Many believe a child’s success is based on intelligence and that those who score highest on tests, from preschool admissions to SATs, will succeed in school and in life. Paul Tough argues that the qualities that matter most have more to do with character: perseverance, curiosity, conscientiousness, optimism, and self-control. In How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, he writes of researchers and educators who are using new tools to develop character, uncovers the ways in which parents do—and do not—prepare their children for adulthood, and he and he looks at ways to help children growing up in poverty.