I have already known that life doesn't end in the four corners of the classroom. Back when I was this rebellious teenager, I used to say that School is not my life. Life is my school. But apparently, how well you do in school contributes to 20% of your success in life. The remaining determinants to success fall on your performance in the work place, your determination and your choices.


I am not that intelligent. I am aware that we have this thing called multiple intelligence and I used to consider myself as intelligent in the field of arts but apparently right now, I dunno. I think I am already below average on that aspect of life. My IQ, as what the online tests suggest, range from average to above average.

I did not perform well in college. I am fully aware of that, since I didn't want to become a nurse in the first place, I am not really called for this profession. Well now I'm here and there's nothing I can do. I might as well deal with it and face it.

I have learned to give up my dream to become a painter the hard way. I spent a year of my college life without a dream, without knowing what I wanna do with my life after I graduate. After a year of feeling like a walking zombie, I finally put myself together and developed a new dream. I wanna become a website developer. That is what I wanna study next.


I have transcribed the discussion into words originally for my own reference. If you want to read it too, please feel free to do so.

When I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding: teaching. I went to teach seventh graders Math in the New York City public schools. And like any teacher, I made quizzes and tests. I gave out homework assignments. When the work came back, I calculated grades. In education, the one thing we know how to measure best is I.Q., but what if doing well in school and in life depends on much more than your ability to learn quickly and easily?

So I left the classroom, and I went to graduate school to become a psychologist. I started studying kids and adults in all kinds of super challenging settings, and in every study my question was: who is successful here and why?

My research team and I went to West Port Military Academy. We tried to predict which cadets would stay in military training and which would drop out.

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

We studied rookie teachers working in really tough neighborhoods, asking which teachers are still going to be here in teaching by the end of the school year, and of those, who will be the most effective at improving learning outcomes for their students?

We partnered with private companies, asking, which of these salespeople is going to keep their jobs? And who's gonna earn the most money?

In all those very different contexts, one characteristic emerged, as a significant predictor of success. And it wasn't social intelligence. It wasn't good looks, physical health, and it wasn't I.Q.

It was grit.

Girt is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals.

Grit is having stamina.

Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the weeks, not just for the month, but for years, and working really hard to make that future a reality.

Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint.

A few years ago, I started studying grit in the Chicago public schools. I asked thousands of high school juniors to take grit questionnaires, and then waited around for more than a year to see who would graduate.

Turns out that grittier kids were significantly more likely to graduate, even when I matched them on every characteristic I could measure. Things like family income, standardized achievement test scores, even how safe kids felt when they were at school. So it's not just at West Point or the National Spelling Bee that grit matters. It's also in school, especially for kids at risk for dropping out.

To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows, about building it. Everyday, parents and teachers ask me,

"How do I build grit in kids? What do I do to to teach kids a solid work ethic? How do I keep them motivated for the long run?"

The honest answer is, I don't know.

What I do know is that talent doesn't make you gritty. Our data shows very clearly that there are many talented individuals who simply do not follow through on their commitments. In fact, in our data, grit is usually unrelated or even inversely related to measures of talent.

So far, the best idea I've heard about building grit in kids is something called "growth mindset." This is an idea developed at Stanford University by Carol Dweck, and it is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed, that it can change with your effort.

Dr. Dweck has shown that when kids read and learn about the brain and how it changes and grows in response to challenge, they're much more likely to persevere when they fail, because they don't believe that failure is a permanent condition.

So growth mindset is a great idea for building grit. But we need more.

And that's when I'm gonna end my remarks because that's where we are. That's the work that stands before us. We need to take our best ideas, our strongest intuitions, and we need to test them. We need to measure whether we've been successful, and we have to be willing to fail, to be wrong, to start over again with lessons learned.

In other words, we need to be gritty about getting our kids grittier. Thank you.