Grit (43 page)

the social multiplier effect:
William T. Dickens and James R. Flynn, “Heritability Estimates Versus Large Environmental Effects: The IQ Paradox Resolved,”
Psychological Review
108 (2001): 346–69.

Grit and age
:
These data are originally reported in Duckworth et al., “Grit,” 1092.

more conscientious, confident, caring, and calm
:
Avshalom Caspi, Brent W. Roberts, and Rebecca L. Shiner, “Personality Development: Stability and Change,”
Annual Review of Psychology
56 (2005): 453–84.

“the maturity principle”
:
Ibid., 468.

“doesn’t come overnight”
:
Shaywitz,
Overcoming Dyslexia
, 347.

“you’re late, you’re fired”
:
Bernie Noe, head of school, Lakeside School, Seattle, in an interview with the author, July 29, 2015.

interest without purpose
:
Ken M. Sheldon, “Becoming Oneself: The Central Role of Self-Concordant Goal Selection,”
Personality and Social Psychology Review
18 (2014): 349–65. See psychologist Ken Sheldon’s work on enjoyment and importance as the two components of what he calls autonomously motivated goals. Ken points out that all of us have responsibilities we must fulfill out of obligation or necessity. But no matter how much we think we care about externally motivated goals, their accomplishment rarely fulfills us in the way that interesting and purposeful goals do. A lot of the people in Ken’s studies are highly educated and very comfortably upper-middle-class yet sorely lacking in autonomously motivated goals. They tell Ken they feel like they’re in the passenger seat of their own lives. By following these individuals over time, Ken’s learned that they’re less likely to accomplish their goals; even when they do achieve them, they derive less satisfaction from having done so. Recently, I collected data from hundreds of adults, ages twenty-five to seventy-five and found that Ken’s measure of autonomous motivation correlates positively with grit.

CHAPTER 6: INTEREST

“follow your passion”
:
Indiana University, “Will Shortz’s 2008 Commencement Address,” CSPAN,
http://www.c-span.org/video/?205168-1/indiana-university-commencement-address
.

“to follow my passion”:
Princeton University, “Jeff Bezos’ 2010 Baccalaureate Remarks,” TED,
https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_bezos_gifts_vs_choices
.

“won’t be able to stick with it”
:
Taylor Soper, “Advice from Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos: Be Proud of Your Choices, Not Your Gifts,”
GeekWire
, October 13, 2013,
http://www.geekwire.com/2013/advice-amazon-founder-jeff-bezos-proud-choices-gifts
.

asks the same questions
:
Hester Lacey, “The Inventory,” published weekly in the
Financial Times
.

“I love what I do”
:
Hester Lacey, journalist for the
Financial Times,
in an interview with the author, June 2, 2015.

fits their personal interests
:
Mark Allen Morris, “A Meta-Analytic Investigation of Vocational Interest-Based Job Fit, and Its Relationship to Job Satisfaction, Performance, and Turnover” (PhD dissertation, University of Houston, 2003).

happier with their lives
:
Rong Su, Louis Tay, and Qi Zhang, “Interest Fit and Life Satisfaction: A Cross-Cultural Study in Ten Countries” (manuscript in preparation).”

perform
better:
Christopher D. Nye, Rong Su, James Rounds, and Fritz Drasgow, “Vocational Interests and Performance: A Quantitative Summary of over 60 Years of Research,”
Perspectives on Psychological Science
7 (2012), 384–403.

very real constraints
:
See Cal Newport,
So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love
(New York: Hachette Book Group, 2012). Cal points out that getting very good at something and therefore making yourself valuable to others often precedes identifying what you do as your passion.

“strength of [our] interest”
:
William James,
Talks to Teachers on Psychology; and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals
(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1916), 114.

“engaged” at work
:
Gallup,
State of the Global Workplace: Employee Engagement Insights for Business Leaders Worldwide
(Washington, DC: Gallup, Inc., 2013).

food could be this good
:
Julie & Julia,
dir. Nora Ephron, Columbia Pictures, 2009.

“I was hooked, and for life”
:
Marilyn Mellowes, “About Julia Child,” PBS, June 15, 2005,
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/julia-child-about-julia-child/555
.

“I could really fall in love with”
:
Rowdy Gaines, Olympic gold medalist swimmer, in an interview with the author, June 15, 2015.

“I’m glad I went this way”
:
Marc Vetri, chef, in an interview with the author, February 2, 2015.

writing a cookbook for Americans
:
Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme,
My Life in France
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006).

“zero interest in the stove”:
Ibid., 3.

“to find my true passion”
:
Mellowes, “About Julia Child.”

“No Career Direction”
:
“Fleeting Interest in Everything, No Career Direction,” Reddit, accessed June 17, 2015,
https://www.reddit.com/r/jobs/comments/1asw10/fleeting_interest_in_everything_no_career
.

“They’re holding out for perfection”
:
Barry Schwartz, Dorwin Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College, in an interview with the author, January 27, 2015.

around middle school
:
Douglas K. S. Low, Mijung Yoon, Brent W. Roberts, and James Rounds. “The Stability of Vocational Interests from Early Adolescence to Middle Adulthood: A Quantitative Review of Longitudinal Studies.”
Psychological Bulletin
131 (2005): 713–37.

with the outside world
:
Much of the content in this chapter on the development of interests comes from an interview between the author and Ann Renninger, Eugene M. Lang Professor of Educational Studies at Swarthmore College, on July 13, 2015. For an in-depth review, the interested reader is referred to K. Ann Renninger and Suzanne Hidi,
The Power of Interest for Motivation and Engagement
(London: Routledge, 2015).

“to
force
an interest”:
Rob Walker, “25 Entrepreneurs We Love: Jeff Bezos,
Amazon.com
,”
Inc.
magazine, April 2004, 150.

“one piece of information led to another”
:
Mike Hopkins, NASA astronaut and colonel in the U.S. Air Force, in an interview with the author, May 12, 2015.

“I started wanting to make that”
:
Vetri, interview.

“I’ll always need you”
:
Marc Vetri,
Il Viaggio Di Vetri: A Culinary Journey
(New York: Ten Speed Press, 2008), ix.

“at the things they love”
:
Amy Chua,
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
(New York: Penguin, 2011), 213.

120 people who achieved
:
Benjamin Bloom,
Developing Talent in Young People
(New York: Ballantine, 1985).

“the early years”
:
Ibid. I would like to point out here that while interest typically precedes the effortful practice we will discuss in the next chapter, it’s also been shown that investing effort into an endeavor can reciprocally increase passion. See Michael M. Gielnik et al., “ ‘I Put in Effort, Therefore I Am Passionate’: Investigating the Path from Effort to Passion in Entrepreneurship,”
Academy of Management Journal
58 (2015): 1012–31.

Encouragement during the early years
:
For related work, see Stacey R. Finkelstein and Ayelet Fishbach, “Tell Me What I Did Wrong: Experts Seek and Respond to Negative Feedback,”
Journal of Consumer Research
39 (2012): 22–38.

“perhaps the major quality”
:
Bloom,
Developing Talent
, 514.

erode intrinsic motivation
:
Robert Vallerand, Nathalie Houlfort, and Jacques Forest, “Passion for Work: Determinants and Outcomes,” in
The Oxford Handbook of Work Engagement, Motivation, and Self-Determination Theory
, ed. Marylène Gagné (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014), 85–105.

injured physically and to burn out
:
Jean Côté, Professor of Psychology at Queen’s University, in an interview with the author, July 24, 2015. See also, Jean Côté, Karl Erickson, and Bruce Abernethy, “Play and Practice During Childhood,” in
Conditions of Children’s Talent Development in Sport
, ed. Jean Côté and Ronnie Lidor (Morgantown, WV: Fitness Information Technology, 2013), 9–20. Côté, Baker, and Abernethy, “Practice and Play in the Development of Sport Exercise,” in
Handbook of Sport Psychology
, ed. Gershon Tenenbaum and Robert C. Eklund (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2007), 184–202.

different motivational needs
:
Robert J. Vallerand
, The Psychology of Passion: A Dualistic Model
(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015). Vallerand has found that passion leads to deliberate practice, and that autonomy support from teachers and parents leads to passion.

“I just wanted to make my own”
:
Will Shortz, crossword puzzle editor for the
New York Times
, in an interview with the author, February 28, 2015.

“my first crossword”
:
Elisabeth Andrews, “20 Questions for Will Shortz,”
Bloom Magazine
, December 2007/January 2008, 58.

“I sold my first puzzle”
:
Shortz, interview.

“what I was supposed to do”
:
Jackie Bezos, in an interview with the author, August 6, 2015. Jackie also told me that Jeff’s early love of space has never waned. His high school valedictory speech was about colonizing space. Decades later, he created Blue Origin to establish a permanent presence in space:
www.blueorigin.com
.

“because they’re so diverse”
:
Shortz, interview.

“call them short-termers”
:
Jane Golden, founder and executive director of the Mural Arts Program, in an interview with the author, June 5, 2015.