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

by Paul Tough

traits—an inclination to persist at a boring and often unrewarding task; the ability to delay gratification; the tendency to follow through on a plan—also

our stress-response system, like that of all mammals, evolved to react to brief and acute stresses. That worked well when humans were out on the savanna running from predators. But modern humans rarely have to contend with lion attacks.

Instead, all the trucks rush off to the fire together at top speed, sirens blaring.

the ones who possessed certain other gifts, skills like optimism and resilience and social agility.

Pessimists, Seligman wrote, tend to react to negative events by explaining them as permanent, personal, and pervasive.

Optimists, by contrast, look for specific, limited, short-term explanations for bad events, and as a result, in the face of a setback, they’re more likely to pick themselves up and try again.

self-discipline scores from the previous fall were better predictors of their final GPAs than their IQ scores.

when the marshmallows were hidden from view, children were able to delay much longer than when the marshmallows were right in front of them.

The more abstractly they thought about the treat, the longer they were able to delay.

mechanics of achievement into two separate dimensions: motivation and volition.

the purpose of a school like Riverdale is not to raise the ceiling on a child’s potential achievement in life but to raise the floor,

mental contrasting, and it combines elements of the other two methods. It means concentrating on a positive outcome and simultaneously concentrating on the obstacles in the way.

is creating a series of “implementation intentions”—specific plans in the form of if/then statements that link the obstacles with ways to overcome them, such as “If I get distracted by TV after school, then I will wait to watch TV until after I finish my homework.”

intelligence is malleable.

you’re trying to help them change their character, then conveying information isn’t enough.

falsification.

When testing a theory, however large or small, an individual doesn’t instinctively look for evidence that contradicts it; he looks for data that prove him right, a tendency known as confirmation bias. That tendency and the ability to overcome it turn out to be crucial elements in chess success.

It’s like public speaking, she explained: if you’re not a bit overconfident when you step up to the microphone, you’re in trouble.

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 we could make public schools more effective—much more effective—the schools could become a more powerful antipoverty tool than anything we had previously tried.