Listen to Angela Duckworth on Grit in Podcasts

Listen to Angela Duckworth on Grit from EconTalk in Podcasts. https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/econtalk/id135066958?mt=2&i=1000373059701

How important is grit relative to talent? Can grit be taught? Angela Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania and author of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance talks with with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the nature of success in work, play and life. How much does grit matter? Is grit malleable or something we're born with? Duckworth discusses her research on these questions and how to think about what it means for a child and an adult to thrive.

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The Power And Problem Of Grit : NPR

I say if you pack an article with Dr. Angela Duckworth's work on GRIT, Carol Dweck's work Growth Mindsets and Anders Ericsson's work on deliberate practice and the 10,000 hour rule then you've got a power packed article.   Enjoy.


from NPR.org 

http://www.npr.org/2016/04/04/472162167/the-power-and-problem-of-grit

The Power And Problem Of Grit

Daniel Fishel for NPR

Before she was a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, Angela Duckworth was a middle school math teacher. As a rookie teacher, she was surprised when she calculated grades. Some of her sharpest students weren't doing so well, while others who struggled through each lesson were getting A's.

"The thing that was revelatory to me was not that effort matters—everybody knows that effort matters," Angela told Shankar. "What was revelatory to me was how much it matters."

This revelation led her back to school, this time as a graduate student, to study a character trait she calls grit, defined as passion and perseverance for long-terms goals. She studied national spelling bee contestants, Green Berets, public school students, West Point cadets, sales representatives, and teachers. Across all these domains, she found those who made it through and did the best were not always the smartest, but they were the grittiest. Since then her work has captured the attention of high-ranking CEOs, educators, and coaches—among them Pete Carroll of the Seattle Seahawks. (You can find out your grit score here). Angela believes grit is made up of four key psychological assets: interest, practice, purpose, and hope.

Most of us can quickly grasp the importance of perseverance for success. But that's only half of the equation, according to Angela. The other half is an abiding interest and passion for a singular pursuit. Gritty people wake up thinking about the same questions they go to bed thinking about. Rather than being "discovered" through angst-ridden introspection, psychologists believe interests are developed and deepened over time through continuing engagement with a pursuit.

And psychologists find people at the tippy-top of their fields engage with their work differently. You've probably heard of the "10,000 hour rule," the average number of hours it takes an expert to become an expert. That's based on research by K. Anders Ericsson, who found that experts do an intensive-kind of practice called "deliberate practice."

In her interviews with people at the top of their fields, Angela found they describe their work as being imbued with meaning and a desire to help others. She finds they are driven by a purpose beyond the self. This is also what psychologists Amy Wrzesniewski and Barry Schwartz have find in their research. If you haven't heard last week's episode, Shankar talked with Amy about how people find meaning and purpose at work.
Gritty people also have hope. They're optimistic about the future and their ability to improve and affect change. To cultivate hope, Angela points to Stanford Professor Carol Dweck's work on growth mindset, the belief that intelligence isn't fixed but can change over time. Angela also points to her PhD advisor Marty Seligman's work on learned optimism.

But other research has also pointed to a potential downside to grit. Like stubborness, too much grit can keep us sticking to goals, ideas, or relationships that should be abandoned.

Psychologist Gale Lucas and her colleagues found in one experiment that gritty individuals will persist in trying to solve unsolvable puzzles at a financial cost. And that's a limitation of grit: it doesn't give you insight into when it will help you prevail and when it will keep you stuck in a dead-end.

So what can teachers, coaches, and parents do to cultivate grit? Psychologists are still working that out, but Angela has assembled research on what they do know here.

Angela's first book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance comes out next month.

The Hidden Brain Podcast is hosted by Shankar Vedantam and produced by Kara McGuirk-Alison, Maggie Penman and Max Nesterak. To subscribe to our newsletter, click here. You can also follow us on Twitter@hiddenbrain, @karamcguirk, @maggiepenman and@maxnesterak, and listen for Hidden Brain stories every week on your local public radio station.

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 http://angeladuckworth.com/qa/


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What Young Athletes need besides 10,000 Hours of Practice

10,000 Hours Of Practice May Not Be Enough | Axon Sports

			10,000 Hours Of Practice May Not Be Enough | Axon Sports The 10,000 hour theory has become the American dream for developing athletes. Just work hard enough and your gold medal, Hall of Fame, championshi...
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The average teacher explains complexity; the gifted teacher reveals simplicity. -- Robert Brault

The 10,000 hour theory has become the American dream for developing athletes.  Just work hard enough and your gold medal, Hall of Fame, championship ambitions can come true.  It is achievable, measurable and finite. However, many athletes never quite cross the 10,000 hour finish line, and have used the scapegoat reason, "I just didn't have enough time to commit to the sport."  Now, recent research suggests that while 10,000 hours of deliberate practice may be necessary to achieve world-class status, it may not be the only ingredient to success. (10,000 hour theory was not wrong, just over-simplified) Celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, a research paper by Florida State professor K. Anders Ericsson, The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance, has been cited in the scientific press over one thousand times earning its own HOF credentials.  The gist of it is that Ericsson visited a West Berlin music academy and interviewed violin students and their teachers.  First, he asked the students to estimate the number of structured practice hours they had endured up to age 20.  Then, he asked their teachers to divide the class into good, better and best thirds.  The correlation uncovered showed that the best students had accumulated, on average, over 10,000 hours of practice while the middle group was at about 8,000 hours and the bottom group had not reached 5,000 hours. After checking this relationship within other groups of skilled experts, Ericsson found similar patterns of 10,000 hours of practice and concluded that innate talent or "what we're born with" had little to do with becoming an expert in any field, even sports.  With that declaration, the dream (and the practice odometer) was launched. However, since that landmark 1993 paper, other researchers have been finding exceptions to the rule; some experts were crowned with only 3,000 hours of practice while others still had not reached the mountaintop even though they had doubled the 10,000 hour mark. David Hambrick, associate professor of psychology at Michigan State, has been searching for the other necessary ingredients for several years.  In 2011, he and his colleague Elizabeth J. Meinz found that deliberate practice among pianists did account for almost half of the variance between experts and novices.  But in their quest to find out what else mattered to make up the other 50% of variance, they found that working memory capacity, the ability to remember a set of objects while engaged in another task, was also a significant determinant of success. This month, Hambrick and his team released new research that looked at 14 different studies of chess and music students to find other clues to expertise.  Again, they were convinced that deliberate practice alone was not enough. "The evidence is quite clear," he writes, "that some people do reach an elite level of performance without copious practice, while other people fail to do so despite copious practice." It's not just any old "practice" , but deliberate practice that makes the difference. Smart teachers adjust the old saying "practice makes perfect" into "practice makes permanent" or "perfect practice makes perfect." Indeed, practicing a skill wrong will make a person better at doing it wrong.  Practice must be designed with quality in mind, as opposed to quantity. Two great repetitions will cause an improvement; 102 bad repetitions will not. --- Across those chess and music studies, they found that practice explained about one third of the journey to being world class.   --- One new factor that did emerge was starting at a young age.  Logically, someone who started training at age 7 versus 12 would have five more years of practice, but Hambrick found that even when total hours of practice were comparable, the student that started at an earlier age became more accomplished.  "This evidence suggests that there may be a critical period for acquiring complex skills just as there may be for acquiring language," he concluded. --- Overall intelligence did make a difference, at least for these chess and music students.  Those students with a higher tested IQ, including working memory capacity, were also more likely to end up being experts. --- Finally, grit, a determined attitude to succeed, also played a role in creating success.  The term has been made famous by Paul Tough in his book How Children Succeed, based on the research of psychologist Angela Duckworth (see TED talk below).  The desire and passion to get better drives the willingness to spend so many hours practicing a skill. So, what does all of this mean for the aspiring superstar?  -- That practice, as much as possible, is still a necessary evil to getting better at a sport.  However, it also confirms that different athletes have different qualities and progress through their journey at different paces.  -- They may need some guidance based on their individual strengths that will help them find the right sport. "If people are given an accurate assessment of their abilities and the likelihood of achieving certain goals given those abilities," Hambrick predicted, "they may gravitate toward domains in which they have a realistic chance of becoming an expert through deliberate practice."

I feel gritty...

Interesting Test.

https://sasupenn.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_06f6QSOS2pZW9qR

Your grit score is: 3.88

You are grittier than at least 70% of the US population.

Sports Are 80 Percent Mental: Coaches Should Reward The Effort More Than The Skill

This articles (below) have an awful lot of Carol Dweck and Mindset: The New Psychology for Success and Angela Duckworth's True Grit in them. Perseverance and effort as the keys to success in sports as well as many other life endeavors.

Football coaches verbalize it better with "It's not how many times you get knocked down, it's how many times you get back up". Of course, in football they spend a lot of time knocking each other down, so that makes sense from a coaching / motivational perspective. 

But think about baseball. 

Not a lot of time spent getting physically knocked down in baseball. Unless you're the high school version of Barry Bonds watching your moon shots leave the yard. Then maybe getting some extra dirt in your diet.  

But think about the mental aspect of the game or your life outside the game. How many times do we mentally or emotionally get knocked down and stay down rather than bounce right back up? Or check out and stop playing hard, so to speak, for innings or games or days or weeks on end? Oh yeah right, I'm the only one this happens to!! OK folks!!

There is so much valuable wisdom for athletes, students, teachers, parents and coaches tied up in some of the quotes below that they do bear repeating.  Definitely something to work on. 

Those life lessons from the ball field, you gotta love 'em!! Now, if we could just stop giving everyone in T-Ball a trophy, we might just have a chance to turn things around a bit.  


from 80percentmental.com:
Sports Are 80 Percent Mental: Coaches Should Reward The Effort More Than The Skill:

Our youth sports culture is similar to the classroom.  Kids who are divided into “A” or “B” teams at an early age are taught that their development path is set; the skills they have now are the same skills they will have in the future.  It becomes a self-fulfilling cycle as the “A” teams get better coaching, play in the better leagues against better competition and the talent gap widens.

 Often, parents can also, unknowingly, contribute to this cycle.  As in school, when a child is told that his or her success is due to his brain not his effort, the perception begins that when they do eventually struggle with a math test or a tougher opponent, there is little they can do to improve.

Jin Li, a psychology professor at Brown University, has also been studying cultural differences in learning and teaching.  One of her research projects recorded conversations between parents and children to hear the language used.  

 There were subtle differences between American and Asian parents when complimenting their kids.  While the Americans praised with phrases like, “you’re so smart”, Asian parents focused on the struggle, “you’ve worked so hard on learning that and now you did it.”

 “So the focus is on the process of persisting through it despite the challenges, not giving up, and that’s what leads to success,” Li said in the same NPR interview.

 Every young athlete will face challenges as they move up the ladder from youth clubs to high school to college.  Instilling them with the belief that they can improve through hard work will keep them motivated to get to the other side of the wall.  Their support team of parents and coaches can help this process by rewarding the learning process.

“Think about that [kind of behavior] spread over a lifetime,” Stigler concluded. “That’s a big difference.”

'via Blog this'

Why Boosting Perseverance Predicts Success More than a Harvard Degree

Posted: June 25th, 2010 by Michele Borba

http://www.micheleborba.com/blog/2010/06/25/why-perseverance-counts-more-than-a-harvard-degree-focus-on-what-really-matters-mom/

Did you know that more top CEOs in United States graduated from a state college than an Ivy League University such as Harvard, Yale, or Princeton?

Shocked?

Research is showing there’s a far more important predictor of a grad’s future success than the prestige of the school or faculty or even the price of tuition. What matters far more is the  graduate’s “personal drive quotient.”

Nothing beats stick-to-it-ness and hard work when it comes to boosting success-absolutely nothing. And research continues to confirm that crucial fact.

 One of the most fascinating recent studies on student achievement was conducted by Harold Stevenson, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. Stevenson sought to answer a question many Americans ask, “Why do Asian students do better academically than American students?”

Since 1979, Stevenson’s team of researchers conducted five intensive cross-national studies analyzing students’ achievement in the United States, China, Taiwan, and Japan. Hundreds of hours observing students and interviewing their teachers, the researchers reached a conclusion: a critical key lies in what parents emphasize about their children’s learning. Here’s the difference in parenting styles:

Asian parents strongly stress the value of effort with their children.  Over and again they tell their children, “Work as hard as you can, and you will be successful.” By expecting their children to work hard, and emphasizing the attitude: “there are no excuses for poor grades, you just didn’t work hard enough,” perseverance is nurtured in Asian children. And the parental expectations had a remarkable effect on their children. The researchers found on the whole, Asian children worker longer and harder than their American counterparts because they had recognized their success was based on how hard they worked.

Instead of prioritizing how much effort our kids put into their learning attempts, research found that most American parents emphasized: “So what grade did you get?” or “How many did you miss?” or “Did you win?”

The researchers also found that the effort a child put into their process is not nearly as important to the American parent as the end product of the grade or score.

Stevenson also found American parents place a greater emphasis on their children’s innate abilities. They tend to lower their academic expectations for their children if they perceive them to have lower academic abilities.

An Asian parents’ philosophy is different: any child can succeed regardless of an IQ score or handicap–success is all a matter of how hard you are willing to work.

Just think a minute of the long term effect of stressing effort could have on our children!

Our kids would learn from an early age that there’s nothing that can stop them from succeeding if they put their heart and soul into their endeavors. They would see mistakes or failures as just temporary setbacks, instead of as excuses to quit. If they just keep on trying, and use their mistakes as learning clues, they’ll ultimately achieve their goals!

True Grit - Angela Duckworth

Great work by Angela Duckworth demonstrating the link between perseverance and success. This trait correlates well to success across many different arenas. Who would have thunk it? Score one for the old-schoolers.

From ironshrink.com:
True Grit | Iron Shrink: "But Duckworth et al. noticed that none of the Big Five predict success very accurately. Nor does intelligence, by itself. At least one study cited by the authors suggests that any single Big Five personality trait accounts for less than 2% of variance in achievement. Intelligence only accounts for up to one third of the variance in some measures of success."

Something is conspicuously absent from the Big Five. Duckworth and company wondered, as did William James a century earlier, “why do some individuals accomplish more than others of equal intelligence?” Being the intrepid researchers that they are, they began to ask around:

“Our hypothesis that grit is essential to high achievement evolved during interviews with professionals in investment banking, painting, journalism, academia, medicine, and law. Asked what quality distinguishes star performers in their respective fields, these individuals cited grit or a close synonym as often as talent. In fact, many were awed by the achievements of peers who did not at first seem as gifted as others abut whose sustained commitment to their ambitions was exceptional. Likewise, many noted with surprise that prodigiously gifted peers did not end up in the upper echelons of their fields.”

In other words, some people simply work harder than others, but that’s not all. They do it in a particular way.

Long-term goals: Grit involves more than a solid work ethic and self-discipline. Hard work by itself is not enough to secure the type of success created by long-term, sustained effort. Back in my loading dock days, I worked very hard and gained no more reward in that environment than guys who did far less. One of the secrets of grit, according to the authors, is passion for long-term goals.

“Grit entails working strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress. The gritty individual approaches achievement as a marathon; his or her advantage is stamina. Whereas disappointment or boredom signals to others that it is time to change trajectory or cut losses, the gritty individual stays the course.”

Commitment: Self-control is not enough, either. In fact, it’s a poor predictor of success in long-term goals.

“An individual high in self-control but moderate in grit may, for example, effectively control his or her temper, stick to his or her diet, and resist the urge to surf the Internet at work – yet switch careers annually.”

Determination: Even the need for achievement is not enough. In fact, the need for recognition can be a hindrance in long-term success. The gritty individual stays the course even when times are tough.

“Whereas individuals high in need for achievement pursue goals that are neither too easy nor too hard, individuals high in grit deliberately set for themselves extremely long-term objectives and do not swerve from them – even in the absence of positive feedback.”

I think I can, I know I can

The gritty individual sets long term goals, does not waver from them, and is able to ride out the rough patches – even when it means tolerating punishment or foregoing reward for long periods. The authors noticed that grit was a better predictor of first summer retention at West Point then was self-control or the Admission Committee’s prediction of the cadet’s abilities. (Self-control was a better predictor of later academic performance, though.)

Among spelling bee contestants, “gritty finalists outperformed their less gritty peers at least in part because they studied longer. Specifically, weekend hours of practice mediated the relationship between grit and final round.” The pertinacious progenture were clearly more distingue and perspicacious.

If the benefits of grit aren’t obvious by now, the authors spell it out: “among relatively intelligent individuals, those who are less bright than their peers compensate by working harder and with more determination.” It’s these gritty individuals who eventually win the day and achieve their goals. More often than not, great leaps forward are achieved through sustained effort rather than a solid but meandering work ethic. Just ask Winston Churchill.

Hope for guys like me

I love the underdog. Heck, I was the underdog. As a fetus, I lacked the foresight to be born rich or good looking and, like many kids, I had a few legitimate challenges to overcome. The beauty of this study is that it sheds light on one of the great equalizers on an unfair planet. This study offers hope for guys like me.

No matter how we enter the world, perseverance and determination can carry us farther than our talents alone. Sometimes, the rewards of grit can even show up quickly, as they did among undergraduates at an elite university who “scored higher in grit [and] earned higher GPAs than their peers, despite having lower SAT scores.” While the authors did not state it outright, I suspect that sustained effort helps a person develop a level of skill that they would not otherwise possess.

Another beautiful thing about grit: it’s free, and anybody can do it. In one of the six sub-studies comprising this paper, the authors noticed that grit tends to increase automatically with age. Apparently, experience teaches us that “quitting plans, shifting goals, and starting over repeatedly are not good strategies for success.” If we tend to learn that lesson intuitively, then there is no reason a person cannot choose to plot a long-term course and stick to it.

---
FROM WIKIPEDIA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grit_(personality_trait)

Grit is defined as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.” [2] Building upon biographical collections of famous leaders in history, researchers and scientists have reached similar conclusions about high achieving individuals. Specifically, those individuals who were deemed more successful and influential than their contemporary counterparts typically possessed traits above and beyond that of normal ability.[3][4][5] While ability was still critically important, these individuals also possessed “zeal” and “persistence of motive and effort.”[2] Duckworth and colleagues (2007) believe this dual-component of Grit to be a crucial differentiator from similar constructs. Grit is conceptualized as a stable trait that does not require immediate positive feedback.[2] Individuals high in Grit are able to maintain their determination and motivation over long periods of time despite experiences with failure and adversity. Their passion and commitment towards the long-term objective is the overriding factor that provides the stamina required to “stay the course” amid challenges and set-backs. Essentially, the Grittier person is focused on winning the marathon, not the sprint.

From Positive Psychology News:
http://positivepsychologynews.com/news/emiliya-zhivotovskaya/200902211582

Grit


Grit is defined as perseverance and passion toward long-term goals (Duckworth et al. 2006). Gritty people tend to persevere, self-regulate and push themselves toward success. Drs. Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman (2006) found that the correlation between self-discipline and achievement was twice as large as the correlation between IQ and achievement.

Additional research suggests that people with grit:

report experiencing more happiness than those who are less gritty, even when controlling for age and education;
earn higher GPAs than their non-gritty classmates, even with lower SATs scores;
are more likely to outperform in spelling bee contests, regardless of verbal IQ.

The article links some of Duckworth's conclusions with those of Carol Dweck (another favorite).

Fixed Mindset People Do Not Love Effort

This is a difficult message for people to embrace who believe in fixed intelligence or proclivity for success. That belief is what Dr. Carol Dweck refers to as fixed mindset. Those in a fixed mindset tend to believe that effort is a bad thing, if they have what it takes to be smart, gifted or talented by nature than they should not need much effort. This type of belief decreases the motivation to work towards long term goals.

Interestingly, according to Dweck, simply learning about fixed mindset causes changes in people’s belief systems. They are more likely to accept a growth mindset- or the belief that effort, embracing challenges and seeking out learning opportunities is a stronger predictor of success. This encourages developing a grittier perspective, contributing to wanting to put more effort and time in.

A few years ago I completed the NYC half-marathon. This was a stretch goal. I had never ran more than 4 miles in my life. It took grit to get to the race and even more to complete it. Nevertheless, afterward I felt so proud and the positive emotions were self-reinforcing.

The mantra of the Army is, “Be all that you can be.” Grit, perseverance and self-regulation towards long term goals can make that happen.