies continues throughout the rest of the book

00:34:10.320 here is the next little section that she describes in parallel i started a partnership

00:34:16.540 with the army special operations forces better known as the green berets 0.93

00:34:20.480 she's on a roll she's on a roll dude the the late aughts fucking ruled you come up with some 1.00

00:34:26.900 bullshit ass TED talk idea and you're all you're fucking you're embedded with the Green Berets 1.00

00:34:32.660 within six months this is like half the book and she's like this person saw my TED talk and then 1.00

00:34:37.220 she goes to like spring training with the Seattle Seahawks because the coach like saw her TED talk

00:34:41.860 this era is is so fucking funny it's amazing dude every Obama intern is watching TED talks

00:34:48.820 yeah I know Mr. President sir you have to see this all right she goes she goes on these are

00:34:56.040 among the army's best trained soldiers, assigned some of the toughest and most dangerous missions.

00:35:01.600 Training for the Green Berets is a grueling multi-stage affair. And then she describes that

00:35:05.680 for a couple paragraphs, like how sort of rigorous it is. Just getting to the selection

00:35:09.860 course is an accomplishment. But even so, 42% of the candidates I studied voluntarily withdrew

00:35:15.760 before it was over. So what distinguished the men who made it through? Grit. It was grit all along.

00:35:20.980 Okay. But this is the second time that it's like, this is good at predicting who makes it through a military boot camp.

00:35:27.320 Like a test of physical strength, basically.

00:35:29.540 Right.

00:35:29.760 Yes.

00:35:30.040 But we started off being like, I've solved childhood education.

00:35:33.500 I know.

00:35:35.580 And also, this is a better set of data because 42% of people dropped out, right?

00:35:40.380 So if you're trying to predict dropout rates, you just have more people who dropped out, so it's easier to find patterns.

00:35:44.120 Yeah, yeah.

00:35:44.580 And so she's saying, what distinguished the men who made it through? Grit.

00:35:49.140 But if you actually look at her results, grit is the worst predictor of like personality traits 1.00

00:35:54.900 that she measures. So she measures grit, intelligence and physical fitness. Intelligence

00:36:00.640 and physical fitness are significantly better predictors than grit. So she, she's just come up

00:36:07.420 with, she's just come up with a third category that's worse. Literally just like worse across

00:36:12.460 the board. That's great. She doesn't, you can tell she's very careful with how she words it.

00:36:16.520 she's like it predicted success yeah so what distinguished what distinguished the men who

00:36:21.480 made it through grit yeah writing writing that when you know that there were multiple better

00:36:27.200 existing metrics i know is like you are doing fraud right it's really really really cynical

00:36:31.820 when you think about it the she also does this in her papers too it drives me insane so in her

00:36:36.940 paper when she's talking about this green beret result she basically she has to admit that grit

00:36:41.480 was not all that predictive right but then she says in a full model controlling for general

00:36:45.940 intelligence physical fitness age and years of schooling the effect of grit remains significant

00:36:50.940 oh so if you control out the things that are better at predicting that matter that rocks dude 1.00

00:36:56.960 academia if you're a piece of shit is so easy it's incredible dude if you're just a lying ass 1.00

00:37:02.240 scumbag but then she does the same thing in her book so this is what she says in her book what 1.00

00:37:07.420 else other than grit predicts success for aspiring green berets baseline physical fitness at the 0.91

00:37:12.660 start of training is essential. But in each of these domains, when you compare people matched

00:37:16.800 on these characteristics, grit still predicts success. In her TED talk, did she say it's less

00:37:22.360 good at predicting things than intelligence and fitness? I have created a new metric and it is

00:37:27.360 worse at predicting outcomes than every existing metric. However, it is still somewhat predictive,

00:37:34.820 folks. I know. That's the thing is like I can see academically, you know, in a very like tempered

00:37:40.520 kind of way be like oh this might be something yeah it's great in some circumstances it's great

00:37:44.260 in other circumstances maybe we need a bespoke thing for beast barracks as opposed to anything

00:37:48.140 else it has a predictive quality to it so maybe we can like find some utility here or whatever

00:37:53.500 but it's like it's like stop teaching your kids how to read folks i've figured this out and also

00:38:00.200 she originally started with this insight that like there's smart kids who don't perform as well

00:38:06.160 right it's it's more than intelligence but then she keeps coming up with these studies that it's

00:38:10.240 like oh it's kind of intelligence it's more than just intelligence although objectively it is less

00:38:14.920 also it turns out it's intelligence and push-ups yeah the most like if i had to guess 0.92

00:38:22.660 fucking answer in the world okay here is the next study she talks about this is how she talks about 0.75

00:38:27.640 it in the book around the same time i received a call from the chicago public schools like the 0.98

00:38:33.140 psychologists at west point researchers there were eager to learn more about the students who

00:38:36.820 would successfully earn their high school diplomas that spring thousands of high school juniors

00:38:41.260 completed an abbreviated grit scale along with a battery of other questionnaires more than a year

00:38:46.140 later 12 of those students failed to graduate students who graduated on schedule were grittier

00:38:51.060 and grit was a more powerful predictor of graduation than how much students cared about

00:38:55.880 school how conscientious they were about their studies and even how safe they felt at school 0.97

00:39:00.800 so fuck school safety which for the record i wouldn't think was that strong of a predictor 0.97

00:39:07.280 what if i told you that it was a more powerful predictor of graduation rate than backpack color 0.99

00:39:14.580 but also it's funny she's like it's more predictive than this it's more predictive than this she

00:39:18.520 doesn't tell you what it's less predictive than and and the things that it's more predictive than

00:39:23.320 are like fairly abstract right yeah how much students cared about school how conscientious

00:39:28.560 they were about their studies how safe they felt like okay what about grades yeah you know what

00:39:33.400 about like performance in the more traditional senses so this is the problem is sat scores were

00:39:38.420 three times more predictive than grit shocker if you want to know who's going to graduate just look

00:39:43.640 at their sat score look as a as a standardized tester who was not always a gpa boy i think it

00:39:51.480 should only be standardized tests i would be dead in a gutter uh if it weren't for a standardized

00:39:56.240 tests. And so I'm very anti-grit now. So there's a researcher named Marcus Cruday who has written

00:40:02.440 two articles following up on all these grit studies. I spoke to him for this episode.

00:40:07.540 Okay. And he points out that grit explains 0.5% of the variance in GPA for the kids in Chicago.

00:40:15.880 SAT scores explain 4% of the variance. Okay. We're talking about very small slices, right?

00:40:22.140 We're talking about 0.5%.

00:40:23.880 She's right that grit did better than these other metrics, but honestly, not that much

00:40:28.540 better.

00:40:28.760 For grit, it's 1.48.

00:40:30.480 For school motivation, it's 1.40.

00:40:33.280 Perceived teacher support, 1.38.

00:40:35.220 It's like, okay.

00:40:36.600 You can't put that in your book.

00:40:38.160 And we're not really going to get into them, but it's the same with these spelling bee

00:40:41.040 studies that she's mentioned.

00:40:42.540 It is true that grit predicts who gets to like the final rounds of the competition,

00:40:48.020 but IQ was a far better predictor.

00:40:51.360 And the best predictor was just the number of hours that you studied.

00:40:56.420 So remember, the entire point of this concept was that grit is doing something that traditional

00:41:01.960 measures, things like SAT scores and IQ can't do.

00:41:05.320 And then you look into her data and it turns out IQ and SAT scores are doing more than

00:41:11.400 grit is.

00:41:12.360 The way that this was initially pitched, in the ways that we measure education, we are

00:41:16.340 missing something fundamental, right?

00:41:18.840 That feels very different from being like, oh, I can predict graduation rates really

00:41:23.300 well with this.

00:41:23.920 The one that turned me into the joker, Peter, was you probably didn't notice it because

00:41:27.080 there's like she's rattling off studies at you so quickly in the TED Talk.

00:41:30.660 In the TED Talk, she says, we studied rookie teachers working in really tough neighborhoods,

00:41:34.860 asking which teachers are still going to be here in teaching by the end of the school

00:41:38.060 year.

00:41:38.640 And of those, who will be the most effective at improving learning outcomes for their

00:41:42.460 students?

00:41:42.940 And which will be giving TED Talks?

00:41:44.600 You would assume from this, right, that she's doing the same thing as West Point, right?

00:41:47.720 We gave teachers like the grit scale at the beginning of two years.

00:41:51.020 It turns out the grittiest teachers are the most likely to still be teaching and they're

00:41:55.000 the most effective for their students, right?

00:41:56.660 That's what you would assume.

00:41:57.860 For this study, she did not test the teachers on grit.

00:42:02.380 She came up with this, I think, like baffling methodology where she rated externally from

00:42:09.540 the outside.

00:42:10.460 She rated their grit by using their resumes.

00:42:13.980 Yeah.

00:42:14.420 So she goes into the teacher's resumes and she gives them a grit score from one to six based on how many extracurriculars they did in high school and college.

00:42:26.240 OK.

00:42:26.840 All right.

00:42:27.420 Let's hold on.

00:42:29.080 Hold on.

00:42:30.080 Because you gave me.

00:42:31.220 I knew you would love this.

00:42:32.500 I knew you would love this.

00:42:33.080 You gave me that whole questionnaire. 0.99

00:42:34.400 But if if there's any correlation between grit and extracurriculars, my grit is fucking zero. 0.98

00:42:40.800 Same, same, same, same. 0.99

00:42:42.260 I did like zero extracurricular shit. 0.99

00:42:44.080 If there was an extracurricular on my resume going into college or going into law school, it was a lie. 0.99

00:42:52.160 Well, OK, she this is so brutal.

00:42:55.040 She gives examples in the paper of like low grit, medium grit and high grit.

00:42:59.640 Right. So how are we looking at these people's resumes?

00:43:01.380 So she says like a low grit person is a member of the swim team for three years, but did not advance or win an award and has no other multi-year activities. 0.98

00:43:10.780 Yeah, they're just a loser. 1.00

00:43:12.580 a fucking loser who was only on the swim team all you did was swim team you're not even the 1.00

00:43:15.860 fucking captain you're not even the captain that's low grit you must advance on the swim team you're 1.00

00:43:19.880 getting fucking mogged by all the high grit people every day getting fucking mogged in the swimming 1.00

00:43:23.380 i love that's so funny that's someone that's someone who has never competed in a sport being 0.99

00:43:31.140 like why aren't you getting better why aren't you winning awards imagine how mad you would be if

00:43:35.660 some fucking academic is like you never won any medals and then the high grit person the highest 0.95

00:43:40.540 grit person is member of the cross-country team for four years and voted MVP in senior year, 0.99

00:43:46.760 founder and president for two years of the university's Habitat for Humanity chapter.

00:43:51.100 Is that even grit?

00:43:51.820 I want to read you the medium grit person.

00:43:53.740 Okay.

00:43:54.000 So medium grit.

00:43:54.720 This is like level three.

00:43:55.920 This is you.

00:43:57.120 Member of a fraternity for three years, but no leadership roles.

00:44:00.640 Yeah.

00:44:00.820 Assistant manager at the local movie theater for three years.

00:44:04.260 That's medium grit? 0.99

00:44:06.320 Fucking including fraternity on this is killing me, dude. 0.98

00:44:10.540 Why is just being present in a fraternity count for more than being on a swim team where you actually do stuff? 1.00

00:44:18.080 You came in second in a bunch of tournaments and somebody's like, why aren't you in Sigma Chi, bitch? 0.99

00:44:21.520 Being in a fraternity was so dumb that we skipped over assistant manager at a movie theater. 1.00

00:44:25.840 That's grit. 0.99

00:44:26.560 But also you can see that it's fundamentally circular, right?

00:44:28.440 Because grit is how you achieve great things.

00:44:31.180 Right.

00:44:31.440 Well, how are we measuring grit?

00:44:32.540 People who achieve great things.

00:44:33.660 I mean, I do think that this goes to show how completely unscientific it is.

00:44:38.800 not just that we're getting these weird outcomes, but that you have the woman who pioneered this

00:44:45.300 just looking at resumes and being like, swimming? No. Assistant manager at movie theater? Yes. 0.55

00:44:53.180 So we just have to read one last thing before we move on. So this is from Marcus Crudet's

00:45:00.160 article. It's called Much Ado About Grit, A Meta-Analytic Synthesis of the Grit Literature.

00:45:05.380 The proponents of grit have not only claimed that grit is an excellent predictor of success,

00:45:09.000 but also that grit is a better predictor of success than other variables such as cognitive

00:45:12.300 ability, admissions test scores, or physical fitness. This does not appear to be correct.

00:45:17.580 The meta-analytic estimate of the relationship between overall grit and academic performance

00:45:21.940 is much weaker than the correlation that has been observed for other variables. For example,

00:45:26.720 meta-analytic reviews have shown that admissions test scores, study skills, and study habits,

00:45:31.240 academic adjustment class attendance and effort regulation and metacognition are much better

00:45:36.980 predictors of college and graduate school achievement while cognitive ability is a 0.96

00:45:40.740 much better predictor of job performance you know your theory is getting fucked up when

00:45:44.640 metacognition is a better predictor and a lot of these like he lists the actual effect sizes for

00:45:51.600 these as he's listing them out and a lot of them have like twice the correlation with achievement

00:45:56.880 than grit does like it's not that grit is like a little bit worse it's like there's things that

00:46:00.800 twice as good as grit. If you want to predict like who's going to graduate from college,

00:46:04.100 who's going to have a good GPA, who's going to be good in their job. Like everyone should have

00:46:08.260 looked at all of this, like her own published work and been like, this just needs like another

00:46:13.500 decade of stress testing. Sometimes I feel like these people are like, like they come up with an

00:46:17.760 idea, but they're not like familiar with the academic literature exactly. And then they just

00:46:23.320 sort of shoehorn it into the academic literature. This is what Marcus Crudet told me when I talked

00:46:28.120 to him too that like he called it the ted talkification of psychology the incentives

00:46:32.620 of a young researcher now are not to go and explore like an existing concept right she was

00:46:38.000 working on self-control which is like very well-defined concept right before she invented

00:46:42.200 grit right and wrote a book called grit that was very canny and smart of her right because yeah

00:46:47.060 exploring something that already exists is not how you get ted talks it's not how you get airport

00:46:51.600 books if you do like some iterative improvement of self-control right you're not getting barack 0.86

00:46:57.340 obama exactly to start building policy around your bullshit whereas if you take what's already known 0.94

00:47:02.100 and you pretend that it's something completely new you tell a really good story about it you 0.99

00:47:06.320 make it seem like it's this bold new idea now the obama dod is structuring drone strikes around your

00:47:12.940 idea only the gritless weddings that that makes sense that there's that there's this sort of like

00:47:18.120 that there's this incentive now to come up with a really catchy idea, not necessarily one that

00:47:27.640 makes any sense or has any real academic rigor behind it. That's kind of the first third of the

00:47:32.980 book, her telling her origin story, going through all of these studies, presenting grit as this bold

00:47:38.100 new idea. The second third of the book is her exploring this dichotomy between talent and hard

00:47:45.600 work okay most of the book is anecdotes little vignettes of successful people and how working 0.99

00:47:52.720 hard help them get to where they are this is like every stupid ass self-help book it's like dude 0.96

00:47:58.040 did you know that uh cleopatra used the secret you're joking but this is literally what like 0.98

00:48:03.500 most of the book is dude genghis khan knew the secret leonardo da vinci knew the secret she says

00:48:09.700 there's a celebrated potter named warren mckenzie who lives in minnesota now 92 years old okay she

00:48:15.200 quotes him as saying, the first 10,000

00:48:17.260 pots are difficult, and then it gets a

00:48:19.240 little bit easier. Malcolm Gladwell said that

00:48:21.320 it takes 10,000 pots to become an expert,

00:48:23.400 I believe. She also talks about John Irving.

00:48:25.480 I didn't know this about John Irving, that

00:48:26.820 he got a C- in English

00:48:29.200 in high school. It turns out he's dyslexic.

00:48:31.800 And so, she says,

00:48:33.180 with Daley Everett, Irving became one of the most masterful

00:48:35.440 and prolific writers in history. With effort,

00:48:37.240 he became a master, and with effort, his

00:48:39.180 mastery produced stories that have touched millions of people,

00:48:41.640 including me. What's the correlation?

00:48:43.160 Okay, never mind.

00:48:44.380 But also, she never really establishes, like, did he work harder than other writers?

00:48:47.260 Are there writers who worked hard but didn't get good or didn't become best-selling authors?

00:48:51.140 Right, right.

00:48:51.640 I'm not going to read any more, but this is a montage of people who she includes in the

00:48:56.300 book, whose, like, stories she tells to illustrate her concepts, right?

00:48:59.440 Olympic gold medalist swimmer Rowdy Gaines, NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins, Tiger Mom Amy

00:49:04.640 Chua, Jeff Bezos, the editor of the New York Times Crossword Puzzle, JPMorgan Chase CEO

00:49:10.260 Jamie Dimon. Yes. Woody Allen. Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll. Hall of Fame pitcher Tom

00:49:15.740 Seaver. The CEO of Cinnabon. Benjamin Franklin. Magician David Blaine. And filmmaker Judd Apatow.

00:49:22.900 Hell yeah. She interviews Will Smith who says like what separates me from other actors and

00:49:28.240 rappers is that like I will outwork anybody. Sure. This is sort of why we're not going to talk about

00:49:33.080 the book all that much is because for most of the book you're reading it and you're like

00:49:37.000 what does this have to do with public school kids in chicago right also i mean first of all i can't

00:49:42.560 think of anything less insightful than interviewing a football coach about grit and hard work well you

00:49:47.440 know what he's gonna say right it's right chapter after chapter after chapter every 0.94

00:49:50.720 fucking press conference a football coach has ever given is about grit and hard work but also 0.97

00:49:56.420 how is she over the course of these interviews with these people how is she separating out 0.99

00:50:01.900 grit from what we might traditionally just call hard work, right?

00:50:06.280 No, I know.

00:50:07.100 Yeah.

00:50:07.200 Like the initial pitch, again, is that she has found something distinct from our traditional

00:50:13.380 understandings of hard work, right?

00:50:15.180 I mean, she does attempt to do this.

00:50:17.040 Her way of doing this is she breaks grit down into four factors, which she says are interest,

00:50:22.520 practice, purpose, and hope, which as far as I can tell, she's completely making up.

00:50:27.220 Like these aren't based on her academic work in any way.

00:50:29.480 Like none of this appears in any of her studies.

00:50:31.440 it's basically she's going through their anecdotes and she's like aha they're very interested in 0.96

00:50:35.380 pottery this is step two of when you have a stupid idea i i think we were talking about this in the 0.98

00:50:39.640 context of bullshit jobs where like you have this initial idea yeah and you're like this idea kind 0.99

00:50:44.760 of pops and then you're on like you're like someone's like oh turn it into a book and then 1.00

00:50:49.840 and then you're like okay chapter two and you just start you just start fucking bullshitting 0.98

00:50:54.820 she has a thing like she's talking about like jamie diamond the ceo of jp morgan chase right 0.99

00:50:59.380 known pervert. She's trying to establish like how gritty he is. She's like in the 2008 financial

00:51:03.960 crisis, Jamie steered his bank to safety. And while other banks collapsed entirely,

00:51:08.360 JPMorgan Chase somehow earned a $5 billion profit. Yeah, somehow. Were the other financial

00:51:13.100 sector CEOs not gritty? Like was he grittier than the other CEOs? Is that why JPMorgan like had a

00:51:20.440 profit in 2009 and other banks didn't? They also, JPMorgan also invented credit default swaps. So

00:51:25.580 was that grit that made them fucking do that? If you're willing to come up with an idea and 0.98

00:51:29.240 execute to the point where the entire economy falls apart. If that's not great, what else is?

00:51:34.340 They're seeing it through. I felt like my brain was leaking out of my ears when I was reading the

00:51:38.120 Will Smith parts too, because like, I'm sure Will Smith worked hard, but like becoming a movie star

00:51:43.000 is 99.9% luck, right? So many people are talented. So many people work hard. I know he wants to tell

00:51:50.240 a story that like, I worked hard and that's why I'm successful. There's something in the human

00:51:54.280 mind that like can't accept like i am just tremendously fucking lucky yeah exactly like 1.00

00:52:00.400 this is how like every time they ask a nepo baby hey do you think it helped they're like i worked 0.78

00:52:04.700 so hard it's like yeah well i know like i believe you but it's just not it's not the relevant metric

00:52:09.440 here there's so many people that that work hard remember when there's like nepo baby discourse

00:52:13.220 about like someone else and jamie lee curtis like went on instagram was like i worked hard my whole

00:52:17.620 life it's so like no one was talking about you no one even remembers that you're a nepo baby 0.92

00:52:22.300 that's the yeah you're about to die like no one knows who your father is no one remembers that 0.95

00:52:27.480 you are an effer baby but the but you saw the discourse exactly and got triggered there's a 0.53

00:52:31.920 very good review of this book in the new yorker here i'm gonna send you an excerpt tautology

00:52:36.280 haunts the shape of these fervent lessons yeah i was about to say that okay grittier spellers

00:52:41.500 practiced more than less gritty spellers duckworth assures us well yes he's looking for winners and

00:52:47.240 winners of a certain sort survivors and highly competitive activities in which a single physical

00:52:51.440 mental or technical skill can be cultivated through relentless practice this is kind of

00:52:55.420 the problem with this is that like you know things like sports or she talks a lot about

00:52:58.880 like concert pianists and violinists yeah what's what's great it's like hard work and dedication

00:53:04.400 who's the grittiest the most hard work and dedicated folks and also people who dedicate

00:53:08.940 themselves to a single skill right a single skill that benefits from dedicated practice right five

00:53:15.960 hours a day etc the skills of getting through school right the skills of passing high school

00:53:20.900 or getting straight A's is not mastery of a single skill, right? You're taking like six classes

00:53:26.320 every single semester. You don't need to demonstrate mastery. You need to demonstrate

00:53:30.280 competency. But the whole book is about mastering a single skill. The entire paradigm of this book,

00:53:37.320 and she doesn't seem to like really realize it, is just the wrong paradigm.

00:53:40.560 Like what have you actually identified here? Because if you're saying, hey, hard work and

00:53:46.140 dedication really matters. And I think the universal reaction is no shit. What I thought 0.99

00:53:50.740 was being pitched is I have figured out how to isolate who is good at this. And like, and then

00:53:56.540 maybe you can think about, well, can we predict early on who's going to be a dedicated hard

00:54:03.660 worker? Can we improve the ability of a child to become a dedicated hard worker? Right? Like that

00:54:10.640 that sort of stuff. But the whole thing very quickly fell apart. And now we're just like,

00:54:15.940 Will Smith's a hard worker. She also, she has all these like vignettes in the book

00:54:19.980 about this, I think, totally false binary between talent and hard work. So she has this vignette

00:54:26.460 where this like swimmer guy watches Mark Spitz swim. Mark Spitz won like a billion gold medals.

00:54:30.480 He was like the most winningest American swimmer before Michael Phelps. And this guy is saying like,

00:54:36.340 oh, he swims like a fish. He's like such an incredible swimmer. And then Duckworth is like,

00:54:40.160 you know oh he's relying on a talent-based explanation but actually mark spitz practiced

00:54:44.320 for thousands of hours and it's like yeah does anyone think an olympic athlete didn't practice

00:54:48.880 they all practice i don't know shit about chess but like if you tell me the name of the grand

00:54:53.800 master i'm gonna assume that he's played thousands of hours of chess in his life i'm not like oh he 0.57

00:54:57.720 woke up yesterday and started playing chess like also the like everything we know about like michael

00:55:02.980 phelps is just like he's a physical freak that's all that's like that's like 90 percent of a huge

00:55:07.780 out of advantage. Right. And then the other thing that she's doing here, I'm going to send you one

00:55:12.940 more paragraph. This is from her book. For years, several American surveys have asked,

00:55:17.980 which is more important to success, talent or effort? Americans are about twice as likely to

00:55:22.940 single out effort. The same is true when you ask Americans about athletic ability. And when asked

00:55:27.800 if you were hiring a new employee, which of the following qualities, what do you think is most

00:55:31.820 important? Americans endorse being hardworking nearly five times as often as they endorse

00:55:36.700 intelligence you're reading this and you're like right so this is already the ideology of most of

00:55:40.700 american life right i mean most of us already value hard work but also i thought grit isn't

00:55:44.720 hard work like grit is like the separate thing and then she it seems like she is sort of like

00:55:50.140 yeah she sort of just bounces back and forth on what the definition is it's how long are you in

00:55:54.040 a fraternity it's one variable but she pitched it as like i found something new and that but then

00:55:59.260 eventually she just ends up being like will smith works really hard it's like yeah who cares she

00:56:04.280 also she says in her in her original definition of it in the 2007 paper that it's like i've

00:56:09.260 identified something right there are certain skills that you need for like regardless of

00:56:12.460 your occupation regardless of your status in life grit is one of those skills right but i don't

00:56:17.580 actually think the grit is this free floating thing like i'm really gritty on some stuff and

00:56:21.800 like give up the minute i face a challenge on other stuff yeah and i think that's most people

00:56:26.200 right it's like right is mark spitz really gritty when it comes to doing his taxes i assume not

00:56:30.400 that's a lot of why i was struggling with the questionnaire yeah yeah because it's like at

00:56:34.180 depends. So the final third of the book, it basically becomes like a self-help book.

00:56:39.580 She has all of these like components of grit, you know, interest, practice, purpose, hope.

00:56:44.380 And then for each one, she gives tips on like how you can build your grit. Okay. So just all this

00:56:50.140 kind of individual advice, but she's not really talking about education reform. There's a chapter

00:56:55.220 on parenting, but mostly it's like individual advice. It's actually very little about kids

00:56:59.700 in the entire book.

00:57:00.560 Parenting, you gotta stick with it.

00:57:02.200 You have to keep doing it. 0.99

00:57:04.300 The main thing that she hammers home

00:57:06.000 over and over again

00:57:06.700 in the final third of the book

00:57:08.080 is basically this argument

00:57:09.820 that grit is malleable.

00:57:11.680 So I'm going to send you this.

00:57:13.620 This book has been about

00:57:14.580 the power of grit

00:57:15.480 to help you achieve your potential.

00:57:17.340 I wrote it because

00:57:18.320 what we accomplish

00:57:19.100 in the marathon of life

00:57:20.220 depends tremendously on our grit,

00:57:22.380 our passion,

00:57:23.240 and our perseverance

00:57:23.920 for long-term goals.

00:57:25.880 An obsession with talent

00:57:27.040 distracts us from that simple truth.

00:57:28.920 Let me close with a few final thoughts.

00:57:32.360 The first is that you can grow your grit.

00:57:35.300 I see two ways to do so.

00:57:37.040 On your own, you can grow your grit from the inside out.

00:57:40.820 You can cultivate your interests.

00:57:42.480 You can develop a habit of daily challenge exceeding skill practice.

00:57:46.420 You can connect your work to a purpose beyond yourself.

00:57:49.400 And you can learn to hope when all seems lost.

00:57:52.640 So Jamie Dimon did.

00:57:53.480 You can also grow your grit from the outside in.

00:57:56.460 So this is where she talks about building a culture of grit.

00:58:00.220 She has this concept of learned industriousness, which is like the mirror image of learned helplessness.

00:58:06.080 You can be trained to think, ah, I can change my surroundings.

00:58:09.400 I can make things better for myself.

00:58:11.540 Just sort of a go-getter attitude.

00:58:13.940 Yeah.

00:58:14.360 She visits the Seahawks training camp to see how they have a culture of grit in practice.

00:58:20.160 She tells the story of how the Finnish army defeated the Russians in World War II.

00:58:26.460 By having sisu or like a national culture of grit.

00:58:30.300 So basically you can like instill this en masse. 0.97

00:58:33.120 And the Russians didn't have it. 0.91

00:58:34.480 Famously. 0.99

00:58:34.980 Famously cowardly and prone to surrender the Russians. 0.86

00:58:39.000 The ending anecdote of the book is about her kid's ballet teacher who is both supportive and demanding. 0.61

00:58:46.360 And we must borrow from ballet culture, the healthiest competition culture.

00:58:51.380 Who do you think was grittier, Natalie Portman or Mila Kunis?

00:58:54.520 But this argument in the final third of the book, basically that grit is malleable, this is the reason for the downfall of grit.

00:59:02.500 So even before the book comes out, we start to get critiques of not really the concept of grit or the idea that kids have grit, but specifically the idea that you can do anything about grit, right?

00:59:13.400 The idea that schools can meaningfully teach grit.

00:59:16.240 So I'm going to send you an excerpt from the New Republic review by Jeffrey Snyder.

00:59:22.240 There may be an increasingly cogent science of character, but there is no science of teaching

00:59:27.100 character. We already know that grit is strongly correlated with conscientiousness, one of the

00:59:31.940 big five personality traits that psychologists view as stable and hereditary. A recent report

00:59:37.080 emphasizes that simply knowing that non-cognitive factors matter is not the same as knowing how to

00:59:43.240 develop them in students. The report concludes that clear, actionable strategies for classroom

00:59:48.740 practice are few and far between. Consider the fact that the world's grittiest students,

00:59:54.020 including Chinese students who log some of the longest hours on their homework, 1.00

00:59:57.620 have never been exposed to a formal curriculum that teaches perseverance. 1.00

01:00:01.340 Which I think is a pretty good point. 0.99

01:00:02.880 This is really more about Chinese genetics than anything else. 0.83

01:00:06.620 Right. So I get this. And this is something nagging at me subconsciously. Just because

01:00:12.120 you can identify a thing does not actually mean anything in a vacuum, right? You've identified

01:00:18.720 identified what you are saying is a personality trait that might be correlated with good outcomes.

01:00:26.880 But what does that matter if you can't manage it in some way?

01:00:31.060 I also read a really interesting article about the self-esteem fad in psychology in the 1980s,

01:00:36.220 where it was basically the same thing, right? That kids who report having higher self-esteem

01:00:39.840 are more likely to graduate from high school, they get better grades, etc. And there were all

01:00:43.320 these efforts to like instill self-esteem in kids but they all kind of fell down because like what

01:00:49.400 are we doing here because a lot of kids are just losers i feel like what ends up happening in all

01:00:54.560 of these situations is that you just end up measuring the thing you measure grit and then

01:01:00.780 you reward the kids that are high in it right which feels like the rich get richer or you do

01:01:05.340 the thing where you just give kids a bunch of like pro grit propaganda and then at the end of the

01:01:09.420 semester all they're going to do is they're going to report that they have grit right are you gritty

01:01:12.780 do you follow through on things? Yep, I sure do. But nothing has actually changed, right? All you've

01:01:17.160 done is you've trained them on how to answer a test question. There's also, when I was talking

01:01:21.280 to Marcus Crudet, who wrote these meta-analyses of like all the grit studies, he also noted that

01:01:26.720 while it's really hard to manipulate personality traits in general, it's just kind of like a doomed

01:01:31.940 endeavor, there are things like study skills that you can teach students and actually do respond to

01:01:37.960 interventions. So he points out in higher education, simply going to class is twice as

01:01:43.300 good a predictor of grades as grit. Yeah. But is that more important than making up new personality

01:01:49.340 traits and writing about them? There's this really interesting article by a researcher

01:01:53.380 named Mike Rose who points out that like, yeah, there isn't really a clear difference between

01:01:58.240 cognitive and non-cognitive skills. And also it's not clear what like teaching non-cognitive skills

01:02:04.160 means like yeah we have kids for six hours a day are we just going to tell them that it's good to

01:02:08.620 be optimistic now i'm going to teach you brainless skills here's this in order for students to

01:02:14.400 believe that they are capable of improving they must have the concrete experience of getting

01:02:18.260 better at challenging tasks otherwise exhortations to change their mindset ring hollow kids generally

01:02:24.480 know when they are improving for real when they can do things that once seem too difficult versus

01:02:29.320 when adults are merely trying to make them feel good it's really striking reading those old white

01:02:34.480 papers just kind of how half-baked this all was like as you heard of those excerpts they talked

01:02:39.800 about how urgent it was how important it was we know that character has this huge effect on kids

01:02:45.620 yeah but then if you keep reading they would mention like 10 pages in that like well we don't

01:02:51.780 really know which character traits are important we don't know how to measure them and we don't

01:02:57.100 know how to change them. There was like this weird rush to do something, but nobody had a clear idea

01:03:02.860 of what they were rushing to do. But then the real nail in the coffin comes in 2015 with a paper

01:03:11.460 called Measurement Matters Assessing Personal Qualities Other Than Cognitive Ability for

01:03:16.360 Educational Purposes. This is an assessment of the efforts to implement these like non-cognitive

01:03:22.840 skills in schools so i'm gonna send you this students in a set of oversubscribed charter

01:03:28.700 schools where students make unusually large test score gains report lower average levels of

01:03:34.180 conscientiousness self-control and grit than students in open enrollment district schools 0.98

01:03:40.500 that makes sense because being surrounded by a bunch of fucking nerds i know is gonna that's 0.97

01:03:46.160 gonna erode your grit over time but what's wild is these are kids that went from public schools 0.98

01:03:52.040 to charter schools. Their test scores got better. Their attendance got better. And they reported

01:03:57.680 lower scores on self-control, grit, and conscientiousness. So basically, there's a

01:04:04.560 mismatch between what they say and what they are doing. So all that stuff about how if you teach

01:04:10.360 kids grit, they'll report themselves to be higher in grit, right? They'll just deliver the propaganda.

01:04:15.220 That turns out not to be true. They're actually lower on these things. You're telling them,

01:04:20.280 Basically, the theory that the researchers come up with is that because you're constantly being told, oh, you must have self-control, you must have grit, over the course of your normal life, you're going to sort of fail at things.

01:04:31.120 You're going to skive off homework to go watch anime, right?

01:04:34.060 You're going to sort of be a normal teenager, but you're basically going to feel worse about yourself for doing it if you're constantly surrounded by this propaganda of like you must have grit, you must follow through on everything.

01:04:43.820 I think my theory also works, but sure.

01:04:46.780 I think that being around this, the soft cerebral types will make you in turn soft and cerebral

01:04:55.340 and weak.

01:04:56.260 But that's also basically the thing, right?

01:04:57.840 If you're surrounded by these kids that are constantly like following through on everything

01:05:00.720 and just higher performance, if you're average at that school, you might feel worse about

01:05:04.740 yourself, right?

01:05:05.240 You're like a fish in a different pond.

01:05:07.220 You know, those like influencers who are like, if you're the smartest person in the room,

01:05:10.300 you're in the wrong room.

01:05:11.340 No, dude.

01:05:12.000 Why?

01:05:12.740 Why?

01:05:13.560 I love to feel smart in the room.

01:05:15.140 So basically, grit at this point is sort of like, okay, schools can't change it.

01:05:20.800 We don't know if it's all that predictive of performance.

01:05:23.640 And if we try to measure schools on it or teachers on it, it might be making the kids worse off or at least reporting that they're worse off, right?

01:05:31.700 So it essentially has like no utility.

01:05:34.600 So are you ready for the twist of this episode, Peter?

01:05:37.120 There's a twist?

01:05:38.000 There's a huge twist, Peter.

01:05:39.400 Okay.

01:05:39.680 So this 2015 paper that is essentially the nail in the coffin of grit.

01:05:46.240 This is over.

01:05:47.100 We tried it.

01:05:47.780 It doesn't work.

01:05:48.680 That paper was written by Angela Duckworth.

01:05:52.460 What?

01:05:53.060 Right?

01:05:53.580 Dun, dun, dun.

01:05:54.900 As all of the hype has departed from this concept, Angela Duckworth has been one of the people leading that charge.

01:06:00.800 Earlier, we watched like the kind of middle section of her TED Talk.

01:06:05.320 Now we're going to watch a little excerpt from the final third of her TED Talk.

01:06:09.680 To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows about building it.

01:06:19.580 Every day, parents and teachers ask me, how do I build grit in kids?

01:06:24.020 What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic?

01:06:27.280 How do I keep them motivated for the long run?

01:06:30.140 The honest answer is, I don't know.

01:06:34.440 I relate to this.

01:06:35.620 when you're just bullshitting and then someone asks you a follow-up question and you're like, 1.00

01:06:39.800 fuck. So you do have to give her credit for like, she did include in this TED talk, 0.99

01:06:44.000 like we don't know anything. Never stop puzzling. She's like, look,

01:06:46.740 we don't know anything. We don't know if this is real. All we know is that we need to be more

01:06:51.920 gritty in order to figure out whether it is real. Thank you very much. Goodbye.

01:06:55.720 I will also give her credit for like in March of 2016, she wrote a New York Times op-ed called

01:07:02.860 Don't Grade Schools on Grit, where she says we're nowhere near ready and perhaps never will be to

01:07:08.720 use feedback on character as a metric for judging the effectiveness of teachers in schools. We

01:07:13.020 shouldn't be rewarding or punishing schools for how teachers perform on these measures.

01:07:16.980 Okay. When this, you know, all these California districts are coming up with these like grit

01:07:20.540 report cards, all of these like non-academic measures for assessing schools. She was on

01:07:24.680 the board of that effort, but she left basically publicly saying, I don't think that we should be

01:07:29.540 doing this this is not a good idea and she says she gave an interview to npr after this happened

01:07:33.420 where she said the enthusiasm is getting ahead of the science wow and then and then in 2015 she

01:07:38.300 writes this paper that is basically like we looked at all of the evidence and like teaching kids grit

01:07:42.720 does not work this is like a cool grift you could do where you come up with an idea and it's

01:07:48.360 bullshit you run it up to the ted talk circuit and then you start to distance yourself you're like

01:07:54.660 you guys are getting carried away with this you know the science isn't there that way you emerge 0.99

01:08:00.000 sort of unscathed but rich i have complicated feelings on her because i do think that this

01:08:05.200 is what happened i think that she came up with this concept she did the ted talk like when an

01:08:10.220 academic does a ted talk they expect maybe you know 50 000 views you know a couple hundred

01:08:14.680 thousand views at best nobody expects 60 million views on their ted talk right right i don't think

01:08:19.940 she assumed the coach of the seahawks would get in touch with her and that you know she'd get this

01:08:24.560 massive book deal. And that like this concept would grow way beyond like where it was in the

01:08:30.220 science, right? She had some preliminary studies. They were relatively small. I think what happened

01:08:35.700 is like this really did like get away from her in a way that she did not predict. I don't think

01:08:40.000 that she's like a cynical person. Right. It is important to me to give her credit, right? I think

01:08:44.300 that this is like better than any other TED Talk person we've had on the show. The fact that she's

01:08:50.120 actually publicly decrying these efforts to like wildly over implement this idea that she came up

01:08:56.380 with. I do genuinely give her a lot of credit for this. Right. Right. However, I think there's also

01:09:00.860 a strong component of like, well, you still released the book. Yeah. Right. I mean, she wrote

01:09:06.840 this paper debunking grit in 2015 and she released the book the following year. Right. She does not

01:09:13.900 talk about education in the book. She has a whole chapter about parenting, but there's no chapter

01:09:18.460 about education and there's no caveats to grit in the book, right? You'd think, hey, I came up with

01:09:24.320 this. You know, we've been trying to implement this in schools. It doesn't really work. It's

01:09:27.860 clearly a concept that is more complicated than just like you need to have it. Obviously the

01:09:32.180 publisher was like, just write it. Just, I know, exactly. Just fucking pump this shit out. Here's

01:09:37.180 $500,000. Just shut up and write it. And she was like, all right. And it sold more than a million 0.99

01:09:41.740 copies. It's like, it is really weird to not mention any of these efforts. The fact that

01:09:46.940 these efforts have happened, you yourself are against them? She doesn't mention this in the

01:09:51.160 book anywhere. She has also like systematically oversold the concept and continues to. So when

01:09:58.220 she is promoting the book in 2016, this is after the book comes out, she gives an interview to the

01:10:03.320 New York Times where she says, my lab has found that grit beats the pants off IQ, SAT scores,

01:10:10.280 physical fitness, and a bazillion other measures to help us know in advance which individuals will

01:10:15.100 be successful in some situations. Yikes. Okay. And I guess she's including like in some situations

01:10:19.680 there to kind of hedge, but it's like beats the pants off of IQ and SAT scores. It doesn't like

01:10:24.580 even when it does beat those measures, it doesn't beat them by that much. And there's many, many

01:10:29.320 studies that show that it doesn't beat IQ and SAT scores, including your own studies. So why would

01:10:34.500 you still be saying this even after you yourself kind of debunked it? I mean, look, there's no way

01:10:41.000 there's no way to interpret this other than just just pure grift and i and look i get it i'll say

01:10:46.620 and do anything for money yeah if someone came up to me and was like peter two million dollars

01:10:51.520 publish a book that you don't believe in i i wouldn't even think twice i would say absolutely

01:10:57.440 i think what she's doing is she keeps like moving the goalposts so in a 2019 interview this is three

01:11:04.620 years after the book they're kind of asking her like why hasn't grit shown up it's like all that

01:11:09.500 useful of a concept now that there's more data. She says, I don't think your report card grades

01:11:13.820 in elementary school, middle school, and high school are, for most students of that age,

01:11:17.360 the prime source of their passion. It's not where they would apply their grit anyway.

01:11:21.540 Duckworth said she wouldn't expect grit to be the most important factor in determining a student's

01:11:25.380 grades or test scores. There ought to be other predictors, like self-control, that would be

01:11:29.600 more predictive of grades than grit. Okay. Remember her original insight from when she

01:11:34.180 was a teacher? The smart kids aren't necessarily the ones that get the good grades. Right. It's

01:11:38.460 actually the gritty kids but now she's like oh well grit was never going to predict grades every

01:11:43.500 now and then you're like oh i think i have this explanatory framework and then you're like writing

01:11:47.860 it out you're like um i'm a fucking genius and then someone's like well what about this and 0.64

01:11:52.220 you're like right right and like there are two paths in front of you at that moment right yeah 0.96

01:11:57.760 one is where you're honest with yourself and one is where you're not and the dishonest path

01:12:03.900 Probably also had a couple million dollars at the end of it for her, and she chose it.

01:12:09.240 Well, what's interesting is I don't know that she's actually being dishonest, right?

01:12:12.000 I know.

01:12:12.160 You are in love with her.

01:12:13.340 You think she's so normal.

01:12:14.920 You're like, I don't think she's doing this cynically.

01:12:16.860 I think what she's doing is bad.

01:12:18.580 It just isn't necessarily dishonest.

01:12:20.720 It's like once you admit all of the caveats of your own concept, right?

01:12:24.020 It doesn't work in schools.

01:12:25.360 It's not useful for assessing teachers.

01:12:27.840 The research behind it doesn't really hold up.

01:12:30.040 It was never going to predict grades anyway.

01:12:31.680 then it's like what is the point of your book then what is even the premise of the book at this point 0.99

01:12:37.080 continuing to pitch your stupid idea a decade after it was functionally debunked that's grit 0.98

01:12:42.820 that's what grit is the other thing that i wanted to say which is like kind of mean is like 1.00

01:12:47.480 you can take the person out of mckinsey but you can't take the mckinsey out of the person

01:12:52.660 so true other people have been thinking about this for years decades other people are within

01:12:56.780 this organization but i'm gonna parachute in right and then like solve it for you she might

01:13:01.320 not even realize that she's doing that when she begins exactly she's like hey i went to normal

01:13:06.020 schools for a year yeah now i have this idea and these losers who are like looking for silver 0.99

01:13:13.380 bullets for everything right are like oh my god let's put you on a fucking stage so little epilogue 0.93

01:13:19.260 most of the people involved with hyping up this trend have kind of moved away from it so the author 0.96

01:13:25.180 of the original airport bestseller that popularized grit paul tuff has also kind of moved away from

01:13:30.860 grit, he gives an interview to the New York Times where he says, there's no evidence that any

01:13:35.500 particular curriculum or textbook or app can effectively teach kids grit or self-control or

01:13:40.080 curiosity. This entire kind of issue of non-cognitive skills has also kind of transformed

01:13:46.760 into like a more holistic understanding of like what contributes to kids' success and like how to

01:13:53.060 foster it in kids. So that guy, Mike Rose, who wrote an article in 2014 being like, hey, let's

01:13:58.980 be careful with this grit stuff. He basically pointed out like exactly what would happen. He

01:14:03.320 predicted like, yeah, this isn't going to turn to be all that useful. He writes a follow-up in 2015

01:14:08.060 just being like, yeah, I was right about this and here's why. Nice. Get them. So I'm going to send

01:14:13.340 you an excerpt from this. Over the last few years, I have been working with a group of community

01:14:18.520 college students who have overcome difficult, even traumatic backgrounds to succeed. They possess

01:14:23.680 grit by the truckload, yet every one of them has been significantly delayed by financial,

01:14:28.100 housing and transportation problems by bureaucratic snafus, by violence in their communities,

01:14:33.460 by disruptions in their families, by health care. One fellow's younger brother was murdered.

01:14:37.840 One woman had to quit school for a year to pay down a $10,000 emergency room bill.

01:14:42.880 The poor routinely face barriers that they have few material resources to address,

01:14:47.240 and sometimes no matter how hard they try, the barriers are too frequent and too high

01:14:51.080 to overcome. A good education has always had as one of its goals the development of character,

01:14:56.280 But as a matter of public policy, it would be counterproductive and ultimately cruel to focus on individual characteristics without also considering the economic and social terrain on which those characteristics play out.

01:15:07.760 It's sort of obvious looking back, but if you want to help poor kids graduate from high school or get better grades, the most effective thing that you can do is solve the poverty, right?

01:15:17.580 There's studies that show that increasing the earned income tax credit improves graduation rates.

01:15:24.120 Increasing food stamps improves grades and graduation rates.

01:15:27.640 Like when kids are less poor, they do better in schools, right? 0.86

01:15:31.500 And it's a little unfair to just make schools kind of solve this problem without even giving the fucking schools more money, much less giving the kids and their families more money, right? 0.97

01:15:41.720 Right. 0.98

01:15:42.120 Right. So this entire kind of grit wave feels like an underhanded way of blaming poor kids

01:15:49.520 for not doing as well. Why is school hard for you? Why are you struggling? Oh,

01:15:53.200 it's because you're not gritty enough. This is the problem with these like abstract

01:15:56.680 characteristics, too. Are you actually measuring something that can cut across

01:16:01.400 class lines, for example? Because if not, it's not actually very useful, right? You're probably

01:16:07.980 Probably just flipping correlation and causation around.

01:16:10.380 I also read a like pretty mean paper by a researcher named Ethan Riss about how from

01:16:16.520 the beginning, the whole grit concept was more geared toward the anxieties of rich parents

01:16:21.000 than like the needs of poor parents.

01:16:22.760 Because like rich parents are nervous that like they've spoiled their kids and that they

01:16:27.120 don't have enough grit, right?

01:16:28.260 That like they're not working hard enough.

01:16:29.560 It's sort of like a kids these days thing.

01:16:31.580 They're soft.

01:16:32.260 Yeah, exactly.

01:16:33.440 And it's like, I don't know that poor parents are like doing that in the same kind of way,

01:16:37.660 right?

01:16:37.840 It's something that I think resonated with wealthy parents because it's like, well, my kid doesn't really work that hard.

01:16:42.940 Like, my kid's smart. 1.00

01:16:43.820 Yeah, my kid's kind of a pussy. 1.00

01:16:46.100 It feels to you like the thing that your kid is lacking. 1.00

01:16:49.540 There's also a unintentionally funny epilogue in the book where in the final chapter, Angela Duckworth talks about what's going on at West Point now.

01:16:58.120 So she continued to track West Point cadets for 10 more years to find out what was going on with their grit scores, etc.

01:17:03.680 And she finds that the dropout rate during Beast Barracks has fallen from 6% when she was doing her first study to 2%.

01:17:11.900 So almost nobody drops out of Beast Barracks anymore.

01:17:14.720 And the issue isn't that they have more grit.

01:17:17.600 The issue is that there's less hazing.

01:17:19.440 So apparently West Point is like really cracked down on hazing of first years.

01:17:22.840 And basically it's like a much less abusive environment now.

01:17:26.940 She chalks this up to like what happened was like the school really has like a culture of grit now.

01:17:32.580 Well, it sounded like it was grittier before with the hazing.

01:17:35.200 Exactly.

01:17:35.900 Is that not gritty?

01:17:36.840 You can actually provide an environment that doesn't cause like six to 10% of the kids

01:17:42.160 to drop out in the first seven weeks.

01:17:44.480 You can also just have like a nice, comfortable, like pro-social environment.

01:17:49.320 This actually isn't a story of grit, right?

01:17:51.720 It's a story of like when we provide the right environment for kids, the same kids

01:17:56.720 can thrive or fail, but it's up to us to provide the environment.

01:18:00.600 I would imagine that if you're trying to identify a population that has more grit, then you'd want the experience to be more miserable.

01:18:12.140 Yeah, exactly.

01:18:12.740 Am I sort of like misunderstanding that?

01:18:14.420 I mean, it just feels like this is whatever she wants it to be.

01:18:17.100 This is what I was thinking too, that, you know, it's a combination of passion and perseverance.

01:18:21.680 And her definition is that like you're gritty if you persevere through failure.

01:18:26.360 but like a lot of the classes that I got A's in, I didn't fail at those classes, right? Like I

01:18:31.260 didn't persevere through challenges to get A's in math. I just like did the assignments and got an

01:18:35.980 A. So I also, it's weird. Like the whole time that I was reading this, I was like, am I gritty?

01:18:40.500 But like, I don't actually think that I am because like that was not that hard for me.

01:18:43.680 Think about podcasting. We have never failed.

01:18:56.360 We'll be right back.

If Books Could Kill - April 30, 2026

Grit

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