I think grit is important. I want grit to be important.
But how important is it?
The Weak Case for Grit [Nautilus] – “It might surprise you to find out how little evidence there is to support the idea that boosting students’ “grit”—their propensity to tenaciously attack difficult problems they encounter rather than give up—is a reliably effective way to improve their school performance or to close long-standing education gaps. After all, you’ve probably heard otherwise. Grit is everywhere. By the time you read this, it will have been a golden child of the world of education for well over a decade. It’s a sexy, appealing idea: grit predicts success, grit can be measured, and grit can be improved.”
The article made me think that trying to boil down a human being’s success into a 10-question test may be a bit too simple. 🙂
COGS: How I Bankrupted MoviePass [Napkin Math] – “MoviePass is my favorite business of all time. For a brief, glorious period between 2017 & 2018, the company sold an unlimited movie watching membership for <$10. All you had to do was pay the fee and you’d go see all the flicks your heart could possibly desire. My favorite theater in Mountain View, California sold a ticket for a leather recliner for 15 bucks. Essentially, MoviePass was selling dollars for cents. Unsurprisingly, people enjoy being given free things! Their subscribers jumped from 20,000 to 3,000,000 in the span of a year. All of my friends had it. We would go to Century Cinema 16 at least once a week just to chill. Each of us were easily costing MoviePass north of 60 dollars a month, all for the low price of 10 bucks." The Rise and Fall of a Double Agent [The Walrus] – “It’s not mentioned in the account of his arrest, but the first thing officers likely did after they cuffed Ramos was reach into his pocket and grab his BlackBerry. That device, and the network it connected to, was at the heart of a sprawling FBI indictment that accused Ramos of racketeering activity involving gambling, money laundering, and drug trafficking. But that doesn’t quite cover the scale of his operation.”