But how much can be gleaned from the endurance of eighteen-year-olds through seven weeks of torment? The cadets are admirable, of course, but they are way off the charts compared with the rest of us their experience may be of limited use. (Perhaps, in this environment, it took grit to withdraw.) And, even if we agree that, broadly speaking, the survivors had more grit, how do we apply this lesson to the rest of life? To get into West Point in the first place, you must have good grades, athletic ability, and leadership qualities you might say that the cadets already had grit. To call all the possible reasons simply an absence of grit can be true in no more than the most general way. Cadets may drop out of a gruelling training period for many reasons-emotional, physical, even moral, in the sense that they are angered by pain administered as an entry test. Seventy-one cadets had dropped out, and “grit turned out to be an astoundingly reliable predictor of who made it through and who did not.”Ī happy experimental result, I suppose, but one can’t suppress certain doubts about it. At the end of Barracks Beast, Duckworth was pleased with the results. The cadets who took the survey were then assigned a grit score. I don’t give up easily” and “My interests change from year to year.” All the statements were essentially a way of measuring perseverance and passion (by which she means stick-to-itiveness-i.e., perseverance again). The survey measured their degree of identification with such statements as “Setbacks don’t discourage me. Thus armed, Duckworth returned to West Point, a couple of years later, with something called the Grit Scale, a written survey that she asked a fresh batch of cadets to administer to themselves. Second, they knew in a very, very deep way what they wanted.” First, these exemplars were unusually resilient and hardworking. In this same period, eager to find out what made top people successful, she was interviewing “leaders in business, art, athletics, journalism, academia, medicine and law.” She discovered that “the highly successful had a kind of ferocious determination that played out in two ways. Why not? Duckworth could make some guesses. Most make it through, though some do not. As a graduate student, she visited West Point, where each year twelve hundred new cadets go through a gruelling seven-week training regimen (“Beast Barracks”) before entering freshman year. Her grit obsession, as she recounts, began at least a decade earlier. Team first.” Since the team trains ferociously all the time-going all out, for instance, in bone-crunching intra-squad practice sessions-this conversation may not have been entirely necessary.ĭuckworth, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, finds grit in the best possible places. Duckworth was impressed by the Seahawks, and she quotes sentiments that are characteristic of the Carroll ethos: “Compete in everything you do. She lectured to the team’s players and coaching staff. Two years later, Duckworth visited the Seahawks training camp. It seems that Carroll had seen Duckworth’s TED talk nine months earlier and got in touch, eager to reassure her that building grit was exactly what the Seahawks culture was all about. Photograph by Ruth Fremson / The New York Times / ReduxĪngela Duckworth, in her best-selling book, “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance,” celebrates a man whom she calls a “grit paragon”: Pete Carroll, the coach of the Seattle Seahawks, who led the team to a Super Bowl victory in 2014. In her best-selling book, “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance,” Angela Duckworth celebrates grit as the single trait in our complex and wavering nature which accounts for success.
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