Grit(49)

Recently, I asked Michael to give a lecture on mindfulness for local schoolteachers. On the day of his talk, he stepped up to the podium and looked intently at his audience. One by one, he made eye contact with each of the seventy educators who’d given up their Sunday afternoon to hear what he had to say. There was a long pause.

And then, with a smile I can only describe as radiant, he began: “I have a calling.”



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I was twenty-one when I first experienced the power of a purposeful top-level goal.

In the spring of my junior year in college, I went to the career services center to find something to do that summer. Turning the pages of an enormous three-ring binder labeled SUMMER PUBLIC SERVICE, I came across a program called Summerbridge. The program was looking for college students to design and teach summer enrichment classes for middle school students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Teaching kids for a summer sounds like a good idea, I thought. I could teach biology and ecology. I’ll show them how to make a solar oven out of tinfoil and cardboard. We’ll roast hot dogs. It’ll be fun.

I didn’t think, This experience is going to change everything.

I didn’t think, Sure, you’re premed now, but not for long.

I didn’t think, Hold on tight—you’re about to discover the power of purpose.

To be honest, I can’t tell you much about that summer. The details escape me. I do know I woke long before dawn each day, including weekends, to prepare for my classes. I do know I worked long into the night. I remember specific kids, and certain moments. But it wasn’t until I returned home and had a moment to reflect that I realized what had happened. I’d glimpsed the possibility that a child’s connection with a teacher can be life-changing—for both.

When I returned to campus that fall, I sought out other students who’d taught at Summerbridge programs. One of these students, Philip King, happened to live in the same dorm. Like me, he felt a palpable urgency to start another Summerbridge program. The idea was too compelling. We couldn’t not try.

We had no money, no idea how to start a nonprofit, no connections, and, in my case, nothing but skepticism and worry from parents convinced this was a catastrophically stupid way to use a Harvard education.

Philip and I had nothing and, yet, we had exactly what we needed. We had purpose.

As anyone who has started an organization from scratch can tell you, there are a million tasks, big and small, and no instruction manual for any of them. If Philip and I were doing something that was merely interesting, we couldn’t have done it at all. But because creating this program was in our minds—and in our hearts—so overwhelmingly important for kids, it gave us a courage and energy neither of us had ever known before.

Because we weren’t asking for ourselves, Philip and I found the gumption to knock on the doors of just about every small business and restaurant in Cambridge, asking for donations. We found the patience to sit in countless waiting rooms of powers-that-be. We waited and waited, sometimes hours on end, until these authority figures had time to see us. Then we found the stubbornness to keep asking and asking until we secured what we needed.

And so it went for everything we had to do—because we weren’t doing it for ourselves, we were doing it for a greater cause.

Two weeks after Philip and I graduated, we opened the doors to the program. That summer, seven high school and college students discovered what it was like to be a teacher. Thirty fifth-grade boys and girls discovered what it was like to spend their summer vacation learning, studying, working hard, and—though it may have seemed impossible before they actually did it—having fun at the same time.

That was more than twenty years ago. Now called Breakthrough Greater Boston, the program has grown far beyond what Philip and I could have imagined, providing tuition-free, year-round academic enrichment for hundreds of students every year. To date, more than a thousand young men and women have taught in the program, many of whom have gone on to pursue full-time careers in education.

Summerbridge led me to pursue teaching. Teaching led me to an enduring interest in helping children do so much more with their lives than they might ever dream possible.

And yet . . .

For me, teaching wasn’t enough. Still unfulfilled was the little girl in me who loved science, who was fascinated by human nature, who, when she was sixteen and had a chance to take a summer enrichment class, picked—of all the courses in the catalog—psychology.

Writing this book made me realize that I’m someone who had an inkling about my interests in adolescence, then some clarity about purpose in my twenties, and finally, in my thirties, the experience and expertise to say that my top-level, life-organizing goal is, and will be until my last breath: Use psychological science to help kids thrive.



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One reason my dad was so upset about Summerbridge is that he loves me. He thought I would sacrifice my welfare for the well-being of other people who, frankly, he didn’t love as much as his own daughter.

Indeed, the concepts of grit and purpose might, in principle, seem to conflict. How is it possible to stay narrowly focused on your own top-level goal while also having the peripheral vision to worry about anyone else? If grit is about having a pyramid of goals that all serve a single personal objective, how do other people fit into the picture?

“Most people think self-oriented and other-oriented motivations are opposite ends of a continuum,” says my colleague and Wharton professor Adam Grant. “Yet, I’ve consistently found that they’re completely independent. You can have neither, and you can have both.” In other words, you can want to be a top dog and, at the same time, be driven to help others.