If Books Could Kill - Grit

Episode Date: April 30, 2026

In 2013, education reformers tried to help poor students the using the best tool at their disposal: The 16th most popular Ted Talk.Special thanks to Marcus Credé! Where to find us: Our PatreonOur merch!Peter's newsletterPeter's other podcast, 5-4Mike's other podcast, Maintenance PhaseSources:Much Ado About GritWhat Shall We Do About Grit?Grit under attackTeaching “Grit”The Problem With GritThe Limits of “Grit”Grit: The power of passion and perseveranceIs 'Grit' Doomed To Be The New Self-Esteem?Measurement MattersUsing Psychological Science to Help Children ThriveSelf-Control and Academic AchievementCognitive and noncognitive predictors of successShould non-cognitive skills be included in school accountability systems?Measuring Students’ Non-Cognitive Skills and the Impact of SchoolingGrit: A Short History of a Useful ConceptTeaching Kids 'Grit' is All the Rage."Grit" RevisitedCharacter Education: A Cautionary NoteWhat if the Secret to Success Is Failure?The Effects of the EITC on Child AchievementAcademic Performance And Food StampsThanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

All right. I have, I'm not kidding when I say I know nothing about this book and I've never heard of it once in my life. That's good. You're going in fresh. It's called grit. I'm going to assume this is about the grit as like a personal characteristic, right? It's like grit, the power of persevering or something. Yeah, literally, Peter. What is that? It's literally grit, colon, the power of passion and perseverance. Dude, I'm so fucking good. Now I, I, I've done the show for too long. Oh my God. Brozah, you're not going to do the obvious zinger? What's the obvious singer?

Isn't the title missing an F? What? Grift. Oh, my, I'm so stupid. I was like, what the fuck's for grit? I think you'd be all over that. All right, let's just go. Yeah, yeah, okay.

Peter. Michael. What do you know about grit? All I know is that that title is one F short of being accurate. So the full title of this book is Grit, colon, the power of passion and perseverance by Angela Duckworth. And we will not be talking about it for at least 45 minutes. Because first you're going to talk about the history of grit, the history of grittiness.

Well, we do actually have to talk about the history of the concept because this episode is really about the rise and fall of an idea. It's also less of a if books could kill episode and more of a if TED Talks could kill episode. Okay. Angela Duckworth, the person who writes the book, is extremely influential. in education policy circles. So her work has been cited 80,000 times. She has the 16th most viewed TED Talk of all time. That's pretty cool, although I bet that, like, number 15 is just like a guy who fell into a tractor and survived or something.

And after the TED Talk comes out, this is a massive idea in, like, education reform circles. So they're talking about giving kids grit report cards in schools at a certain point. There are numerous schools that are holding grit reform circles. Britt pep rallies. Yeah, I got Fs in math, science, reading, but B plus and grit, baby. So because we're going to kind of do this chronologically, and she is so central to the rise and fall of this idea, we have to go through her biography. So Angela Duckworth is born in 1970 to Chinese immigrant parents in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, Peter, neighbor. Not really, but I know it.

She gets a BA in neurobiology from Harvard. She gets her master's from Oxford. After she finishes graduate school, she kind of bounces around. She's an intern in the White House speech writing department. She eventually lands at McKinsey as a management consultant. It's so funny to have a resume that's like you're at like the top schools in the world. You're getting fucking genius grants or whatever and running around doing outstanding. And then you just slither your way into McKinsey at the end.

She did literally get a genius. grant in 2013. This is like... Oh, like the MacArthur Grant. Yeah, the actual official genius grant. She got one. Yes. I'm like foreseeing this episode in a weird way. It's Chekhov's, it's Chekhov's McKinsey consultant career. So in her late 20, she's 27. She leaves McKinsey, like high salary

McKinsey job to become a public school math teacher in New York City. 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. The alphabet area. And so it's a lot of like poor kids. like non-white kids. It's kids that are really struggling. This is such classic, over-educated person life crisis where they have this big, fancy career, and they're like, no, this is too abstract. I want to go help people. And then she's going to, like, go become a teacher so that she can help kids directly. And then she's like,

I'm not doing enough. I need to do something bigger. And then she's like, I have to give a TED talk about this, right? This is a type of person who teaches for like a year and a half. And then they're like, Well, I'm never doing this again, but I am going to talk about it for the rest of my life. So basically the core insight from her time as a teacher is something I think most of us remember from school is like at the social level, like there's smart kids and there's kind of dumb kids. Like there's kids that get it the first time you explain a concept. And there's kids that like struggle to really grasp it or like never really grasp it, right? But then at the end of the semester, when she's doing the grading, she's like, wait a minute, the smart kids are not the ones getting the best grades, right? There's something different that is motivating the kids who are getting good grades.

Time to isolate the X factor. Exactly. This is like the core insight of her time as a teacher. And she gets really, really interested in this problem. So after four years as a teacher in 2002, she is 32 years old. She joins the psychology grad school at the University of Pennsylvania where she wants to explore this problem. Like, why can't we predict who is going to do well in school? why are grades separate from these kind of cognitive skills or kind of book smarts, right?

So this is an excerpt from a book called How Children Succeed. When she applied to the PhD program at Penn, she wrote in her application essay that her experiences working in schools had given her a distinctly different view of school reform than the one she had started out with in her 20s. The problem, I think, is not only the schools, but also the students themselves, she wrote. Here's why. Learning is hard. True, learning is fun, exhilarating, and gratifying, but it is also often daunting, exhausting, and sometimes discouraging. To help chronically low-performing but intelligent students, educators and parents must first recognize that character is at least as important as intellect. Not just intellect. There's something more going on.

Why do I feel like this leads to like uniforms in schools or something? So in the first few years of her time as a graduate student, she's really interested in this metric of self-control. There's all of these like kind of well established psychological concepts that are good predictors of academic performance. One of them is self-control. It's basically the ability to resist immediate temptation, right? You're working on your laptop and your phone is like next to your laptop and you're like, do I reach for it?

Do I not reach for it? You're having an immediate impulse and you're able to say, ah, no, I'm going to keep working on my homework. Yeah, I will say that is something I do not have at all. I probably shouldn't be talking too much shit this episode. She publishes a couple of studies on self-control. But eventually she lands on this concept of grit. And in 2007, in a paper called grit, perseverance and passion for long-term goals, she defines what it is.

So I'm going to send this to you. It's just the least amount of ADHD. Attention surplus disorder. I love the idea of like you take a type of neurodivergence and then you just sort of like flip it. And instead of talking about children who have the neurodivergence, you talk about how the kids who don't have it rock. Those are the best kids. All right, read it, read, read it. Why do some individuals accomplish more than others of equal intelligence?

In addition to cognitive ability, a list of attributes of high achieving individuals would likely include creativity, vigor, emotional intelligence. I was trying to hobbs it. People are listening to this at 1.5 speed. Glass houses here, all right? Let's settle down. I will not be. I will not be chided for me. We're reading too fast on this podcast.

I'm like, tone it down, Peter. Peter, haven't you ever, haven't you ever fucking podcasted before? You have to go slow. Did you see someone emailed us and said, I'm the only podcaster that she listens to at 0.5 speed? Point five. I was like, first of all, mission accomplished. And then, and now you know what it's like. I talk like you for 10 seconds and you're like, can you chill to fuck out?

Right, go, go. In addition to cognitive ability, a list of attributes of high achieving individuals would likely include creativity, vigor, emotional intelligence, charisma, self-confidence, emotional stability, physical attractiveness, and other positive qualities. A priori, some traits seem more crucial than others for particular vocations. Extraversion may be fundamental to a career in sales, for instance, but irrelevant to a career in creative writing. However, some traits might be essential to success no matter the domain. We suggest that one personal quality is shared by the most prominent leaders in every field. Grit.

We define grit as perseverance and 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 and cut losses, the gritty individual stays the course. I do think it's a real concept, right?

People who are able to stick with something in the long term is something that, like, is a real thing, but I also do not have it. I also think that the types of people that do have it are the airport book readers, right? Yeah, yeah. Because by the time you're picking up your third Gladwell book, what do you think's going to happen? 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? So she has a sample of just kind of a bunch of adults. There's like a web portal that she's set up where people can log on and be like, how gritty are you? She finds it like people who are college graduates are higher in grit than like high school graduates, et cetera.

It's sort of basic descriptive statistics. She also surveys undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania. The only kind of interesting finding of that is that grit is associated with lower SAT scores, indicating that like if you're not as smart, you might compensate for that by being grittier. Maybe that's why I have no grit because I'm so naturally smart. Well, we're about to find out actually for you, Peter, because in, after this kind of basic descriptive study, it's only 15 pages long, she then in 2009, she publishes an article called Development and Validation of the Short Grit Scale, where she proposes a way of measuring this and a way of like tallying it up. And she's also tested it on various populations. So instead of me walking you through it in general, I'm just going to send it to you and we're going to do it together. Okay.

What would you say, okay, just eyeballing. it from what you know about grit. On a scale of one to five, where do you think you fall? I don't want to get too weird with it. I'm going to say three. Three. Okay. I'm going to read the, I'll read the questions and then you tell me what you think and then I have to do the math. Okay. Okay. All right. New ideas and projects sometimes distract me from previous ones. I'm going to say mostly like me. Setbacks don't discourage me. I don't give up easily. I'm going to say somewhat like me. I often set a goal, but later choose to pursue a different one. It's tricky because I don't really set goals at Not applicable.

I'm going to say somewhat again. I am a hard worker. I have some bosses who would strongly disagree, but I'm going to say mostly. I have difficulty maintaining my focus on projects that take more than a few months to complete. I'm not entirely sure that I've ever had a project that took more than a few months to complete. Really? Not in corporate America? You never had like a year-long project or something? The thing about projects that take more than a few months to complete is that they're all fake.

I'm just going to say that this is very, very much like me. Yeah, because that means you're giving up on the first. after a couple months, basically. You wait. At the nine month mark, someone within the corporation who you've never met before and whose name you've never seen will email you being like, hey, would love to touch base on this. And then you have a call with them where you pretend that you've done some stuff, but you're quietly trying to figure out what it is you need to do in the next week.

I've heard enough, Peter. I'm giving you one point on this. I'm giving you very much like me. I agree. I just don't think this is real. I finish whatever I begin. Not much like me. My interests change from year to year.

I feel like this is everyone. I feel like this is a bad question. For some things, it's very true. Yeah. And for other things, it's not at all true. Yeah. I'm just going to go in the middle. I'll go somewhat.

I am diligent. I never give up. I would never even, like, the fact that this doesn't resonate with me at all. I never give up. What are you talking? I make podcasts for a living. You know what I mean? The fact of you like, every question you're like, what?

I have been obsessed with a certain idea or product. for a short time but later lost interest. I'm just, I'm going to pop myself in the middle again. I'm sorry for hedging on everyone, but that's what I'm doing. All right. Last one. I have overcome setbacks to conquer an important challenge. Sure.

If you put a month long or so thing in front of me, I'm like highly capable, like extremely good at that. Like this is why I'm good at like standardized tests or whatever. Because if you want to, if you want someone to do Adderall every day and figure out the LSATs, I'm your man. Right. But you're not like playing the violin or something that takes like years. years and years and years at practice.

Right, right. But yeah, that's like super long-term focus. I'm not entirely sure that I would say that I have that. Right, so you said you're eyeballing at grit score is three. Your official grit score, Peter, is 2.6. So you were pretty close. Now, what's the word for someone who knows their grit score in advance? That's me.

So you may not have caught this, but the grit scale consists of two different measures. There is passion and there is perseverance. When you hear passion, you think that's something that, like, somebody's interested in. Like, I love chess, so I play chess a lot. Right. But that's not actually what she's talking about. Passion here, she's defined as consistency of interest, meaning, do you do the same thing for, like, years and years and years? It's not actually about how interested you are in it.

Perseverance is the ability to push through, like, difficulties or plateaus. It's not just do you do the same thing for many years. So that study comes out in 2009 with the validation of the short grit scale. Again, there's, like, very short descriptions. of six different studies. Some of it is the same samples as the last study. Some of it is new. But it's mostly just kind of descriptive statistics of like, okay, we got this sample and we gave

him the grit score and here's what it's correlated with, right? So like this one's only 10 pages long. You know, these two studies come out. They don't like set the world on fire particularly. But the concept of grit and Angela Duckworth's work specifically are massively popularized in 2012 through another airport book. So this is like a little airport book. Dirk in this episode.

Okay. The overall context of this, the sort of early 2010s, is there is a growing backlash to the No Child Left Behind Act. You remember this, I'm sure. Over the course of the 2000s, there's more and more concerned about like teaching to the test. And this idea that kids are just like fucking doing standardized tests all the time. Right.

Nobody defines education or what you need to be a functioning adult as just like you can regurgitate things on multiple choice tests. It's like, we should have morality and character and you should like know things. And that's not the same thing as standardized tests, right? And so right when Duckworth is doing these studies, the pendulum is swinging away from No Child Left Behind, but it's not clear what it's swinging toward yet. People are like pissed off with standardized tests and stuff, but like they don't really have like a new paradigm that they can apply, right?

This is also the Waiting for Superman era. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Like we will not find solutions in public schools. We need to look outside of them and think creatively. And that's the future. This is the other thing I was just about to mention is like it's also a time of a ton of hype around these no excuses charter schools. And specifically KIP, this thing, knowledge is power program, right?

That do have uniforms and a much more kind of military kind of paradigm. And like every student who gets a B minus is expelled. And then everyone's like, how are those kids performing so well? Yeah, they all go to college. It's like, while we expelled everyone who won't go to college. Yeah. There's tons of hype around like we need this new paradigm and especially around like character education, right? because a lot of what they're doing is like these external markers of like good behavior, right?

It's not just standardized tests. It's also like you need to show up on time. You need to show respect. You have all these kind of like values and character things that you're also being judged on and being like accountable to. Right. So it's like these two things are sort of both brewing at the same time. And so in 2012, we get a book called How Children Succeed, Colan, Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character by a New York Times writer named Paul Tuff. And I'm going to send you the sort of nut graph of the book.

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. 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. 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. Economists refer to these as non-cognitive skills. Psychologists call them personality traits,

and the rest of us sometimes think of them as character. 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? We know that there's like moral character. We know that character matters. There's more than IQ, but like what specifically is it, right? And how to measure it? There's something I haven't pinned that doesn't, that isn't adding up to me here. Maybe it's just the fact that I refuse to believe that that dumb little questionnaire is capable of providing an insight into someone that cuts through all of these different dynamics. I think, I also think you know the premise of this podcast and you know all the foreshadowing that I've given you. It's a little one weird trick.

Yeah. 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. Okay. So I'm sending this to you.

You are about to experience TED Talk royalty. 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 Point 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 going to 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 IQ. It was grit. Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. 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 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 that West Point or the National Spelling Bee that grit matters, it's also in school, especially for kids at risk for dropping out. It's a very convincing case, I think. If you knew nothing else about this, you'd be like, Dan, there's like study after study showing the same thing predict success, right? 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?

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 would disappear if we simply prioritize our focus on grit. And this works for poor kids, right? This could be a really exciting idea to help poor non-white kids in public education. I'm reading the YouTube comments on the grit TED Talk. Oh, yeah, they're all about assignment. Yeah, thumbs up if you're here because of a school assignment, L.O.L. 13,000 thumbs up.

Damn, I didn't know everyone had the same assignment I did 4,000 thumbs up. And then there's one person with fewer thumbs up and says, I'm glad that I'm here not because of an assignment, but because I want to be the best version

of myself. Whatever, you fucking loser, dude. You're here because you had an assignment. I'm here because I want to be a better version of myself. We're not the same. She gives us talk in 2013. This explodes immediately.

She's all of a sudden like a massive academic celebrity. this also gets very quickly taken up by education reformers and like policy. So in 2013, the Department of Education produces a report that emphasizes non-cognitive skills. It's called promoting grit, tenacity, and perseverance critical factors for success in the 21st century. And the number one recommendation, if you read the executive summary, is educators, administrators, policymakers, parents, and researchers should consider how to give priority to grit, tenacity, perseverance in curriculum, teaching practices, professional development, and out-of-school support.

Got to prioritize grit. I'm relatively far into this episode. I don't have the slightest idea of what that would mean. There's a huge wave of white papers. The Economic Policy Institute published one in 2014 called The Need to Address Non-Cognitive Skills in the Education Policy Agenda. 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. Just languish forever. But then someone comes up with like some fucking catchy little idea. And all of a sudden, every fucking economist on earth is like, ooh. This also gets taken up by the Obama administration. So in 2015, they reauthorize. No doubt, dude. No doubt.

The No Child Left Behind Act. And they change the name of it. They change the focus of it. They solve a lot of its problems, basically. It's called the Every Student Succeeds Act. And that includes for school assessment. If you're going to assess like the quality of one school. versus another, states have to include at least one non-academic outcome.

So something like grit, something like something that is not just test scores, right? Okay. And then the following year in 2016, there are eight California districts say that they're also testing non-academic performance. So this is from an NPR article. It says, in a few short weeks, students in California will be taking high-stakes tests. But the test won't just cover math, reading, and science. Students will also be responding to survey statements like, I usually finish what I start,

or I can do anything if I try. A group of big city districts is among the first to try to measure student self-control, empathy, and other social and emotional skills, and to hold schools accountable for the answers. It's important. If a kid says, I can do anything if I try, you have to realize that that kid is dumb as shit. What are you talking about? So as all this hype cycle is happening, there's, you know, schools are starting to implement this idea.

Finally, in 2016, Angela Duckworth releases her book, Grit. Okay. So we're going to spend the next thing. little section of the episode talking about the book. We're probably going to talk less about the book in this episode than like almost any other episode of the show for reasons that will become clear soon. But for now, we are going to start with the introduction. She starts by describing this West Point study. The admissions process for West Point is at least as rigorous as for the most selective universities. Each year in their junior year of high school,

more than 14,000 applicants begin the admissions process. this pool is winnowed to just 4,000 who succeed in getting the required nomination. Slightly more than half of those applicants, about 2,500, meet West Point's rigorous, academic, and physical standards, and from that select group, just 1,200 are admitted and enrolled. Nearly all the men and women who come to West Point were varsity athletes, most were team captains. And yet one in five cadets will drop out before graduation. What's more remarkable is that, historically, a substantial fraction of dropouts leave in their very first summer during an intensive seven-week training program named even an official literature Beast Barracks.

She then describes like how intense this Beast Barracks is. It's kind of classic military thing. You're waking up at five. You're like marching around. You're hoisting flags, et cetera. I guess she's saying that she can predict this, but I am sort of wondering why this is presented as if it's a mystery. For some reason, a large number of people are dropping out from this like hyperintensive program. Like, yeah.

This book is like very gladwillian. She's like, it's actually a fairly like readable book. She's like good at storytelling. Right. She's like really builds us up as like nobody can explain this. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's like it's actually, it's really physically taxing. And people are like, oh, this sucks ass. I'm going to go to a regular college. It's like 16 hours of like pushups a day. Yeah. Yeah. This is cool. I'll go to Rutgers. That's fine. She also talks about how the school itself has created their own bespoke measurement to grade candidates. It's called the whole. candidate score. It's a mixture of your academics, your, like, extracurriculars, your physical fitness. It's this thing that they've come up with to try to predict who is going to drop out. She has this whole kind of yarn about her, like, the head of the school brings her in. And it's like, we're going to give all the kids this, like, grit scale on the second day of school when they're doing all this other, like, personality testing. And then we're going to follow

up with them to find out who drops out. Okay. This is one of the studies included in her 2009 study that we talked about. It says the grit scale predicted completion of the rigorous summer training program better than the whole candidate score. Cadets who scored a standard deviation higher than average on the grit scale were 99% more likely to complete summer training. That's sort of the academic version. I'll send you this from her book. So what matters from making it through beast? Not your SAT scores, not your high school rank, not your leadership experience, not your athletic ability, not your whole candidate score.

what matters is grit. So her little tool predicted who was going to drop out of Beast Barracks. Peter thoughts. Well, this makes sense. There's no need for Beast Barracks at all. Simply give them the grit questionnaire.

Don't go through the formality of doing a bunch of push-ups and getting up early. We already know. You can envision a world where this is correct. Yeah. But I'm just not seeing it.

I just have an ambient skepticism. That's how I'm feeling about this right now. There are so many problems with this study. The first is that she mentions in the text that I had you read. She says one in five cadets will drop out before graduation, which makes you think that Beast Barracks is like really elite and really punitive. And so all of the students are dropping out in Beast Barracks. That's not true. One in five students drop out over the course of the entire four years. In this Beast Barracks, this first seven weeks thing, only six percent of the students are dropping out. So out of a class of 1,200, only 70

dropped out. She said a substantial fraction. Or someone said it. Who said? She said substantial fraction. Okay. So that's not a substantial fraction. All she is trying to do is predict this beast barracks component. 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? Because like 94% of students are completing beast barracks. The other huge problem is that like aren't all of these kids really, really high in grit? Like, these are elite students. Like they're. team captains, like it's she, 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. I'm actually fairly skeptical that like there's actually all that much of a spread among West Point cadets, right? You're looking at people who are like at best high in grit versus very high in grid. 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 super type A. They're not cool, right? I don't know. I don't say that. I think they're very disciplined.

I think these are people who already are very disciplined. No, no. It's not about being disciplined. It's about wanting to lead a life of discipline. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That is close to a mental disorder. The fun part of your life is about to begin unless you do this. It's peter.

shamshiri at gmail.com. to everybody know any correspondence, any complaints about this. I don't see what, if you disagree with me and therefore support the war with Iran, then feel free to speak up. The other problem with the study that she kind of skips over in her TED talk is that grit does not predict overall graduation rate. It only predicts people who complete the first seven weeks of school. Grit does not predict GPA.

It does not predict something called the. military performance score, which is like a more holistic assessment of like leadership potential, et cetera. So the only thing it predicts is do you make it through this first seven weeks? Okay. We're okay. Then we're moving into like statistical anomaly territory here. Well, also speaking of statistical stuff, Peter, she's also making a mathematical slash linguistic

error in the way that she is presenting the findings. She says cadets who scored a standard deviation higher than average on the grid scale were 99% more likely to complete summer training. Yeah. So if you're high in grit, you're twice as likely to complete the summer program, right? I am going to send you the results from her study. Okay. Okay.

Yeah. This is a chart of grit score as well as whole candidate score, the West Point score, against retention rate over the course of the Beast Barracks, which shows that for the highest performing grit scores, you have a 98% retention rate. For the second quartile of grit scores, you have maybe one point lower, maybe one point lower. Yeah, kind of also a 98%. But then even the lowest grit score or have an 88% retention rate. Yeah.

So the lowest it gets is 88%. Right. So 10 points down, which is not nothing, but still quite a high retention rate. And she's talking here about one standard deviation. She doesn't, again, include all that many descriptive statistics. But if we're talking about, like, around the mean, right, if we compare the second quartile to the third quartile, like a little bit above average, a little bit below average, it's a 4% difference.

94% of kids graduate versus 98% of kids graduate. Right. You would not describe that as twice as likely to graduate. Right. Right. If somebody says, if you smoke, you're twice as likely to get cancer, you assume I have a 2% chance or I have a 4% chance, right? I have a 5% chance.

I have a 10% chance. You don't assume I have a 94% or a 98% chance. This is incorrect. She's apologized for this wording since. Okay, okay. You're 4% more likely to graduate. You're not 99% more likely to graduate. So grit predicts nothing except for whether you make it through the Beast games or whatever.

Yeah. And the effect is really small. So I'm going to be honest. I'm starting to sound pretty fucking fake. Starting to sound not real. So now they eventually published in 2019 a 10-year fall. follow-up study with like much more data. They've tracked these kids for a longer period of time. So it turns out grit is still the best predictor of completing the beast barracks thing,

the first seven weeks. However, among everything else they measured, grit is tied as the worst predictor of GPA. It's tied with physical fitness. This military performance score thing, this sort of holistic assessment of your leadership performance, grit is the worst predictor of everything they measured. And when you look at the dropout rate over the course of the entire four years, this whole candidate score thing is a significantly better predictor than grit. And grit is also tied with physical fitness for predicting the overall dropout rate. So you might as want to be like, how many push-ups can you do? That's just as good of a predictor.

And also, it's not even clear that they wanted this whole candidate score thing to predict who gets through beast barracks. It's probably like, who's going to get a good GPA, who's going to complete all four years of school. And like, it's still better than grit for that. Obviously, if they have like a holistic rating, a holistic rating, a whole thing. holistic score that's meant to measure you across like 10 different categories. Like you can you can come up with a metric that outperforms it for any given category.

Yeah, exactly. That's not the hard part. The hard part is the holistic score. That's why they have it, right? Yeah. And 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A physical fitness adjacent metric might make sense there.

Or like extroversion potential for homesickness, right? It's the first summer that you're away from home for a lot of these like 18-year-old kids. Now, these kids all went to weird camps. So this problem with sort of overhyping studies continues throughout the rest of the book. Here is the next little section that she describes. In parallel, I started a partnership with the Army Special Operations 4th. is better known as the Green Berets. She's on a roll.

She's on a roll. Dude, the late aughts fucking ruled. You come up with some bullshit-ass TED Talk idea and you're, you're, fucking, you're embedded with the Green Berets within six months. This is like half the book and she's like, this person saw my TED talk. And then she goes to like spring training with the Seattle Seahawks because the coach, like, saw her TED Talk. This era is so fucking funny.

It's amazing, dude. Every Obama intern is watching TED Talk. Yeah, I know. Mr. President, sir, you have to see this. All right. She goes on, these are among the Army's best trained soldiers, assigned some of the toughest and most dangerous missions. Training for the Green Berets is a grueling multi-stage affair.

And then she describes that for a couple paragraphs, like how sort of rigorous it is. Just getting to the selection course is an accomplishment. But even so, 42% of the candidates I studied voluntarily withdrew before it was over. So what distinguished the men who made it through? Grit. It was grit all along. Okay. But this is the second time that it's like this is good at predicting who makes it through a military boot camp.

Like a test of physical strength, basically. Right. But we started off being like, I've solved childhood education. I know. And also this is a better set of data because 42% of people dropped out, right? So if you're trying to predict dropout rates, you just have more people who dropped out so it's easier to find patterns. Yeah, yeah. And so she's saying what distinguished the men who made it through, grit.

But if you actually look at her results, grit is the worst predictor of like personality traits that she measures. So she measures grit, intelligence, and physical fitness. Intelligence and physical fitness are significantly better predictors than grit. So she has she's just come up with, she's just come up with a third category that's worse across. Literally just like worse across the board. That's great. She doesn't. You can tell she's very careful with how she words it. She's like, it predicted success. Yeah. So what distinguished, what distinguished the men who made it through? Grit.

Yeah. Righting that when you know that they were multiple better existing metrics. I know. Is like you are doing fraud, right? It's really, really, really cynical when you think about it. She also does this in her papers, too. It drives me insane. So in her paper, when she's talking about this green beret result, she basically, she has to admit that grit was not all that predictive. Right.

But then she says, in a full model controlling for general intelligence, physical fitness, age, and years of schooling, the effect of grit remains significant. Oh, so if you control out the things that are better at predicting. That matters. That rocks. Dude, academia, if you're a piece of shit, is so easy. It's incredible, dude. If you're just a lying-ass scumbag. But then she does the same thing in her book.

So this is what she says in her book. What else other than grit predict success? For aspiring green berets, baseline physical fitness at the start of the first of it. training is essential. But in each of these domains, when you compare people matched on these characteristics, grit still predicts success. In her TED Talk, did she say it's less good at predicting things than intelligence and fitness? I have created a new metric and it is worse at predicting outcomes than every existing metric. However, it is still somewhat predictive, folks. I know. That's the thing is like, I can see academically, you know, in a very like tempered kind of way, be like, oh, this might be

something. Yeah. It's great in some circumstances. It's great in other circumstances. Maybe we need a bespoke thing for beast barracks as opposed to anything else. It has a predictive quality to it. So maybe we can like find some utility here or whatever. But it's like, it's like stop teaching your kids how to read, folks.

I figured this out. And also she originally started with this insight that like there's smart kids who don't perform as well, right? It's more than intelligence. But then she keeps coming up with these studies that it's like, oh, it's kind of intelligence. It's more than just intelligence, although objectively, it is less. It's, yeah. Also, it turns out it's intelligence and push-ups. Yeah, the most, like, if I had to guess, fucking answer in the world. Okay, here is the next study she talks about. This is how she talks about it in the book. Around the same time, I received a call from the Chicago public schools.

Like the psychologist at West Point, researchers there were eager to learn more about the students who would successfully earn their high school diplomas. That spring, thousands of high school juniors completed an abbreviated grit scale, along with a battery of other questionnaires. More than a year later, 12% of those students failed to graduate. Students who graduated on schedule were grittier, and grit was a more powerful predictor of graduation than how much students cared about school, how conscientious they were about their studies, and even how safe they felt at school. So fuck school safety.

Which for the record, I wouldn't think was that strong of a predictor of graduation. What if I told you that it? was a more powerful predictor of graduation rate than backpack color. But also, it's funny. She's like, it's more predictive than this. It's more predictive than this. She doesn't tell you what it's less predictive then. And the things that it's more predictive then are like fairly abstract, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. How much students cared about school. How conscientious they were about their studies. How safe they felt. Like, okay, what about grades? Yeah. You know, what about like performance in the more traditional senses? So this is the problem is SAT scores were three times more predictive than grit.

If you want to know who's going to graduate, just look at their SAT score. Look, as a standardized tester who was not always a GPA boy, I think it should only be standardized tests. I would be dead in a gutter if it weren't for standardized tests. And so I'm very anti-grit now. So there's a researcher named Marcus Crudey who has written two articles following up on all these grit studies. I spoke to him for this episode. Okay. And he points out that grit explains 0.5.

of the variance in GPA for the kids in Chicago. SAT scores explain 4% of the variance. We're talking about very small slices, right? We're talking about 0.5%. She's right that Grit did better than these other metrics, but honestly, not that much better. Right. For grit, it's 1.48. For school motivation, it's 1.40.

Receive teacher support, 1.38. It's like, okay. You can't put that in your book. And we're not really going to get into them, but it's the same with these spelling B studies that she's mentioned. It is true that grit predicts who gets to like the final rounds of the competition, but IQ was a far better predictor and the best predictor was just the number of hours that you studied. Nice. So remember, the entire point of this concept was that grit is doing something that traditional measures, things like SAT scores and IQ can't do. And then you look

into her data, and it turns out IQ and SAT scores are doing more than grit is. The way that this was initially pitched, in the ways that we measure education, we are missing something fundamental, right? That feels very different from being like, oh, I can predict graduation rates really well with this. The one that turned me into the Joker, Peter, was you probably didn't notice it because she's rattling off studies at you so quickly in the TED Talk. In the TED Talk, she says, 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? And which will be giving TED talks? You would assume from this, right, that she's doing the same thing as West Point, right? We gave teachers like the grit scale at the beginning of two years. It turns out the grittiest teachers are the most likely to still be teaching, and they're the most effective for their students, right? That's what you would assume.

For this study, she did not test the teachers on grit. she came up with this, I think, like, baffling methodology where she rated externally from the outside, she rated their grit by using their resumes. Yeah. 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. Okay. All right.

Let's hold on. Hold on because you gave me. I knew you would love this. I knew you would love this. You gave me that whole questionnaire, but if there's any correlation between grit and extracurriculars, my grit is fucking zero. Same, same, same, same. I did like zero extracurricular shit. If there was an extracurricular on my resume going into college or going into law school, it was a lie.

Well, okay, she, this is so brutal. She gives examples in the paper of like low grit, medium grit, and high grit, right? So how are we looking at these people? people's resume. 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. Yeah, they're just a loser. A fucking loser who was only on the swim team. All you did was swim team. You're not even the fucking captain. You're not even the captain. That's low grit. You must advance on the swim team. You're getting fucking mobbed by all the high grit people every day getting fucking mocked in the

swimming pool. I love that's so funny. That's someone that's someone who has never competed in a sport. being like, why aren't you getting better? Why aren't you winning awards? Imagine how mad you would be if some fucking academic is like, you never won any medals? And then the high grit person, the highest grit person, is member of the cross-country team for four years

and voted MVP in senior year, founder and president for two years of the university's Habitat for Humanity chapter. Is that even grit? I want to read you the medium-grit person. So medium-grit. This is like level three. This is you.

Member of a fraternity for three years, but no leadership roles. assistant manager at the local movie theater for three years. That's medium grit. Fucking including fraternity on this is killing me, dude. Why is just being present in a fraternity count for more than being on a swim team where you actually do stuff? You came in second in a bunch of tournaments and somebody's like, why aren't you in Sigma Kai, bitch?

Being in a fraternity was so dumb that we skipped over assistant manager at a movie theater. That's grit. But also, you can see that it's fundamentally circular, right? because grit is how you achieve great things. Right. Well, how are we measuring grit? People who achieve great things. I mean, I do think that this goes to show how completely unscientific it is, not just that we're getting these weird outcomes, but that you have the woman who pioneered this.

Just looking at resumes and being like, swimming. No. Assistant manager at movie theater. Yes. So we just have to read one last thing before we move on. So this is from Marcus Creday's article. It's called Much Addo About Grit, a meta-analytic synthesis of the grit literature. The proponents of grit have not only claimed that grit is an excellent predictor of success,

but also that grit is a better predictor of success than other variables, such as cognitive ability, admissions, test scores, or physical fitness. This does not appear to be correct. The meta-analytic estimate of the relationship between overall grit and academic performance is much weaker than the correlation that has been observed for other variables. For example, meta-analytic reviews have shown that admissions, test scores, study skills, and study habits, academic adjustment, class attendance, and effort regulation and metacognition are much better predictors of college and graduate school achievement, while cognitive ability is a much better predictor of job performance. You know your theory is getting fucked up when metacognition is a better predictor. And a lot of these, like, he lists the actual effect sizes for these as he's listing them out.

And a lot of them have like twice the correlation with achievement than grit does. Like it's not that grit is like a little bit worse. It's like there's things that are twice as good as grit if you want to predict like who's going to graduate from college, who's going to have a good GPA, who's going to be good in their job. Like everyone should have looked at all of this. Like her own published work and been like this just needs like another decade of stress testing. Sometimes I feel like these people are like like they come up with an idea but they're not like familiar with the academic literature exactly. and then they just sort of shoehorned it into the academic literature.

This is what Marcus Crudey told me when I talked to him, too, that, like, he called it the TED Talkification of psychology. The incentives of a young researcher now are not to go and explore, like, an existing concept, right? She was working on self-control, which is like a very well-defined concept. Right. Before she invented grit, right, and wrote a book called grit. That was very canny and smart of her, right? Because exploring something that already exists is not how you get TED Talks. It's not how you get airport books.

If you do like some iterative improvement of self-control, you're not getting Barack Obama to start building policy around your bullshit. Whereas if you take what's already known and you pretend that it's something completely new, you tell a really good story about it, you make it seem like it's this bold new idea. Now the Obama DoD is structuring drone strikes around your idea. Only the gritless weddings. That makes sense that there's this sort of like, that there's this incentive now to come up with a really catchy idea, not necessarily one that makes any sense or has any real academic rigor behind it.

That's kind of the first third of the book, her telling her origin story, going through all of these studies, presenting grit as this bold new idea. The second third of the book is her exploring this dichotomy between talent and hard work. Okay. Most of the book is anecdotes, little vignettes of successful people and how working hard help them get to where they are. This is like every stupid-ass self-help book. It's like, dude. Did you know that Cleopatra used The Secret? You're joking, but this is literally what like most of the book is, dude.

Genghis Khan knew the secret. Leonardo da Vinci knew the secret. She says, there's a celebrated potter named Warren McKenzie who lives in Minnesota, now 92 years old. Okay. She quotes him as saying, the first 10,000 pots are difficult, and then it gets a little bit easier. Malcolm Gladwell said that it takes 10,000 pots to become an expert, I believe. She also talks about John Irving. I didn't know this about John Irving, that he got a C-minus in English in high school.

It turns out he's dyslexic. And so she says, with daily effort, Irving became one of the most masterful and prolific writers in history. With effort, he became a master, and with effort, his mastery produced stories that have touched millions of people, including me. What's the correlation? I don't, okay, never mind. But also she never really establishes like, did he work harder than other writers? Are there writers who worked hard but didn't get good or didn't become bestselling authors? Right, right.

I'm not going to read anymore, but this is a montage of people who she includes in the book, whose like stories she tells to illustrate her concepts, right? Olympic gold medalist swimmer Rowdy Gaines, NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins, Tiger Mom, Amy Chua, Jeff Bezos, the editor of the New York Times crossword puzzle, J.P. Morgan Chase, CEO, Jamie Diamond. Yes. Woody Allen. Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll. Hall of Fame pitcher Tom Seaver, the CEO of Sinabun, Benjamin Franklin, magician David Blaine,

and filmmaker Jud Abattow. Hell yeah. She interviews Will Smith, who says, like, what separates me from other actors and rappers, is it like, I will outwork anybody? Sure. This is sort of why we're not going to talk about the book all that much is because for most of the book, you're reading it and you're like, what does this have to do with public school kids in Chicago?

Right. Also, I mean, first of all, I can't think of anything less insightful. than interviewing a football coach about grit and hard work. Well, you know what he's going to say, right? It's chapter after chapter after chapter. Every fucking press conference a football coach has ever given is about grit and hard work. But also, how is she, over the course of these interviews of these people, how is she separating out grit from what we might traditionally just call hard work? Right.

Because the initial pitch, again, is that she has found something distinct from our traditional understandings of, hard work, right? I mean, she does attempt to do this. Her way of doing this is that she breaks grit down into four factors, which she says are interest, practice, purpose, and hope. Which, as far as I can tell, she's completely making up, like, these aren't based on her academic work in any way. Like, none of this appears in any of her studies. It's basically she's going through their anecdotes and she's like, aha, they're very interested in pottery. This is step two of when you have a stupid idea. I think we were talking about this in the context of bullshit jobs where like, you have this initial idea. Yeah, yeah. And you're like, this.

idea kind of pops. And then you're on like, you're like, someone's like, ooh, turn it into a book. And then and then you're like, okay, chapter two. I know. You just start, you just start fucking bullshitting. She has a thing like, she's talking about like Jamie Diamond, the CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase, right? Known pervert. She's trying to establish like how gritty he is. She's like, in the 2008 financial crisis, Jamie steered his bank to safety. And while other banks collapsed entirely, J.P. Morgan Chase somehow earned a $5 billion profit. Yeah, somehow. Were the other financial sector CEOs not gritty? Like, was he grittier than the other CEOs?

Is that why J.P. Morgan, like, had a profit in 2009 and other banks didn't? They also, J.P. Morgan also invented credit default swaps. So was that grit that made them fucking do that? If you're willing to come up with an idea and execute to the point where the entire economy falls apart. Yeah. If that's not grit, what else is? They're seeing it through.

I felt like my brain was leaking out of my ears when I was reading the Will Smith parts, too. Because, like, I'm sure Will Smith worked hard. But, like, becoming a movie star is 99.9% luck, right? So many people are talented. So many people work hard. Yeah. I know he wants to tell a story that, like, I worked hard and that's why I'm successful. There's something in the human mind that, like, can't accept, like, I am just tremendously fucking lucky. Yeah, exactly. Like, this is how, like, every time they ask a Nepo baby, hey, do you think it helped? They're like, I worked so hard. It's like, yeah. Well, I know. Like, I believe you. But it's just not, it's not the relevant metric here. There's so many people that work hard.

Remember when there's like nepo baby discourse about like someone else and Jamie Lee Curtis, like went on Instagram was like, I worked hard my whole life. It's so embarrassing. No one was talking about you. No one even remembers that you're a nepo baby. That's the, yeah, you're about to die. No one knows who your father is. No one remembers that you are a nepo baby, but the, but you saw the discourse and got triggered.

There's a very good review of this book in The New Yorker. Here, I'm going to send you an excerpt. Totology haunts the shape of these fervent lessons. I was about to say that. Okay. Grittier spellers practiced more than less gritty spellers, Duckworth assures us. Well, yes. She's looking for winners and winners of a certain sort. Survivors in highly competitive activities in which a single physical, mental, or technical skill can be cultivated through relentless practice. And this is kind of the problem with this is that, like, you know, things like sports or she talks a lot about like concert pianists and violinists. Yeah, what's great? It's like hard work and dedication. Who's the grittiest? The most hard work and dedicated folks. And also people who dedicate themselves to a single skill, right?

A single skill that benefits from dedicated practice, right? Five hours, day, et cetera. The skills of getting through school, right? The skills of passing high school or getting straight A's is not mastery of a single skill. Right. You're taking like six classes every single semester. You don't need to demonstrate mastery. You need to demonstrate competency.

But the whole book is about mastering a single skill. The entire paradigm of this book. and she doesn't seem to like really realize it. It's just the wrong paradigm. Like what have you actually identified here? Because if you're saying, hey, hard work and dedication really matters, then I think the universal reaction is no shit. Yeah.

What I thought was being pitched is I have figured out how to isolate who is good at this. And like, and then maybe you can think about, well, can we predict early on who's going to be a dedicated hard worker? Can we improve the ability of a child to become a dedicated hard worker, right? Like that sort of stuff. But the whole thing very quickly fell apart. And now we're just like Will Smith's a hard worker. She also, she has all these like vignettes in the book about this, I think totally false binary between talent and hard work.

So she has this vignette where this like swimmer guy watches Mark Spitz swim. Mark Spitz won like a billion gold medals. He was like the most winningest American swimmer before Michael Phelps. And this guy is saying like, oh, he swims like a fish. He's like such an incredible swimmer. And then Duckworth is like, you know, oh, he's relying on a talent-based explanation, but actually Mark Spitz practiced for thousands of hours. And it's like, yeah, does anyone think an Olympic athlete didn't practice?

They all practice. I don't know shit about chess. But like, if you tell me the name of the Grand Master, I'm going to assume that he's played thousands of hours of chess in his life. I'm not like, oh, he woke up yesterday and started playing chess. Like, no. Also, like, everything we know about like Michael Phelps is just like, He's a physical freak.

That's like 90% of it. A huge amount of advantage, right? And then the other thing that she's doing, here I'm going to send you one more paragraph. This is from her book. For years, several American surveys have asked, which is more important to success, talent, or effort? Americans are about twice as likely to single out effort. The same is true when you ask Americans about athletic ability. And when asked, if you were hiring a new employee, which of the following qualities,

what do you think is most important? Americans endorse being hardworking nearly five times as often as they endorse intelligence. You're reading this and you're like, right, so this is already the ideology of most of American life. Right. I mean, most of us already value hard work. But also, I thought grit isn't hard work. Like, grit is like the separate thing. And then she, it seems like she is sort of like, she sort of just bounces back and forth on what the definition is.

It's how long are you in a fraternity? It's one variable. But she pitched it as like, I found something new. And then eventually she just ends up being like, Will Smith works really hard. It's like, yeah, who cares? She also, she says in her original definition of it in the 2007 paper that it's like, I've identified something. There are certain skills that you need for like regardless of your occupation, regardless of

your status in life. Grit is one of those skills, right? But I don't actually think that grit is this free floating thing. Like, I'm really gritty on some stuff and like give up the minute I face a challenge on other stuff. And I think that's most people, right? It's like, is Mark Spitz really gritty when it comes to doing his taxes? I assume not.

That's a lot of why I was struggling with the. questionnaire. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it's like, yeah, it depends. So the final third of the book, it basically becomes like a self-help book. She has all of these like components of grit, you know, interest, practice, purpose, hope. And then for each one, she gives tips on like how you can build your grit. Okay. So just all this kind of individual advice, but she's not really talking about education reform. There's a chapter on parenting, but mostly it's like individual advice. It's actually very little about kids in the entire book. Parenting, you got to stick with it. You have to keep doing it.

The main thing that she hammers home over and over again in the final third of the book is basically this argument that grit is malleable. So I'm going to send you this. This book has been about the power of grit to help you achieve your potential. I wrote it because what we accomplish in the marathon of life depends tremendously on our grit, our passion, and our perseverance for long-term goals. An obsession with talent distracts us from that simple truth. Let me close with a few final thoughts.

The first is that you can grow your grit. I see two ways to do so. On your own, you can grow your grit from the inside out. You can cultivate your interests. You can develop a habit of daily challenge exceeding skill practice. You can connect your work to a purpose beyond yourself. And you can learn to hope when all seems lost. So Jamie Diamond did.

You can also grow your grit from the outside in. So this is where she talks about building a culture of grit. She has this concept of learned industriousness, which is like the mirror image of learned helplessness. You can be trained to think, ah, I can change my surroundings. I can make things better for myself. Just sort of go-getter attitude. Yeah. She visits the Seahawks training camp to see how they have a culture of grit in practice.

She tells the story of how the Finnish army defeated the Russians in World War II by having Sisu or like a national culture of grit. So basically you can like instill this on mass. And the Russians didn't have it. Famously. Famously cowardly and prone to surrender the Russians. The ending anecdote of the book is about her kid's ballet teacher, who is both supportive and demanding. And we must borrow from ballet culture, the healthiest competition culture.

Who do you think was grittier, Natalie Portman or Milakunis? But this argument in the final third of the book, basically that grit is malleable. This is the reason. for the downfall of grit. Okay. 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?

The idea that schools can meaningfully teach grit. So I'm going to send you an excerpt from the New Republic Review by Jeffrey Snyder. There may be an increasingly cogent science of character, but there is no science of teaching character. We already know that grit is strongly core. correlated with conscientiousness, one of the Big Five personality traits that psychologists view as stable and hereditary. A recent report emphasizes that simply knowing that non-cognitive factors matter is not the same as knowing how to develop them in students. The report concludes that clear, actionable strategies for classroom practice are few and far between.

Consider the fact that the world's grittiest students, including Chinese students who log some of the longest hours on their homework, have never been exposed to a formal curriculum that teaches perseverance. Which I think is a pretty good point. This is really more about Chinese genetics than anything else. Right. So, no, I get this. And this is something nagging at me subconsciously. Just because you can identify a thing does not actually mean anything in a vacuum, right?

You've identified what you are saying is a personality trait that might be correlated with good outcomes. But what does that matter if you can't match? it in some way. I also read a really interesting article about the self-esteem fad in psychology in the 1980s, where it was basically the same thing, right, that kids who report having higher self-esteem are more likely to graduate from high school, they get better grades, et cetera. And there were all these efforts to, like, instill self-esteem in kids, but they all kind of fell down because, like, what are we doing here? Because a lot of kids are just losers. I feel like what ends up happening in all of these situations is that you just end up measuring the thing. You measure,

grit and then you reward the kids that are high in it, right? Which feels like the rich get richer. Or you do the thing where you just give kids a bunch of like pro-grit propaganda. And then at the end of the semester, all they're going to do is they're going to report that they have grit, right? Are you gritty? Do you follow through on things? Yep, I sure do.

But nothing has actually changed, right? All you've done is you've trained them on how to answer a test question. There's also, when I was talking to Marcus Crudey, who wrote these meta-analyses of like all the grit studies, he also noted that while it's really hard to manipulate personality, traits in general, it's just kind of like a doomed endeavor, there are things like study skills that you can teach students and actually do respond to interventions. So he points out in higher education, simply going to class is twice as good a predictor of grades as grit. Yeah, but is that more important than making up new personality traits and writing about them? There's this really

interesting article by a researcher named Mike Rose who points out that like, yeah, there isn't really a clear difference between cognitive and non-cognitive skills. And also, it's not clear what, like, teaching non-cognitive skills means. Like, we have kids for six hours a day. Are we just going to tell them that it's good to be optimistic? Now I'm going to teach you brainless skills. Here's this. In order for students to believe that they are capable of improving, they must have the concrete experience of getting better at challenging tasks. Otherwise, exhortations to change their mindset ring hollow. Kids generally know when they are improving for real, when they can do things. things that once seem too difficult versus when adults are merely trying to make them feel good.

It's really striking reading those old white papers, just kind of how half-baked this all was. Like, as you heard of those excerpts, they talked about how urgent it was, how important it was. We know that character has this huge effect on kids. Yeah, yeah. But then if you keep reading, they would mention like 10 pages in that, like, well, we don't really know which character traits are important. We don't know how to measure them. and we don't know how to change them. There was like this weird rush to do something,

but nobody had a clear idea of what they were rushing to do. Yeah. But then the real nail in the coffin comes in 2015 with a paper called Measurement Matters, assessing personal qualities other than cognitive ability for educational purposes. This is an assessment of the efforts to implement these non-cognitive skills in schools.

So I'm going to send you this. Students in a set of oversubscribed charter schools where students make unusually large test score gains report lower average levels of conscientiousness, self-control, and grit than students in open enrollment district schools. That makes sense because being surrounded by a bunch of fucking nerds. I know. That's going to erode your grit over time. But what's wild is these are kids that went from public schools to charter schools. Their test scores got better. their attendance got better.

And they reported lower scores on self-control, grit, and conscientiousness. So basically, like, there's a mismatch between what they say and what they are doing. So all that stuff about how if you teach kids grit, they'll report themselves to be higher in grit, right? They'll just deliver the propaganda. That turns out not to be true. They're actually lower on these things. You're telling them, 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. You're going to scyve off homework to go watch anime, right? 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. I think my theory also works, but sure, I think that being around the soft cerebral types

will make you, in turn. soft and cerebral and weak. But that's also basically the thing, right? If you're surrounded by these kids that are constantly like following through on everything and just higher performance, if you're average at that school, you might feel worse about yourself, right? You're like a fish in a different pond. You know those like influencers who are like, if you're the smartest person in the room,

you're in the wrong room? No, dude. Why? Why? I love to feel smart in the room. So basically, grit at this point is sort of like, okay, schools can't change it. We don't know if it's all that predictive of performance. 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? So it essentially has like no utility. So are you ready for the twist of this episode, Peter? There's a twist? There's a huge twist, Peter. Okay. So this 2015 paper that is essentially the nail in the coffin of grit, this is over, we tried it, it doesn't work.

That paper was written by Angela Duckworth. What? Right? Da, da, da. As all of the hype has departed from this concept, Angela Duckworth has been one of the people leading that charge. Earlier, we watched, like, the kind of middle section of her TED talk. Now we're going to watch a little excerpt from the final third of her TED talk.

To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows about building it. Every day, parents and teachers ask me, How do I build grit in kids? What do I do 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. I relate to this when you're just bullshitting

and then someone asks you a follow question and you're like, fuck. So you do have to give her credit for like she did include in this TED talk. Like we don't know anything. Never stop puzzling. She's like, look, we don't know anything. We don't know if this is real. All we know is that we need to be more. gritty in order to figure out whether it is real. Thank you very much. Goodbye. I will also give her credit

for like in March of 2016. She wrote a New York Times op-ed called Don't Grade Schools on Grit, where she says, we're nowhere near ready and perhaps never will be, to use feedback on character as a metric for judging the effectiveness of teachers in schools. We shouldn't be rewarding or punishing schools for how teachers perform on these measures. Okay. When this, you know, all these California districts are coming up with these like grit report cards, all of these like, non-academic measures for assessing schools. She was on the board of that effort, but she left basically publicly saying, I don't think that we should be doing this.

This is not a good idea. And she says she gave an interview to NPR after this happened where she said, the enthusiasm is getting ahead of the science. Wow. And then in 2015, she writes this paper that is basically like we looked at all of the evidence and like teaching kids grit does not work. This is like a cool grift you could do where you come up with an idea and it's bullshit. You run it up to the TED Talk circuit.

and then you start to distance yourself. You're like, you guys are getting carried away with this, you know? The science isn't there. That way, you emerge sort of unscathed, but rich. I have complicated feelings on her because I do think that this is what happened. I think that she came up with this concept. She did the TED talk. Like, when an academic does a TED talk, they expect maybe, you know, 50,000 views,

you know, a couple hundred thousand views at best. Nobody expects 60 million views on their TED talk, right? Right. I don't think she assumed the coach of the Seahawks would get in touch with her and that, you know, she'd get this massive book deal and that, like, this concept would grow way beyond, like, where it was in the science, right? She had some preliminary studies. They were relatively small. I think what happened is, like, this really did, like, get away from her in a way that she did not predict. I don't think that she's, like, a cynical person.

Right. It is important to me to give her credit, right? I think that this is, like, better than any other TED Talk person we've had on this. the show. The fact that she's actually publicly decrying these efforts to like wildly over-implement this idea that she came up with. I do genuinely give her a lot of credit for this, right? Right. However, I think there's also a strong component of like, well, you still released the book. Yeah. Right. I mean, she wrote this paper debunking grit in 2015 and she released the book the following year. Right. She does not talk about education in the book. She has a whole chapter about parenting,

but there's no chapter about education and there's no caveats to grit in the book, right? You'd think, hey, I came up with this. You know, we've been trying to implement this in schools. It doesn't really work. It's clearly a concept that is more complicated than just like you need to have it. Obviously, the publisher was like, just write it. I know, exactly. I just fucking pump this shit out.

Here's $500,000. Just shut up and write it. And she was like, all right. And it sold more than a million copies. It's like, it is really weird to not mention any of these efforts. the fact that these efforts have happened, you yourself are against them? She doesn't mention this in the book anywhere. She has also like systematically oversold the concept and continues to. So when she is promoting the book in 2016, this is after the book comes out, she gives an

interview to the New York Times where she says, my lab has found that grit beats the pants off IQ SAT scores, physical fitness, and a bazillion other measures to help us know in advance which individuals will be successful in some situations. Yikes. Okay. And I guess she's including, like, in some situations there to kind of hedge, but it's like, beats the pants off of IQ and SAT scores. It doesn't. Like, even when it does beat those measures, it doesn't beat them by that much. And there's many, many studies that show that it doesn't beat IQ and SAT scores, including your own studies. So why would you still be saying this even after you yourself kind of debunked it? I mean, look, there's no way, there's no way to interpret this other than just, just pure grift.

And look, I get it. I'll say and do anything for money. Yeah. If someone came up to me and was like, Peter, $2 million publish a book that you don't believe in, I wouldn't even think twice. I would say, absolutely. I think what she's doing is she keeps like moving the goalposts. So in a 2019 interview, this is three years after the book, they're kind of asking her like, why hasn't grit shown up is like all that useful of a concept now that there's more data? she says, I don't think your report card grades in elementary school, middle school, and high school are, for most students of that age, the prime source of their passion. It's not where they would apply their grit anyway.

Duckworth said she wouldn't expect grit to be the most important factor in determining a student's grades or test scores. There ought to be other predictors, like self-control, that would be more predictive of grades than grit. Okay. Remember her original insight from when she was a teacher? The smart kids aren't necessarily the ones that get the good grades. Right. It's actually the gritty kids. But now she's like, oh, well, grit was never going to predict grades.

Every now and then you're like, oh, I think I have this explanatory framework. And then you're like writing it out. You're like, I'm a fucking genius. And then someone's like, well, what about this? And you're like, hmm. Right, right. And like there are two paths in front of you at that moment, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

One is where you're honest with yourself and one is where you're not. And the dishonest path probably also had a couple million dollars at the end of it for her. And she chose it. Well, what's interesting is I don't know that she's actually being dishonest. I know. You are in love with her. You think she's so normal. You're like, I don't think she's doing this cynically. I think what she's doing is bad. It just isn't necessarily dishonest. It's like once you admit all of the caveats of your own concept, right? It doesn't work in schools. It's not useful for assessing teachers. The research behind it doesn't really hold up. Yeah. It was never going to predict grades anyway. Then it's like, what is the point of your book then? What is even the premise of the book at this point? Continuing to pitch your stupid idea. A decade after it was functionally debunk, that's grit.

That's what great is. The other thing that I wanted to say, which is, like, kind of mean, is, like, you can take the person out of McKinsey, but you can't take the McKinsey out of the person. So true. Other people have been thinking about this for years, decades. Other people are within this organization, but I'm going to parachute in and then, like, solve it for you. She might not even realize that she's doing that when she begins.

No, exactly. She's like, hey, I went to normal schools for a year. Yeah. Now I have this idea. I know. And these losers who are like looking for silver bullets for everything are like, oh my God, let's put you on a fucking stage. So little epilogue, most of the people involved with hyping up this trend have kind of

moved away from it. So the author of the original airport bestseller that popularized grit, Paul Tuff, has also kind of moved away from grit. He gives an interview to the New York Times where he says, there's no evidence that any particular curriculum or textbook or app can effectively teach kids grit or self-control or curiosity. This entire kind of issue of non-cognitive skills has also kind of transformed into a more holistic understanding of like what contributes to kids' success and like how to

foster it in kids. So that guy Mike Rose who wrote an article in 2014 being like, hey, let's all be careful with this grit stuff. He basically pointed out like exactly what would happen. He predicted like, yeah, this isn't going to turn it to be all that useful. He writes a follow-up in 2015. just being like, yeah, I was right about this and here's why. Nice. Get them.

So I'm going to send you an excerpt from this. Over the last few years, I have been working with a group of community college students who have overcome difficult, even traumatic backgrounds to succeed. They possess grit by the truckload. Yet every one of them has been significantly delayed by financial, housing, and transportation problems by bureaucratic snafus, by violence in their communities, by disruptions in their families, by health care. One fellow's younger brother was murdered.

One woman had to quit school for a year to pay down a $10,000 emergency room bill. The poor routinely face barriers that they have few material resources to address, and sometimes no matter how hard they try, the barriers are too frequent and too high to overcome. A good education has always had as one of its goals the development of character. 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. 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? There's studies that show that increasing the earned income tax credit improves graduation rates, increasing food stamps, improves grades and graduation rates. Like, when kids are less poor, they do better in schools, right? And it's a little unfair to just make schools kind of solve this problem. them without even giving the fucking schools more money, much less giving the kids and their families more money, right? Right. So this entire kind of grit wave feels like an underhanded way of blaming poor kids

for not doing as well. Why is school hard for you? Why are you struggling? Oh, it's because you're not gritty enough. This is the problem with these like abstract characteristics too. Are you actually measuring something that can cut across class lines, for example? Because if not, it's not actually very useful, right? You're probably just flipping correlation and causation around.

I also read a pretty mean paper by a researcher named Ethan Riss about how from the beginning, the whole grit concept was more geared toward the anxieties of rich parents than like the needs of poor parents. Because like rich parents are nervous that like they've spoiled their kids and that they don't have enough grit, right? That like they're not working hard enough. It's sort of like a kids these days thing. They're soft. Yeah, exactly. And it's like, I don't know that poor parents are like doing that in the same kind of way, right?

It's something that I think resonated with wealthy parents because it's like, well, my kid doesn't really work that hard. Like, my kid's smart. Yeah, my kid's kind of a pussy. Yeah, but it feels to you like the thing that your kid is lacking. 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. So she continued to track West Point cadets for 10 more years to find out what was going on with their grit scores, et cetera. And she finds that the dropout rate during Beast Barracks has fallen from 6% when she was doing her first study to 2%. So almost nobody drops out of Beast Barracks anymore.

And the issue isn't that they have more grit. The issue is that there's less hazing. So apparently West Point is like really cracked down on hazing of first years. And basically it's like a much less abusive environment now. She chalks this up to like what happened was like the school really has like a culture of grit now. Well, it sounded like it was grittier before with the hazing. Exactly. Is that not gritty? You can actually provide an environment that doesn't cause like six to 10% of the kids to drop out in the first seven weeks. You can also just have like a nice, comfortable like pro social environment. This actually isn't a story of grit, right? It's a story of like when we provide the right environment for kids. The same kids can thrive or fail,

but it's up to us to provide the environment. 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. Yeah, exactly. Am I sort of like a misunderstanding that? I mean, it just feels like this is whatever she wants it to be. This is what I was thinking, too, that, you know, it's a combination of passion and perseverance. And her definition is that, like, you're gritty if you persevere through failure.

but like a lot of the classes that I got A's in, I didn't fail at those classes, right? Like I didn't persevere through challenges to get A's in math. I just like did the assignments and got an A. So I also, it's weird like the whole time that I was reading this, I was like, am I gritty? But like I don't actually think that I am because like that was not that hard for me. Think about podcasting. We have never failed.