When Passion and Perseverance Carry the Day

How do our children grow to become capable, successful young men and women? Angela Duckworth studied successful children and adults across a wide range of schools and careers and says the most significant predictor of success she found is grit. “It’s not good looks, physical health, and it wasn’t I.Q. It was grit,” which she goes on to define as “passion and perseverance…”

 

Carol Dweck, a professor at Stanford University, has developed something called a “growth mindset,” which is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed, and that it can change with effort.

Children who can see failures as temporary and as learning opportunities will become more successful than those who believe that failures are permanent and can’t be overcome. Developing grit takes a growth mindset.
 

Paul Tough, the author of “How Children Succeed,” says noncognitive skills, like persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit and self-confidence, are more crucial than sheer brain power to achieving success.

I was reminded of this last summer just before I walked my daughter, McKenzie, down the aisle on her wedding day.
 

The day dawned with an overcast sky, and the weather app on my iPhone showed a large green expanse heading in from the Pacific and covering the Olympic Mountains to the west. It did not look good for a 5:30 outdoor wedding. McKenzie, now a Seattle native, seemed calm. At 2:30, with chairs and tables already set up, a light rain began to fall. My daughter, looking out the window and getting ready for the big day, seemed unaffected, while her father began a slow panic.
 

By 4:30, the tables and chairs were beading water, but there was a break in the drizzle and towels were found to wipe everything dry. By 5:15 sunlight was beginning to break through, and I saw my daughter for the first time in her wedding dress. I stood there unable to say a word, fearing I'd become an emotional wreck. Not only was she beautiful, but I was filled with pride at what she had pulled off in planning the day.
 

As we waited to walk down the aisle, I wanted to say something memorable, but all that came out was an attempt at humor to the effect of, “Hey, let’s skip this and just go get some dinner together.” To which she replied with great calm something to the effect, “I don’t think that’s a good idea. Deal with it, Dad.”  I was a mess, but McKenzie stood radiant, fully present and in control. It was her day, and she was loving every moment of it!
 

If we want our children to become self-confident and successful, they will need a growth mindset and many successes and failures at solving tough problems. My daughter has developed perseverance and grit by successfully working through many setbacks in school, sports, work and life. We never rushed in to rescue her, but instead helped her to find ways to solve her problems and to know that her successes were hers, not ours.
 

I have been proud of McKenzie’s successes in school, where her writing and grades carried the day, but on the most important day of her life, she proved that persistence, self-control, self-confidence and grit were all she needed to carry the day.

Helping our Children to be Successful

Tremendous importance has been put on "smarts" - intelligence as measured by IQ, grades, and frequently SAT and ACT scores.  Sure, you need a certain level of education and ability to get a job but, "smarts" in the real world isn’t so much about intelligence or IQ. It’s more about grit, tenacity, courage and hard work.

My daughter is a tenacious sales person for a well known business internet provider. She tells me that there is a direct correlation between the number of calls she makes each week and the number of sales she is able to close. I can’t argue her numbers, but I also believe that her ability to be successful and make those calls each day - week after week, month after month - has more to do with tenacity, the ability to take rejection and, most importantly, to learn from each of the 10-20 calls a day she makes. She has put herself on a fast learning curve, discovering quickly, each time she contacts a potential customer, what works and what doesn’t work. She has learned techniques to overcome rejection and not just accept it. She is also learning the rewards of delayed gratification and self-discipline. These are important life skills that reach far beyond the degree in Political Science she earned four years ago.

CEO Tom Georgens of NetApp, the $6.3 billion data storage company, made a very interesting observation: “I know this irritates a lot of people, but once someone is at a certain point in his or her career – and it’s not that far out, maybe five years – all the grades and academic credentials in the world don’t mean anything anymore.  It’s all about accomplishments from that point on.” He goes on to say, “I don’t even know where some members of my staff went to college or what they studied.”

Greg Becker, CEO of Silicon Valley Bank is quoted as saying, “Some of the better venture capital firms that I know want people who are scrappy, who have been through trials and tribulations. These people will figure out a way to make it work, no matter what.” I would add that these are the qualities and experiences that every employer wants.

So, how do schools and families help our young people to develop these talents? The old

saying is, “If you want your child to become a problem solver, let them solve problems.”

Here are some things that parents and teachers can do to prepare children to develop the skills they will need to be successful in the world of work:

• Promote perseverance
  • Help your children to:
    • hold high expectations for themselves over an extended period of time
    • place a high value on challenging goals and low estimates on the costs of working toward those goals
    • see that goals are feasible
    • maintain high expectations despite failures and setbacks
    • (Note: Watch this TEDX Video by Angela Duckworth)
• Be a nudge
  • Let your kids know that you expect them to do their best and create a structure that will help them do it
  • Learning any new skill, athletic, musical, or otherwise, is not easy. Nudging also means scheduling
• Welcome boredom and frustration
  • Success comes with challenges along the way. Confusion, frustration and boredom are part of the voyage.
  • Help kids to learn that accomplishments are not always easy and that having a hard time doesn’t mean they are stupid

• Let her or him fail — and model resilience
  • Letting her fail and pick herself up is probably the most important skill a child can learn
  • Share your own failures and how you overcame them. Modeling is powerful calm and determination in the face of your challenges.

We need to help our children to see that IQ and SAT scores are not what define them. In the real world, perseverance, delayed gratification and self-discipline are the "smarts" that our children need to be successful. When we help them to develop these qualities, and not step in to rescue them every time they face a challenge, we will be doing our jobs as parents and teachers.

Learning to Play or Build a Resume?

As our juniors begin thinking about the college application process, I am reminded once again of the pressure they feel to enhance their resumes with long lists of volunteer work, awards, recognitions, honors, clubs, athletic and artistic accomplishments, and demonstrations of leadership. All of this is in addition to the academic expectations of a high grade point average, outstanding SAT scores, mastery of a foreign language, and multiple AP and advanced classes.

It makes me wonder when our students have time to play, spend time with their families, reflect, and get to know themselves. A recent article by Peg L. Smith, CEO, American Camp Association pointed out the importance of play in the lives of young people and how its loss can actually work against the presumed gains of an enhanced college resume.

She quotes Stuart Brown, the author of Play: How it shapes the Brain, who writes, “There is a great deal of evidence that the road to mastery of any subject is guided by play.”
I frequently hear parents lamenting the fact that they are constantly running their children from one organized activity to the next after school and on weekends, leaving no time for their children to be creative or to explore on their own. They then frequently comment that in their youth they would take off on their bikes on Saturday morning and return in the late afternoon after a day of play and exploration with friends. Parents cite the many images of violence and abduction as the reason that they tend to micromanage their children, but this tendency may be slowing down their children’s natural development.

Smith reports that evidence suggests unstructured play has been on the decline since 1955 along with a parallel decrease in children’s access to the outdoors. She states that the average radius of play is only 500 square feet and that outside play has decreased by 50% according to the Children and Nature Network.

Brain research has repeatedly discovered the brain thrives and develops its greatest potential when it has been allowed to create multiple techniques to acquire and process information. It is critically important that it be stimulated through experimenting, engaging with their friends, solving problems, and through opportunities for movement and exploration. Smith challenges us to ask if we are exchanging opportunities for the brain to develop “how” to learn with “what” to learn. She avows, “This is a misguided notion. One’s ability to discover meaning is always more valuable than information alone.”

We may discover that helping our children to have more opportunities to play and explore will serve their long-term success more than having them engage in the organized activities that now dominate their college resumes.

Innovation Ready?

With over two and one-half billion people now using the Internet, the access to information and the speed of collaboration and professional expertise through instant communication has never been easier.

Many believe that the most successful workers in the future will be those who are able to think and act entrepreneurially. Princeton University professor Anne-Marie Slaughter suggests that a winning strategy for the future of work is to be able to “design your own profession and convince employers that you are exactly what they need.”

Tony Wagner, in his latest book, “Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World,” writes; “because knowledge is available on every Internet-connected device, what you know matters far less than what you can do with what you know. The capacity to innovate —the ability to solve problems creatively or bring new possibilities to life — and skills like critical thinking, communication and collaboration are far more important than academic knowledge. As one executive told me, ‘We can teach new hires the content, and we will have to because it continues to change, but we can’t teach them how to think — to ask the right questions — and to take initiative.’ ”

Our future college graduates may have to invent” a job rather than follow in our footsteps of “finding” a job.