Grit(13)

“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.’?”

In other words, mythologizing natural talent lets us all off the hook. It lets us relax into the status quo. That’s what undoubtedly occurred in my early days of teaching when I mistakenly equated talent and achievement, and by doing so, removed effort—both my students’ and my own—from further consideration.

So what is the reality of greatness? Nietzsche came to the same conclusion Dan Chambliss did. Great things are accomplished by those “people whose thinking is active in one direction, who employ everything as material, who always zealously observe their own inner life and that of others, who perceive everywhere models and incentives, who never tire of combining together the means available to them.”

And what about talent? Nietzsche implored us to consider exemplars to be, above all else, craftsmen: “Do not talk about giftedness, inborn talents! One can name great men of all kinds who were very little gifted. They acquired greatness, became ‘geniuses’ (as we put it). . . . They all possessed that seriousness of the efficient workman which first learns to construct the parts properly before it ventures to fashion a great whole; they allowed themselves time for it, because they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole.”



* * *



In my second year of graduate school, I sat down to a weekly meeting with my advisor, Marty Seligman. I was more than a little nervous. Marty has that effect on people, especially his students.

Then in his sixties, Marty had won just about every accolade psychology has to offer. His early research led to an unprecedented understanding of clinical depression. More recently, as president of the American Psychological Association, he christened the field of Positive Psychology, a discipline that applies the scientific method to questions of human flourishing.

Marty is barrel-chested and baritone-voiced. He may study happiness and well-being, but cheerful is not a word I’d use to describe him.

In the middle of whatever it was I was saying—a report on what I’d done in the past week, I suppose, or the next steps in one of our research studies—Marty interrupted. “You haven’t had a good idea in two years.”

I stared at him, openmouthed, trying to process what he’d just said. Then I blinked. Two years? I hadn’t even been in graduate school for two years!

Silence.

Then he crossed his arms, frowned, and said: “You can do all kinds of fancy statistics. You somehow get every parent in a school to return their consent form. You’ve made a few insightful observations. But you don’t have a theory. You don’t have a theory for the psychology of achievement.”

Silence.

“What’s a theory?” I finally asked, having absolutely no clue as to what he was talking about.