Grit(86)

In the end, the plurality of character operates against any one virtue being uniquely important.



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I’m often asked whether encouraging grit does children a disservice by setting expectations unreasonably high. “Careful, Dr. Duckworth, or children will all grow up thinking they can be Usain Bolt, Wolfgang Mozart, or Albert Einstein.”

If we can’t be Einstein, is it worth studying physics? If we can’t be Usain Bolt, should we go for a run this morning? Is there any point in trying to run a little faster or longer than we did yesterday? In my view, these are absurd questions. If my daughter says to me, “Mom, I shouldn’t practice my piano today because I’ll never be Mozart,” I’ll say in reply, “You’re not practicing piano to be Mozart.”

We all face limits—not just in talent, but in opportunity. But more often than we think, our limits are self-imposed. We try, fail, and conclude we’ve bumped our heads against the ceiling of possibility. Or maybe after taking just a few steps we change direction. In either case, we never venture as far as we might have.

To be gritty is to keep putting one foot in front of the other. To be gritty is to hold fast to an interesting and purposeful goal. To be gritty is to invest, day after week after year, in challenging practice. To be gritty is to fall down seven times, and rise eight.

I was interviewed recently by a journalist. As he was packing up his notes, he said, “So, it’s obvious you could have talked all day. You really love this subject.”

“Oh, gosh. Is there anything as interesting as the psychology of achievement? Could there be anything more important?”

He chuckled. “You know,” he said, “I absolutely love what I do, too. It’s amazing to me how many people I know who’re well into their forties and haven’t really committed to anything. They don’t know what they’re missing.”



* * *



One final thought.

Earlier this year, the latest MacArthur genius awards were announced. One of the winners was Ta-Nehisi Coates, the journalist whose second book, Between the World and Me, has been an extraordinary best seller.

Eight years ago, Coates was unemployed, recently laid off by Time magazine, and scrambling to get freelance work. It was a hard time. He guesses he gained thirty pounds from the strain. “I knew what kind of writer I wanted to be. I was not becoming that kind of writer. I was banging my head against a wall and nothing was coming out.”

His wife, he says, was “unerringly supportive.” Still, they had a young son. There were practical realities. “I was considering driving a cab.”

He finally got back on his feet, and after pushing through the “extraordinary stress” of his book, he began to hit his stride. “The writing was very, very different. The sentences had much more power.”

In his three-minute video posted on the MacArthur website, the first thing Coates says is: “Failure is probably the most important factor in all of my work. Writing is failure. Over and over and over again.” Then he explains, that as a boy, he was insatiably curious. Growing up in Baltimore, he was particularly obsessed with the idea of physical safety, and the lack thereof, and has remained so since. Journalism, he says, lets him keep asking the questions that interest him.

Toward the end of the video, Coates offers the best description of what it’s like to write that I’ve ever heard. To give you a sense of his intonation, and the cadence, I’ve laid out the words as I heard them—as a poem:

The challenge of writing

Is to see your horribleness on page.

To see your terribleness

And then to go to bed.

And wake up the next day,

And take that horribleness and that terribleness,

And refine it,

And make it not so terrible and not so horrible.

And then to go to bed again.

And come the next day,

And refine it a little bit more,

And make it not so bad.

And then to go to bed the next day.

And do it again,

And make it maybe average.

And then one more time,

If you’re lucky,

Maybe you get to good.

And if you’ve done that,

That’s a success.

You might think Coates is especially modest. He is. But he’s also especially gritty. And I’ve yet to meet a MacArthur Fellow, Nobel laureate, or Olympic champion who says that what they achieved came in any other way.

“You’re no genius,” my dad used to say when I was just a little girl. I realize now he was talking to himself as much as he was talking to me.

If you define genius as being able to accomplish great things in life without effort, then he was right: I’m no genius, and neither is he.

But if, instead, you define genius as working toward excellence, ceaselessly, with every element of your being—then, in fact, my dad is a genius, and so am I, and so is Coates, and, if you’re willing, so are you.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS





When I pick up a book for the first time, I immediately flip to the Acknowledgments. Like many readers, I’m eager to peek behind the curtain; I want to meet the cast and crew responsible for the show. Writing my own book has only deepened my appreciation for the team effort that any work represents. If you like this book, please know that credit for its creation is shared among the wonderful human beings recognized here. It’s time for these many supporters to step out into the footlights for a moment and take a well-deserved bow. If I’ve left anyone in the wings, I apologize; any omissions are inadvertent.