How to Raise Successful People by Esther Wojcicki

Author:Esther Wojcicki
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

GRIT IS A TEACHABLE SKILL

On the east side of Stanford’s campus sits Bing Nursery School, beloved for its classrooms filled with games and toys and a massive outdoor play area. In the spring of 1972, Susan had been a student at Bing for almost two years when she was asked to participate in an educational experiment that sounded like fun. Susan was four years old at the time.

“We had marshmallows today,” Susan announced as we walked to the parking lot, “and I got two.” She told me she had been in a special game room and had been given a marshmallow. “If I could wait and not eat it right away, I’d get a second one,” she said. She was super proud of herself for her restraint being rewarded. She couldn’t stop talking about those marshmallows.

I later found out that Susan had been a participant in the famous marshmallow experiment. If you Google it, you’ll find over two million hits describing Walter Mischel’s groundbreaking research. Mischel wanted to test children’s ability to delay gratification and assert self-control, and he wondered how these qualities affected them in adult life. In a way, he decided to torture the nursery school students—but nicely. His team of researchers would lead children ages four to five into an empty room at the school. A treat—often a marshmallow, but M&M’s, Oreos, and other goodies were sometimes used—was placed on the table. The child was told they could eat the marshmallow right then, or they could wait by themselves until the researcher returned (after fifteen minutes, practically a lifetime for a little kid) and get two marshmallows instead of one. Some kids succumbed right away. The marshmallow was just too tempting. The kids who waited the longest found all kinds of creative ways to distract themselves—singing songs, dancing, sitting on their hands, looking anywhere but at the marshmallow. But what was most striking were the follow-up studies. Mischel and his research team found over the course of forty years that children who could delay gratification at a young age were “more cognitively and socially competent adolescents,” had lower BMIs (body mass index), and fewer interpersonal problems as adults.9

Just as I was about to pull away from the nursery school, one of the researchers ran up to the car and told me that of all the students at Bing, Susan had waited the longest for her marshmallow. He seemed very proud. Though I didn’t understand the experiment at the time, it makes sense now. Susan is one of the most patient and logical people I know. She’s also tremendously calm under pressure. Nothing fazes her. She has enormous self-control. She surrounds herself with employees that she trusts and respects. She had all these traits as a young girl, and not because she’d been born that way, but because she’d been practicing for years.

Grit is made up of many different skills. I think of them as pieces of a puzzle: each is important. One major key is knowing yourself

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