OK, having read the whole article, it seems like energetic people who buy in to what they're doing are more likely to be successful than people who despair at t

OK, having read the whole article, it seems like energetic people who buy in to what they're doing are more likely to be successful than people who despair at their ability to control their outcome. People highly energetic about where they're going are more likely to work harder at it, so that's not all that surprising. And there have been enough links on here about 'grit' to make that consequence not surprising at all. The interesting question to me would be to see longitudinal results from random teachers in general. I remember in high school having a PHENOMENAL teacher who was in his 3rd year of teaching. I went back to visit him recently (he'd have been teaching 10 more years now), and he was very, very despondent. I wonder how his 'class performance' during those first 3 years compares to his class performance during his last 3. "Great teachers...were also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness. For example, when Farr called up teachers who were making remarkable gains and asked to visit their classrooms, he noticed he’d get a similar response from all of them: 'They’d say, "You’re welcome to come, but I have to warn you—I am in the middle of just blowing up my classroom structure and changing my reading workshop because I think it’s not working as well as it could." When you hear that over and over, and you don’t hear that from other teachers, you start to form a hypothesis.' Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing." Sounds like software development, too.