TED TALK 2: GRIT

When I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job
that was even more demanding: teaching. I went to teach seventh graders math in the
New York City public schools. And like any teacher, I made quizzes and tests. I gave out
homework assignments. When the work came back, I calculated grades. What struck me
was that IQ was not the only difference between my best and my worst students. Some
of my strongest performers did not have stratospheric IQ scores. Some of my smartest
kids weren't doing so well. And that got me thinking. 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.
After several more years of teaching, I came to the conclusion that what we need in
education is a much better understanding of students and learning from a motivational
perspective, from a psychological perspective. In education, the one thing we know how
to measure best is IQ. But what if doing well in school and in life depends on much
more than your ability to learn quickly and easily?
So I left the classroom, and I went to graduate school to become a psychologist. I started
studying kids and adults in all kinds of super challenging settings, and in every study my
question was, who is successful here and why? My research team and I went to West
Point Military Academy. We tried to predict which cadets would stay in military training
and which would drop out. We went to the National Spelling Bee and tried to predict
which children would advance farthest in competition. We studied rookie teachers
working in really tough neighborhoods, asking which teachers are still going to be here
in teaching by the end of the school year, and of those, who will be the most effective at
improving learning outcomes for their students? We partnered with private companies,
asking, which of these salespeople is going to keep their jobs? And who's going to earn
the most money? In all those very different contexts, one characteristic emerged as a
significant predictor of success. And it wasn't social intelligence. It wasn't good looks,
physical health, and it wasn't IQ. It was grit.
Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is having stamina. Grit is
sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but
for years, and working really hard to make that future a reality. Grit is living life like it's
a marathon, not a sprint.
A few years ago, I started studying grit in the Chicago public schools. I asked thousands
of high school juniors to take grit questionnaires, and then waited around more than a
year to see who would graduate. Turns out that grittier kids were significantly more likely
to graduate, even when I matched them on every characteristic I could measure, things
like family income, standardized achievement test scores, even how safe kids felt when
they were at school. So it's not just at West Point or the National Spelling Bee that grit
matters. It's also in school, especially for kids at risk for dropping out.
To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows,
about building it. Every day, parents and teachers ask me, "How do I build grit in
kids? What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic? How do I keep them motivated for
the long run?" The honest answer is, I don't know.
What I do know is that talent doesn't make you gritty. Our data show very clearly that
there are many talented individuals who simply do not follow through on their
commitments. In fact, in our data, grit is usually unrelated or even inversely related to
measures of talent.
So far, the best idea I've heard about building grit in kids is something called "growth
mindset." This is an idea developed at Stanford University by Carol Dweck, and 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.
So growth mindset is a great idea for building grit. But we need more. And that's where
I'm going to end my remarks, because that's where we are. That's the work that stands
before us. We need to take our best ideas, our strongest intuitions, and we need to test
them. We need to measure whether we've been successful, and we have to be willing to
fail, to be wrong, to start over again with lessons learned.
In other words, we need to be gritty about getting our kids grittier. Thank you.

TED TALK 3: TRY SOMETHING NEW FOR 30 DAYS

A few years ago, I felt like I was stuck in a rut, so I decided to follow in the footsteps of
the great American philosopher, Morgan Spurlock, and try something new for 30
days. The idea is actually pretty simple. Think about something you've always wanted to
add to your life and try it for the next 30 days. It turns out 30 days is just about the right
amount of time to add a new habit or subtract a habit -- like watching the news -- from
your life.
There's a few things I learned while doing these 30-day challenges. The first was, instead
of the months flying by, forgotten, the time was much more memorable. This was part of
a challenge I did to take a picture every day for a month. And I remember exactly where
I was and what I was doing that day. I also noticed that as I started to do more and harder
30-day challenges, my self-confidence grew. I went from desk-dwelling computer
nerd to the kind of guy who bikes to work. For fun!
Even last year, I ended up hiking up Mt. Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa. I
would never have been that adventurous before I started my 30-day challenges.
I also figured out that if you really want something badly enough, you can do anything
for 30 days. Have you ever wanted to write a novel? Every November, tens of thousands
of people try to write their own 50,000-word novel, from scratch, in 30 days. It turns out,
all you have to do is write 1,667 words a day for a month. So I did. By the way, the secret
is not to go to sleep until you've written your words for the day. You might be sleep-
deprived, but you'll finish your novel. Now is my book the next great American
novel? No. I wrote it in a month. It's awful.
But for the rest of my life, if I meet John Hodgman at a TED party, I don't have to
say, "I'm a computer scientist." No, no, if I want to, I can say, "I'm a novelist."
So here's one last thing I'd like to mention. I learned that when I made small, sustainable
changes, things I could keep doing, they were more likely to stick. There's nothing wrong
with big, crazy challenges. In fact, they're a ton of fun. But they're less likely to
stick. When I gave up sugar for 30 days, day 31 looked like this.
So here's my question to you: What are you waiting for? I guarantee you the next 30
days are going to pass whether you like it or not, so why not think about something you
have always wanted to try and give it a shot! For the next 30 days. Thanks.

TED TALK: HOW CAN WE MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE BY 2030
Do you think the world is going to be a better place next year? In the next decade? Can
we end hunger, achieve gender equality, halt climate change, all in the next 15
years? Well, according to the governments of the world, yes we can. In the last few days,
the leaders of the world, meeting at the UN in New York, agreed a new set of Global
Goals for the development of the world to 2030. And here they are: these goals are the
product of a massive consultation exercise. The Global Goals are who we, humanity,
want to be.
Now that's the plan, but can we get there? Can this vision for a better world really be
achieved? Well, I'm here today because we've run the numbers, and the answer,
shockingly, is that maybe we actually can. But not with business as usual.
Now, the idea that the world is going to get a better place may seem a little
fanciful. Watch the news every day and the world seems to be going backwards, not
forwards. And let's be frank: it's pretty easy to be skeptical about grand
announcements coming out of the UN.
But please, I invite you to suspend your disbelief for just a moment. Because back in
2001, the UN agreed another set of goals, the Millennium Development Goals. And the
flagship target there was to halve the proportion of people living in poverty by 2015. The
target was to take from a baseline of 1990, when 36 percent of the world's population
lived in poverty, to get to 18 percent poverty this year.
Did we hit this target? Well, no, we didn't. We exceeded it. This year, global poverty is
going to fall to 12 percent. Now, that's still not good enough, and the world does still have
plenty of problems. But the pessimists and doomsayers who say that the world can't get
better are simply wrong.
So how did we achieve this success? Well, a lot of it was because of economic
growth. Some of the biggest reductions in poverty were in countries such as China and
India, which have seen rapid economic growth in recent years. So can we pull off the
same trick again? Can economic growth get us to the Global Goals? Well, to answer that
question, we need to benchmark where the world is today against the Global Goals and
figure out how far we have to travel.
But that ain't easy, because the Global Goals aren't just ambitious, they're also pretty
complicated. Over 17 goals, there are then 169 targets and literally hundreds of
indicators. Also, while some of the goals are pretty specific -- end hunger -- others are a
lot vaguer -- promote peaceful and tolerant societies.
So to help us with this benchmarking, I'm going to use a tool called the Social Progress
Index. What this does is measures all the stuff the Global Goals are trying to achieve, but
sums it up into a single number that we can use as our benchmark and track progress over
time.
The Social Progress Index basically asks three fundamental questions about a
society. First of all, does everyone have the basic needs of survival: food, water, shelter,
safety? Secondly, does everyone have the building blocks of a better life: education,
information, health and a sustainable environment? And does everyone have the
opportunity to improve their lives, through rights, freedom of choice, freedom from
discrimination, and access to the world's most advanced knowledge?
The Social Progress Index sums all this together using 52 indicators to create an
aggregate score on a scale of 0 to 100. And what we find is that there's a wide diversity
of performance in the world today. The highest performing country, Norway, scores
88. The lowest performing country, Central African Republic, scores 31. And we can add
up all the countries together, weighting for the different population sizes, and that global
score is 61. In concrete terms, that means that the average human being is living on a
level of social progress about the same of Cuba or Kazakhstan today.
That's where we are today: 61 out of 100. What do we have to get to to achieve the Global
Goals? Now, the Global Goals are certainly ambitious, but they're not about turning the
world into Norway in just 15 years. So having looked at the numbers, my estimate is that
a score of 75 would not only be a giant leap forward in human well-being, it would also
count as hitting the Global Goals target. So there's our target, 75 out of 100. Can we get
there?
Well, the Social Progress Index can help us calculate this, because as you might have
noticed, there are no economic indicators in there; there's no GDP or economic growth
in the Social Progress Index model. And what that lets us do is understand the
relationship between economic growth and social progress.
Let me show you on this chart. So here on the vertical axis, I've put social progress, the
stuff the Global Goals are trying to achieve. Higher is better. And then on the horizontal
axis, is GDP per capita. Further to the right means richer. And in there, I'm now going to
put all the countries of the world, each one represented by a dot, and on top of that I'm
going to put the regression line that shows the average relationship. And what this tells
us is that as we get richer, social progress does tend to improve. However, as we get richer,
each extra dollar of GDP is buying us less and less social progress. And now we can use
this information to start building our forecast. So here is the world in 2015. We have a
social progress score of 61 and a GDP per capita of $14,000. And the place we're trying
to get to, remember, is 75, that Global Goals target. So here we are today, $14,000 per
capita GDP. How rich are we going to be in 2030? That's what we need to know
next. Well, the best forecast we can find comes from the US Department of
Agriculture, which forecasts 3.1 percent average global economic growth over the next
15 years, which means that in 2030, if they're right, per capita GDP will be about
$23,000. So now the question is: if we get that much richer, how much social progress
are we going to get? Well, we asked a team of economists at Deloitte who checked and
crunched the numbers, and they came back and said, well, look: if the world's average
wealth goes from $14,000 a year to $23,000 a year, social progress is going to
increase from 61 to 62.4. Just 62.4. Just a tiny increase.
Now this seems a bit strange. Economic growth seems to have really helped in the fight
against poverty, but it doesn't seem to be having much impact on trying to get to the
Global Goals. So what's going on? Well, I think there are two things. The first is that in
a way, we're the victims of our own success. We've used up the easy wins from economic
growth, and now we're moving on to harder problems. And also, we know that economic
growth comes with costs as well as benefits. There are costs to the environment, costs
from new health problems like obesity.
So that's the bad news. We're not going to get to the Global Goals just by getting
richer. So are the pessimists right? Well, maybe not. Because the Social Progress Index
also has some very good news. Let me take you back to that regression line. So this is the
average relationship between GDP and social progress, and this is what our last forecast
was based on. But as you saw already, there is actually lots of noise around this trend line.
What that tells us, quite simply, is that GDP is not destiny. We have countries that are
underperforming on social progress, relative to their wealth. Russia has lots of natural
resource wealth, but lots of social problems. China has boomed economically, but hasn't
made much headway on human rights or environmental issues. India has a space program
and millions of people without toilets. Now, on the other hand, we have countries that are
overperforming on social progress relative to their GDP. Costa Rica has prioritized
education, health and environmental sustainability, and as a result, it's achieving a very
high level of social progress, despite only having a rather modest GDP. And Costa Rica's
not alone. From poor countries like Rwanda to richer countries like New Zealand, we see
that it's possible to get lots of social progress, even if your GDP is not so great.
And that's really important, because it tells us two things. First of all, it tells us that we
already in the world have the solutions to many of the problems that the Global Goals are
trying to solve. It also tells us that we're not slaves to GDP. Our choices matter: if we
prioritize the well-being of people, then we can make a lot more progress than our GDP
might expect.
How much? Enough to get us to the Global Goals? Well, let's look at some
numbers. What we know already: the world today is scoring 61 on social progress, and
the place we want to get to is 75. If we rely on economic growth alone, we're going to get
to 62.4. So let's assume now that we can get the countries that are
currently underperforming on social progress -- the Russia, China, Indias -- just up to the
average. How much social progress does that get us? Well, that takes us to 65. It's a bit
better, but still quite a long way to go. So let's get a little bit more optimistic and say, what
if every country gets a little bit better at turning its wealth into well-being? Well then, we
get to 67. And now let's be even bolder still. What if every country in the world chose to
be like Costa Rica in prioritizing human well-being, using its wealth for the well-being
of its citizens? Well then, we get to nearly 73, very close to the Global Goals.
Can we achieve the Global Goals? Certainly not with business as usual. Even a flood tide
of economic growth is not going to get us there, if it just raises the mega-yachts and the
super-wealthy and leaves the rest behind. If we're going to achieve the Global Goals we
have to do things differently. We have to prioritize social progress, and really scale
solutions around the world. I believe the Global Goals are a historic opportunity, because
the world's leaders have promised to deliver them. Let's not dismiss the goals or slide into
pessimism; let's hold them to that promise. And we need to hold them to that promise by
holding them accountable, tracking their progress all the way through the next 15 years.
And I want to finish by showing you a way to do that, called the People's Report
Card. The People's Report Card brings together all this data into a simple framework that
we'll all be familiar with from our school days, to hold them to account. It grades our
performance on the Global Goals on a scale from F to A, where F is humanity at its worst,
and A is humanity at its best. Our world today is scoring a C-. The Global Goals are all
about getting to an A, and that's why we're going to be updating the People's Report Card
annually, for the world and for all the countries of the world, so we can hold our leaders
to account to achieve this target and fulfill this promise. Because getting to the Global
Goals will only happen if we do things differently, if our leaders do things differently, and
for that to happen, that needs us to demand it.
So let's reject business as usual. Let's demand a different path. Let's choose the world that
we want. Thank you.