Grit: The power of passion and perseverance

Learning strategies are undeniably crucial, but so is grit. The kinds of things you need to learn in seventh grade math, sure, they're hard: ratios, decimals, the area of a parallelogram. But these concepts are not impossible, and I was firmly convinced that every one of my students could learn the material if they worked hard and long enough.

Growth Mindset

So far, the best idea I've heard about building grit in kids is something called "growth mindset." It is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed, that it can change with your effort. Dr. Dweck has shown that when kids read and learn about the brain and how it changes and grows in response to challenge, they're much more likely to persevere when they fail, because they don't believe that failure is a permanent condition.

Growth Mindset: Clearing up Some Common Confusions

Intelligence and Grit

Somewhat surprisingly, in four separate samples, grit was found to be either orthogonal to or slightly inversely correlated with intelligence.

Grit and Relationship

Building Grit by Being with Grittier People

Experiment after experiment has shown just how impactful our social relations are to our moral compass and our values.

Keeping bad company is unhealthy to the soul (or our mental health, if you prefer a modern variant). This is because, when a relationship is toxic, or if our company is full of knaves who behave badly, we become knavish ourselves. As Epictetus wrote, “If a companion is dirty, his friends cannot help but get a little dirty too, no matter how clean they started out.”

And how true this is. If we spend an evening gossiping and being mean, we also become spiteful and cruel. If our friends have no ambition or mock the aspirational, we will never dare to dream. If our friends celebrate ignorance, we will give no weight to education or learning.

The friends you have and the company you keep will make you who you are, so we ought to weigh carefully who they are.