Grit (6 page)

It was not until age fourteen that an observant special education teacher took Scott aside and asked why he wasn’t in more challenging classes. Until then, Scott had never questioned his intellectual status. Instead, he’d assumed that his lack of talent would put a very low ceiling on what he might do with his life.

Meeting a teacher who believed in his potential was a critical turning point: a pivot from
This is all you can do
to
Who knows what you can do?
At that moment, Scott started wondering, for the very first time:
Who am I? Am I a learning disabled kid with no real future? Or maybe something else?

And then, to find out, Scott signed up for just about every challenge his school had to offer. Latin class. The school musical. Choir. He didn’t necessarily excel in everything, but he
learned
in all. What Scott learned is that he wasn’t hopeless.

Something that Scott found he
did
learn fairly easily was the cello. His grandfather had been a cellist in the Philadelphia Orchestra for nearly fifty years, and Scott had the idea that his grandfather could give him lessons. He did, and the summer that Scott first picked up the cello, he began practicing eight or nine hours a day. He was fiercely determined to improve, and not only because he enjoyed the cello:
“I was so driven to just show someone, anyone, that I was intellectually capable of anything. At this point I didn’t even care what it was.”

Improve he did, and by the fall, he earned a seat in his high school orchestra. If the story ended there and then, it might not be about grit. But here’s what happened next. Scott kept up—and even increased—his practicing. He skipped lunch to practice. Sometimes he skipped classes to practice. By senior year, he was second chair—he was the second-best cellist in the orchestra—and he was in the choir, too, and winning all kinds of awards from the music department.

He also started doing well in his classes, many of which were now honors classes. Almost all of his friends were in the gifted and talented program, and Scott wanted to join them. He wanted to talk about Plato and do mental puzzles and learn more than he was already learning. Of course, with his IQ scores from childhood, there was no such possibility. He remembers the school psychologist drawing a bell-shaped curve on the back of a napkin and pointing to its peak—“This is average”—then moving to the right—“This is where you’d have to be for gifted and talented classes”—and then moving to the left—“And this is where you are.”

“At what point,” Scott asked,
“does achievement trump potential?”

The school psychologist shook his head and showed Scott the door.

That fall, Scott decided he wanted to study this thing called “intelligence” and come to his own conclusions. He applied to the cognitive science program at Carnegie Mellon University. And he was rejected. The rejection letter did not specify why, of course, but given his stellar grades and extracurricular accomplishments, Scott could only conclude that the impediment was his low SAT scores.

“I had this grit,” Scott recalls. “I said, ‘I’m going to do it. I don’t care. I’m going to find a way to study what I want to study.’ ” And then Scott auditioned for Carnegie Mellon’s opera program. Why? Because the opera program didn’t look very hard at SAT scores, focusing instead on musical aptitude and expression. In his first year, Scott took a psychology course as an elective. Soon after, he added psychology as a minor.
Next, he transferred his major from opera to psychology. And then he graduated Phi Beta Kappa.

Like Scott, I took an IQ test early in my schooling and was
deemed insufficiently bright to benefit from gifted and talented classes. For whatever reason—maybe a teacher asked that I be retested—I was evaluated again the following year, and I made the cut. I guess you could say I was borderline gifted.

One way to interpret these stories is that talent is great, but
tests
of talent stink. There’s certainly an argument to be made that tests of talent—and tests of anything else psychologists study, including grit—are highly imperfect.

But another conclusion is that the focus on talent distracts us from something that is at least as important, and that is effort. In the next chapter, I’ll argue that, as much as talent counts, effort counts twice.

Chapter 3

EFFORT COUNTS TWICE

Not a day goes by that I don’t read or hear the word
talent
. In every section of the newspaper—from the sports page to the business section, from profiles of actors and musicians in the weekend supplement, to front-page stories of rising stars in politics—allusions to talent abound. It seems that when anyone accomplishes a feat worth writing about, we rush to anoint that individual as extraordinarily “talented.”

If we overemphasize talent, we underemphasize everything else. In the extreme, it’s as if, deep down, we hold the following to be true:

For instance, I recently listened to a radio commentator draw a comparison between Hillary and Bill Clinton. He observed that both are unusually good communicators. But while her husband, Bill, is a gifted politician, Hillary has to contort herself into the role. Bill is a
natural; Hillary merely a striver. The unsaid but obvious implication is that she’ll never quite be his equal.

I’ve caught myself doing it, too. When someone really, really impresses me, I might reflexively say to myself:
What a genius!
I should know better. I do. So what’s going on? Why does an unconscious bias toward talent persist?

A few years ago, I read a study of competitive swimmers titled
“The Mundanity of Excellence.” The title of the article encapsulates its major conclusion: the most dazzling human achievements are, in fact, the aggregate of countless individual elements, each of which is, in a sense, ordinary.

Dan Chambliss, the sociologist who completed the study, observed: “Superlative performance is really a confluence of
dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then are fitted together in a synthesized whole. There is nothing extraordinary or superhuman in any one of those actions; only the fact that they are done consistently and correctly, and all together, produce excellence.”

But mundanity is a hard sell. When finishing up his analyses, Dan shared a few chapters with a colleague. “
You need to jazz it up,” his friend said. “You need to make these people more interesting. . . .”

When I called Dan to probe a few of his observations, I learned that he’d become fascinated with the idea of talent—and what we really mean by it—as a swimmer himself and, for several years afterward, as a part-time coach. As a young assistant professor, Dan decided to do an in-depth, qualitative study of swimmers. In total, Dan devoted six years to interviewing, watching, and sometimes living and traveling with swimmers and coaches at all levels—from the local swim club to an elite team made up of future Olympians.

“Talent,” he observed, “is perhaps the most pervasive lay explanation
we have for athletic success.” It is as if talent were some invisible “substance behind the surface reality of performance, which finally
distinguishes the best among our athletes.” And these great athletes seem blessed “with a special gift, almost a ‘thing’ inside of them, denied to the rest of us—perhaps physical, genetic, psychological, or physiological. Some have ‘it,’ and some don’t. Some are ‘natural athletes,’ and some aren’t.”

I think Dan is exactly right. If we can’t explain how an athlete, musician, or anyone else has done something jaw-droppingly amazing, we’re inclined to throw up our hands and say, “It’s a gift! Nobody can teach you that.” In other words, when we can’t easily see how experience and training got someone to a level of excellence that is so clearly beyond the norm, we default to labeling that person a “natural.”

Dan points out that the biographies of great swimmers reveal many, many factors that contribute to their ultimate success. For instance, the most accomplished swimmers almost invariably had parents who were interested in the sport and earned enough money to pay for coaching, travel to swim meets, and not the least important: access to a pool. And, crucially, there were the thousands of hours of practice in the pool over years and years—all spent refining the many individual elements whose sum create a single flawless performance.

Though it seems wrong to assume that talent is a complete explanation for dazzling performance, it’s also understandable.
“It’s easy to do,” Dan explained, “especially if one’s only exposure to top athletes comes once every four years while watching the Olympics on television, or if one only sees them in performances rather than in day-to-day training.”

Another point he makes is that the minimal talent needed to succeed in swimming is lower than most of us think.

“I don’t think you mean to say that any of us could be Michael Phelps,” I said. “
Do
you?”

“No, of course not,” Dan replied. “To begin with, there are certain
anatomical advantages that you really can’t train for.”

“And,” I continued, “wouldn’t you say that some swimmers improve more than others, even if they’re trying equally hard and getting the same coaching?”

“Yes, but the main thing is that greatness is doable. Greatness is many, many individual feats, and each of them is doable.”

Dan’s point is that if you had a time-lapse film of the hours and days and weeks and years that produced excellence, you could see what he saw: that a high level of performance is, in fact, an accretion of mundane acts. But does the incremental mastery of mundane individual components explain everything? I wondered. Is that all there is?

“Well, we all love mystery and magic,” he said. “I do, too.”

Then Dan told me about the day he got to watch Rowdy Gaines and Mark Spitz swim laps. “Spitz won seven gold medals in the ’72 Olympics and was the big thing before Michael Phelps,” he explained. “In ’84, twelve years after retirement, Spitz showed up. He’s in his mid-thirties. And he gets into the water with Rowdy Gaines, who at that time held the world record in the one hundred free. They did some fifties—in other words, two lengths of the pool, just sprints, like little races. Gaines won most of them, but by the time they were halfway through, the entire team was standing around the edge of the pool just to watch Spitz swim.”

Everyone on the team had been training with Gaines, and they knew how good he was. They knew he was favored to win Olympic gold. But because of the age gap, nobody had swum with Spitz.

One swimmer turned to Dan and said, pointing to Spitz, “My god. He’s a fish.”

I could hear the wonder in Dan’s voice. Even a student of mundanity, it seems, is easily lulled into talent explanations. I pressed him a bit. Was that sort of majestic performance something divine?

Dan told me to go read Nietzsche.

Nietzsche? The
philosopher
? What would a nineteenth-century
German philosopher have to say that might explain Mark Spitz? As it turns out, Nietzsche, too, had thought long and hard about the same questions.

“With everything perfect,” Nietzsche wrote, “we do not ask
how it came to be.” Instead, “we rejoice in the present fact as though it came
out of the ground by magic.”

When I read that passage, I thought of the young swimmers watching their icon Spitz exhibit form that almost didn’t seem human.

“No one can see in the work of the artist how it has
become
,” Nietzsche said. “That is its advantage, for wherever one can see the act of becoming one
grows somewhat cool.” In other words, we
want
to believe that Mark Spitz was born to swim in a way that none of us were and that none of us could. We don’t want to sit on the pool deck and watch him progress from amateur to expert. We prefer our excellence fully formed. We prefer mystery to mundanity.

But why? What’s the reason for fooling ourselves into thinking Mark Spitz didn’t
earn
his mastery?

“Our vanity, our self-love, promotes
the cult of the genius,” Nietzsche said. “For if we think of genius as something magical, we are not obliged to compare ourselves and find ourselves lacking. . . . To call someone ‘divine’ means: ‘here there is no need to compete.’ ”