Grit(53)

The quiz started out fine but quickly became more difficult. I began to panic, thinking over and over: I’m not going to finish! I have no idea what I’m doing! I’m going to fail! This, of course, was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more my mind was crowded by those heart-palpitating thoughts, the less I could concentrate. Time ran out before I’d even read the last problem.

A few days later, the professor handed back the quiz. I looked down disconsolately at my miserable grade and, shortly thereafter, shuffled into the office of my assigned teaching assistant. “You should really consider dropping this course,” he advised. “You’re just a freshman. You have three more years. You can always take the class later.”

“I took AP Bio in high school,” I countered.

“How did you do?”

“I got an A, but my teacher didn’t teach us much, which is probably why I didn’t take the actual AP exam.” This confirmed his intuition that I should drop the course.

Virtually the same scenario repeated itself with the midterm, for which I’d studied madly, and after which, I found myself in the teaching assistant’s office once again. This time his tone was more urgent. “You do not want a failing grade on your transcript. It’s not too late to withdraw from the course. If you do, nothing will get factored into your GPA.”

I thanked him for his time and closed the door behind me. In the hallway, I surprised myself by not crying. Instead, I reviewed the facts of the situation: two failures and only one more exam—the final—before the end of the semester. I realized I should have started out in a lower-level course, and now, more than halfway through the semester, it was obvious my energetic studying wasn’t proving sufficient. If I stayed, there was a good chance I’d choke on the final and end up with an F on my transcript. If I dropped the course, I’d cut my losses.

I curled my hands into fists, clenched my jaw, and marched directly to the registrar’s office. At that moment, I’d resolved to stay enrolled in—and, in fact, major in—neurobiology.

Looking back on that pivotal day, I can see that I’d been knocked down—or, more accurately, tripped on my own two feet and fell flat on my face. Regardless, it was a moment when I could have stayed down. I could have said to myself: I’m an idiot! Nothing I do is good enough! And I could have dropped the class.

Instead, my self-talk was defiantly hopeful: I won’t quit! I can figure this out!

For the rest of the semester, I not only tried harder, I tried things I hadn’t done before. I went to every teaching assistants’ office hours. I asked for extra work. I practiced doing the most difficult problems under time pressure—mimicking the conditions under which I needed to produce a flawless performance. I knew my nerves were going to be a problem at exam time, so I resolved to attain a level of mastery where nothing could surprise me. By the time the final exam came around, I felt like I could have written it myself.

I aced the final. My overall grade in the course was a B—the lowest grade I’d get in four years, but, ultimately, the one that made me the proudest.



* * *



Little did I know when I was foundering in my neurobiology class that I was re-creating the conditions of a famous psychology experiment.

Let me wind back the clock to 1964. Two first-year psychology doctoral students named Marty Seligman and Steve Maier are in a windowless laboratory, watching a caged dog receive electric shocks to its back paws. The shocks come randomly and without warning. If the dog does nothing, the shock lasts five seconds, but if the dog pushes its nose against a panel at the front of the cage, the shock ends early. In a separate cage, another dog is receiving the same shocks at exactly the same intervals, but there’s no panel to push on. In other words, both dogs get the exact same dosage of shock at the exact same times, but only the first dog is in control of how long each shock lasts. After sixty-four shocks, both dogs go back to their home cages, and new dogs are brought in for the same procedure.

The next day, one by one, all the dogs are placed in a different cage called a shuttle box. In the middle, there’s a low wall, just high enough that the dogs can leap the barrier if they try. A high-pitched tone plays, heralding an impending shock, which comes through the floor of the half of the shuttle box where the dog is standing. Nearly all the dogs who had control over the shocks the previous day learn to leap the barrier. They hear the tone and jump over the wall to safety. In contrast, two-thirds of the dogs who had no control over the shocks the previous day just lie down whimpering, passively waiting for the punishments to stop.

This seminal experiment proved for the first time that it isn’t suffering that leads to hopelessness. It’s suffering you think you can’t control.

Many years after deciding to major in the subject I was failing, I sat in a graduate student cubicle a few doors down from Marty’s office, reading about this experiment on learned helplessness. I quickly saw the parallels to my earlier experience. The first neurobiology quiz brought unexpected pain. I struggled to improve my situation, but when the midterm came, I got shocked again. The shuttle box was the rest of the semester. Would I conclude from my earlier experience that I was helpless to change my situation? After all, my immediate experience suggested that two disastrous outcomes would be followed by a third.

Or would I be like the few dogs who, despite recent memories of uncontrollable pain, held fast to hope? Would I consider my earlier suffering to be the result of particular mistakes I could avoid in the future? Would I expand my focus beyond the recent past, remembering the many times I’d shrugged off failure and eventually prevailed?