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 at West Point / or the National Spelling Bee that grit matters. // It's also in school, / especially for kids at risk for dropping out. // 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. // What I do know is that / talent doesn't make you gritty. // Our data show very clearly / that there are many talented individuals / who / simply do not follow through on their commitments. // In fact, / in our data, / grit is usually unrelated / or even inversely related to measures of talent. // So far, / the best idea I've heard about building grit in kids / is something called / "growth mindset." // This is an idea developed at Stanford University / by Carol Dweck, / and it is the belief that the ability to learn / is not fixed, / that it can change with your effort. // Dr. Dweck has shown that / when kids read and learn about the brain / and how it changes and grows in response to challenge, / they're much more likely to persevere when they fail, / because / they don't believe that failure is a permanent condition. // So growth mindset / is a great idea for building grit. // But we need more. // And that's where I'm going to end my remarks, / because / that's where we are. // That's the work that stands before us. // We need to take our best ideas, / our strongest intuitions, / and we need to test them. // We need to measure whether we've been successful, / and we have to be willing to fail, / to be wrong, / to start over again with lessons learned. // In other words, / we need to be gritty about getting our kids grittier. // Thank you. //