How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character

by Paul Tough

To help chronically low-performing but intelligent students, educators and parents must first recognize that character is at least as important as intellect.”

Over the past couple of decades, a consensus has emerged among personality psychologists that the most effective way to analyze the human personality is to consider it along five dimensions, known as the Big Five: agreeableness, extraversion, neuroticism, openness to experience, and conscientiousness.

students do much better academically if they believe intelligence is malleable.

Cognitive flexibility is the ability to see alternative solutions to problems, to think outside the box, to negotiate unfamiliar situations. Cognitive self-control is the ability to inhibit an instinctive or habitual response and substitute a more effective, less obvious one. Both skills are central to the training Spiegel gives to her students. To prevail at chess, she says, you need a heightened ability to see new and different ideas: Which especially creative winning move have you overlooked? And which potentially lethal move of your opponent’s are you blindly ignoring? She also teaches them to resist the temptation to pursue an immediately attractive move, since that type of move (as Sebastian Garcia found out) often leads to trouble down the road. “Teaching chess is really about teaching the habits that go along with thinking,” Spiegel explained to me one morning when I visited her classroom. “Like how to understand your mistakes and how to be more aware of your thought processes.”

It’s a little like what people ideally get out of psychotherapy, Spiegel says. You go over the mistakes you made—or the mistakes you keep making—and you try to get to the bottom of why you made them. And just like the best therapists, Spiegel tries to lead her students down a narrow and difficult path: to have them take responsibility for their mistakes and learn from them without obsessing over them or beating themselves up for them.

What Spiegel’s success suggests, though, is that when children reach early adolescence, what motivates them most effectively isn’t licking and grooming–style care but a very different kind of attention. Perhaps what pushes middle-school students to concentrate and practice as maniacally as Spiegel’s chess players do is the unexpected experience of someone taking them seriously, believing in their abilities, and challenging them to improve themselves.

Csikszentmihalyi studied what he called optimal experiences, those rare moments in human existence when a person feels free of mundane distractions, in control of his fate, totally engaged by the moment. Csikszentmihalyi came up with a word for this state of intense concentration: flow. He wrote that flow moments most often occur “when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult or worthwhile.”

And when Angela Duckworth, the guru of self-control and grit at the University of Pennsylvania, analyzed GPA and standardized-test scores among middle-school and high-school students, she found that standardized-test scores were predicted by scores on pure IQ tests and that GPA was predicted by scores on tests of self-control.

“In our view,” Bowen, Chingos, and McPherson wrote, “high school grades reveal much more than mastery of content. They reveal qualities of motivation and perseverance—as well as the presence of good study habits and time management skills—that tell us a great deal about the chances that a student will complete a college program.”

This idea—the importance of learning how to deal with and learn from your own failures—is a common thread in many of the chapters in this book. It’s what Elizabeth Spiegel, the chess coach, was such an expert at. She took it for granted that her students were going to fail a lot. Every chess player does. As she saw it, her job was not to prevent them from failing; it was to teach them how to learn from each failure, how to stare at their failures with unblinking honesty, how to confront exactly why they had messed up. If they could do that, she believed, they would do better next time.

But they don’t accurately represent the biggest obstacles to academic success that poor children, especially very poor children, often face: a home and a community that create high levels of stress, and the absence of a secure relationship with a caregiver that would allow a child to manage that stress.