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Going Beyond Grit
Part 1: What happened to one of the most popular ideas in psychology?
On their first day at West Point, each incoming class of over 1200 cadets completes a stack of psychological questionnaires. Then they start what is famously called “Beast Barracks:” six weeks of training that the new cadet handbook describes as “the most physically and emotionally demanding part of the four years at West Point.” For a few choice years, one of those questionnaires queried cadets to rate themselves from “very much like me” to “not like me at all” using the following:
Setbacks don’t discourage me.
I finish whatever I begin.
New ideas and projects sometimes distract me from previous ones.
West Point graduate or not, how would you rate those questions?
These questions are from the Grit Scale, developed by the psychologist Angela Duckworth, and for about a decade its scores were all the rage in school and other settings.
Duckworth opened her 2013 TED talk this way: “When I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding: teaching.” She had graduated from Harvard, studied neuroscience at Oxford, and worked at McKinsey before switching things up to teach math and science for about five years in public school (NYC, San Francisco, Philly). She talked about how she made the observation that kids who seemed the smartest weren’t always the ones…
