Personalized Grit Lab Report

Hi Avni,

Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab report! We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.

We hope this will help you reflect on what you learned and experienced during Grit Lab.

Here's how you started. On week one, after learning the basics of grit:

• You rated your passion as Stage 3: I'm actively figuring out what my interests are by trying one or more of them out in some way

• ...and your perseverance as Stage 5: Other people would tell you that I not only hold myself to a standard that is higher than what is explicitly asked of me, I also actively seek feedback about how to improve.

Here's a graph:

Then, you learned about goal setting, planning, and deliberate practice.

You established a wish, imagined its associated outcome, identified potential personal obstacles, and then planned accordingly, using implementation intentions. ___

Did it go according to plan?

And here is how much you learned

In week four, we discussed feedback.

You told us that you felt "criticized" when receiving negative feedback,

...and "validated" when recieveing positive feedback.

We then turned to learning about stress.

In week 5, you reported feeling "a lot" of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being midterms.

We also talked about adversity and failure.

Although related, adversity and failure are different: Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible. Perhaps that is why you said that failure had made you feel disappointed.

However, how we interpret stress and failure matters...

You said that you believe it is false that the effects of stress are negative and should be avoided,

...and that it is false that stress facilitates learning and growth.

Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being and health.

On week six, we talked about mentors

...you said for you, your most important mentor was someone other than a teacher, coach, etc..

Here's how you described him or her:

You also wrote a gratitude letter to a friend. Do you remember what you said and how it made you feel?

On week eight, we talked about interest.

You saw this picture.

You rated it as 6/10 in enjoyment,

5/10 in interestingness,

and 4/10 in novelty.

What about Francis Bacon's Head Surrounded by Sides of Beef?

You rated it as 3/10 in enjoyment,

7/10 in interestingness,

and 8/10 in novelty.

Prior research has shown that for most people, what is interesting is not necessarily related to what is enjoyable.

We talked about states of extreme interest, or as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi would call it, flow.

You said you had experienced flow when writing.

We then transitioned into values.

There, you said you preferred to gain knowledge, have approval from others and be spontaneous.

These responses, in a sense, spoke about what you valued.

You wrote a This I Believe essay, and located it here in Schwartz's value circle:

For strengths, Danny gave us an interesting lecture on the nature of talent.

You defined it as ease.

You ranked your talents as Verbal, Social, Analytic, Artistic / Spatial, Musical, Spiritual, Kinesthetic.

You said you're personality strenght was Conscientiousness.

We then examined demand and social impact. Here's how you said you cared about salary vs. social impact for your first career move:

We also asked why you worked hard.

You said you disagree to working hard for wanting to help others,

...and you agree with working hard because you enjoy it.

Regarding demand, you said the most serious issues affecting your country were

Inequality (income, discrimination), Lack of economic opportunity and employment, Climate change, Lack of education, Safety/security/well-being, Government accountability / corruption, Lack of political freedom/political instability, Poverty, Religious conflicts, Loss of privacy due to technology, Lack of infrastructure.

Hopefully, you can find ways to use your work to impact in these.

We then talked about goal hierarchies, which requiere you to have a top level goal. About how clear is yours you said: "I have a general intuition but nothing specific yet".

Over time and with self-reflection, this will get clearer and clearer.

One particular goal you have for the next six months is to graduate!.

Here is how self concordant that goal is:

On the final lecture contentwise, we looked at paying it forward.

We learned about givers, takers and matchers, and also about prosocial purpose.

Here are your responses to items surveying this:

After all this time, we hope you have emerged from gritlab a little grittier than you started.

Do you want to see you your grit rubric changed?

Drumroll please...

Don't worry if the rubric doesn't yet reflect growth. It is of course a course measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.

In any case, grit is not built in a day,

...so stay passionate and perseverant on the life long quest of choosing easy, working hard, and paying it forward.

With grit and gratitude,

Angela and the GritLab team.