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

by Paul Tough

Sensible though this process might sound, it’s actually a pretty unusual way to teach chess, or to learn it.

“It’s uncomfortable to focus so intensely on what you’re bad at,”

If you really want to get better at chess, you have to look at your games and figure out what you’re doing wrong.”

I try to teach my students that losing is something you do, not something you are.”

It’s the basic narrative of all postgame chess analysis, in fact: You thought you had a good idea here, but you were wrong.

And I really believe that’s why we seem to win girls’ nationals sections pretty easily every year: most people won’t tell teenage girls (especially the together, articulate ones) that they are lazy and the quality of their work is unacceptable. And sometimes kids need to hear that, or they have no reason to step up.

Researchers, including Michael Meaney and Clancy Blair, have demonstrated that for infants to develop qualities like perseverance and focus, they need a high level of warmth and nurturance from their caregivers. 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.

Like students at KIPP, IS 318 students were being challenged to look deeply at their own mistakes, examine why they had made them, and think hard about what they might have done differently.

In a team competition, Spiegel knew, it was not the ability of your best player that made the real difference; it was the ability of your fourth-best player.

Marshall Chess Club, which occupies two floors of a beautiful old town house on a tree-lined street in Greenwich Village.

“When it comes to ambition,” Rowson wrote, “it is crucial to distinguish between ‘wanting’ something and ‘choosing’ it.”

I think the worst thing is you look back on your childhood and it’s one blur of sitting in class and being bored and coming home and watching TV.

You simply don’t experience flow if you aren’t good at something—I will never feel it at the chessboard.

“I figure with six months, if he’s into it and will do the work, I can teach a smart kid anything, right?”

whether or not a student is able to graduate from a decent American college doesn’t necessarily have all that much to do with how smart he or she is.

Nelson’s belief is that underperforming high-school students can relatively quickly transform themselves into highly successful college students—but that it is almost impossible for them to make that transition without the help of a highly effective teacher.

we also needed to train them to succeed once they got there. We needed to teach students to be highly effective people.”

resourcefulness, resilience, ambition, professionalism, and integrity.

That time is certainly not always wasted, but it generally doesn’t contribute much to a student’s academic outcomes. And so Nelson sees freshman year as a “magical timeframe” for OneGoal students “where they can radically close the achievement gap.” As Nelson explained his theory in one of our early conversations, “Freshman year is this unique moment in time.

“The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get that through failure,” Randolph told me. “And in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything.”

There is no soul more overwrought than that of an eighteen-year-old trying to make a life-changing decision.

the powerful connection between infant brain chemistry and adult psychology.

scientists have demonstrated that the most reliable way to produce an adult who is brave and curious and kind and prudent is to ensure that when he is an infant, his hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis functions well. And how do you do that? It is not magic. First, as much as possible, you protect him from serious trauma and chronic stress; then, even more important, you provide him with a secure, nurturing relationship with at least one parent and ideally two. That’s not the whole secret of success, but it is a big, big part of it.

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.

learn to manage failure.

And he explained that the reason that path is so well trod is not the money, though that doesn’t hurt. It’s that the firms make the path and the decision so easy to take and so hard to resist.

The postcollege choices of Ivy League students, he explained, “are motivated by two main decision rules: (1) close down as few options as possible; and (2) only do things that increase the possibility of future overachievement.” Recruiters for investment banks and consulting firms understand this psychology, and they exploit it perfectly: the jobs are competitive and high status, but the process of applying and being accepted is regimented and predictable.

explain why the poverty debate disappeared: it merged with the education debate.

education reformers have mostly united around one specific issue: teacher quality.

variations in teacher quality probably accounted for less than 10 percent of the gap between high- and low-performing students.

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.

It’s rude to discuss other people’s parenting practices in a critical way in public. It’s especially rude when you’re talking about parents who don’t have the material advantages that you do. And when the person making the comments is white and the parents in question are black, everyone’s anxiety level increases. This is a conversation that inevitably unearths painful issues in American politics and the American psyche.