Discipline Outdoes IQ in the Long Run

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, 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-disciple 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 no pain.