Grit(89)

“never give up” attitude: Mike Matthews, professor of engineering psychology at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, in conversation with the author, May 25, 2015.

physical fitness marks: Hanser and Oguz, Selecting for Success.

seventy-one cadets had dropped out: Duckworth et al., “Grit.”

55 percent of the salespeople: Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, Elizabeth P. Shulman, Scott A. Beal, and Angela L. Duckworth, “The Grit Effect: Predicting Retention in the Military, the Workplace, School and Marriage,” Frontiers in Psychology 5 (2014): 1–12.

graduate degree were grittier: Duckworth, et al., “Grit.”

as high as 80 percent: For more information on college dropout rates in the United States, see “Institutional Retention and Graduation Rates for Undergraduate Students,” National Center for Education Statistics, last updated May 2015, http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cva.asp.

“where we decide”: Dick Couch, Chosen Soldier: The Making of a Special Forces Warrior (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007), 108.

42 percent of the candidates: Eskreis-Winkler et al., “The Grit Effect.”

Success in the military, business, and education: Ibid. Importantly, the bivariate associations between grit and outcomes were in all cases significant as well.

to all 273 spellers: Duckworth et al., “Grit.”

SAT scores and grit: Ibid. See also Kennon M. Sheldon, Paul E. Jose, Todd B. Kashdan, and Aaron Jarden, “Personality, Effective Goal-Striving, and Enhanced Well-Being: Comparing 10 Candidate Personality Strengths,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 1 (2015), 1–11. In this one-year longitudinal study, grit emerged as a more reliable predictor of goal attainment than any other measured personality strength. Likewise, my colleagues Phil Tetlock and Barbara Mellers have found in their longitudinal research that people who forecast future events with astonishing accuracy are considerably grittier than others: “The strongest predictor of rising into the ranks of superforecasters is perpetual beta, the degree to which one is committed to belief updating and self-improvement. It is roughly three times as powerful a predictor as its closest rival, intelligence.” See Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction (New York: Crown, 2015), page 192.





CHAPTER 2: DISTRACTED BY TALENT


in the classroom: The school I taught at was created by Teach For America alumnus Daniel Oscar, and in my view, the best teacher in the school was a guy named Neil Dorosin. Both Daniel and Neil are still in the vanguard of education reform.

“I was a little behind”: David Luong, in an interview with the author, May 8, 2015.

learning came easy: Karl Pearson, The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton, vol. 1 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1930), 66.

“capacity for hard labor”: Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius (London: Macmillan, 1869), 38. It’s important to note here that Galton’s fascination with heredity was misguided. While his conclusions about the importance of zeal and hard work and ability have been supported by modern research, his erroneous conclusions about heredity and race have not.

“eminently important difference”: Charles Darwin, Letter to Francis Galton, December 23, 1869. Frederick Burkhardt et al., ed., The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 17, 1869 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 530.

supernatural intelligence: See Leonard Mlodinow, The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey from Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos (New York: Pantheon Books, 2015), 195. Catharine Morris Cox, “The Early Mental Traits of Three Hundred Geniuses,” in Genetic Studies of Genius, vol. 2, ed. Lewis M. Terman, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1926), 399.

“no great quickness”: Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (London: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1958), 140–41.

data presented itself: Adam S. Wilkins, “Charles Darwin: Genius or Plodder?” Genetics 183 (2009): 773–77.

“The Energies of Men”: William James, “The Energies of Men,” Science 25 (1907): 321–32.

that our talents vary: Talents are, of course, plural. For interested readers, see Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (New York: Basic Books, 1983). Also, Ellen Winner, Gifted Children: Myths and Realities (New York: Basic Books, 1996). Robert J. Sternberg and James C. Kaufman, “Human Abilities,” Annual Review of Psychology 49 (1998): 479–502.

twice as likely to single out effort: Survey of America’s Inner Financial Life, Worth Magazine, November 1993.

about athletic ability: “CBS News Poll: Does Practice Make Perfect in Sports?,” CBS News website, April 6, 2014, www.cbsnews.com/news/cbsnews-poll-does-practice-make-perfect-in-sports.

endorse “intelligence”: The 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair Poll, Vanity Fair, January 2010.

more likely to succeed: Chia-Jung Tsay and Mahzarin R. Banaji, “Naturals and Strivers: Preferences and Beliefs About Sources of Achievement,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 47 (2011): 460–65.

naturals were rated higher: Chia-Jung Tsay, “Privileging Naturals Over Strivers: The Costs of the Naturalness Bias,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (2015).

favor the natural: Ibid.

“technical skills can flourish”: “Juilliard PreCollege,” The Juilliard School, accessed August 10, 2015, http://www.juilliard.edu/youth-adult-programs/juilliard-pre-college