I'm Angela Duckworth, I'm an associate professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and a 2013 MacArthur Fellow. Before I was a psychologist, I was a classroom teacher and I would work with students of all different ability levels. And one thing that just struck me very clearly really from day one of teaching, is that what kids were being asked to do, was in one sense very hard for them. Certainly, felt that way. Doing anything that you can't do feels impossible even. And from my perspective, however, as their teacher, I knew with full confidence that in almost every case, they could master what was in front of them even if it didn't feel that way. In other words, it was very hard in some sense and yet not very hard. That led me to think that when kids fail to learn the things that they're being asked to learn, fail to perform in ways that we expect them to, it's often a failure of something other than intellectual ability. In other words, it's not always IQ that puts a ceiling on what kids can do. This then, led me to study grit and self-control. Two of the very important determinants of how much effort kids can cumulatively put to tasks like learning, studying and so forth. That's what our lab studies. We're interested in what determines effort because effort is so important to learning. I'm a mom of an 11-year-old and a 13-year-old. And when people say, "Well, why do you think that only grit and self-control are important?" I think immediately of my own kids. And the answer is, "I don't." I would like my two girls to grow up to be honest people. I would really like them to be generous and kind, sympathetic, good listeners. So our lab has a primary focus on two of the many characters ranks that there are. Character is something that most people have a good sense about what it is, but it's actually hard to define precisely. Here's my definition. When I think of character, I think of ways that children and grownups think about things, feel about things and actually do things in ways that are beneficial both to themselves and also to the people around them. So one could say, "Character is the way you are in the world." But particularly, "The way you are when it benefits yourself and it benefits other people.". There's a controversy always about whether schools and teachers step too far into the personal lives of children and families when they talk about teaching character. My personal view is that, it's always been part of the educational mission to teach kids right from wrong, to teach them how to be self-control, to teach them how to work hard on things. So for me, I see less controversy and more consensus. It's important that kids need us to help them learn those character skills. They're not things that would just completely on their own develop without any instruction, modeling, and encouragement. I'm often asked the question, is grit hard wired or can you learn it? And I say, "Yes." Because grit, and self-control, and generosity, and even honesty, these things where we might have an intuition that it's going to be one or the other. In fact, the scientific evidence is very clear. Everything that we care about as psychologists, are both partly influenced by our genes which, of course, you can't do anything about at this point. But also, about our experience not only the experiences in the home, but also outside of the home. So I believe that character is genetically influenced by whatever DNA kids got handed to them. But it's also within the power of themselves and their loved ones to grow, to cultivate. Very recently, we've been partnering with other psychologists to expand a little bit beyond our specialty. We're exploring for example, gratitude with a psychologist named Bob Emins. That's one thing I hope my kids develop and they're already pretty well down that path, I'm happy to say. We're looking at pro-social purpose, a sense of meaningful service to things that are beyond the self. And we're doing that work with a psychologist at Stanford named Bill Damen. And the third departure from just grit and self-control for our lab, is curiosity. And we're looking at that with a judgment and decision making expert named John Baron. One of the reasons why there's such an interest in character and education these days is that, many of us have an intuition that the character that children develop while they're still in school, is something that they carry with them and that importantly, helps them navigate the world beyond school. In many ways, school is a preparation for adult life. And so, character is one of those things that we think equip kids to deal with all the ups and downs that every adult can tell you that they're certainly faced with. There's a lot of evidence that suggests that competencies that children develop and show in childhood do predict outcomes. Probably the best developed research on this is on self-control. So children for example, who are able to delay gratification at age four, who when for example, given the choice between two marshmallows later, or one marshmallow right away, the ability to wait for that better but delayed reward at age four years, is a predictor of adolescent well-being, SAT scores, other standardized test scores, high school GPA, not drinking and smoking underaged, having a healthy body weight. And then, if you look longitudinally beyond that in samples that extend into adulthood, that ability to control yourself and to wait for things even though it doesn't feel good at the moment, predicts not going to jail, having a job versus not having a job, more formal education and so forth. So there's lots of evidence suggest that character as it's developed and expressed early in life, is important for outcomes much later.
