Grit (5 page)

Chia’s research pulls back the curtain on our ambivalence toward talent and effort. What we
say
we care about may not correspond with what—deep down—we actually
believe
to be more valuable. It’s a little like saying we don’t care at all about physical attractiveness in a romantic
partner and then, when it comes to actually choosing whom to date, picking the cute guy over the nice one.

The “naturalness bias” is a hidden prejudice against those who’ve achieved what they have because they worked for it, and a hidden preference for those whom we think arrived at their place in life because they’re naturally talented. We may not admit to others this bias for naturals; we may not even admit it to ourselves. But the bias is evident in the choices we make.

Chia’s own life is an interesting example of the natural versus striver phenomenon. Now a professor at University College London, she publishes her scholarly work in the most prestigious of academic journals. As a child, she attended classes at Juilliard, whose pre-college program invites students “who exhibit the talent, potential, and accomplishment to pursue a career in music” to experience “an atmosphere where artistic gifts and
technical skills can flourish.”

Chia holds several degrees from Harvard. Her first was a bachelor’s degree in psychology; she graduated magna cum laude with highest honors. She also has two master’s degrees: one in the history of science and the other in social psychology. And, finally, while completing her PhD in organizational behavior and psychology at Harvard, she also picked up a secondary PhD in music.

Impressed? If not, let me add that Chia also has degrees from the Peabody Conservatory in piano performance and pedagogy—and yes, she’s performed at Carnegie Hall, not to mention Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, and at the palace recital commemorating the presidency of the European Union.

If you only saw her credentials, you might leap to the conclusion that Chia was born more gifted than anyone you know: “My god! What an extraordinarily talented young woman!” And, if Chia’s research is right, that explanation would embellish her accomplishments with
more luster, more mystery, and more awe than the alternative: “My god! What an extraordinarily dedicated, hardworking young woman!”

And then what would happen? There’s a vast amount of research on what happens when we believe a student is especially talented. We begin to lavish extra attention on them and hold them to higher expectations. We expect them to excel, and that expectation becomes
a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I’ve asked Chia what she makes of her own musical accomplishments. “Well, I guess I may have some talent,” Chia said. “But I think, more than that, I loved music so much I practiced four to six hours a day all throughout childhood.” And in college, despite a punishing schedule of classes and activities, she made time to practice almost as much. So, yes, she has some talent—but she’s a striver, too.

Why did Chia practice so much? I wondered. Was it forced on her? Did she have any choice in the matter?

“Oh, it was
me
. It was what I wanted.
I wanted to get better and better and better. When I practiced piano, I pictured myself onstage in front of a crowded audience. I imagined them clapping.”

The year I left McKinsey for teaching, three of the firm’s partners published a report called “
The War for Talent.” The report was widely read and eventually
became a best-selling book. The basic argument was that companies in the modern economy rise and fall depending on their ability to attract and retain “A players.”

“
What do we mean by
talent
?” the McKinsey authors ask in the book’s opening pages. Answering their own question: “In the most general sense, talent is the sum of a person’s abilities—his or her intrinsic gifts, skills, knowledge, experience, intelligence, judgment, attitude, character, and drive. It also includes his or her ability to learn and grow.” That’s a long list, and it reveals the struggle most of us have
when we try to define talent with any precision. But it doesn’t surprise me that “intrinsic gifts” are mentioned first.

When
Fortune
magazine put McKinsey on its cover, the lead article began: “When in the presence of a young McKinsey partner, one gets the distinct impression that if plied with a cocktail or two, he might well lean across the table and suggest something awkward,
like comparing SAT scores.” It’s almost impossible, the journalist observed, to overestimate “the premium placed within the McKinsey culture on analytic ability, or as its denizens say,
on being ‘bright.’ ”

McKinsey is famous for recruiting and rewarding smart men and women—some with MBAs from places like Harvard and Stanford, and the rest, like me, who possess some other credential that suggests we must have very big brains.

My interviews with McKinsey unfolded as most do, with a series of brainteasers designed to test my analytic mettle. One interviewer sat me down and introduced himself, then asked: “How many tennis balls are manufactured in the United States per year?”

“I guess there are two ways to approach that question,” I responded. “The first way is to find the right person, or maybe trade organization, to tell you.” My interviewer nodded, but gave me a look that said he wanted the other kind of answer.

“Or you could take some basic assumptions and do some multiplying to figure it out.”

My interviewer smiled broadly. So I gave him what he wanted.

“Okay, assume there are about two hundred fifty million people in the United States. Let’s say the most active tennis players are between the age of ten and thirty. That’s got to be, roughly speaking, one-fourth of the population. I guess that gives you a little over sixty million potential tennis players.”

Now my interviewer was really excited. I continued the logic game, multiplying and dividing by numbers according to my completely uninformed estimates of how many people actually play tennis, and
how often they play on average, and how many balls they would use in a game, and then how often they would need to replace dead or lost ones.

I got to some number, which was probably wildly off, because at every step I was making another uninformed assumption that was, to some degree or another, incorrect. Finally, I said: “The math here isn’t that hard for me. I’m tutoring a little girl who is practicing her fractions right now, and we do a lot of mental math together. But if you want to know what I’d
really
do if I needed to know the answer to that question, I’ll tell you: I’d just call someone who actually knows.”

More smiling, and then an assurance that he’d learned all he needed to from our interaction. And also from my application—including my SAT scores, which McKinsey heavily relies on to do their early sorting of candidates. In other words, if the advice to corporate America is to create a culture that values talent above all else, McKinsey practices what it preaches.

Once I accepted the offer to join the New York City office, I was told that my first month would be spent in a fancy hotel in Clearwater, Florida. There I joined about three dozen other new hires who, like me, lacked any training in business. Instead, each of us had earned some other academic badge of honor. I sat next to a guy with a PhD in physics, for example. On my other side was a surgeon, and behind me were two lawyers.

None of us knew much about management in general, or about any industry in particular. But that was about to change: in a single month, we would complete a crash course called the “mini-MBA.” Since we were all vetted to be superfast learners, there was no question that we would successfully master a massive amount of information in a very short amount of time.

Newly equipped with a casual acquaintance with cash flow, the difference
between revenue and profit, and some other rudimentary facts about what I now knew to call “the private sector,” we were shipped off to our designated offices around the world, where we would join teams of other consultants and be matched up with corporate clients to solve whatever problems they threw our way.

I soon learned that McKinsey’s basic business proposition is straightforward. For a very large sum of money per month, companies can hire a McKinsey team to solve problems too thorny to be solved by the folks who are already working on them. At the end of this “engagement,” as it was called in the firm, we were supposed to produce a report that was dramatically more insightful than anything they could have generated in-house.

It occurred to me, as I was putting together slides summarizing bold, sweeping recommendations for a multibillion-dollar medical products conglomerate, that, really, I had no idea what I was talking about. There were senior consultants on the team who may have known more, but there were also more junior consultants who, having just graduated from college, surely knew even less.

Why hire us, then, at such an exorbitant cost? Well, for one thing, we had the advantage of an outsider’s perspective untainted by insider politics. We also had a method for solving business problems that was hypothesis and data driven. There were probably lots of good reasons CEOs brought in McKinsey. But among them, I think, was that we were supposed to be sharper than the people who were already on-site. Hiring McKinsey meant hiring the very “best and brightest”—as if being the brightest also made us the best.

According to
The War for Talent
, the companies that excel are those that aggressively promote the most talented employees while just as aggressively culling the least talented. In such companies, huge disparities in salary are not only justified but desirable. Why? Because a
competitive, winner-take-all environment encourages the
most
talented to stick around and the
least
talented to find alternative employment.

Duff McDonald, the journalist who’s done the most in-depth research on McKinsey to date, has suggested that this particular business philosophy would be more aptly titled
The War on Common Sense
. McDonald points out that the companies highlighted in the original McKinsey report as exemplars of their endorsed strategy didn’t do so well in the years after that report was published.

Journalist Malcolm
Gladwell has also critiqued the
The War for Talent
. Enron, he points out, epitomized the “talent mindset” approach to management advocated by McKinsey. As we all know, the Enron story doesn’t have a happy ending. Once one of the largest energy trading companies in the world, Enron was named America’s Most Innovative Company by
Fortune
magazine six years in a row. Yet, by the end of 2001, when the business filed for bankruptcy, it had become clear that the company’s extraordinary profits were attributable to massive and systematic accounting fraud. When Enron collapsed, thousands of its employees, who had no hand at all in the wrongdoing, lost their jobs, health insurance, and retirement savings. At the time, it was the
largest corporate bankruptcy in U.S. history.

You can’t blame the Enron debacle on a surfeit of IQ points. You can’t blame it on a lack of grit, either. But Gladwell argues convincingly that demanding Enron employees prove that they were smarter than everyone else inadvertently contributed to a narcissistic culture, with an overrepresentation of employees who were both incredibly smug and driven by deep insecurity to keep showing off. It was a culture that encouraged short-term performance but discouraged long-term learning and growth.

The same point comes through in the postmortem documentary on Enron called, appropriately enough,
The Smartest Guys in the Room
. During the company’s ascendency, it was a brash and brilliant former McKinsey consultant named Jeff Skilling who was Enron’s CEO. Skilling
developed a performance review system for Enron that consisted of grading employees annually and summarily
firing the bottom 15 percent. In other words, no matter what your absolute level of performance, if you were weak, relative to others, you got fired. Inside Enron, this practice was known as “rank-and-yank.” Skilling considered it one of the most important strategies his company had. But ultimately, it may have contributed to a work environment that rewarded deception and discouraged integrity.

Is talent a bad thing? Are we all equally talented? No and no. The ability to quickly climb the learning curve of any skill is obviously a very good thing, and, like it or not, some of us are better at it than others.

So why, then, is it such a bad thing to favor “naturals” over “strivers”? What’s the downside of television shows like
America’s Got Talent
,
The X Factor
, and
Child Genius
? Why shouldn’t we separate children as young as seven or eight into two groups: those few children who are “gifted and talented” and the many, many more who aren’t? What harm is there, really, in a talent show being named a “talent show”?

In my view, the biggest reason a preoccupation with talent can be harmful is simple: By shining our spotlight on talent, we risk leaving everything else in the shadows. We inadvertently send the message that these other factors—including grit—don’t matter as much as they really do.

Consider, for example, the story of Scott Barry Kaufman. Scott’s office is just two doors down from mine, and he’s a lot like the other academic psychologists I know: He spends most of his waking hours reading, thinking, collecting data, doing statistics, and writing. He publishes his research in scientific journals. He knows a lot of polysyllabic words. He has degrees from Carnegie Mellon, Cambridge University, and Yale. He plays the cello
for fun
.

But as a child, Scott was considered a slow learner—which was true.
“Basically, I got a lot of ear infections as a kid,” Scott explains. “And that led to this problem with processing information from sound in real time. I was
always a step or two behind the other kids in my class.” So halting was his academic progress, in fact, that he was placed in special education classes. He repeated third grade. Around the same time, he met with a school psychologist to take an IQ test. In an anxiety-ridden test session he describes as “harrowing,” Scott performed so poorly that he was sent to a special school for children with learning disabilities.