![]() On the right are "distractors": games, music videos, great moments in sports. On the left side is some academic lesson: repetitive arithmetic, spatial orientation, anything boring. Students are positioned in front of a split computer screen. The atmosphere in their digs at the Positive Psychology Center on the second floor of 3701 Market Street in Philadelphia the day I'm there hums with the quiet din of people thinking, their heads bent as they crunch data in the continuing work to create and administer questionnaires and activities that test aspects of grit and, more so now, self-control. Over at the Duckworth Lab at Penn, an awful lot of what the researchers do is drudgery, conducted in an exacting atmosphere that is relieved on rare occasions by fleeting moments of greatness and enchantment. You can come see me next Tuesday at 11:30." Some Days You're Going to Cry And I'm like, 'Put your head down, do the work, be with the students.' Mostly, it's like if I could not sleep, I would not sleep so I could just work on stuff. I'm trying hard not to be an awful, narcissistic human being. Time is finite!" And second, "I do feel it's hard to be modest and humble and egoless when people are telling you you are so great and wanting to give you prizes and energy. First, she just wants to do her research, which is complicated and takes forever. Two things about all the attention were getting to her. She'd been rejecting all recent media requests through intermediaries, including my own, until I reached her directly-"This is Angela"-early one morning at Penn, hoping she would reward my determination not to give up so easily. Yes, she's all about the work of reforming education but at the same time much more-and no doubt cringing as she reads this, if she gets around to reading it at all. She's an alpha female and a born giver who's driven by an impulse to do good in the world and right inequities. Yet by all accounts Angela has managed to remain utterly and unself-consciously herself, the sort of person commonly said to be not quite like anyone else: former Cherry Hill, New Jersey, cheerleader and über-volunteer, Harvard undergrad, Oxford postgrad, inner-city schoolteacher, thought-leading TED-talker. The avalanche of attention only increased after the 2013 MacArthur award. There's no getting around, however, that she's "a whirlwind of brilliance and energy," according to one Stanford colleague, and a leading voice in the effort to translate into the classroom ideas like hers that self-control and grit, more than talent and IQ, may hold the keys to a better life. When the moderator of a recent live video presentation introduced her by saying, "I tried to find something on her, but she appears to be perfect," she couldn't help but ever-so-slightly grimace. Her pioneering studies at the University of Pennsylvania into how character relates to achievement have been going on for 12 laborious years now, and she expects to die doing them, but you can spare her the fanfare. PHILADELPHIA-MacArthur Foundation "genius" award winner and research psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth is a reluctant star.
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