Grit (19 page)

So who’s right?

As fate would have it, the same summer Csikszentmihalyi was visiting, Ericsson was also in town. I arranged for them to debate the topic of “
passion and world-class performance” before an audience of about eighty educators.

When they sat down at the table in the front of the lecture hall, I realized that the two men are near-perfect doppelgängers. Both are tall and solidly built. Both are European by birth, with slight accents that somehow make them seem even more eminent and scholarly. Both sport close-cropped beards, and though only Csikszentmihalyi’s has gone all white, either man would be a good choice if you were looking for someone to play Santa Claus.

On the day of the panel, I was a little anxious. I don’t like conflict—even when it’s not mine.

It turns out I had nothing to worry about. The proponents of deliberate practice versus flow behaved as perfect gentlemen. No insults were exchanged. There wasn’t even a hint of disrespect.

Instead, Ericsson and Csikszentmihalyi sat shoulder to shoulder, each taking the microphone when it was their turn, each methodically summarizing decades of research supporting starkly contrasting perspectives. When one was speaking, the other appeared to listen intently. And then the microphone would change hands. So it went for ninety minutes.

Do experts suffer
, I wanted to know.
Or are they ecstatic?

Somehow, the dialogue I hoped would resolve this conundrum played out as two separate presentations—one on deliberate practice and the other on flow—spliced together.

When it was all over, I found myself a little disappointed. It wasn’t the drama that I missed, it was the resolution. I still didn’t have an answer to my question: Is expert performance a matter of arduous and not-so-fun-in-the-moment exertion, or can it be effortless and joyous?

For years after that anticlimactic summit, I read and thought about the issue. Finally, because I never developed the conviction that might prompt me to reject one side and take the other, I decided to collect some data. I asked thousands of adults who’d taken the Grit Scale online to take a second questionnaire assessing flow. The participants in this study included men and women of all ages representing all manner of professions: actors, bakers, bank tellers, barbers, dentists, doctors, police officers, secretaries, teachers, waiters, and welders . . . to name just a few.

Across these diverse occupations, grittier adults reported experiencing
more
flow, not less. In other words,
flow and grit go hand in hand.

Putting together what I learned from this survey, the findings on National Spelling Bee finalists, and a decadelong inspection of the relevant research literature, I’ve come to the following conclusion:
Gritty people do more deliberate practice
and
experience more flow
. There’s no contradiction here, for two reasons. First, deliberate practice is a behavior, and flow is an experience. Anders Ericsson is talking about what experts
do
; Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is talking about how experts
feel
. Second, you don’t have to be doing deliberate practice and experiencing flow at the same time. And, in fact, I think that for most experts, they rarely go together.

More research is needed to settle the question, and in the next few years, I’m hoping that Ericsson, Csikszentmihalyi, and I can collaborate to do exactly that.

Currently, my view is that the primary motivation for doing effortful deliberate practice is to improve your skill. You’re concentrating one hundred percent, and you’ve deliberately set the level of challenge to exceed your current level of skill. You’re in “problem solving” mode, analyzing everything you do to bring it closer to the ideal—the goal you
set at the beginning of the practice session. You’re getting feedback, and a lot of that feedback is about what you’re doing wrong, and you’re using that feedback to make adjustments and try again.

The motivation that predominates during flow, in contrast, is entirely different. The flow state is intrinsically pleasurable. You don’t care whether you’re improving some narrow aspect of your skill set. And though you’re concentrating one hundred percent, you’re not at all in “problem solving” mode. You’re not analyzing what you’re doing; you’re just doing. You’re getting feedback, but because the level of challenge
just meets
your current level of skill, that feedback is telling you that you’re doing a lot right. You feel like you’re in complete control, because you are. You’re floating. You lose track of time. No matter how fast you’re running or how intensely you’re thinking, when you’re in flow, everything
feels
effortless.

In other words, deliberate practice is for preparation, and flow is for performance.

Let’s return to swimmer Rowdy Gaines.

Gaines told me he once tabulated how much practice it took to develop the stamina, technique, confidence, and judgment to win an Olympic gold medal. In the eight-year period leading up to the 1984 games, he swam, in increments of fifty-yard laps, at least twenty thousand miles. Of course, if you add in the years before and after, the odometer goes even higher.

“
I swam around the world,” he told me with a soft laugh, “for a race that lasted forty-nine seconds.”

“Did you enjoy those miles?” I asked. “I mean, did you love practicing?”

“I’m not going to lie,” he replied. “I never really enjoyed going to practice, and I certainly didn’t enjoy it while I was there. In fact, there were brief moments, walking to the pool at four or four-thirty in the morning, or sometimes when I couldn’t take the pain, when I’d think, ‘God, is this worth it?’ ”

“So why didn’t you quit?”

“It’s very simple,” Rowdy said. “It’s because I loved swimming. . . . I had a passion for competing, for the
result
of training, for the feeling of being in shape, for winning, for traveling, for meeting friends. I hated practice, but I had an overall passion for swimming.”

Olympic gold medalist rower Mads Rasmussen offered a similar account of his motivation: “
It’s about hard work. When it’s not fun, you do what you need to do anyway. Because when you achieve results, it’s incredibly fun. You get to enjoy the ‘Aha’ at the end, and that is what drags you along a lot of the way.”

The idea of years of challenge-exceeding-skill practice leading to moments of challenge-meeting-skill flow explains why elite performance can
look
so effortless: in a sense, it
is
. Here’s an example. Eighteen-year-old swimmer Katie Ledecky recently broke her own world record in the 1,500-meter freestyle. Improbably, history was made during a preliminary round at a competition in Kazan, Russia. “To be honest, it felt pretty easy,” she said afterward. “I was so relaxed.” But it’s not flow to which Ledecky credits her speed: “Breaking that record is
testament to the work I have put in and the shape I am in right now.”

Indeed, Ledecky has been swimming since she was six. She’s developed a reputation for working fiercely hard at every single practice, sometimes training with male swimmers for added challenge. Three years ago, Ledecky described blanking out a little bit in the race that won her the gold medal in the eight-hundred-meter freestyle. “One thing in terms of swimming that people don’t really know,” she later said, “is that the work you put in [during] practice
shows off in the meet.”

Here’s my own story of hours of effortful deliberate practice leading to moments of effortless flow. A few years ago, a producer named Juliet Blake called to ask if I’d be interested in giving a six-minute TED talk. “Sure,” I said. “Sounds fun!”

“Wonderful! After you have your talk ready, we’ll have a video conference where we watch you give it, and we’ll give you some feedback. You know, something like a rehearsal.”

Hmmm, “feedback” you say
?
Something other than applause?
More slowly, I said, “Sure . . . that sounds fine.”

I prepared a talk and on the appointed day connected with Juliet and her boss, the leader of TED, Chris Anderson. Staring into the webcam, I delivered my talk in the allotted time. Then I waited for my effusive praise.

If there was any, I missed it.

Instead, what I got was Chris telling me he’d gotten lost in all my scientific jargon. Too many syllables. Too many slides. And not enough clear, understandable examples. Further, how I’d come to this whole line of research—my road from teacher to psychologist—was unclear and unsatisfying. Juliet agreed. She added that I’d managed to tell a story with absolutely zero suspense. The way I’d designed my talk was like telling the punch line of a joke at the very beginning.

Ouch! That bad, huh? Juliet and Chris are busy people, and I knew I wouldn’t get a second chance at getting coached. So I forced myself to listen. Afterward, I pondered who knew better how to give a great talk on grit: them or me?

It didn’t take long to realize that
they
were the experienced storytellers, and I was the scientist who needed feedback to make her talk better.

So I rewrote the talk, practiced in front of my family, and got more negative feedback. “Why do you say ‘Um’ all the time?” my older daughter, Amanda, asked. “Yeah, why do you do that, Mom?” my younger daughter, Lucy, chimed in. “And you bite your lip when you’re nervous. Don’t do that. It’s distracting.”

More practice. More refinements.

Then the fateful day arrived. I gave a talk that bore only a weak resemblance to the one I’d originally proposed. It was better. A
lot
better.
Watch that talk and you’ll see me in flow. Search YouTube for the many rehearsals that preceded it—or, for that matter, footage of
anyone
doing effortful, mistake-ridden, repetitive deliberate practice—and my guess is you’ll come up empty.

Nobody wants to show you the hours and hours of becoming. They’d rather show the highlight of what they’ve become.

After it was all over, I rushed to meet my husband and mother-in-law, who’d been in the audience that day to cheer me on. As soon as they were within earshot, I called out preemptively: “Just the effusive praise, please!” And they delivered.

Lately, I’ve been asking gritty performers and their coaches in diverse fields to elaborate on how it feels to do deliberate practice. Many agree with dancer Martha Graham that attempting to do what you cannot yet do is frustrating, uncomfortable, and even painful.

However, some have suggested that, in fact, the experience of deliberate practice can be extremely positive—not just in the long-term but in the moment.
Fun
isn’t quite the word they use to describe deliberate practice, but neither is
bitter
. And, too, top performers point out that the alternative to deliberate practice—mindlessly “going through the motions” without improvement—can be its own form of suffering.

I puzzled over these observations for a while, and then I decided to look back at the diary data that Ericsson and I had collected from the National Spelling Bee finalists. While I knew that spellers rated deliberate practice as especially effortful and unenjoyable, I also recalled that there was quite a spread around these averages. In other words, not all spellers had the same exact experience.

I looked to see how grittier competitors experienced deliberate practice. Compared to their less passionate, less persevering competitors, grittier spellers not only logged more hours of deliberate practice,
they rated it as both
more enjoyable
and
more effortful
. That’s right. Grittier kids reported working harder than other kids when doing deliberate practice but, at the same time,
said they enjoyed it more than other kids, too.

It’s hard to know for sure what to make of this finding. One possibility is that grittier kids spend more time doing deliberate practice, and that, over the years, they develop a taste for hard work as they experience the rewards of their labor. This is the “learn to love the burn” story. Alternatively, it could be that grittier kids enjoy the hard work more, and that gets them to do more of it. This is the “some people enjoy a challenge” story.

I can’t tell you which of these accounts is accurate, and if I had to guess, I’d say there’s some truth to both. As we’ll learn in chapter 11, there’s solid scientific evidence that the subjective experience of effort—what it
feels
like to work hard—can and does change when, for example, effort is rewarded in some way. I’ve watched my own daughters learn to enjoy working hard more than they used to, and I can say the same for myself.

On the other hand, Katie Ledecky’s coach, Bruce Gemmell, says she’s
always
relished a tough challenge.

“There’s a little video clip that Katie’s parents have of one of her first swim meets,” Bruce told me. “It’s just one lap. She’s six years old. She swims a few strokes and then grabs on to the lane line. She swims a few more strokes and grabs on to the lane line again. Finally, she gets to the end of the pool and gets out of the water. Dad’s filming it, and he asks, ‘Tell me about your first race. How was it?’ She goes, ‘Great!’ A few seconds later, she adds, ‘That was hard!’ And she’s beaming—a smile from ear to ear. That says it all right there.
She has that attitude with everything we do.”

In the same conversation, Bruce told me that Katie willingly does more deliberate practice than anyone he’s ever met. “We’ll try a drill that she’s horrible at—something where she’ll start off in the poorest
third of the group doing it. Then I’ll catch her sneaking practice time to get better at it, so within some period of time, she’s one of the best in the group. Some other swimmers, well, they try and they fail at it, and I have to cajole and beg them to try it again.”

If deliberate practice can be “awesome,” can it ever feel like effortless flow?

When I asked spelling champ Kerry Close if she’d ever experienced the state of flow during deliberate practice, she said, “No, the only time I could say that I was in flow was when I wasn’t being challenged.” At the same time, she described deliberate practice as gratifying in its own way: “Some of my most
rewarding
studying,” she told me, “was on my own, forcing myself to break down a big task into multiple parts
and getting it done.”