Grit (16 page)

In other words, even the most accomplished of experts start out as unserious beginners.

This is also the conclusion of psychologist Benjamin Bloom, who interviewed
120 people who achieved world-class skills in sports, arts, or science—plus their parents, coaches, and teachers. Among Bloom’s important findings is that the development of skill progresses through three different stages, each lasting several years. Interests are discovered and developed in what Bloom called “
the early years.”

Encouragement during the early years is crucial because beginners are still figuring out whether they want to commit or cut bait. Accordingly, Bloom and his research team found that the best mentors at this stage were especially warm and supportive: “
Perhaps the major quality of these teachers was that they made the initial learning very pleasant and rewarding. Much of the introduction to the field was as playful activity, and the learning at the beginning of this stage was much like a game.”

A degree of autonomy during the early years is also important. Longitudinal studies tracking learners confirm that overbearing parents and teachers
erode intrinsic motivation. Kids whose parents let them make their own choices about what they like are more likely to develop interests later identified as a passion. So, while my dad in Shanghai in 1950 didn’t think twice about his father assigning him a career path, most young people today would find it difficult to fully “own” interests decided without their input.

Sports psychologist Jean Côté finds that shortcutting this stage of relaxed, playful interest, discovery, and development has dire consequences. In his research, professional athletes like Rowdy Gaines who, as children, sampled a variety of different sports before committing to one, generally fare much better in the long run. This early breadth of experience helps the young athlete figure out which sport fits better
than others. Sampling also provides an opportunity to “cross-train” muscles and skills that will eventually complement more focused training. While athletes who skip this stage often enjoy an early advantage in competition against less specialized peers, Côté finds that they’re more likely to become
injured physically and to burn out.

We’ll discuss what Bloom calls “the middle years” in the next chapter, on practice. Finally, we’ll plumb “the later years” in chapter 8 when we discuss purpose.

For now, what I hope to convey is that experts and beginners have
different motivational needs. At the start of an endeavor, we need encouragement and freedom to figure out what we enjoy. We need small wins. We need applause. Yes, we can handle a tincture of criticism and corrective feedback. Yes, we need to practice. But not too much and not too soon. Rush a beginner and you’ll bludgeon their budding interest. It’s very, very hard to get that back once you do.

Let’s return to our commencement speakers. They’re case studies in passion, so there’s something to be learned from how they spent their early years.

New York Times
puzzle editor Will Shortz told me that his mother was “a writer and a lover of words,” and that her mother, in turn, had been a crossword fan. An inclination toward language, Shortz speculated, could very well be in his genes.

But the unique path he walked was not just a matter of genetic destiny. Not very long after he learned to read and write, Shortz came across a puzzle book. “I was just entranced by it,” he recalls. “
I just wanted to make my own.”

Predictably, that first puzzle book—the initial trigger for his curiosity—was followed by a slew of others. “Word puzzles, math puzzles, you name it. . . .” Soon enough, Shortz knew all of the major puzzle makers by name, acquiring the complete Dover Books collection of
his hero Sam Loyd, as well as the works of a half-dozen other puzzle makers whose names are as familiar to Shortz as they are foreign to me.

Who bought all those books?

His mother.

What else did she do?

“I remember when I was very young my mom had a bridge club over, and to keep me quiet for the afternoon she took a piece of paper, ruled it into squares, and showed me how to enter long words across and up and down. And I was happy all afternoon making my little puzzles. When the bridge club left, my mother came in and numbered the grid for me and showed me how to write clues. So that was
my first crossword.”

And then Shortz’s mother did what few mothers—including me—would have the initiative or know-how to do: “My mom encouraged me to sell my puzzles once I started making them, because as a writer, she submitted articles for publication to magazines and newspapers. Once she saw this interest that I had, she showed me how to submit my work.

“
I sold my first puzzle when I was fourteen, and I became a regular contributor to Dell puzzle magazines when I was sixteen.”

Shortz’s mother was clearly on the lookout for what might pique her son’s interest: “My mom did a lot of great things,” he told me. “For instance, I loved listening to radio and pop music and rock music when I was a kid. When she saw this interest, she got a guitar from a neighbor and set it on the bunk bed above my bed. I had the opportunity, if I wanted it, to pick up the guitar and start playing.”

But the desire to make music was nothing compared to the desire to make puzzles. “After nine months, when I had never touched the guitar, she took it back. I guess I liked listening to music, but I had no interest in playing it.”

When Shortz enrolled at Indiana University, it was his mom who found the individualized program that enabled Shortz to invent his
own major: to this day, Shortz remains the only person in the world to hold a college degree in enigmatology—the study of puzzles.

What about Jeff Bezos?

Jeff’s unusually interest-filled childhood has a lot to do with his unusually curious mother, Jackie.

Jeff came into the world two weeks after Jackie turned seventeen years old. “So,” she told me, “I didn’t have a lot of preconceived notions about
what I was supposed to do.”

She remembers being deeply intrigued by Jeff and his younger brother and sister: “I was just so curious about these little creatures and who they were and what they were going to do. I paid attention to what interested each one—they were all different—and followed their lead. I felt it was my responsibility to let them do deep dives into what they enjoyed.”

For instance, at three, Jeff asked multiple times to sleep in a “big bed.” Jackie explained that
eventually
he would sleep in a “big bed,” but not yet. She walked into his room the next day and found him, screwdriver in hand, disassembling his crib. Jackie didn’t scold him. Instead, she sat on the floor and helped. Jeff slept in a “big bed” that night.

By middle school, he was inventing all sorts of mechanical contraptions, including an alarm on his bedroom door that made a loud buzzing sound whenever one of his siblings trespassed across the threshold. “We made so many trips to RadioShack,” Jackie said, laughing. “Sometimes we’d go back four times in a day because we needed another component.

“Once, he took string and tied all the handles of the kitchen cupboards together, and then, when you opened one, all of them would pop open.”

I tried to picture myself in these situations. I tried to picture
not
freaking out. I tried to imagine doing what Jackie did, which was to
notice that her oldest son was blooming into a world-class problem solver, and then merrily nurture that interest.

“My moniker at the house was ‘Captain of Chaos,’ ” Jackie told me, “and that’s because just about anything that you wanted to do would be acceptable in some fashion.”

Jackie remembers that when Jeff decided to build an infinity cube, essentially a motorized set of mirrors that reflect one another’s images back and forth ad infinitum, she was sitting on the sidewalk with a friend. “Jeff comes up to us and is telling us all the science behind it, and I listen and nod my head and ask a question every once in a while. After he walked away, my friend asked if I understood everything. And I said, ‘It’s not important that I understand everything. It’s important that I listen.’ ”

By high school, Jeff had turned the family garage into a laboratory for inventing and experimentation. One day, Jackie got a call from Jeff’s high school saying he was skipping classes after lunch. When he got home, she asked him where he’d been going in the afternoons. Jeff told her he’d found a local professor who was letting him experiment with airplane wings and friction and drag, and—“Okay,” Jackie said. “I got it. Now, let’s see if we can negotiate a legal way to do that.”

In college, Jeff majored in computer science and electrical engineering, and after graduating, applied his programming skills to the management of investment funds. Several years later, Jeff built an Internet bookstore named after the longest river in the world: Amazon.com. (He also registered the URL www.relentless.com; type it into your browser and see where it takes you. . . . )

“I’m always learning,” Will Shortz told me. “I’m always stretching my brain in a new way, trying to find a new clue for a word, search out a new theme. I read once—a writer said that if you’re bored with writing, that means you’re bored with life. I think the same is true of puzzles. If you’re
bored with puzzles, you’re bored with life,
because they’re so diverse.”

Pretty much every grit paragon I’ve talked to, including my own dad, says the same thing. And in examining one large-scale study after another, I find that the grittier an individual is, the fewer career changes they’re likely to make.

In contrast, we all know people who habitually throw themselves headlong into a new project, developing a fierce interest, only to move on after three or four or five years to something entirely different. There seems no harm in pursuing a variety of different hobbies, but endlessly dating new occupations, and never settling down with just one, is a more serious matter.

“I
call them short-termers,” Jane Golden told me.

Jane has been promoting public art in my home city of Philadelphia for more than thirty years as the director of the revered Mural Arts Program. At last count, she’s helped convert the walls of more than 3,600 buildings into murals; hers is the single largest public art program in the country. Most people who know her would describe her commitment to mural arts as “relentless,” and Jane would agree.

“Short-termers come work here for a little while and then they move on, and then they go somewhere else, and then somewhere else again, and so on. I’m always sort of looking at them like they’re from another planet because I’m like, ‘How’s that? How do you not lock in to something?’ ”

Of course, it’s Jane’s unwavering focus that needs explaining, not the limited attention spans of the short-termers who come and go. Fundamentally, the emotion of boredom, after doing something for a while, is a very natural reaction. All human beings, even from infancy, tend to look away from things they’ve already seen and, instead, turn their gaze to things that are new and surprising. In fact, the word
interest
comes from the Latin
interesse
, which means “to differ.” To be interesting is, literally, to be different. We are, by our natures, neophiles.

Even though getting tired of things after a while is common, it’s not inevitable. If you revisit the Grit Scale, you’ll see that half the items ask about how consistent your interests are over long stretches of time. This links back to the fact that grit paragons don’t just discover something they enjoy and develop that interest—they also learn to
deepen
it.

As a young woman, Jane thought she’d become a painter. Now she battles bureaucratic red tape and raises money and deals with neighborhood politics. I wondered whether she’d sacrificed her life to a cause she felt was more meaningful but less interesting. I wondered if she’d given up novelty.

“When I stopped painting, it was very difficult,” Jane told me. “But then I discovered that growing the Mural Arts Program could be a creative endeavor. And that was great, because I’m a very curious person.

“From the outside, you might see my life as mundane: ‘Jane, you’re just running the Mural Arts Program and you’ve been doing that forever.’ I would say, ‘No, listen, today I went to a maximum security prison. I was in North Philly. I went to church. I was in a boardroom. I met with a deputy commissioner. I met with a city council person. I worked at an artists’ residency program. I saw kids graduating.’ ”

Then Jane used a painter’s analogy: “I’m like an artist who looks at the sky every morning and sees a variety of really brilliant colors where other people would just see blue or gray. I’m seeing in the course of a single day this tremendous complexity and nuance. I see something that is ever evolving and rich.”

For help understanding the ever-deepening interests of experts, I turned to the psychologist Paul Silvia.

Paul is a leading authority on the emotion of interest. He began our conversation by pointing out that babies know just about zilch when they’re born. Unlike other animals, which have strong instincts to act in certain ways, babies need to learn almost everything from experience. If babies
didn’t
have a strong drive for novelty, they wouldn’t learn as much, and that would make it less likely they’d survive. “So, interest—the desire to learn new things, to explore the world, to seek novelty, to be on the lookout for change and variety—
it’s a basic drive.”

How, then, do we explain the
enduring interests of grit paragons?

Like me, Paul has found that experts often say things like “The more I know, the less I understand.” Sir John Templeton, for example, who pioneered the idea of diversified mutual funds, made the motto of his philanthropic foundation “How little we know,
how eager to learn.”

The key, Paul explained, is that novelty for the beginner comes in one form, and novelty for the expert in another. For the beginner, novelty is anything that hasn’t been encountered before.
For the expert, novelty is nuance.

“Take modern art,” Paul said. “A lot of pieces could seem very similar to a novice that seem very different to an expert. Novices don’t have the necessary background knowledge. They just see colors and shapes.
They’re not sure what it’s all about.” But the art expert has comparatively enormous understanding. He or she has developed a sensitivity to details that the rest of us can’t even see.