Angela Duckworth Showing Up Analysis

In “Showing Up” by Angela Duckworth she investigates the high dropout rate that occurs in the United States Military Academy called West Point. This is an academy where on the most athletic and smart people can attend. They undergo an intensive training called the beast and this is where the most students start to drop out. At first Duckworth believes that in order to succeed in this rigorous training you had to have the knowledge to do it, but in the end she finds out that knowledge is not the driving force behind the success of students that accomplish the beast. In 1955 a psychologist by the name of Jerry Kagan was the first person to try to understand why so many cadets would drop out of the training. He created a test that consisted of showing cadets pictures, and they would have to make stories about them. The people with the most positive stories were thought to be the people who would end up succeeding in the training. The people who visualized negative stories out of the pictures were believed to be the ones that would not be able to graduate from the training. This method turned out to not be a success. Then in 2004 Duckworth decided to try and see why cadets were dropping out of the academy and began to draw her
The success of the cadets does not rely on their knowledge and physical performance, but their amount of grit. Grit is the ability to be able to adjust to situations that had setbacks, and the endurance to fulfil set goals. Duckworth was able to devise a test that would calculate the amount of grit the cadets had. The cadets who had the most grit turned out to be the ones that were able to graduate from the academy. Grit also can be connected to the outside world for instance in school, jobs, life goals, sports, and fields where people face