

Self-Discipline Outdoes IQ in Predicting Academic Performance of Adolescents - tokenadult
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~duckwort/images/PsychologicalScienceDec2005.pdf

======
TheElder
I think of myself as having average or even low IQ. Some background: I was
partially raised in government housing as a child, had parents who were drug
and alcohol abusers, and was never encouraged to do anything intellectually
stimulating while growing up. I lived in a poor mixed raced city and attended
a mostly nonwhite high school. Learning was never a concern of mine while in
high school, not getting my face smashed in was (which happened).

I was not in an environment for intellectual growth, nor was I in an
environment that would have indicators of high IQ.

Through pure luck, I had a high school teacher that somewhat set me on the
right course. For half a day, two years long, I had this teacher for a CAD
class. He told me attitude was everything and encouraged me to enroll in
college. My first two years weren't great. I struggled in classes like
algebra. I also didn't know how to study.

After two years of getting nowhere, I moved to a large US city as a result of
certain life circumstances. I finished up my undergraduate degree and took a
year off. I didn't feel very happy though. I wanted to get a graduate degree.
My company was willing to pay for it, as long as I worked 40 hours a week and
made good grades. It was a complete change for me, kind of a fresh start. I
decided I would take the university serious. Because my undergrad wasn't
computer science, I had to complete all of the undergrad computer science
courses. So I had at least four years ahead of me to get my masters.

Only because I worked really hard and studied a lot, I would often be the top
performer in my 3 calculus classes, discrete math, and so on (this wasn't
always the case... but hey, I was working a full-time job too). I ended up
with a masters in computer science, something I never thought was possible for
me.

Something that inspired me was that I'd see the international students (mostly
east Asian and Indian) study very hard. They would study all day long in the
library. They seemed like the very definition of self-discipline. I adapted to
that the best I could while still working 40 hours per week doing .net
programming.

It seems like I fit the premise of this paper and can relate: Low to average
IQ who often did better than my higher IQ classmates and friends.

~~~
pepsi_can
I've had a similar experience to yours. I grew up with an alcoholic and
domestically violent father in a poverty stricken neighborhood. I was
encouraged to go to college by a girlfriend of all things. I graduated in the
lower half of my class and scored only a 900 on my SAT but despite this I
finished my BS with a 3.55 overall GPA and a 4.0 in computer science. I'm
currently working on my Master's degree.

I also feel like my intelligence is average but what helped me succeed is how
much I enjoyed all my computer science courses.

~~~
TheElder
The good things is that one doesn't have to be gifted to do well in life. What
matters are the values a person holds and how well they treat others, but
unfortunately being a good person alone doesn't put food on the table. Work
hard.

------
btilly
No surprise at all. I'm reminded of the famous marshmallow test:
[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_lehrer)

The executive summary is that children's ability to delay gratification at age
4 was one of the best predictors of future academic success decades later.

------
krakensden
Anyone who's participated in academics /should/ know this intuitively- but
people seem to really, really want to believe that academic performance and
intelligence are the same thing.

It would certainly make hiring easier.

~~~
Dilpil
But then again, would we rather hire people with extraordinary IQ or
extraordinary self discipline?

~~~
skolor
Then again, the question is also: Do you really want to hire people who do
exceptionally in Academics?

From my experience, you will very often see a very intelligent student blow
off tests and homework, only to do average in the class, despite having easily
picked up the concepts. On the other hand, you'll see someone with average
intelligence (or slightly above average, but nothing remarkable) get straight
A's because they spend hours every night studying.

Personally, I would rather have the intelligent person who may get sidetracked
easier, but is able to pick up new concepts easily than a extremely
disciplined person who may take 3 times as long to learn new concepts. I like
to think of the intelligent, non-disciplined person as someone whose time to
complete a task has very high variance, but averages low, and a highly
disciplined, average intelligence person as someone whose time to completion
has very low variance, but a higher (possibly considerably higher) average.

~~~
tokenadult
_Do you really want to hire people who do exceptionally in Academics?_

I think that is a good question variant. I would definitely want to hire
someone who is

a) smart (as demonstrated by something I can observe)

and

b) self-disciplined (ditto). I might or might not care about a job applicant's
school grades, depending on where the applicant went to school, what I'm
hiring for, what the applicant's accomplishments outside of school are, and so
on.

In most real-world hiring situations, it is hard to find an applicant who is
at the top of the heap in all hiring criteria, so one must make trade-offs. My
own taste runs less to regarding school grades as a good sign than to giving
applicants work-sample tests, but I tell my children that many hiring
processes give very high regard to school grades, so that it is expedient to
work to get good grades.

------
pchristensen
This is something that's painfully obvious now but would have been considered
blasphemy if you told me when I was an adolescent.

~~~
warwick
They did tell me this when I was an teenager: "You're a smart kid, but you
need to put in more effort".

I tried putting effort towards school for a while. I figured if I had to play,
I may as well win. The problem with treating high school as a game is that
it's not fun. Learning the material doesn't get you anything, not even more
advanced material to dig into.

For me, digging my teeth into a difficult problem is it's own reward. In high
school I wasn't asked to work on difficult problems. Instead I sat in the back
of the class, ignored the lecture, worked on whatever I was doing at the time,
and coasted through the tests well enough to pass.

Plenty of effort. Plenty of work ethic. Plenty of smarts. Nothing I wanted to
work on.

~~~
sp332
It's not about effort, it's about self-control. If you had been able to make
yourself work on the class assignments, even if you didn't like them, you
would have better grades.

~~~
jibiki
If you had been able to make yourself work on chess problems, even if you
didn't like them, you would have been better at chess.

------
aidenn0
I'm with everyone else in not being at all surprised. Maybe that's because of
the fact that as an adolescent, I had a high-IQ, low self-discipline, and a
low GPA.

~~~
TheElder
I'm curious. How did you know your IQ? Did your parents have you tested?

~~~
tokenadult
Noted for factual reference here is that almost no one gets the same IQ score
twice, if tested more than once, so it can be a little bit better to say, "My
IQ score when I was tested at [age] on [brand of test]" rather than to say "My
IQ." That said, there is a known phenomenon in the literature on education of
gifted students of high-IQ young people being bored with school because it is
underchallenging and getting poor grades. That is inexpedient, but I
definitely saw it happen in my generation and I have seen it happen in the
current generation.

~~~
zmimon
> there is a known phenomenon in the literature on education of gifted
> students of high-IQ young people being bored with school because it is
> underchallenging and getting poor grades

Reminds me of some of the parenting books I've been reading since we had our
first child. The advice is generally _not_ to try to teach your children to
read ahead of when they do it in school. The reason being that you will
probably achieve at best mediocre results at the expense of completely ruining
the novelty of it for your child, guaranteeing that when time does come to
learn and they are fully developmentally receptive, they will be far less
interested than otherwise. Studies have shown that there is (on average) no
developmental benefit from early reading and a mild possibility of negative
impact.

~~~
rdouble
_Reminds me of some of the parenting books I've been reading.... Studies have
shown that there is (on average) no developmental benefit from early reading
and a mild possibility of negative impact._

What books and studies suggest this?

~~~
zmimon
The particular book where I read this is:

[http://www.amazon.com/Expect-Toddler-Years-Arlene-
Eisenberg/...](http://www.amazon.com/Expect-Toddler-Years-Arlene-
Eisenberg/dp/0894809946)

I went back and checked and unfortunately the book itself simply says "studies
support the following general conclusions..." and don't give references (not
exactly a scientific publication!).

Note that it's not in any way suggesting preventing children from learning to
read if they want to and show an active interest, nor from stimulating them
with an environment rich in reading-relevant material (games with letters,
numbers etc.). It is simply saying that sitting them down and giving them
lessons in how to read or anything else they are not developmentally ready for
is probably going to be counterproductive.

------
pg
Though I'm a big fan of self-discipline, I worry this study tells us more
about eighth grade than human nature.

------
doki_pen
Come now. High School curriculum doesn't require much intelligence. Most of it
is just completing brain dead assignments. It would be interesting to compare
the results to something much more challenging.

------
queensnake
Chinese' success is an example: [http://www.amazon.com/Asian-Americans-
Achievement-Beyond-Iq/...](http://www.amazon.com/Asian-Americans-Achievement-
Beyond-Iq/dp/0805811109)

Note that Flynn (yes, that one) is no racist.

------
mattmcknight
"the only one among 32 measured personality variables (e.g., self-esteem,
extraversion, energy level) that predicted college grade point average (GPA)
more robustly than SAT scores did." Is college GPA really indicative of
anything? Probably more so than high school GPA, but given the wide variance
in difficulty, perhaps high GPA people are simply the people that choose to do
things that are easy...

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gwern
Reading that, and the other article on grades, suddenly something clicked:
what if the reason that getting rid of tracking (separate classes for high &
low achievers) in schools hurts the upper end of students is because when they
are competing against all the poor & mediocre students they no longer need to
try very hard, and so they lose practice in self-discipline?

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icono
The article should be renamed to Parental Guidance and Aptitude Outdoes IQ.
There's are a lot of "smart" people out there who are the result of very
fortunate parenting rather than actually possessing any intelligence.

------
David
Oh, irony. I'm at work, right now. Reading this instead of actually working.

Think I can successfully rationalize this as a focus-enhancing short term
break instead of a lack of self-discipline?

------
ssn
Let's see if you can spend a day without visiting HN... :->

