Here is a brief excerpt from an article written by Maria Popova for her website, Brain Pickings. Her focus is on Angela Duckworth and her assertion that “character is at least as important as intellect.” To read the complete article, check out others, and learn more about Brain Pickings, please click here.

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Creative history brims with embodied examples of why the secret of genius is doggedness rather than “god”-given talent, from the case of young Mozart’s upbringing to E. B. White’s wisdom on writing to Chuck Close’s assertion about art to Tchaikovsky’s conviction about composition to Neil Gaiman’s advice to aspiring writers. But it takes a brilliant scholar of the psychology of achievement to empirically prove these creative intuitions: Math-teacher-turned-psychologist Angela Duckworth, who began her graduate studies under positive psychology godfather Martin Seligman at my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, has done more than anyone for advancing our understanding of how self-control and grit – the relentless work ethic of sustaining your commitments toward a long-term goal – impact success. So how heartening to hear that Duckworth is the recipient of a 2013 MacArthur “genius” grant for her extraordinary endeavors, the implications of which span from education to employment to human happiness.

In a short video from the MacArthur Foundation, Duckworth traces her journey and explores the essence of her work:

“We need more than the intuitions of educators to work on this problem. For sure we need the educators, but in partnership I think we need scientists to study this from different vantage points, and that actually inspired me to move out of the classroom as a teacher and into the lab as a research psychologist.”

In the exceedingly excellent How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2012) – a necessary addition to these fantastic reads on education – Paul Tough writes of Duckworth’s work:

“Duckworth had come to Penn in 2002, at the age of thirty-two, later in life than a typical graduate student. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, she had been a classic multitasking overachiever in her teens and twenties. After completing her undergraduate degree at Harvard (and starting a summer school for low-income kids in Cambridge in her spare time), she had bounced from one station of the mid-nineties meritocracy to the next: intern in the White House speechwriting office, Marshall scholar at Oxford (where she studied neuroscience), management consultant for McKinsey and Company, charter-school adviser.”

Duckworth spent a number of years toying with the idea of starting her own charter school, but eventually concluded that the model didn’t hold much promise for changing the circumstances of children from disadvantaged backgrounds, those whom the education system was failing most tragically. Instead, she decided to pursue a PhD program at Penn.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

To watch Duckworth’s TED program about the importance of grit, please click here.

To learn more about Maria Popova, please click here.

To read my review of How Children Succeed, please click here.