Grit

Grit Chapter 1 SHOWING UP
By the time you set foot on the campus of the United States Military Academy at West Point, you've earned it.

The admissions process for West Point is at least as rigorous as for the most selective universities. Top scores on the SAT or ACT and outstanding high school grades are a must. But when you apply to Harvard, you don't need to start your application in the eleventh grade, and you don't need to secure a nomination from a member of Congress, a senator, or the vice president of the United States. You don't, for that matter, have to get superlative marks in a fitness assessment that includes running, push-ups, sit-ups, and pull-ups.

Each year, in their junior year of high school, more than 14,000 applicants begin the admissions process. This pool is winnowed to just 4,000 who succeed in getting the required nomination. Slightly more than half of those applicants-about 2,500-meet West Point's rigorous academic and physical standards, and from that select group just 1,200 are admitted and enrolled. Nearly all the men and women who come to West Point were varsity athletes; most were team captains.

And yet, one in five cadets will drop out before graduation. What's more remarkable is that, historically, a substantial fraction of dropouts leave in their very first summer, during an intensive seven-week training program named, even in official literature, Beast Barracks. Or, for short, just Beast.

Who spends two years trying to get into a place and then drops out in the first two months?

Then again, these are no ordinary months. Beast is described in the West Point handbook for new cadets as "the most physically and emotionally demanding part of your four years at West Point . . . designed to help you make the transition from new cadet to Soldier."

A Typical Day at Beast Barracks

5:00 a.m.

Wake-up

5:30 a.m.

Reveille Formation

5:30 to 6:55 a.m.

Physical Training

6:55 to 7:25 a.m.

Angela Duckworth, PhD, is a 2013 MacArthur Fellow and professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. She has advised the World Bank, NBA and NFL teams, and Fortune 500 CEOs. She is also the founder and CEO of Character Lab, a nonprofit whose mission is to advance scientific insights that help kids thrive. She completed her BA in neurobiology at Harvard, her MSc in neuroscience at Oxford, and her PhD in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance is her first book and an instant New York Times bestseller.

"Duckworth is the researcher most associated with the study and popularization of grit. And yet what I like about her new book, Grit, is the way she is pulling away from the narrow, joyless intonations of that word, and pointing us beyond the way many schools are now teaching it...Most important, she notes that the quality of our longing matters. Gritty people are resilient and hard working, sure. But they also, she writes, know in a very, very deep way what it is they want."
-David Brooks, New York Times