Gavin Ovsak is one of those guys who never seems to slow down. On top of his classwork at Harvard medical school, he’s got a side hustle—writing an original software program to help doctors make better decisions.
“It’s fun for me,” explains the 23-year-old Minnesota native, who studied biomedical engineering and computer science at Duke as an undergraduate. He admits he sometimes lets eating and cleaning slide when he’s really engaged in one of his projects.
There’s a term for people like Ovsak—the kind of go-getter who would actually choose to take on a complicated programming challenge on top of a heavy load of demanding schoolwork. Educational psychologists Adele and Allen Gottfried call people who are standouts when it comes to effort and determination “motivationally gifted.” According to the Gottfrieds, our culture has vastly underestimated just how essential motivation is to ensuring success later in life. If society learns to value this quality in the same way that it regards intelligence or leadership skills, it could be an enormous boon for children—particularly because motivation, unlike many other talents, is a quality that’s accessible to us all.
The Gottfrieds have plenty of research to back up their theories on motivation—quite literally, enough to fill a lifetime. In the late 1970s, the Gottfrieds were professors at California State University; Allen at Fullerton, and Adele at Northridge. They undertook a research project studying 130 babies born in a hospital in Fullerton, California. About 90% of the participants were Caucasian, and nearly all fell on the continuum from working- to upper-middle-class.
Over the next four decades, the Gottfrieds and several colleagues collected a staggering trove of data on the study participants, yielding important insights into working parents, temperament, and other topics. Researchers collected information about participants from parents, teachers and transcripts, tested their IQ and motivation levels,and even visited their homes. In all, the Fullerton Longitudinal Study has amassed an estimated 18,000 pieces of information on each of the remaining 107 participants. “It’s our life’s work,” says Allen cheerfully. “We’ll take it to our grave.”
The Gottfrieds believe one of the study’s most significant findings centers on motivation. Kids who scored higher on measures of academic intrinsic motivation at a young age—meaning that they enjoyed learning for its own sake—performed better in school, took more challenging courses, and earned more advanced degrees than their peers. They were more likely to be leaders and more self-confident about schoolwork. Teachers saw them as learning more and working harder. As young adults, they continued to seek out challenges and leadership opportunities. If there’s a secret sauce to winning at life, the motivational kids seemed to have found it.
About 19% of the babies selected at random for the Fullerton study later scored 130 or higher on an IQ Test —a widely accepted standard for intellectual giftedness. But, with a few exceptions, the Gottfrieds’ “motivationally gifted” cohort didn’t overlap with the intellectually gifted ones. In other words, these highly motivated kids excelled even when controlling for differences in intelligence or ability.
“[Motivation] in itself is accounting for a certain amount of variance in achievement that goes above and beyond IQ,” Adele explains. As the Gottfrieds watched the highly motivated kids thrive and grow, they started to look for clues about how they got that way.
The massive volume of information in the Fullerton study offered an unusual window into the home lives of the study kids. Along with colleagues, the Gottfrieds undertook the laborious task of parsing their voluminous data to tease out “pathways”—environmental influences that did or didn’t nudge kids toward intrinsic motivation when it came to learning.
The results validated some bits of conventional wisdom and deflated others. Parents who read to their kids helped them develop a love of reading, which indirectly led to higher reading a