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Translator: Eriko T
Reviewer: Reiko Bovee
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What does it take to be successful?
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If you'd asked me
that question years ago,
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I would've had a simple answer.
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I would have said,
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"You've got to be smart and work hard."
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Putting it a bit more crisply,
you need to have wit,
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that means being intelligent.
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Here's a man with a lot of wit,
Albert Einstein.
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And you need to have grit.
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You need to work hard and persevere.
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Like an athlete,
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like this high jumper.
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Of course, this old view
of believing in wit and grit
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is something that I have been
thinking about for a long time,
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and today I am going to trace
the evolution of my thinking.
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Here is an example of a young man
who we hope has wit and grit,
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otherwise he won't do well in his test.
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Here is a somewhat older group.
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(Laughter)
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We really hope they have wit and grit,
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because this is the Situation Room
in the White House
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and they have to make
some pretty tough decisions.
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So we hope that they'll have wit
and grit as well.
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Today I’m going to review research
that I have done as a psychologist
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over the last 40 years or so.
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And I have really changed my mind
about the importance of wit and grit.
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That is the story
that I will be talking about.
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This is how I looked a few years ago,
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(Laughter)
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when I started my work.
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And at that time,
I was a prototypical believer
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that intelligence was a single thing,
with a single computer in our mind-brain.
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If it worked well,
we would be smart in everything.
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If it was sluggish, too bad,
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we would not be able
to do anything at all.
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And of course, what I believed in
at the time was the IQ test.
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Probably everybody here
has had an IQ test.
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The IQ test purportedly tells you
how smart you are.
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Unfortunately, if it tells you
you're not smart, you are in big trouble
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because you think you are not smart.
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And that's not a good idea
to walk around with
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for the rest of your life.
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What I did in my research
is I worked with young kids,
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kids of different ages, different talents,
different backgrounds.
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Watched them do all sorts of things,
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and I discovered that if a child
was good in one thing,
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it didn't necessarily mean that he or she
would be good in other things.
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More dramatically, I worked
with brain-damaged patients,
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individuals who had the misfortune
of having a stroke,
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or some other kind of brain lesion.
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The single most important thing
about brain damage is where it occurs.
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Is it the left side
or the right side of your brain?
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Is it anterior or posterior?
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And as you may know,
the location of the lesion
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tells you what abilities are knocked out
and which ones are spared.
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And you could have two patients
who have absolutely opposite profiles:
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one being strong in the very area
the other one is weak in.
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This led me, in the early 1980s,
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the study of human development
in different cultures,
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and the study of the brain
and its very specialized regions.
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This led me to write a book
called "Frames of Mind."
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Subtitled: "Theory
of Multiple Intelligences,"
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often shortened as "MI Theory."
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And this is the work
for which I'm still best known.
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And it was a big book, about 400 pages,
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but the nice thing about a big book
is you can give a very short summary
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especially if it's, a TED talk,
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and the claim of the book is that
rather than having a single computer,
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we all have at least seven
or eight different computers.
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And one computer can work
well in one person,
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another computer can
work well in another person.
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And that's why we need
to think about Multiple Intelligences.
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So, let me introduce you
to the computers with some photographs.
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Linguistic intelligence
is the intelligence of a poet
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like Emily Dickinson or Edgar Allan Poe,
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or a journalist, a CNN journalist.
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Second intelligence
is logical-mathematical:
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the intelligence of a scientist
or a computer programmer.
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If you do well in language and logic,
you will do well in school.
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And as long as you stay in school,
you'll think you are smart.
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(Laughter)
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If you ever walk out on the highway
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or let alone the forest or the jungle,
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you'll discover the other intelligences
are important too.
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(Laughter)
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Musical intelligence is one,
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the intelligence of the conductor,
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or of a great performer like Yo-Yo Ma.
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On the left you can see him
as a young prodigy,
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and on the right the Yo-Yo of today
whom we all venerate.
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Fourth kind of intelligence is spatial:
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the ability to deal with local space,
like a chess player,
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or much broader space
the way a sailor or navigator would.
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Fifth kind of intelligence
is bodily kinesthetic:
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the kind of intelligence of an athlete
who uses his whole body
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or a craft person
who is working with wood,
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or metal, or some other kind of material.
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Sixth intelligence
is interpersonal intelligence:
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understanding other people.
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Martin Luther King Jr. understood a lot
about how to motivate other people.
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He had interpersonal intelligence.
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The somewhat mundane level
is a sales person who is trying
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to convince you to get a car you don't
want, for a price you don't want to pay
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but that's interpersonal
intelligence as well.
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Seventh intelligence is intrapersonal
intelligence: understanding yourself.
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A meditator may have
intrapersonal intelligence.
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If you go through psychoanalysis,
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the goal is to have more
understanding of yourself.
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I recently added as eighth intelligence
the naturalist intelligence.
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It's the intelligence that permits people
to make distinctions in nature
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between one plant and another,
or to communicate with an animal.
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This is Jane Goodall
talking to one of her favorite chimps.
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So those are the eight intelligences
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and I describe them in a book
called "Multiple Intelligences,"
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and the key move here, I moved
from "wit," singular, to "wits," plural.
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Now there are some takeaways.
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One is that all of us
have these intelligences,
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that's really what makes us human
in a cognitive way.
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But no two people,
not even identical twins
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have exactly the same intelligence
in the same proportion.
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That's amazing.
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And the fact that we have
different intelligences should affect
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what goes on in school,
what goes on at work,
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and how you relate to other people.
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And importantly,
how you think about yourself,
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because everybody has
some intellectual strength.
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Nobody is a flat zero.
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So if you wanted to assess intelligences,
what might you do?
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Many people ask me that.
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And what you can't do is use
a paper and pencil test.
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Why? Because that's just
a language logic machine.
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If you're good at language logic,
you'll do well in the test.
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You have to create environments
where you can watch individuals,
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make use or not make use
of their intelligences.
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So let me show you
what we did with young kids.
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We gave them a chance to take apart
and put together familiar objects:
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spatial and bodily intelligence.
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We looked at their musical ability
to see if they could create
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or if they could imitate
melodies which they heard.
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Linguistic intelligence:
learn new phrases, learn new languages,
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have the right tone of voice and prosody.
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Looked at fine motor skills,
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if you don't hold this carefully
you make an awful buzzing sound.
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That's a fine motor skill, but here
if you don't walk through the terrain,
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and you trip the wire, again,
you make a very heinous sound.
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Naturalist intelligence:
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what distinctions can the child make
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with a magnification
or with the naked eye?
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And then here's an interesting game.
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It's a board game, and board games
get at your numerical intelligence.
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But they also get at your
interpersonal intelligence
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because if you're young,
and you understand
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other people don't know
what you know, you can cheat.
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(Laughter)
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And so until the age of four,
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cheating is a sign
of interpersonal intelligence.
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Thereafter, we tend to discourage it.
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(Laughter)
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So we created a website called
"Multiple Intelligences Oasis."
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It's a deliberate figure of speech,
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because it's a source of nourishment
in the middle of what might be a desert,
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because in that desert
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are some misconceptions
about multiple intelligences.
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For example, something
called dermatoglyphics,
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- awful word -
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claims that you can take a look
at people's fingerprints
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and tell how smart they are.
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Total nonsense.
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So we talk about dermatoglyphics
at the website.
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But this is a more serious thing
that happened.
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Over 20 years ago,
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there was a state in Australia
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where they built a whole curriculum
around Multiple Intelligences,
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and I was very flattered and I'm sure
they were well motivated.
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But then I discovered that as part
of that curriculum
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they listed all the racial
and ethnic groups in Australia
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and which intelligences they had,
and which ones they lacked.
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And this really freaked me out,
because it was such a misuse of my ideas.
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There was no evidence for it, so I went
on television in Australia, and I said,
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"Sorry, please don't use this,"
and happily, they stopped using it.
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But this led me to ask a question
which many scholars need to ask.
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That is, we develop ideas, it's great
if people talk about them and use them,
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but let's say they misuse them.
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What's our responsibility?
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I began to realize
that if I didn't speak out
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in things like Oasis,
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I really couldn't expect
anybody else to do so either.
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So we've been talking about cognition,
thinking, intelligence, until now.
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But in the meantime, in many
educational environments,
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there's been a switch to thinking
more about social, emotional,
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and personal traits.
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And probably the new star,
which I introduced at the beginning,
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is grit.
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Grit has been written about
by a psychologist
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at the University of Pennsylvania,
named Angela Duckworth,
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and it became very famous
when Paul Tough, a journalist, said:
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"If you want kids to succeed
you need to have them have grit."
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Now, this sounds great,
I mean, who would be against grit?
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I want grit, I'd like my kids
and grandchildren to have grit,
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I'd like everybody to have grit.
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But, if you begin to think
about it for a while,
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you realize that people like Hitler
and his stormtroopers had lots of grit.
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That wasn't their problem,
but they put it to evil uses.
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Then a somewhat more contemporary
and less heinous example,
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are what we call
"The Smartest Guys in the Room."
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The people who develop
a company called Enron,
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and it became a very valuable company,
and they worked very hard,
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but they lied and cheated
about how much money they had,
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and about what the price
of energy was around the country,
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and when Enron collapsed,
many people lost their jobs,
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many people lost their retirement.
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Again, the problem was not wit or grit,
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it was the uses to which the grit was put.
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So, great to have grit,
but what I'm interested in
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and what I've worked on
for the last 20 years
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after "Multiple Intelligences,"
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is what it means to be a good person,
a good worker, and a good citizen.
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It's good to have some icons.
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Nelson Mandela, much-admired, brought
South African warring groups together
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in a peaceful way.
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Eleanor Roosevelt,
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when she was growing up,
she couldn't even vote.
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But she became a leader of thinking
in the United States
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and had a great positive influence
on her husband, President Roosevelt.
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And my personal hero,
Mahatma Gandhi,
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who understood better than anybody else
that people can disagree,
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but if we disagree violently,
our whole world will collapse.
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So the nonviolent ideas of Gandhi
are so important for our time
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and going forward.
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So we set up something called
"The Good Work Project" -
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as researchers we have projects -
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we eventually changed the name
to "The Good Project"
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and I worked with many wonderful people
whose names are on this slide.
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And of course you're thinking,
"What is good work?"
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20 years, 1200 people,
nine different professions,
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but as with MI, I can give it to you
quite succinctly.
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Good work is what you find
from some lawyers and judges,
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from some scientists and doctors,
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from some chemists and teachers.
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And good work has three components.
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It's excellent, it's engaged
and it's ethical.
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So let's talk about teaching.
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A good working teacher
knows his or her stuff,
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they are excellently informed,
they are engaged, they care,
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they look forward to going to school,
they love the kids,
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they want to work with them.
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And what I'm going to focus on
for the rest of my talk,
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good workers are ethical.
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They understand if they have
difficult decisions to make
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and they work very hard
to make the right decisions,
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and if they don't do the right decisions,
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then they try to do better the next time.
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And we call this Triple Helix "ENA,"
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kind of playing on DNA,
you all know the double helix of DNA,
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but a person doesn't get
the good work seal of approval
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unless he or she is excellent,
and engaged, and ethical.
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And now, after two decades of work,
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we have again,
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a website and a source
of information, The Good Project,
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where we talk about good work, good play,
good citizenship, good collaboration,
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and we give people games
and devices and tools
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to try to become good themselves
and help other people attain the good.
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This is the GoodWork Toolkit,
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and I'm going to give you one example
from the GoodWork Toolkit.
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It's an example which is true
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but the photograph is not of the person,
and the name has been changed.
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It's a story of Debbie.
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And if you're a student or a teacher,
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you hear about Debbie
and you have to decide,
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"What should Debbie do?"
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She is a journalist,
a wonderful journalist,
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editor of her high school newspaper,
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and her grandfather was a famous
reporter for The New York Times.
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There's a rape on campus.
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It's Debbie's job as the journalist
to write about the rape
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and she proceeds to do so,
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but then the headmaster
calls her in and says,
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"Debbie, you cannot write
about the rape in the newspaper
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because next week
we're doing recruiting at the school,
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and if you talk about a rapist,
nobody's going to want to go to the school
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so I forbid you to write about it."
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Debbie has got an ethical dilemma.
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She goes home, and she sees her mother,
and mother gives her a great hug and says,
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"Debbie, you're wonderful,
your grandfather would be so proud of you.
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You're a terrific journalist,
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but you know your brother Teddy
wants to go to the school next year.
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And you know if you publish the story,
he may not get into the school,
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so you've got to think a lot
about what you have to do."
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This is an ethical dilemma
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because Debbie wants
to be a good journalist,
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and that calls her to do one thing.
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She wants to be a good member
of her school community,
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but what does that mean?
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And then she wants
to be a good person at home.
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She wants to do what her parents
want and what's good for her brother.
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So these are the kind
of ethical dilemmas that we deal with
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when we are trying to understand
what it means to be a good person,
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a good worker, or a good citizen.
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You're probably thinking,
especially if you're a philosopher,
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"Well, who decides what's good?"
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Here is one answer: the Supreme Court,
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(Laughter)
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and they have some power,
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but if you're like me you don't always
like what the Supreme Court says.
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So I have a better answer, we have
a lot of research to support this.
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The better answer is to talk, communicate,
with people in your world.
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This is a group of teachers
with whom I worked for many years.
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When a problem comes up,
we talk about it face to face, in person,
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try to decide what to do.
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Make a decision, do it,
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and then if it doesn't work out,
try to do better the next time.
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We call this "creating a common space,"
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and it's much better if the commons
occurs in person than online,
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but it's better online than not at all.
00:16:01
But if you want it to strain
toward being good,
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you can't do it on your own,
00:16:05
you need to have people
whom you know and trust,
00:16:07
with whom you can discuss
these very vexing issues.
00:16:11
So after 40 years, two takeaways.
00:16:13
Number one: people can
be smart in different ways,
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and that should influence how we
think about ourselves and others.
00:16:20
Second of all,
grit alone is not enough.
00:16:23
We have to decide how to apply grit,
and work ceaselessly
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to make the grit in service of the good.
00:16:30
Now I'm not going to give you a summary.
00:16:32
Instead, the question
is: could we tweet this?
00:16:36
What do you think? Let's try.
00:16:41
We can pluralize "Wit,"
00:16:45
and we can prepose "Good"
in front of "Grit."
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Multiple Wits, Good Grits.
00:16:51
Thank you.
00:16:53
(Applause)
