Preface

My dad didn’t think my brother and sister were geniuses, either.
Instead, he had the right answer (“ No, she’s not”) to the wrong question (“ Is she a genius?”).
A girl who is told repeatedly that she’s no genius ends up winning an award for being one.
What’s more, I know that grit is mutable, not fixed, and I have insights from research about how to grow it.

Part I: What Grit Is and Why It Matters

And yet, one in five cadets will drop out before graduation.
So, who makes it through Beast?
The Whole Candidate Score is the single most important factor in West Point admissions, and yet it didn’t reliably predict who would make it through Beast.
Rather, what mattered, Mike said, was a “never give up” attitude.
In their own eyes, they were never good enough.
In a word, they had grit.
In other words, how talented a cadet was said nothing about their grit, and vice versa.
Around the same time, I received a call from the Chicago Public Schools.

Throughout college, I’d tutored and mentored kids from the local public schools.
Dinner was now a sandwich eaten hurriedly while grading papers, not sushi ordered in at the client’s expense.