The US military is the most powerful military force on earth. Each year, roughly 1,300 cadets join its famously demanding military academy at West Point.
Part of their initiation involves a series of extremely difficult challenges called Beast Barracks. According to researchers who studied West Point cadets, these challenges are “deliberately engineered to test the very limits of cadets’ mental capacities”.
When I read about this study, I, like most people, assumed that the cadets with the greatest stamina, intelligence, physical strength and athletic ability would be the most successful.
But when Angela Duckworth, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, studied The Secret to Surviving West Point
achievements—and, more specifically, how mental toughness, perseverance and passion affect one’s ability to achieve goals—she discovered something very surprising.
Duckworth tracked almost 2,500 cadets across two initiation classes. She compared several measures, including their high school rankings, SAT scores, Physical Aptitude Test results and Grit Scale scores. The Grit Scale measures perseverance and passion for long-term goals on a scale of one to five.
It turned out that physical strength, intelligence and leadership potential were not the most accurate indicators of whether a cadet would make it through Beast Barracks.
It came down to mental toughness, combined with determination to achieve a long-term goal.
Perseverance was the most important factor.
Believe it or not, cadets who scored just one standard deviation higher on the Grit Scale were 60 per cent more likely to make it through Beast Barracks.
Steven Bartlett in The Diary of a CEO.
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