Grit(35)

Even though getting tired of things after a while is common, it’s not inevitable. If you revisit the Grit Scale, you’ll see that half the items ask about how consistent your interests are over long stretches of time. This links back to the fact that grit paragons don’t just discover something they enjoy and develop that interest—they also learn to deepen it.

As a young woman, Jane thought she’d become a painter. Now she battles bureaucratic red tape and raises money and deals with neighborhood politics. I wondered whether she’d sacrificed her life to a cause she felt was more meaningful but less interesting. I wondered if she’d given up novelty.

“When I stopped painting, it was very difficult,” Jane told me. “But then I discovered that growing the Mural Arts Program could be a creative endeavor. And that was great, because I’m a very curious person.

“From the outside, you might see my life as mundane: ‘Jane, you’re just running the Mural Arts Program and you’ve been doing that forever.’ I would say, ‘No, listen, today I went to a maximum security prison. I was in North Philly. I went to church. I was in a boardroom. I met with a deputy commissioner. I met with a city council person. I worked at an artists’ residency program. I saw kids graduating.’?”

Then Jane used a painter’s analogy: “I’m like an artist who looks at the sky every morning and sees a variety of really brilliant colors where other people would just see blue or gray. I’m seeing in the course of a single day this tremendous complexity and nuance. I see something that is ever evolving and rich.”



* * *



For help understanding the ever-deepening interests of experts, I turned to the psychologist Paul Silvia.

Paul is a leading authority on the emotion of interest. He began our conversation by pointing out that babies know just about zilch when they’re born. Unlike other animals, which have strong instincts to act in certain ways, babies need to learn almost everything from experience. If babies didn’t have a strong drive for novelty, they wouldn’t learn as much, and that would make it less likely they’d survive. “So, interest—the desire to learn new things, to explore the world, to seek novelty, to be on the lookout for change and variety—it’s a basic drive.”

How, then, do we explain the enduring interests of grit paragons?

Like me, Paul has found that experts often say things like “The more I know, the less I understand.” Sir John Templeton, for example, who pioneered the idea of diversified mutual funds, made the motto of his philanthropic foundation “How little we know, how eager to learn.”

The key, Paul explained, is that novelty for the beginner comes in one form, and novelty for the expert in another. For the beginner, novelty is anything that hasn’t been encountered before. For the expert, novelty is nuance.

“Take modern art,” Paul said. “A lot of pieces could seem very similar to a novice that seem very different to an expert. Novices don’t have the necessary background knowledge. They just see colors and shapes. They’re not sure what it’s all about.” But the art expert has comparatively enormous understanding. He or she has developed a sensitivity to details that the rest of us can’t even see.

Here’s another example. Ever watch the Olympics? Ever listen to the commentators say things, in real time, like “Oh! That triple lutz was just a little short!” “That push-off was perfectly timed”? You sit there and wonder how these commentators can perceive such microscopic differences in the performance of one athlete versus another without watching the video playback in slow motion. I need that video playback. I am insensitive to those nuances. But an expert has the accumulated knowledge and skill to see what I, a beginner, cannot.



* * *



If you’d like to follow your passion but haven’t yet fostered one, you must begin at the beginning: discovery.

Ask yourself a few simple questions: What do I like to think about? Where does my mind wander? What do I really care about? What matters most to me? How do I enjoy spending my time? And, in contrast, what do I find absolutely unbearable? If you find it hard to answer these questions, try recalling your teen years, the stage of life at which vocational interests commonly sprout.

As soon as you have even a general direction in mind, you must trigger your nascent interests. Do this by going out into the world and doing something. To young graduates wringing their hands over what to do, I say, Experiment! Try! You’ll certainly learn more than if you don’t!

At this early stage of exploration, here are a few relevant rules of thumb taken from Will Shortz’s essay “How to Solve the New York Times Crossword Puzzle”:

Begin with the answers you’re surest of and build from there. However ill-defined your interests, there are some things you know you’d hate doing for a living, and some things that seem more promising than others. That’s a start.

Don’t be afraid to guess. Like it or not, there’s a certain amount of trial and error inherent in the process of interest discovery. Unlike the answers to crossword puzzles, there isn’t just one thing you can do that might develop into a passion. There are many. You don’t have to find the “right” one, or even the “best” one—just a direction that feels good. It can also be difficult to know if something will be a good fit until you try it for a while.