Grit (14 page)

First comes
interest
. Passion begins with intrinsically enjoying what you do. Every gritty person I’ve studied can point to aspects of their work they enjoy less than others, and most have to put up with at least one or two chores they don’t enjoy at all. Nevertheless, they’re captivated by the endeavor as a whole. With enduring fascination and childlike curiosity, they practically shout out, “I love what I do!”

Next comes the capacity to
practice
. One form of perseverance is the daily discipline of trying to do things better than we did yesterday. So, after you’ve discovered and developed interest in a particular area, you must devote yourself to the sort of focused, full-hearted, challenge-exceeding-skill practice that leads to mastery. You must zero in on your weaknesses, and you must do so over and over again, for hours a day, week after month after year. To be gritty is to resist complacency. “Whatever it takes, I want to improve!” is a refrain of all paragons of grit, no matter their particular interest, and no matter how excellent they already are.

Third is
purpose
. What ripens passion is the conviction that your work matters. For most people,
interest without purpose is nearly impossible to sustain for a lifetime. It is therefore imperative that you identify your work as both personally interesting and, at the same time, integrally connected to the well-being of others. For a few, a sense of purpose dawns early, but for many, the motivation to serve others heightens
after
the development of interest and years of disciplined practice. Regardless, fully mature exemplars of grit invariably tell me, “My work is important—both to me and to others.”

And, finally,
hope
. Hope is a rising-to-the-occasion kind of perseverance. In this book, I discuss it after interest, practice, and purpose—but
hope does
not
define the last stage of grit. It defines
every
stage. From the very beginning to the very end, it is inestimably important to learn to keep going even when things are difficult, even when we have doubts. At various points, in big ways and small, we get knocked down. If we stay down, grit loses. If we get up, grit prevails.

Without the meddling of a psychologist like me, you may have figured grit out all on your own. You may already have a deep and abiding interest, a ready appetite for constant challenge, an evolved sense of purpose, and buoyant confidence in your ability to keep going that no adversity could sink. If so, you’re probably close to 5 out of 5 on the Grit Scale. I applaud you!

If, on the other hand, you’re not as gritty as you wish you were, then there’s something for you in the chapters that follow. Like calculus and piano, you can learn the psychology of grit on your own, but a little guidance can be a tremendous help.

The four psychological assets of interest, practice, purpose, and hope are not
You have it or you don’t
commodities. You can learn to discover, develop, and deepen your interests. You can acquire the habit of discipline. You can cultivate a sense of purpose and meaning. And you can teach yourself to hope.

You can grow your grit from the inside out. If you’d like to know how, read on.

Part II

GROWING GRIT FROM THE INSIDE OUT

Chapter 6

INTEREST

Follow your passion
is a popular theme of commencement speeches. I’ve sat through my fair share, both as a student and professor. I’d wager that at least half of all speakers, maybe more, underscore the importance of doing something you love.

For instance, Will Shortz, long-time editor of the
New York Times
crossword puzzle, told students at Indiana University: “My advice for you is, figure out what you enjoy doing most in life, and then try to do it full-time. Life is short. Follow your passion.”

Jeff Bezos told Princeton graduates the story of leaving a high-salary, high-status Manhattan finance job to start Amazon: “After much consideration, I took the less safe path
to follow my passion.” He has also said, “Whatever it is that you want to do, you’ll find in life that if you’re not passionate about what it is you’re working on, you
won’t be able to stick with it.”

And it’s not just on hot June days in our cap and gown that we get this advice. I hear the same thing—over and over again, nearly verbatim—from the grit paragons I interview.

So does Hester Lacey.

Hester is a British journalist who has been interviewing achievers
of the caliber of Shortz and Bezos—one per week—since 2011. Her column appears weekly in the
Financial Times
. Whether they’re fashion designers (Nicole Farhi), authors (Salman Rushdie), musicians (Lang Lang), comedians (Michael Palin), chocolatiers (Chantal Coady), or bartenders (Colin Field), Hester
asks the same questions, including: “What drives you on?” and “If you lost everything tomorrow, what would you do?”

I asked Hester what she’s learned from talking to more than two hundred “mega successful” people, as she described them during our conversation.

“One thing that comes up time and time again is: ‘
I love what I do.’ People couch it differently. Quite often, they say just that: ‘I love what I do.’ But they also say things like ‘I’m so lucky, I get up every morning looking forward to work, I can’t wait to get into the studio, I can’t wait to get on with the next project.’ These people are doing things not because they have to or because it’s financially lucrative. . . .”

Follow your passion
was not the message I heard growing up.

Instead, I was told that the practical realities of surviving “in the real world” were far more important than any young person living a “sheltered life” such as my own could imagine. I was warned that overly idealistic dreams of “finding something I loved” could in fact be a breadcrumb trail into poverty and disappointment. I was reminded that certain jobs, like being a doctor, were both high-income and high-status, and that these things would matter more to me in the long run than I might appreciate in the moment.

As you might have guessed, the individual proffering this advice was my dad.

“So, why’d you become a chemist?” I once asked.

“Because my father told me to,” he answered without a hint of resentment. “When I was a boy, history was my favorite subject.” He
then explained that he’d enjoyed math and science, too, but there was really no choice when it came to what he’d study in college. The family business was textiles, and my grandfather dispatched each of his sons to study trades relevant to one stage or another of textile production. “Our business needed a chemist, not a historian.”

As it turned out, the Communist Revolution in China brought a premature end to the family textile business. Not long after he settled here in the United States, my dad went to work for DuPont. Thirty-five years later, he retired as the highest-ranking scientist in the company.

Given how absorbed my dad was in his work—often lost in reverie about some scientific or management problem—and how successful he was over the arc of his career, it seems worth considering the possibility that it’s best to choose practicality over passion.

Just how ridiculous
is
it to advise young people to go out and do what they love? Within the last decade or so, scientists who study interests have arrived at a definitive answer.

First, research shows that people are enormously more satisfied with their jobs when they do something that
fits their personal interests. This is the conclusion of a meta-analysis that aggregated data from almost a hundred different studies that collectively included working adults in just about every conceivable profession. For instance, people who enjoy thinking about abstract ideas are
not
happy managing the minutiae of logistically complicated projects; they’d rather be solving math problems. And people who really enjoy interacting with people are
not
happy when their job is to work alone at a computer all day; they’re much better off in jobs like sales or teaching. What’s more, people whose jobs match their personal interests are, in general,
happier with their lives as a whole.

Second, people
perform
better at work when what they do interests them. This is the conclusion of another meta-analysis of sixty studies conducted over the past sixty years. Employees whose intrinsic personal interests fit with their occupations do their jobs better, are
more helpful to their coworkers, and stay at their jobs longer. College students whose personal interests align with their major earn higher grades and are less likely to drop out.

It’s certainly true that you can’t get a job just doing
anything
you enjoy. It’s tough to make a living playing Minecraft, no matter how good you get at it. And there are a lot of people in the world whose circumstances preclude the luxury of choosing among a broad array of occupational options. Like it or not, there are
very real constraints in the choices we can make about how we earn a living.

Nevertheless, as William James foretold a century ago, these new scientific findings affirm commencement speech wisdom: the “casting vote” for how well we can expect to do in any endeavor is “desire and passion, the
strength of [our] interest. . . .”

In a 2014 Gallup poll, more than two-thirds of adults said they were not
engaged at work, a good portion of whom were “actively disengaged.”

The picture is even bleaker abroad. In a survey of 141 nations, Gallup found that every country but Canada has even higher numbers of “not engaged” and “actively disengaged” workers than the United States. Worldwide, only 13 percent of adults call themselves “engaged” at work.

So it seems that very few people end up loving what they do for a living.

It’s difficult to reconcile the straightforward directives offered in inspirational speeches with epidemic levels of indifference toward work. When it comes to lining up our occupations with what we enjoy, how come so many of us miss the mark? And does my dad’s success offer a counterexample to the passion argument? What should we make of the fact that, by the time I came along, my father’s work really was his passion? Should we stop telling people to
follow your passion
and, instead, tell them to
follow our orders
?

I don’t think so.

In fact, I see Will Shortz and Jeff Bezos as terrific inspirations for what work can be. While it’s naive to think that any of us could love every minute of what we do, I believe the thousands of data points in those meta-analyses, which confirm the commonsense intuition that interest matters. Nobody is interested in everything, and everyone is interested in something. So matching your job to what captures your attention and imagination is a good idea. It may not guarantee happiness and success, but it sure helps the odds.

That said, I don’t think most young people need encouragement to follow their passion. Most
would
do exactly that—in a heartbeat—if only they had a passion in the first place. If I’m ever invited to give a commencement speech, I’ll begin with the advice to
foster a passion
. And then I’ll spend the rest of my time trying to change young minds about how that actually happens.

When I first started interviewing grit paragons, I assumed they’d all have stories about the singular moment when, suddenly, they’d discovered their God-given passion. In my mind’s eye, this was a filmable event, with dramatic lighting and a soundtrack of rousing orchestral music commensurate with its monumental, life-changing import.

In the opening scene of
Julie & Julia
, a younger Julia Child than any of us watched on television is dining in a fancy French restaurant with her husband, Paul. Julia takes one bite of her
sole meunière
—beautifully seared and perfectly deboned by the waiter moments before and now napped in a sauce of Normandy butter, lemon, and parsley. She swoons. She’s never experienced anything like this before. She always liked to eat, but she never knew
food could be
this
good.