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

by Paul Tough

“I’m left now, in my thirties,” Dave wrote, “often wondering how much more I could have accomplished if I wasn’t terrified of failure, and prone to shying away from ventures where my success wasn’t guaranteed.”

exegesis

overwrought

insufferability,

But that was precisely what I felt I needed: to do something uncertain, unsafe; something I didn’t know if I could succeed at.

subject myself

Steve Jobs gave at Stanford University in 2005.

Jobs had dropped out of college—Reed College, in Oregon.

calligraphy and typography.

“I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great,” Jobs said. “None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life”—until, of course, a decade later, when he and Steve Wozniak were designing the Macintosh and decided to include, for the first time, creative typography in a personal computer. That flourish helped distinguish the Mac from everything that had come before.

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.

less sure about everything.”

gave college another try a few months later, back in my native Canada—McGill University,

three semesters after that, I dropped out again to take an internship at Harper’s Magazine.

I never went back to college, never got a BA, and, haltingly, I began a career as a magazine editor and a journalist.

And yes, the development of an individual’s character depends on all sorts of mysterious interactions among culture and family and genes and free will and fate.

Chemistry is not destiny, certainly. But these 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.

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.

They did their LG-ing mostly in one very specific situation: when their pups were stressed out.

through repetition, a valuable skill: how to manage their inflamed stress systems and restore them to a resting state.

it involves a lot of comforting and hugging and talking and reassuring.

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.

child-size adversity,

we need to first let him fail.

we need to help him learn to manage failure.

This idea—the importance of learning how to deal with and learn from your own failures—is a common thread in ma...

It’s what Elizabeth Spiegel, the chess coach, was such an expert at. She took it for granted that her stu...

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...

that their children were so overly protected from adversity that they weren’t developing the ability to overcome failure and learn from it.

pervasive,

inch...

an...

that young people were graduating from our finest institutions of higher learning with excellent credentials and well-honed test-taking skills and not much else that would allow them to make their own way in the world.

There are fewer entrepreneurs graduating from our best colleges these days; fewer iconoclasts; fewer artists; fewer everything, in fact, except investment bankers and management consultants.

More than half of the class, in other words, was going into investment banking or consulting—and

not known for their high level of personal fulfillment or deep social value

kids who worked very hard but never had to make a difficult decision or confront a real challenge and so entered the adult world competent but lost.

James...

“Why Do Harvard Kids Head to W...

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 typical contemporary Harvard undergraduate, Kwak wrote, “is driven more by fear of not being a success than by a concrete desire to do anything in particular.”

(2) only do things that increase the possibility of future overachievement.”

exploit it perfectly:

“For people who don’t know how to get a job in the open economy,” Kwak wrote, “and who have ended each phase of their lives by taking the test to do the most prestigious thing possible in the next phase, all of this comes naturally.”

“The government should guarantee every citizen enough to eat and a place to sleep” and “It is the responsibility of the government to take care of people who can’t take care of themselves.”

1987, when Pew started asking these questions, between 87 percent and 94 percent of respondents in every poll have agreed with the statement “Our society should do what is necessary to make sure that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed.”

It is not that poverty itself has disappeared. Far from it. In 1966, at the height of the War on Poverty, the poverty rate was just under 15 percent; in 2010, it was 15.1 percent. And the child poverty rate is substantially higher now. In 1966, the rate stood at a little more than 17 percent. Now the figure is 22 percent, meaning that between a fifth and a quarter of American children are growing up in poverty.

wonks.

The Bell Curve, the controversial 1994 book about IQ by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein.