craschworks / grit

Angela Lee Duckworth – Why Grit Is Necessary To Success

04-Apr-11

via youtube.com

“Why is it that gritty kids are winning the National Spelling Bee…It turns out …what differentiates kids who are gritty from kids who are not gritty, is not just the hours of work that they’re putting in….They’re not studying the words they already know…They isolate what they don’t know, they identify their own weaknesses, and then they work just on that.”

“I’ve never viewed myself as particularly talented. I’ve viewed myself as slightly above average in talent. Where I excel is with a ridiculous, sickening work ethic. While the other guy’s sleeping, I’m working. While the other guy is eating, I’m working. While the other guy’s making love, I mean, I’m making love, too, but I’m working really hard at it! ”

– Will Smith on success

Test scores bear little correlation to real-life success

03-Apr-11

high-stakes tests are often spectacularly bad at predicting performance in the real world. Though the SAT does a decent job of predicting the grades of college freshmen—the test accounts for about 12% of the individual variation in grade point average—it is much less effective at predicting levels of achievement after graduation. Professional academic tests suffer from the same flaw. A study by the University of Michigan Law School, for instance, found that LSAT scores bore virtually no relationship to career success as measured by levels of income, life satisfaction or public service.

Even the NFL Combine is a big waste of time. According to a recent study by economists at the University of Louisville, there’s no “consistent statistical relationship” between the results of players at the Combine and subsequent NFL performance.

The reason maximal measures are such bad predictors is rooted in what these tests don’t measure. It turns out that many of the most important factors for life success are character traits, such as grit and self-control, and these can’t be measured quickly.

via online.wsj.com

Tough girl

02-Dec-07

High school runner breaks leg in meet, crawls to finish anyway

It has been almost two weeks since Claire Markwardt’s horrific fall in the final stretch of the Ohio state high school cross country championship, and yet, the Berkshire High School senior has seen the video only once.

Only once has she logged on to YouTube and watched herself fall to the ground as first her left tibia and then her fibula snap in half. Only once has she watched herself crawl the final 45 feet to the finish line, ensuring that she would complete the final race of her high school career.

And even that one time, she had to stop the video at the point where a race official picks her up and carries her to a doctor.

“There’s a scene in ‘Harry Potter’ where Harry breaks his arm and it’s really jiggly,” Markwardt said by phone this week. “When [the official] picked me up, that’s what I remember thinking my leg felt like. It felt like it was swinging around a lot. And I didn’t want to see that, so I stopped watching.”

(more…)

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