What does it take to persevere and succeed, not just in our careers but in all aspects of our lives? For psychologist Angela Duckworth, the answer can be summed up in one concept: grit. She explains the ingredients in grit and the experiences that make one person persist where another gives up -- and offers concrete steps to instill grit early in life and sustain it. Listen and subscribe to The TED Interview and more podcasts from the TED Audio Collective at audiocollective.ted.com.

So, I have a hunch that today's conversation may strike you as kind of extraordinary.

We're talking about ideas that could actually change how we manage our lives, how we reach that extra level, if you like.

That's because I'm talking today with Angela Lee Duckworth.

She's a psychologist who has dedicated her career to understanding 1 of life's most consequential questions.

I don't just mean successful in the financial sense, but successful in whatever way you want to define it.

Why does 1 person realize their goals while another doesn't?

So after years of studying this, what she found went in the face of what I think so many of us instinctually believe.

This is how she explained it at TED all the way back in

The 1 thing we know how to measure best is IQ.

But what if doing well in school and in life depends on much more than your ability to learn quickly and easily?

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.

In all those very different contexts, 1 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.

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

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

So Angela introduced this idea of grit as a predictor of success that is often even more powerful than IQ, which raised a question for a lot of other people.

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?

Now, Angela was still early in her research, but here we are, 8 years later, and her discoveries around this same question, how can we wire ourselves to achieve great hard things, have deepened?

Some of that is because she received pushback and she's woven a lot of this into her latest ideas.

Anyway, today I'm really thrilled to spend an hour talking with Angela and exploring with greater nuance and depth such an important question.

Okay, Angela Duckworth, welcome to the TED interview.

We're going to be speaking together about really some of the most important things there are to talk about.

You know, what it takes to actually make the most of your life.

Like, it's hard to imagine topics more important than this, but we talk about words like self-control and determination and grit and perseverance and other related terms.

And Angela, could you start by tell us some of your story and how you got interested in these topics?

I think like so many people when you ask why am I doing this you can go all the way back to your childhood.

And, you know, it's not an exaggeration to say that I grew up in a family with a father just obsessed with achievement.

I mean, the highest heights of human achievement.

So my dad was probably 1 of the very few people who eagerly awaited the announcement of the Nobel Prize winners each year and just marveled at human excellence, really in all its forms, you know, the Olympics and whoever was winning the accolades in any field.

That's what obsessed my father and I think to some extent my extended family.

You know, growing up in that kind of family culture, you have to ask yourself, what about me?

What platform am I gonna stand on someday to earn my father's adoration?

And I quickly figured out that I wasn't the smartest person even in my elementary school homeroom of 30 kids.

So that suggested that I was not going to end up being 1 of these outliers in achievement that my dad so much admired.

And I think in some ways, growing up to become a psychologist who studies things that my dad didn't talk about as much, you know, loving what you do for a really long time, sticking with things for a really long time, even when progress is uncertain or faltering.

I think in a way it was, you know, a big, grand arc of trying to prove my dad wrong.

Talk about a couple of incidents that made you think that, um, there was a different narrative to tell.

When I looked at my dad as a role model for me, you know, not what he would talk about at the family dinner table, which really was a lot about implicitly about giftedness.

But I mean, the conversations would be like, who was the smartest scientist ever?

These conversations had this implicit narrative that what you were looking for are those rare geniuses who changed the world and they're not like us, but that didn't exactly connect with what I saw him doing.

He immigrated to this country when he was a young man and did his PhD at the University of Cincinnati in organic chemistry.

He ended up quickly finding himself to DuPont, the chemical company.

And my dad was so passionate about what he did.

I mean, it was automotive refinishing products.

So you get your car dented and you know, you want the color blue that matches the rest of the car, but your car is 3 years old.

So it's been through the sun and the rain.

And my dad worked on that, but he really did.

I mean, he, he, he clearly thought about it like 7 days a week, morning, noon, and night, and talked about it all the time.

So I had this contrast between, you know, a narrative, which at least I heard as being very much about, you know, who's special.

But then his lived example was very much about, about what I call grit, you know, passion and perseverance over very long time periods.

Your success in life is not just due to what people think of as kind of innate talent or God-given gifts or however you want to frame it.

And of course, there's this mystery as to whether grit itself is to some extent a God-given gift.

But I think it's important, first of all, that we get some kind of landscape of the different terms.

So talk about your early research into these topics and the path of discovery that you yourself took to understand these topics better.

For me, the beginning of my scientific career, at least as a psychologist, I was a neurobiology major as an undergraduate.

I had picked up a master's of neuroscience somewhere along the way, but really in the 10 years since graduating from college, I spent most of it with kids.

I started and ran a summer school for less advantaged school children.

And I ran a nonprofit with somebody else.

Anyway, I entered the PhD program in psychology at the age of 32 is at the university of Pennsylvania, came to work with Marty Seligman, a very famous psychologist who I knew so little about psychology.

I didn't even know he was famous, but when I started, I had a question, which I think is the most important thing to have as a doctoral student, you know, an authentic question from your lived experience.

And for me, it was, why is it that so many of my very, very bright young students in my classroom when I was a math teacher, why is it that they didn't learn as much math as I expected them to?

I really didn't understand my failings as a teacher to bring out their potential.

The first work that I did with Marty Seligman was on this idea that when a person, young or old, has a choice between doing something not so fun in the moment, like your algebra homework that you don't quite understand and takes a lot of attention and effort.

And you have a choice between that and, you know, almost anything else, like just lying down on the couch and hanging out or thinking about your friends or, or playing video games.

I mean, if you have that choice between something that's immediately gratifying, like those games and something, which is delayed gratification, but more valuable, it's always a struggle.

And my first study with Marty just showed that young people who were better able to choose longer-term rewards over immediate gratifications predicted their year-end report card grades better than IQ tests that we administered also at the beginning of the year.

So for me, it was the first step in this journey to say, well, it can't all be about your measured IQ because look, here's report card grades that depend also on this thing that is not very highly correlated with your IQ.

And I guess that is the core idea behind the famous, possibly over famous, marshmallow test.

You know, kids who are given a single marshmallow can have 2 marshmallows in 15 minutes if they can wait, and then they're left with a single marshmallow sitting there.

The ones that can refrain from eating that marshmallow turn out to have allegedly much better outcomes in school and in life in general.

It's essentially, it's the same idea, correct?

It was absolutely inspired by that classic study, you know, I think the technical term is the preschool delay of gratification paradigm, but colloquially and much more memorably, it is called the marshmallow test.

And I will tell you that in the last couple of years, There's been some debate, some controversy over how predictive the task really is of your long-term life outcomes.

The original claim and the original findings that were published said, look, the number of seconds you can wait for 2 marshmallows instead of gobbling down 1 right away.

The original claim was that it predicted everything about your life, your likelihood of committing a crime, your income, your mental well-being, your relationships.

And then scientists came along and analyzed the same data, but also some additional data that have been collected.

And I think there's a lively debate about how predictive it is.

My own read of this research is that this delay of gratification test, the marshmallow test, is predictive of life outcomes.

But when scientists say, oh, it predicts your life outcomes, I think what most people hear is it's like determinative.

Like I can count the number of seconds you wait and then I can pretty much guess, you know, your salary when you're 45.

It's a probabilistic weak relationship, meaning that yeah, better than chance I can guess, but not much better than chance.

And 1 of the things that I've most recently, you know, in the last, I guess, a year or so, I've been really profoundly impressed by is that life is extremely unpredictable.

And yes, there's grit, and yes, there's ability, and yes, there's self-control, and yes, there's socioeconomic status, but all of these things have an element of luck to them.

And in addition to them, there really is this complex unfolding of a human life that, for many reasons, is hard to predict.

Okay, so we're going to come back to this question of, you know, nature versus nurture and the, um, you know, what you might do as a kid if you discovered that you were really bad at the marshmallow test or whatever.

But let's first of all go on and tell me where you went from there and how, you know, self-control, if you like, or the ability to delay gratification.

How does that relate to grit and to some of these other terms that you use?

So, grit is the perseverance and passion for long-term goals.

The distinction is this, at least it seems like this to me, people can disagree with me when we talk about like waiting for 2 marshmallows versus 1, you know, it's really a short timeframe.

I mean, we're first of all talking about the order of seconds or maybe minutes, the same for us grownups.

You're like, you know, should I have that second scoop of Ben and Jerry's chubby hubby, or should I not?

So that time course is very short, right?

You don't feel regret like 20 years later, you, you feel it probably 5 minutes later.

Now the time course of grit really is different.

And I think the dynamics and the fundamental causes of grit can be different.

You know, when I talk about gritty people, I talk about people who continue to work on it for a very long time.

That time course, I think, of goal commitment does not come from like, Oh, I'm really good at suppressing my impulses or I have these tricks that I can play to, you know, delay gratification.

And in part it comes from really caring in a way that resonates with your values and your deepest interests about what you're doing and the ability to overcome disappointment that really shakes your confidence.

And all of those dynamics are maybe cousins of what goes on with self-control, but not exactly the same thing.

And last thing I'll just say on that topic is that many of the grit paragons, I call them paragons of grit because to me, they just exemplify passion and perseverance for long-term goals.

You know, some of them are walking around with diagnoses of ADHD, right?

Like they're not especially good at reigning in their impulses or controlling their attention, but that doesn't mean that they can't have grit.

I actually find that hugely relieving to hear because I really struggle with short-term impulse control.

Like certainly when it comes to food sometimes, and you know, what, what, what, you know.

But long-term, there is a sort of constancy to some things I'm truly passionate about.

So it sounds like your definition of grit, that there are several words that are key to it.

You described it as the long-term pursuit of those things that you really care about, I think.

Give me the more detailed definition of grit.

I'll give you the more detailed definition of grit if you wouldn't mind elaborating, because I am really curious about how you came to have the goal that you have, but I'll go first.

So grit is the perseverance and passion for long-term goals that I alluded to.

More specifically, what perseverance looks like over stretches of years or decades is really 2 things.

1 is resilience in the face of obstacles and setbacks.

So, you know, you don't get tenure and you go find your way at a different university or your first and second and third attempt at a startup are catastrophic failures and you're undaunted and you try for a fourth time, maybe in a different way, but you're still trying to build something.

It's kind of rising to the occasion perseverance.

But the other kind of perseverance is like lowercase P perseverance.

And I think this is less glamorous but just as essential and that is that people who are gritty tend to be working in a diligent daily way to improve.

So I think this is the mundanity of excellence that a sociologist named Dan Chambliss wrote about.

He stayed as a resident with swim teams at all levels, including Olympic hopefuls, but also the swim team around the corner.

And what he said after a half decade of study is that when you really ask the question, what makes an Olympic athlete an Olympic athlete, it's mundane.

It's this daily dedication to trying to improve in tiny, tiny ways to become better at the craft that you've devoted yourself to.

So that's perseverance and more fine grain detail.

And then passion, I think is a really a kind of a commitment that comes from having interest in what you do, which is itself fascinating because people have interests in, in things that I don't think people fully understand why.

I mean, I'm interested in psychology and also I'm interested in food.

Why did I not grow up to love art the way my mom does?

But my interest is in psychology and then my values.

I care about them more than grownups and I think for me, my work has this passion because it's at the intersection of a few of my interests, psychology, writing, et cetera, and my values, like helping kids.

And I think if you put all that together, you get a pretty complex portrait of what it means to be gritty and what leads to grit.

And if you then start to ask yourself, like, oh, is that the same thing as being able to delay gratification when the second marshmallow is there, but you have to wait for it.

Like you quickly realize that it can't quite be exactly the same thing.

I mean, look, this goes to the fundamental riddle about your work, because I think the critique of your work, if I can summarize it, would be something like, Angela, it sounds like what you're saying is that kids fail because frankly, they're just not trying hard enough.

Do you have any idea what it's like for some of these kids?

What if you grew up in a home where your parents didn't have any time to read with you or work with you?

What if you came to school in a neighborhood where you felt unsafe?

You know, how dare you focus on the individual instead of addressing structural issues?

That's just sort of an extreme version of the critique.

Yeah, no, it's not that extreme, actually.

So this critique has been, I think, louder and louder in recent years.

And I think that's partly because a society as a whole is kind of waking up to the inequalities and the unfairness that has been around for a very long time, you know, really all over the world, but certainly in the United States and then that would lead you to say well Why are you talking about, you know individual capabilities like grit and you know What an individual can do despite the odds That sounds like you're ignoring the odds and maybe undermining the greater good by diverting attention and energy and maybe even resources away from what we should be doing like, you know policy changes and scholarships and more than just scholarships, right?

Like make the playing field even, don't celebrate the people who dug themselves out of a hole.

And I think there's a legitimacy to that that I first want to just agree with.

I think most social scientists are well aware that there is no mythic place where, you know, your life outcomes are just about your individual agency.

And there's no such thing as societal inopportunity or factors or luck.

And in fact, I would just ask the gentle reader to come along 1 step farther in the logic, which is to say that, you know, I don't think of the individual and their situation as a tug of war, where, you know, if you say the individual matters, then you're saying the situation doesn't.

Or if you're saying that the situation matters, you're saying that the individual doesn't.

I think we need a different metaphor and the best 1 I've been able to come up with, it's like a dance.

You know, I think I have an effect on my situation.

Also, I think my situation has an effect on me.

And if there is a critique that says, hey, don't forget about the situation, that's legitimate.

And if I need to say more loudly that I believe that that's important than I should.

If you said that the key to grit is to, you know, to pursue over the longterm, the things that you really care about, does that imply that you need to know now what is worth caring about for the longterm?

Because I think a lot of people, and I would include myself in some aspects of this, don't know really what the longterm should look like for them.

So many of us have been brought up, especially in recent years, say since the 60s or whatever, to believe that passion is all that, you know, you are a special person, you have unique passions, you can be whoever you want to be, find those passions and pursue them and the world is your oyster.

And that is wonderful in some ways because passion is actually, I heard you say, a key part of great, you need that passion to sort of pull you through.

But if you don't know passion for what, you are lost.

I actually got a journal from a student who was graduating.

It was a gift and on the cover was the famous quote by Joseph Campbell, follow your bliss.

And I think it's terrifying because if you don't know what your passion is, then now you're really screwed, right?

Like, Oh my God, like I, I would follow it, but now like, what do I do?

And, and how do I even begin to quote unquote, find it?

I think my thinking about this has really shifted or evolves.

I don't know what the right way to describe it is, but when you look at somebody in the full maturity of their career, it looks like maybe there was a blueprint that was written.

I think that is actually what I used to think maybe happened, you know, that at some point you write down all your goals, you draw lines between them so that your 1 year goals connect to your 5 year goals and your 5 year goals connect to your 10 year goals.

And I think the farthest anybody could really see into the myths of the future is probably like 2 or 3 years.

And, um, what I think instead is that you have a kind of North star or a compass, you know, something directionally where you're like kids, psychological science, right?

That's for me, you know, like, okay, if I'm navigating my professional life by some kind of compass, that constellation in the sky has to include kids and psychological science.

I don't know where I will be 9 years from now on this journey.

But I can look maybe 2 or 3 years into this future.

And I want to make sure that the 2 or 3 years that I've mapped out, the projects I've committed to, the grants that I've written, that these 2 to 3 year commitments are directionally aligned with those far off values and interests.

So I think maybe I probably should find a better metaphor and maybe being on a journey with a constellation in the sky and just knowing that you have to plan out the next couple of years of your journey, maybe, right?

Just so you can make some progress and not have no plan is better than what I used to say, which is like a pyramid of goals, right?

And that sounds like you could write them all down.

Yeah, so if you don't have a picture of what that long-term vision is and what your long-term passion might be or whatever, what are some other short-term things you can see that will help you take a step in the right direction, will help you know that I should work at taking this particular step right now rather than having another milkshake?

I guess you could call them, I have 3 recommendations.

Brian Grazer, the Hollywood producer, who I'm sure you know, I don't know, I think he must have set a world record for the number of Emmy and Oscar awards he's been nominated for.

But he has this little trick that he's been using since he was a young man, a kind of like, you know, a nobody in Hollywood who's just trying to get in.

And that is to have a curiosity conversation.

And that is a conversation with somebody you don't know and whose work you're curious to learn more about.

And he started doing this when he was in his twenties and he still does them today.

He was like, do you want to have a curiosity conversation?

And I said, well, I'm curious to know what a curiosity conversation is.

Um, and I think if you're really struggling to figure out like what your constellation is and what direction to set off and you're paralyzed, just standing in 1 place, like a potted plant.

Then I think a curiosity conversation of 15 or 20 minutes with somebody who you think, gosh, that sounds interesting.

I wonder what it is like to be a product designer or a, you know, a midwife or a food writing editor, you know, just having those conversations I think can give you like a mental model of what that path would look like.

The second thing I would recommend is a bit of reflection, right?

Like now that you know that human beings can be motivated by many things, but I think the most enduring of our motives are tied to our interests and our values, then maybe you could write down in your journal or just take a walk and think about, you know, what are the things that interest you?

And if you're having trouble thinking about that, then think about the things that are boring to you.

To me, it was like, Oh, I definitely do not want to become, uh, you know, anything to do with finance like that.

I mean, I don't even know how much money I make.

Um, what, what subjects did I hate in high school?

Then that will probably lead you to like, by contrast, I really liked my class in neurobiology or math or whatever.

So reflection is a second recommendation.

But the third recommendation I think is the most important and that is to do anything.

Yesterday I was on the phone with Luis Vaughn on, he's the founder of duo lingo, the language app and also MacArthur fellow and also the chair of my board for my nonprofit.

And we were having a conversation about, you know, something that we had to do in this nonprofit that had to do with like setting a price.

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How to turn grit into a lifelong habit | Angela Duckworth