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The speaker shares their experience of leaving a demanding job in management consulting to become a teacher. They noticed that IQ was not the only factor determining a student's success. They believed that with hard work, every student could learn. This led them to conclude that education needs a better understanding of students and their motivations. They decided to study psychology to explore this further. When I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding, teaching. I went to teach 7th graders math in the New York City public schools. And like any teacher, I made clues and tests, I gave out homework assignments. When the work came back, I calculated grades. What struck me was that IQ was not the only difference between my best and my worst students. Some of my strongest performers did not have stratospheric IQ scores. Some of my smartest kids weren't doing so well. So that got me thinking. The kind of things you need to learn in 7th grade math, sure they're hard, ratios, decimals, the area of a parallelogram, but these concepts are not impossible. And I was firmly convinced that every one of my students could learn the material if they worked hard and long enough. After several more years of teaching, I came to the conclusion that what we need in education is a much better understanding of students and learning from a motivational perspective, from a psychological perspective. In education, the one thing we know how to measure best is IQ. But what if doing well in school and in life depends on much more than your ability to learn quickly and easily? So I left the classroom and I went to graduate school to become a psychologist. I started studying kids and adults in all kinds of super challenging settings.