Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

overdosing
on extracurriculars is pretty rare. These days,
the average American teenager reports spending more than three hours a day watching television and
playing video games. Additional time is drained away checking social media feeds, texting friends
links to cat videos, and tracking the Kardashians as they figure out which outfit to wear—which
makes it hard to argue that time can’t be spared for the chess club or the school play, or just about any
other structured, skill-focused, adult-guided activity.
But what about grit? What about accomplishing something that takes years, as opposed to months,
of work? If grit is about sticking with a goal for the long-term, and if extracurricular activities are a
way of practicing grit, it stands to reason that they’re especially beneficial when we do them 
for more
than a year
.
In fact, lessons learned while working to improve from one season to the next come up repeatedly
in my interviews with paragons of grit.
Here’s an example: After a lackluster passing season his junior year of high school football, future
NFL Hall of Famer Steve Young went down to the high school woodshop and fashioned a wooden
football with tape for laces. In one end, he screwed in an eye hook and used that to latch the football
to a weight machine in the high school gym. Then, gripping the ball, he’d move it back and forth in a
passing motion, the added resistance developing his forearms and shoulders. His passing yardage
doubled the next year.
Even more convincing evidence for the benefits of long-term extracurricular activities comes from
a study conducted by psychologist Margo Gardner. Margo and her collaborators at Columbia
University followed eleven thousand American teenagers until they were twenty-six years old to see
what effect, if any, participating in high school extracurriculars for two years, as opposed to just one,
might have on success in adulthood.
Here’s what Margo found: kids who spend more than a year in extracurriculars are significantly
more likely to graduate from college and, as young adults, to volunteer in their communities. The
hours per week kids devote to extracurriculars also predict having a job (as opposed to being
unemployed as a young adult) and earning more money, but 
only
for kids who participate in activities
for two years rather than one.

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One of the first scientists to study the importance of following through with extracurricular activities
—as opposed to just dabbling—was Warren Willingham.
In 1978, Willingham was the director of the Personal Qualities Project. Even today, this study
remains the most ambitious attempt ever to identify the determinants of success in young adulthood.
The project was funded by the Educational Testing Service. ETS, as it’s more commonly called,
occupies a sprawling campus in Princeton, New Jersey, and employs more than a thousand
statisticians, psychologists, and other scientists—all devoted to the development of tests that predict
achievement in school and the workplace. If you’ve taken the SAT, you’ve taken an ETS test. Ditto for
the GRE, TOEFL, Praxis, and any one of three dozen advanced placement exams. Basically, ETS is to
standardized testing what Kleenex is to tissues: Sure, there are other organizations that make
standardized tests, but most of us are hard-pressed to think of their names.
So, what motivated ETS to look beyond standardized tests?
Better than anyone, Willingham and other scientists at ETS knew that, together, high school grades
and test scores did only a half-decent job of predicting success later in life. It’s very often the case
that two kids with identical grades and test scores will end up faring very differently later in life. The
simple question Willingham set out to answer was