Grit (13 page)

Flynn began his talk with the basic facts on IQ change. Digging through the raw scores of IQ tests taken over the years, he found that the improvements on some tests were much bigger than others. He went to the chalkboard and sketched out a steep line indicating that scores had climbed most sharply for IQ tests assessing abstract reasoning. For instance, many young children today can answer the question “Dogs and rabbits: How are they alike?” They might tell you that both dogs and rabbits are alive, or that they’re both animals. In the scoring
manual, these answers only earn a half credit. Some children might go so far as to say that they’re both mammals, and for that insight, they’d earn a full credit. In contrast, young children a century ago might look at you quizzically and say, “Dogs chase rabbits.” Zero points.

As a species, we’re getting better and better at abstract reasoning.

By way of explaining massive gains in certain IQ subtests but not in others, Flynn told a story about basketball and television. Basketball, at all levels of competition, has gotten more competitive over the last century. Flynn played a little ball himself as a student and remembers the game changing even within a few years. What happened?

According to Flynn, what happened was television. Basketball was a great game to watch on the small screen and the exposure fueled the game’s popularity. Once television became a household fixture, more kids started playing the game, trying left-handed layups, crossover dribbles, graceful hook shots, and other skills that seemed routine among star players. And by getting better, each kid inadvertently enriched the learning environment for the kids he or she was playing against. Because one thing that makes you better at basketball is playing with kids who are just a little more skilled.

Flynn called this virtuous cycle of skill improvement
the social multiplier effect, and he used the same logic to explain generational changes in abstract reasoning. More and more, over the past century, our jobs and daily lives ask us to think analytically, logically. We go to school for longer, and in school, we’re asked, more and more, to reason rather than rely on rote memorization.

Either small environmental differences, or genetic ones, can trigger a virtuous cycle. Either way, the effects are multiplied socially, through culture, because each of us enriches the environment of all of us.

Here is a graph showing how Grit Scale scores vary by age. These are data from a large sample of American adults, and you can see from the
horizontal axis that the grittiest adults in my sample were in their late sixties or older; the least gritty were in their twenties.

One explanation for this data is that there’s a sort of “reverse Flynn effect” for grit. For instance, it’s possible that adults in their seventh decade of life are grittier because they grew up in a very different cultural era, perhaps one whose values and norms emphasized sustained passion and perseverance more than has been the case recently. In other words, it could be that the Greatest Generation is grittier than the millennials because cultural forces are different today than yesterday.

This explanation for why
grit and age go hand in hand was suggested to me by an older colleague who, looking over my shoulder at the same graph, shook his head and said, “I knew it! I’ve been teaching the same undergraduates the same course at the same university for decades. And I’ll tell you, they just don’t work as hard these days as they used to!” My dad, who gave his entire professional life as a chemist
to DuPont and quite literally retired with the gold watch, might say the same of the Wharton entrepreneur who approached me after my lecture. Even while pulling all-nighters for his present venture, the young man half expected to be on to something entirely new within a few years.

Alternatively, it’s possible these age trends have nothing to do with generational changes in grit. Instead, what the data may be showing is how people
mature
over time. My own experience, and the stories of grit paragons like Jeff Gettleman and Bob Mankoff suggest that, indeed, grit grows as we figure out our life philosophy, learn to dust ourselves off after rejection and disappointment, and learn to tell the difference between low-level goals that should be abandoned quickly and higher-level goals that demand more tenacity. The maturation story is that we
develop
the capacity for long-term passion and perseverance as we get older.

To distinguish between these rival explanations, we need a different kind of study. To generate the data I just showed you, I asked people of different ages about their current level of grit. What I got was a snapshot of grit in younger and older adults. Ideally, I’d follow these people for the rest of their lives, the way psychologist George Vaillant followed the Harvard men. Since the Grit Scale hasn’t been around very long, I can’t play you a time-lapse movie of grit over the life course. What I want is that movie. What I have is a snapshot.

Fortunately, many other aspects of personality have been examined longitudinally. In dozens of studies that have followed people over years and decades, the trends are clear. Most of us become
more conscientious, confident, caring, and calm with life experience. A lot of that change happens between the ages of twenty and forty, but, in fact, there’s no epoch in the human life span where personality stops evolving. Collectively, these data demonstrate what personality psychologists now call
“the maturity principle.”

We grow up. Or at least, most of us do.

To some extent, these changes are preprogrammed and biological. Puberty and menopause are things that change our personalities, for example. But on the whole, personality change is more a function of life experience.

Exactly how do life experiences change personality?

One reason we change is that we learn something we simply didn’t know before. For instance, we might learn through trial and error that repeatedly swapping out one career ambition for another is unfulfilling. That’s certainly what happened to me in my twenties. After running a nonprofit, then pursuing neuroscience research, then management consulting, then teaching, I learned that being a “promising beginner” is fun, but being an actual expert is infinitely more gratifying. I also learned that years of hard work are often mistaken for innate talent, and that passion is as necessary as perseverance to world-class excellence.

Likewise, we learn, as novelist John Irving did, that “to do anything really well, you have to overextend yourself,” to appreciate that, “in doing something over and over again, something that was never natural becomes almost second nature,” and finally, that the capacity to do work that diligently
“doesn’t come overnight.”

Other than insights about the human condition, what else is there that changes with age?

What changes, I think, are our circumstances. As we grow older, we’re thrust into new situations. We get our first job. We may get married. Our parents get older, and we find ourselves their caretakers. Often, these new situations call on us to act differently than we used to. And, because there’s no species on the planet more adaptable than ours, we change. We rise to the occasion.

In other words, we change when we
need
to. Necessity is the mother of adaptation.

Here’s a trivial example. Somehow, my youngest daughter, Lucy, reached the age of three without learning to use the potty. My husband
and I had done our best to bribe, cajole, and trick her into leaving diapers behind. We’d read all the books about all the right things to do, and we’d tried to do all those things—or at least we tried as energetically as is possible for working parents with other things on their to-do lists. To no avail. Lucy’s will proved stronger than ours.

Soon after her third birthday, Lucy changed preschool classrooms: from the toddler classroom, where almost all the children were still in diapers, to the “big kid” classroom, which didn’t even have a changing table. The first day I dropped her off in the new room, her eyes widened to saucers, scanning this new environment—a little bit afraid, I think, and more likely than not wishing she could stay in her old room, where she’d grown comfortable.

I’ll never forget picking Lucy up that afternoon. She smiled at me proudly and announced she’d used the potty. And then, in so many words, she told me she was done with diapers. And she was. Potty training happened in a single moment in time. How? Because when a child lines up for the potty with all the other children and sees that she’s expected to take her turn, she does exactly that. She learns to do what she needs to do.

Bernie Noe, the headmaster of the Lakeside School in Seattle, recently shared the following story about his own daughter. It illustrates the maturity principle to a T. Noe’s family lives on campus, and as a teenager, his daughter was late to school almost every day. One summer, his daughter got a job folding clothes at the local American Eagle. On her first day, the store manager said, “Oh, by the way, the first time
you’re late, you’re fired.” She was stunned. No second chances? All her life, there’d been patience, understanding, and second chances.

So then what happened?

“It was amazing,” Noe remembered. “Quite literally, it was the most immediate behavior change I’ve ever seen her make.” Suddenly, his daughter was setting two alarms to make sure she was on time, or early, to a job where being late was simply not tolerated. As a headmaster
tasked with shepherding young people along toward maturity, Noe considers his power to do so somewhat limited. “If you’re a business, you don’t care whether a kid thinks they’re special. What you care about is ‘Can you deliver? If you can’t deliver, hey, we don’t have any use for you.’ ”

Lectures don’t have half the effect of consequences.

What the maturity principle comes down to, I think, is this. Over time, we learn life lessons we don’t forget, and we adapt in response to the growing demands of our circumstances. Eventually, new ways of thinking and acting become habitual. There comes a day when we can hardly remember our immature former selves. We’ve adapted, those adaptations have become durable, and, finally, our identity—the sort of person we see ourselves to be—has evolved. We’ve matured.

Taken together, the data I’ve collected on grit and age are consistent with two different stories. One story says that our grit changes as a function of the cultural era in which we grow up. The other story says that we get grittier as we get older. Both could be true, and I have a suspicion that both
are
, at least to an extent. Either way, this snapshot reveals that grit is not entirely fixed. Like every aspect of your psychological character, grit is more plastic than you might think.

If grit can grow, how does that happen?

I get emails and letters almost every day from people who wish they had more grit. They lament that they never stuck with anything in order to get really good at it. They feel they’ve squandered their talents. They desperately want a long-term goal, and they want to pursue that goal with passion and perseverance.

But they don’t know where to begin.

A good place to start is to understand where you are today. If you’re not as gritty as you want to be, ask yourself
why
.

The most obvious answer people come up with goes something like this: “I guess I’m just lazy.”

Here’s another: “I’m just a flake.”

Or: “I’m congenitally incapable of sticking with things.”

All of these answers, I think, are wrong.

In fact, when people drop out of things, they do so for a reason. Actually, they do so for
different
reasons. Any of the following four thoughts might go through your head right before you quit what you’re doing:

“I’m bored.”

“The effort isn’t worth it.”

“This isn’t important to me.”

“I can’t do this, so I might as well give up.”

There’s nothing wrong—morally or otherwise—with thoughts like these. As I tried to show in this chapter, paragons of grit quit goals, too. But the higher the level of the goal in question, the more stubborn they are about seeing it through. Most important, paragons of grit don’t swap compasses: when it comes to the one, singularly important aim that guides almost everything else they do, the very gritty tend
not
to utter the statements above.

A lot of what I’ve learned about how grit grows comes from interviewing men and women who epitomize the qualities of passion and perseverance. I’ve included snippets of those conversations throughout this book so that you, too, can peer inside the mind and heart of a grit paragon and see whether there’s a belief, attitude, or habit worth emulating.

These stories of grit are one kind of data, and they complement the more systematic, quantitative studies I’ve done in places like West
Point and the National Spelling Bee. Together, the research reveals the psychological assets that mature paragons of grit have in common. There are four. They counter each of the buzz-killers listed above, and they tend to develop, over the years, in a particular order.