Range - David Epstein Page 0,53

never, never” is an oft-quoted trope. The end of the sentence is always left out: “except to convictions of honor and good sense.”

Labor economist Kirabo Jackson has demonstrated that even the dreaded administrative headache known as “teacher turnover” captures the value of informed switching. He found that teachers are more effective at improving student performance after they switch to a new school, and that the effect is not explained by switching to higher-achieving schools or better students. “Teachers tend to leave schools at which they are poorly matched,” he concluded. “Teacher turnover . . . may in fact move us closer to an optimal allocation of teachers to schools.”

Switchers are winners. It seems to fly in the face of hoary adages about quitting, and of far newer concepts in modern psychology.

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Psychologist Angela Duckworth conducted the most famous study of quitting. She sought to predict which incoming freshmen would drop out of the U.S. Military Academy’s basic-training-cum-orientation, traditionally known as “Beast Barracks.”

Six and a half weeks of physical and emotional rigors are designed to transition young men and women from teenagers on summer break to officers-in-training. Cadets are in formation by 5:30 a.m. to begin running or calisthenics. In the mess hall for breakfast, new cadets, or “plebes,” must sit straight in their chairs and bring food to their mouths, not their faces toward their plates. An upperclassman can pepper them with questions. “How’s the cow?” is shorthand for “How much milk is left?” A plebe will learn to respond, “Sir/Ma’am, she walks, she talks, she’s full of chalk! The lacteal fluid extracted from the female of the bovine species is highly prolific to the [nth] degree!” N represents the number of milk cartons left at the table.

The rest of the day is a mix of classroom and physical activities, like the windowless tear gas chamber where plebes have to remove their gas masks and recite facts while their faces are burning. Puking isn’t required, nor is it discouraged. Lights-out at 10 p.m., so it can start all over in the morning. It is a precarious time for the morale of new student-soldiers. To get into the academy, all had to be excellent students, many were outstanding athletes, and most completed an application process that included a nomination from a member of Congress. Slackers do not arrive at Beast. Still, some will be gone before the first month is out.

Duckworth learned that the Whole Candidate Score—an agglomeration of standardized test scores, high school rank, physical fitness tests, and demonstrated leadership—is the single most important factor for admission, but that it is useless for predicting who will drop out before completing Beast. She had been talking to high performers across domains, and decided to study passion and perseverance, a combination she cleverly formulated as “grit.” She designed a self-assessment that captured the two components of grit. One is essentially work ethic and resilience, and the other is “consistency of interests”—direction, knowing exactly what one wants.

In 2004, at the beginning of Beast, Duckworth gave 1,218 plebes in the incoming class the grit survey. They were asked to pick from five ratings how much each of twelve statements applied to them. Some of the statements were plainly about work ethic (“I am a hard worker”; “I am diligent”). Others probed persistence or singular focus (“I often set a goal but later choose to pursue a different one”; “My interests change from year to year”).

Where the Whole Candidate Score failed to predict Beast dropouts, the Grit Scale was better. Duckworth extended the study to other domains, like the finals of the Scripps National Spelling Bee. She found that both verbal IQ tests and grit predicted how far a speller would get in the competition, but that they did so separately. It was best to have a ton of both, but spellers with little grit could make up for it with high verbal IQ scores, and spellers with lower verbal IQ scores could compensate with grit.

Duckworth’s intriguing work spawned a cottage industry, for a very large cottage. Sports teams, Fortune 500 companies, charter school networks, and the U.S. Department of Education began touting grit, attempting to develop grit, even testing for grit. Duckworth won a MacArthur “genius” grant for her work, but nonetheless responded thoughtfully to the fervor with an op-ed in the New York Times. “I worry I’ve contributed, inadvertently, to an idea I vigorously oppose: high-stakes character assessment,” she wrote. That is not the only way in which grit