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

by Paul Tough

In the early twentieth century, the Austrian philosopher Sir Karl Popper wrote that the nature of scientific thought was such that one could never truly verify scientific theories; the only way to test the validity of any particular theory was to prove it wrong, a process he labeled falsification. This idea made its way into cognitive science with the observation that most people are actually quite bad at falsification—not just in science but in daily life. 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.

And the reason we’re all so bad at games like this is the tendency toward confirmation bias: It feels much better to find evidence that confirms what you believe to be true than to find evidence that falsifies what you believe to be true.

It hasn’t escaped my attention that many of the researchers I’ve written about in this book—everyone from James Heckman to Angela Duckworth to Melissa Roderick to the authors of Crossing the Finish Line—have identified dropping out of high school or college as a symptom of substandard noncognitive ability: low grit, low perseverance, bad planning skills.

What struck me most about Jobs’s speech, though, was the story he told about his greatest failure: being fired from Apple, the company he created, just after his thirtieth birthday. “What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating,” he said. “I was a very public failure.” What he wasn’t able to see at the time, Jobs said, but that became clear later was that the experience of such a dramatic failure allowed him to reorient himself and his work in a way that led to his greatest successes: buying and transforming Pixar, getting married, returning to Apple rejuvenated. As Jobs put it in his speech: “The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything.”

Those high-LG dams, I realized, were not helicopter parents. They didn’t hover anxiously. They weren’t constantly licking and grooming their pups. They did their LG-ing mostly in one very specific situation: when their pups were stressed out. It was almost as if the dams were trying to teach their pups, through repetition, a valuable skill: how to manage their inflamed stress systems and restore them to a resting state. The equivalent skill for human infants, I think, is being able to calm down after a tantrum or a bad scare, and that’s what I concentrated on trying to help Ellington learn how to do. To be clear: I didn’t lick my son. I didn’t even really groom him much, to be honest. But if there is a human equivalent to high-LG parenting, it involves a lot of comforting and hugging and talking and reassuring. And my wife, Paula, and I both did a lot of that when Ellington was little. My guess is that doing those things with Ellington in his infancy will turn out to have made a bigger difference in his character, and in his ultimate happiness and success, than anything else we do.

As Ellington grew older, though, I found, as countless parents had found before me, that he needed something more than love and hugs. He also needed discipline, rules, limits; someone to say no. And what he needed more than anything was some child-size adversity, a chance to fall down and get back up on his own, without help.

This was harder for Paula and me—it came less naturally to us than the hugging and comforting—and I know that it is just the beginning of the long struggle we will face, as all parents do, between our urge to provide everything for our child, to protect him from all harm, and our knowledge that if we really want him to succeed, we nee...

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. Just like Steve Jobs at Apple the second time around.