Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
A 4.0 won't help in combat
What GPA shows
GPA does tell recruiters something. A Naval Academy or ROTC graduate has shown the discipline to sit down and do the hard work, and hopefully has the brains to do it. What it can't show is what happens when things go south, and not every student with a 4.0 can think through that.
Where it breaks down
Basic SEAL training is where that gets found out. A trainee is cold, wet, miserable, and exhausted, and the instructors throw a whole bunch of extra trouble on top. The question is whether he can think his way out of it. In combat bad things will happen, and a 4.0 may not help.
What every team needs
The person they want stays calm, with just enough swagger and just enough humility to get out of the problem. Other teams select differently: a medical research team at MD Anderson wants the smartest men and women it can get, and nobody there cares whether anyone can do a pull-up. Whether it is MD Anderson, Sloan Kettering, or the Navy SEALs, the team still needs people who think under pressure and work well with others.
Why does stress make thinking harder?
Neuroscientist Amy Arnsten at Yale has shown that even mild uncontrollable stress can quickly weaken the prefrontal cortex. That region handles working memory, planning, and flexible reasoning. Stress floods it with high levels of norepinephrine and dopamine, which disrupts its signaling. Meanwhile, older and more automatic circuits, such as the amygdala, take stronger control of behavior.
Why did grit predict who finished West Point?
Psychologist Angela Duckworth and colleagues studied cadets entering West Point's Cadet Basic Training, the summer program for new cadets, in a 2007 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Scores for grit, a measure of perseverance and sustained interest, predicted who would finish the program beyond what the Academy's own Whole Candidate Score did. The Whole Candidate Score is built from SAT results, class rank, leadership experience, and a physical test.
More from Not Dead Yet
