Grit (31 page)

In deciding between an immediately lucrative career and graduate school, Cody did some hard thinking about how he’d gotten to where he was. Next fall, he’ll begin a PhD program in computer science at Stanford. Here’s the first sentence from his application essay: “My mission is to utilize my passion for computer science and machine learning to benefit society at large, while serving as an example of success that will shape the future of our society.”

So, Cody Coleman did not have a psychologically wise mother, father, or grandparent. I wish he had. What he
did
have was a brother who said the right thing at the right time, an extraordinarily wise and wonderful high school math teacher, and an ecosystem of other teachers, mentors, and fellow students who collectively showed him what’s possible and helped him to get there.

Chantel refuses to take credit for Cody’s success. “The truth is that Cody has touched my life more than I’ve touched his. He’s taught me that nothing is impossible and no goal is beyond reach. He’s one of the kindest human beings I have ever met, and I couldn’t be prouder when he calls me ‘Mom.’ ”

A local radio station recently interviewed Cody. Toward the end of the conversation, Cody was asked what he had to say to listeners struggling to overcome similar life circumstances. “
Stay positive,” Cody said. “Go past those negative beliefs in what’s possible and impossible and just give it a try.”

Cody had these final words: “You don’t need to be a parent to make a difference in someone’s life. If you just care about them and get to know what’s going on, you can make an impact. Try to understand what’s going on in their life and help them through that. That’s something I experienced firsthand. It made the difference.”

I
. When I hear that, I sometimes interrupt with a précis of Steve Maier’s research showing that, in fact, finding a way
out
of the suffering is what does the strengthening.

Chapter 11

THE PLAYING FIELDS OF GRIT

One day, when she was about four years old, my daughter Lucy sat at the kitchen table, struggling to open a little box of raisins. She was hungry. She wanted those raisins. But the top of that box stubbornly resisted her efforts. After a minute or so, she put down the unopened box with a sigh and wandered off. I was watching from another room, and I nearly gasped.
Oh god, my daughter has been defeated by a box of raisins! What are the odds she’ll grow up to have any grit?

I rushed over and encouraged Lucy to try again. I did my best to be both supportive and demanding. Nevertheless, she refused.

Not long after, I found a ballet studio around the corner and signed her up.

Like a lot of parents, I had a strong intuition that grit is enhanced by doing activities like ballet . . . or piano . . . or football . . . or really any structured extracurricular activity. These activities possess two important features that are hard to replicate in any other setting. First, there’s an adult in charge—ideally, a supportive and demanding one—who is
not
the parent. Second, these pursuits are
designed
to cultivate interest, practice, purpose, and hope. The ballet studio, the recital
hall, the dojo, the basketball court, the gridiron—these are the playing fields of grit.

The evidence on extracurricular activities is incomplete. I cannot point to a single study in which kids have been randomly assigned to play a sport or musical instrument, compete on the debate team, hold an after-school job, or work on the school newspaper. If you think about it for a moment, you’ll realize why. No parent wants to volunteer their kids to do things (or not) by the flip of a coin, and for ethical reasons, no scientist can really force kids to stay in (or out) of activities.

Nevertheless, as a parent and as a social scientist, I would recommend that, as soon as your child is old enough, you find something they might enjoy doing
outside of class
and sign them up. In fact, if I could wave a magic wand, I’d have all the children in the world engage in at least one extracurricular activity of their choice, and as for those in high school, I’d require that they stick with at least one activity for more than a year.

Do I think every moment of a child’s day should be scripted? Not at all. But I do think kids thrive when they spend at least some part of their week doing hard things that interest them.

Like I said, the evidence for such a bold recommendation is incomplete. But the research that
has
been done is, in my view, highly suggestive. Put it all together, and you have a compelling case for kids learning grit at the elbow of a wise ballet instructor, football coach, or violin teacher.

For starters, a few researchers have equipped kids with beepers so that, throughout the day, they can be prompted to report on what they’re doing and how they feel at that very moment. When kids are
in class, they report feeling challenged—but especially unmotivated. Hanging out with friends, in contrast, is not very challenging but super fun. And what about extracurricular activities? When kids are playing sports or music or rehearsing for the school play, they’re
both
challenged and having fun. There’s no other experience in the lives of young people that reliably provides this combination of challenge and intrinsic motivation.

The bottom line of this research is this: School’s hard, but for many kids it’s not intrinsically interesting. Texting your friends is interesting, but it’s not hard. But ballet? Ballet can be both.

In-the-moment experience is one thing, but what about long-term benefits? Do extracurriculars pay off in any measurable way?

There are countless research studies showing that kids who are more
involved in extracurriculars fare better on just about every conceivable metric—they earn better grades, have higher self-esteem, are less likely to get in trouble and so forth. A handful of these studies are longitudinal, meaning that researchers waited to see what happened to kids later in life. These longer-term studies come to the same conclusion: more participation in activities
predicts better outcomes.

The same research clearly indicates that
overdosing
on extracurriculars is pretty rare. These days, the average American teenager reports spending more than three hours a day watching television and
playing video games. Additional time is drained away checking social media feeds, texting friends links to cat videos, and tracking the Kardashians as they figure out which outfit to wear—which makes it hard to argue that time can’t be spared for the chess club or the school play, or just about any other structured, skill-focused, adult-guided activity.

But what about grit? What about accomplishing something that takes years, as opposed to months, of work? If grit is about sticking
with a goal for the long-term, and if extracurricular activities are a way of practicing grit, it stands to reason that they’re especially beneficial when we do them
for more than a year
.

In fact, lessons learned while working to improve from one season to the next come up repeatedly in my interviews with paragons of grit.

Here’s an example: After a lackluster passing season his junior year of high school football, future NFL Hall of Famer Steve Young went down to the high school woodshop and fashioned a wooden football with tape for laces. In one end, he screwed in an eye hook and used that to latch the football to a weight machine in the high school gym. Then, gripping the ball, he’d move it back and forth in a passing motion, the added resistance developing his forearms and shoulders. His passing yardage doubled the next year.

Even more convincing evidence for the benefits of long-term extracurricular activities comes from a study conducted by psychologist Margo Gardner. Margo and her collaborators at Columbia University followed eleven thousand American teenagers until they were twenty-six years old to see what effect, if any, participating in high school extracurriculars for two years, as opposed to just one, might have on
success in adulthood.

Here’s what Margo found: kids who spend more than a year in extracurriculars are significantly more likely to graduate from college and, as young adults, to volunteer in their communities. The hours per week kids devote to extracurriculars also predict having a job (as opposed to being unemployed as a young adult) and earning more money, but
only
for kids who participate in activities for two years rather than one.

One of the first scientists to study the importance of following through with extracurricular activities—as opposed to just dabbling—was Warren Willingham.

In 1978,
Willingham was the director of the Personal Qualities
Project. Even today, this study remains the most ambitious attempt ever to identify the determinants of success in young adulthood.

The project was funded by the Educational Testing Service. ETS, as it’s more commonly called, occupies a sprawling campus in Princeton, New Jersey, and employs more than a thousand statisticians, psychologists, and other scientists—all devoted to the development of tests that predict achievement in school and the workplace. If you’ve taken the SAT, you’ve taken an ETS test. Ditto for the GRE, TOEFL, Praxis, and any one of three dozen advanced placement exams. Basically, ETS is to standardized testing what Kleenex is to tissues: Sure, there are other organizations that make standardized tests, but most of us are hard-pressed to think of their names.

So, what motivated ETS to look
beyond standardized tests?

Better than anyone, Willingham and other scientists at ETS knew that, together, high school grades and test scores did only a half-decent job of predicting success later in life. It’s very often the case that two kids with identical grades and test scores will end up faring very differently later in life. The simple question Willingham set out to answer was
What other personal qualities matter?

To find out, Willingham’s team followed several thousand students for five years, beginning in their senior year of high school.

At the start of the study, college application materials, questionnaires, writing samples, interviews, and school records were collected for each student. This information was used to produce numerical ratings for
more than one hundred
different personal characteristics. These included family background variables, like parent occupation and socioeconomic status, as well as self-declared career interests, motivation for a college degree, educational goals, and many more.

Then, as the students progressed through college, objective measures of success were collected across three broad categories: First, did the student distinguish him or herself academically? Next, as a young adult, did this individual demonstrate leadership? And, finally,
to what extent could these young men and women point to a significant accomplishment in science and technology, the arts, sports, writing and speaking, entrepreneurism, or community service?

In a sense, the Personal Qualities Project was a horse race. Each of the hundred-plus measures at the start of the study could have ended up as the strongest predictor of later success. It’s clear from reading the first report, completed several years before the final data were collected, that Willingham was entirely dispassionate on the issue. He methodically described each variable, its rationale for being included, how it was measured, and so on.

But when all the data were finally in, Willingham was unequivocal and emphatic about what he’d learned. One horse did win, and by a long stretch:
follow-through
.

This is how Willingham and his team put a number on it: “The follow-through rating involved evidence of
purposeful, continuous commitment to certain types of activities (in high school) versus sporadic efforts in diverse areas.”

Students who earned a top follow-through rating participated in two different high school extracurricular activities for several years each and, in both of those activities, advanced significantly in some way (e.g., becoming editor of the newspaper, winning MVP for the volleyball team, winning a prize for artwork). As an example, Willingham described a student who was “on his school newspaper staff for three years and became managing editor, and was on the track team for three years and ended up
winning an important meet.”

In contrast, students who hadn’t participated in a single multiyear activity earned the lowest possible follow-through rating. Some students in this category didn’t participate in any activities at all in high school. But many, many others were simply itinerant, joining a club or team one year but then, the following year, moving on to something entirely different.

The predictive power of follow-through was striking: After controlling
for high school grades and SAT scores, follow-through in high school extracurriculars predicted graduating from college with academic honors better than any variable. Likewise, follow-through was the single best predictor of holding an appointed or elected leadership position in young adulthood. And, finally, better than any of the more than one hundred personal characteristics Willingham had measured, follow-through predicted notable accomplishments for a young adult in all domains, from the arts and writing to entrepreneurism and community service.