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There is a nominalization here, very typical of US people: Talking about success like it is one thing, and the same thing for everybody. The fact is that there

There is a nominalization here, very typical of US people: Talking about success like it is one thing, and the same thing for everybody. The fact is that there are as many different definitions of success as different people in the world. For some people success is being free to travel the world without constraints or having lots of friends or having sex with lots of people. For others is raising a healthy family and spending lots of time with them. For other people is having power over others, other people want to have a second or third house. Other people want to have more money that they could spend. Or being famous. Other people want to get something significant that merits a Nobel Price. There is this delusion that you could have it all, you could make yourself rich without working or risking anything, have all the time on the world, travel and be famous. There is no such a thing. I have met elite sport people that are the best in the world, rich and famous, but they really hate being famous. They have very little time or freedom, and if they want to travel anywhere, specially in South America, Asia or Africa everybody knows they are rich and they can be kidnapped or blackmailed at any time. They can not trust the people around them, unless is family or old friends(or people as rich as them). I have met very rich business people that don't have free time at all. The money they earn, the wife or children waste. Children getting addictions like drugs or alcohol because their parents send them to internship and demand from them only work and more hard work. I have met travelers that have traveled dozens of countries, but were incapable of raising a family and always short of money because they stop working as soon as they have enough for discovering a new place. For me personally success is learning, traveling the world and having free time. I sacrificed money in order to get what I wanted. I got what I wanted, but had to sacrifice other things for it. Over time I got back most of the things I sacrificed, like money, probably thanks to the people I met along the way, but I did lose it first. If success is only "economical success", most people from the US are way richer than 90% of the people in the world. They have non economic wealth like rule of law and legal security that in countries like China, most of Africa or in some countries in South America does not exist.

zhdc1 5y ago
The article is largely talking about academic success (with one or two exceptions) which imo is much easier to normalize across countries. The context to this article is that "grit" is used as one of the characteristics that charter schools and other educational programs in the US try to maximize in low performing areas. If "grit" can't be measured, or if it's just another way of describing another attribute (e.g., contentiousness, which is the article uses - or persistence, which is what you find in many academic articles), then there isn't much of a point of trying to maximize it in academic contexts. All of this assumes that school performance is something that educators want to increase. This may not necessarily be true in every country and in every context, but it should be true in most of them (and certainly in the US, where a lot of local governments are funding programs using these concepts).

zhdc1 5y ago

The article is largely talking about academic success (with one or two exceptions) which imo is much easier to normalize across countries. The context to this article is that "grit" is used as one of the characteristics that charter schools and other educational programs in the US try to maximize in low performing areas. If "grit" can't be measured, or if it's just another way of describing another attribute (e.g., contentiousness, which is the article uses - or persistence, which is what you find in many academic articles), then there isn't much of a point of trying to maximize it in academic contexts. All of this assumes that school performance is something that educators want to increase. This may not necessarily be true in every country and in every context, but it should be true in most of them (and certainly in the US, where a lot of local governments are funding programs using these concepts).