What Can We Learn From J.K. Rowling?
What it takes to be from zero to hero
When J.K Rowling started to write her first Harry Potter’s series, she was at the bottom pit of her life. She was jobless, divorced, penniless and with a dependent child. Not to mention having to go through several episodes of depression and had to depend on government welfare.
And if that was not enough, her first manuscript was rejected multiple times by 12 publishers! And she got many rude replies from the publishers too!
By modern standard at that time, she was a failure, maybe a bad one.
In her own words in front of Harvard’s graduates,
“You might never fail on the scale I did, But it is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all — in which case, you fail by default.”
If you ask me, what makes her a successful author (with more than 20 books) and a billionaire today…
My answer is — GRIT
GRIT, as defined by Angela Lee Duckworth, an Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania in her famous TED TALK,
“is passion and perseverance for very long term goal, sticking with your future for years and put in a tremendous effort to make it a reality.”
Grit is found to be a superior predictor of success than IQ or exam scores. The concept of grit is usually coupled with resilience. Although some literatures used both terms interchangeably but they have quite a distinct difference.
Resilience generally means the ability to bounce back from the stressful and negative emotional experience and by definition, is an inherent attribute of grit.(ref).
In a good article titled Declining Student Resilience: A Serious Problem for Colleges, it was mentioned that students are afraid to fail; they do not take risks; they need to be certain about things. For many of them, failure is seen as catastrophic and unacceptable. External measures of success are more important than learning and autonomous development.
We did see these happening to our students too, yes?
The author attributed this problem to the declining opportunities for children to play and explore at their early age, they lost the golden chance to make their own decision and solve their own problem. Basically, our younger generations don’t have enough exposure to experience their own trouble, failures and realized that they can survive it without too much intervention from adults — parents, family and society as a whole.
It seems logical to me that grit is a very important attribute for our students who will become future doctors and healthcare professionals. So my next questions are: Do our current students have enough grit? How can we teach our students to become grittier?
And with increasing numbers of ‘problematic’ interns during housemanship training , is this an indicator of our younger generation lacking grit and resilient? Maybe.
So, how can we make our students grittier?
Science did not know much about this and according to Angela, the closest thing that we can try to develop grit in our students is GROWTH MINDSET.
Growth Mindset is an idea developed by Carol Dweck from Stanford University and she found that
when students had a growth mindset; a mindset which perceives a challenge as an opportunity to learn rather than an obstacle to overcome, they responded with constructive thoughts and their behavior showed persistence rather than defeat.
This article gives 5 tips on how to create an environment that fosters grit in the classroom. Even though it was designed for school classroom but the concept and practice can be applied in college as well.
And if you are planning to do a proper introduction of the growth mindset concept to your students in your department or posting, maybe this resources from Khan Academy can be used to design such a session.
Hard job? No doubt about it.
But as Angela said in her closing remark -
We need to be gritty in getting our kids (students) grittier.
