By Alex Busack
Dr. Angela Duckworth, Assistant Psychology Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is an educator with a theory, one that is making people sit up and take notice. Through her experiences in the school system, she searched for the key ingredient to success. After years of scouring and exploring she has an answer: Grit.
Grit, according to Duckworth is the “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.” Duckworth found that more important than IQ, GRIT is a determiner of success in children.
And so, it is not surprising that more and more people are asking themselves the same question: “How do you develop grit?”
At Outward Bound, we ask ourselves “How can we instill it in others?” After all, the school was founded as a way to teach resiliency to others. Kurt Hahn, the founder of Outward Bound, set out on a path to develop alternative education to instill qualities in youth that went beyond the reading, writing and arithmetic they learned in the classroom. Hahn wanted to teach traits such as endurance, excellence, integrity, and tenacity, among others. He believed that these skills were best learned in the wilderness, not the classroom. His first experiment with this revolutionary idea took place in the early 1900’s and it involved teaching young sailors the skills necessary for survival through a wilderness expedition. The sailors learned survival skills and more: they learned how to problem-solve, trust themselves and others, and to find the grit they possessed to face adverse conditions and to persevere. It was through experiential learning that they developed the stamina necessary to not only endure trial and error but to learn from it.
The idea of stamina may be the most instrumental in the Outward Bound realm of education. You see, Hahn believed that we should “meet the children with triumph and defeat.” Oftentimes, Outward Bound instructors will allow the crew to make navigational errors, much to the chagrin of the students. They may protest that it is unjust but instructors smile as they know this one key to success: Without allowing others to fall, how can we ever expect them to learn how to get back up? And this is what grit is all about — finding the courage and determination to push on when things are tough and the unexpected derails you.
Today, Outward Bound continues this mission, and the grit is evident on the faces of our students. There’s the moment when a teenager absolutely believes he can’t summit the mountain carrying the pack on his shoulders, and then there’s the moment he realizes that he can. It’s evident in the college student who has lost her way in life but has somehow learned to navigate a sailboat through a foggy night off the coast of Maine. It is continually humbling to see the light in the eyes of our students as they learn one simple truth: They can do it.
We know it’s a tough world out there. With a tough job market and increasing competition for our young adults trying to get into college, Duckworth says it is grit and not IQ that will help students get there. If the tough question is where to find it, the easy answer is this: It’s outside.