The key to succes? GRIT

Angela Lee Duckworth tells us what the real key to success is. How has she discovered it?

She leaves his “successful” job as a consulting to become a math teacher in New York public schools. It was when she realizes that the IQ isn’t what marks the difference between his “best students” and those who struggled. Then is when she decided to become a sociologist and she started to study people, adults and children. Lee Duckworth and his team were able to predict with a surprising precision what children will be able to success in a spelling competition, what children will have more probabilities to graduate independently of his means, what employer could success in an important company or what teacher will be teaching at the end of the course in the schools from he worst neighbourhoods in the city.

All those different kind of success have something in common, and it is not the ability to learn faster or the ability to do it easily. This only works in school to difference better students from others who don’t have this facility. It means, that the fact of succeeding is not necessary related with our “brain capacity” how we usual think. In education the only thing we can calculate the best is the IQ of our children, but what happens when the success, in the school and in the life, depend on other things? And of course, it does. The real predictor of success doesn't relate with the IQ, the good look or the health, but with the grit. 

Grit is in our life and for that is also in our schools and can determinate which children is going to give up. For Lee Duckworth grit is having resistance, having cling to our future day in day out and work very hard to do this future real. We don’t know how the grit can be developed or how grit can be found and keep. The only thing we know is that talent isn't gritted. 

Everyone would have the key to success and everyone would like there was a potion with which achieve success. Many would be ok if only exist a pill with which they could improve their marks, pull more or earn more money.  What I mean is that everybody wants to success in their life but want it with the least effort. 

I think Lee Duckworth was very wise when she think that the real key to success is not the IQ, and she could see it quickly in their students. A lot of times, in the school, for example, we related that someone have good marks because he is very clever. A lot of times I have listening someone who excuse himself saying “oh, is not my foul, my head is not to avail” or something similar happened when they said that someone have better marks because of “he has more facilities and is easier”. I’m not going to refuse that is true the fact that someone could have more facilities to learn something than others. But what I don’t like is people who saying that are “despising” the amount of effort that there is behind someone who has better results than him.

Who excuse himself saying he doesn’t have “that facility” what is really saying is he doesn’t have the persistence and he doesn’t put the effort needed, or what Lee Duckworth call the grit. 

But grit is not only necessary in the school, grit is necessary for the whole of our lives: in the sports, in our job, in our relations… all need time to be done and what we considered more important for us is where we have to spend more time and effort with it. 

I know I’m only 17 and I don’t have enough experiences to give lessons, but if I have noticed something in all that time is that when you effort in something and you work hard for something is when it really works and when you really have the better results. I think that this idea is what Lee Duckworth called the theory about the growing mentality which says that the capacity of learning isn't fixed, it change according to the effort. Something similar happens with the rest of things; the result of something is closely related with the effort you made to get it. 

In conclusion, the key to success is something that all of us have in our hands and use it means that we are willing to accept both our failures and triumphs and consider their as a consequence because of the effort we have made and not as excuse to restrict our obligations or possibilities.