High GPA? Forget it, Focus on Your Relationship GPA.
Imagine, you’re 82 years old. As your dying wish, you travel back in time to speak to your 20-year old self. Now, standing in front of your college age reflection, you have 5 minutes. What do you say?
In 1938, Harvard University began a lifelong study of 268 men. Researchers followed the lives of Harvard students from sophomore year to their death up to 70 years later. During that time, the men graduated, married, and fought in World War II. Some went on to incredible success: of the study participants, four would run for U.S. Senate, and one would become president of the United States. Others fell in the opposite direction. Many would die early, divorce, or grow addicted to alcohol.
As the participants entered their 80’s, the third director, George Vaillant, began to look holistically at the lives of these men. As he did, he examined their records from college up until their death. In particular, he wanted to find what factors led to long-life, happiness, and perceived professional success. His discovery culminated in a simple idea; personal relationships matter more than anything else.
As Valliant put it, “It is social aptitude, not intellectual brilliance or parental social class, that leads to successful aging.” Over the course of the study, individuals with strong personal relationships were healthier, happier, and lived longer than their more isolated peers. The current director, Robert Waldinger, summed up the findings in one sentence, “The good life is built with good relationships.”
In 2015, 68 years after the study began, Greg Foster and I — two Harvard sophomores — stumbled upon the Grant study.
Instantly, we were hooked.
The similarity between the study and the lives of millions of college students was too obvious to ignore. And yet, we’d never learned about the study at Harvard. We could use linear algebra, write in iambic pentameter, and even read Chinese at a first-grade level. But, we were clueless about the factors for a happy, successful life.
So, we began on a quest to understand what the most successful Grant Study men did. In the process, we interviewed dozens of current Harvard students and compared. We focused on personal relationships in college. How did the best students find friends, make mentors, and expand their personal network?
The year’s work has culminated into a book — “Your Relationship GPA: Lessons from Harvard students on how to make time for what matters most.” We have come to a not-too-startling realization: students, by and large, focus on the wrong things in college. Evidence of this abounds at Harvard; students eat alone, give cursory answers to questions like “how are you”, and focus on personal success at the expense of deep relationships.
Unfortunately, the structure of college makes it difficult for students to focus on what matters. The only measurable feedback students receive is a grade. Harvard Business School professor, Michael Norton, calls this dilemma “the curse of counting.” In his research, he shows that you optimize what you can count — even if it’s not in your long-term interest. People slave away to earn more, even if doing so is proven not to guarantee happiness. His research focuses on the accumulation of money, but the same holds true for GPAs. We manage our grades because we can quantify their movement up and down and compare them with the people around us.
But, what if we’re quantifying the wrong thing? As psychologist Daniel Goleman wrote in his landmark book, “Emotional Intelligence” your EQ is a better predictor of success past a certain IQ. Once a college student’s intelligence is one standard deviation away from the mean, roughly an IQ of 115–120, adding a few extra IQ points has little effect on long-term success.
Many companies recognize this and are moving away from tests of intelligence. Google’s people analytics team, essentially an academic research group placed inside a company, discovered that grades were not predictive of hiring success after two years out of college. As Laszlo Bock, head of Google’s People Operations, commented, “We did a bunch of analysis and found that grades are (slightly) predictive your first two years, but for the rest of your career don’t matter at all.”
In some ways, the idea of focusing on more meaningful metrics isn’t unique. We all face a struggle between our external goals and our inner desire to be good, loved, or cared for. David Brooks, author of “On the Road to Character” labels these two categories as resume virtues and eulogy virtues. “The resume virtues are the skills you bring to the job marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?”
For many students, college is the first time leaving their childhood homes; so, it is a unique time to rebalance priorities. Research from Duke University shows that habits are most malleable when individuals enter a new environment. Without constraints of the past 18 years, students need to think critically about themselves. Do I treat people as I should? Would I sacrifice for my friends? And What do I want to be said at my funeral? College is the time to focus on what matters most.
The mission of Harvard College is “to educate the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society.” But, if schools like Harvard won’t help us develop the habits to form strong relationships, we’ll have to do it ourselves. For, as the Grant study put it, “The only thing that matters in life are your relationships with other people.”
