A recent study at the University of Pennsylvania concluded what most of us already suspected: Hard work has more to do with performance than being naturally gifted.
Photo by billaday.
The next time you're itching to take a shortcut, it might be worth it to put in some extra time and effort for a better product. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania measured a group of adolescent students. Using a variety of methods including self-reports, teacher reports, and parent reports, they measured the self-discipline of the students in conjunction with their academic performance. Students who were more self-disciplined and were able to delay gratification performed better than their peers who had higher IQs.
Highly self-disciplined adolescents outperformed their more impulsive peers on every academic-performance variable, including report-card grades, standardized achievement-test scores, admission to a competitive high school, and attendance. Self-discipline measured in the fall predicted more variance in each of these outcomes than did IQ, and unlike IQ, self-discipline predicted gains in academic performance over the school year.
It seems that there really is no gain without pain.
Send an email to Erica Ho, the author of this post, at erica@lifehacker.com.
