Grit(91)

CHAPTER 3: EFFORT COUNTS TWICE


“The Mundanity of Excellence”: Daniel F. Chambliss, “The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers,” Sociological Theory 7 (1989): 70–86.

“dozens of small skills”: Ibid., 81.

“You need to jazz it up”: Ibid., 86.

“we have for athletic success”: Ibid., 78.

“distinguishes the best among our athletes”: Ibid, 78.

“It’s easy to do”: Ibid., 79.

“anatomical advantages”: Daniel F. Chambliss, professor of sociology at Hamilton College, in an interview with the author, June 2, 2015.

“how it came to be”: This is an informal translation, Friedrich Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches: Ein Buch für Freie Geister (Leipzig: Alfred Kr?ner Verlag, 1925), 135.

“out of the ground by magic”: Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 80.

“grows somewhat cool”: Ibid., 86.

“the cult of the genius”: Ibid.

“active in one direction”: Ibid.

“giftedness, inborn talents!”: Ibid.

human flourishing: Marty Seligman lays out the rationale for Positive Psychology in his presidential address to the American Psychological Association, reprinted in American Psychologist 54 (1999): 559–62.

talent is how quickly: The word talent is used differently by different people, but I think the most intuitive definition is the one I’ve offered here. For evidence that individuals do differ in the rate at which they acquire skills, see Paul B. Baltes and Reinhold Kliegl, “Further Testing of Limits of Cognitive Plasticity: Negative Age Differences in a Mnemonic Skill Are Robust,” Developmental Psychology 28 (1992): 121–25. See also Tom Stafford and Michael Dewar, “Tracing the Trajectory of Skill Learning with a Very Large Sample of Online Game Players,” Psychological Science, 25 (2014), 511–18. Finally, see the work of David Hambrick and colleagues on factors other than practice that likely influence skill acquisition; for example, see Brooke N. Macnamara, David Z. Hambrick, and Frederick L. Oswald, “Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education, and Professions: A Meta-Analysis,” Psychological Science 25 (2014): 1608–18. A critique of this meta-analysis by psychologist Anders Ericsson, whose work we explore in depth in chapter 7, is posted on his website: https://psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.hp.html.

“going to be the renaissance people”: “Oral History Interview with Warren MacKenzie, 2002 October 29,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-warren-mackenzie-12417.

“our true interest lay”: Ibid.

“40 or 50 pots in a day”: Warren MacKenzie, potter, in an interview with the author, June 16, 2015.

“continue to engage the senses”: Warren MacKenzie, Artist’s Statement, Schaller Gallery, https://www.schallergallery.com/artists/macwa/pdf/MacKenzie-Warren-statement.pdf.

“the most exciting things”: “Oral History,” Archives of American Art.

“in my work today”: Ibid.

“first 10,000 pots are difficult”: Alex Lauer, “Living with Pottery: Warren MacKenzie at 90,” Walker Art Center blog, February 16, 2014, http://blogs.walkerart.org/visualarts/2014/02/16/living-with-pottery-warren-mackenzie-at-90.

“Garp was a natural storyteller”: John Irving, The World According to Garp (New York: Ballantine, 1978), 127.

“the great storyteller”: Peter Matthiessen, quoted in “Life & Times: John Iriving,” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/15/lifetimes/irving.html.

Garp “could make things up”: Irving, Garp, 127.

“my lack of talent”: John Irving, The Imaginary Girlfriend: A Memoir (New York: Ballantine, 1996), 10.

SAT verbal score was 475: Sally Shaywitz, Overcoming Dyslexia: A New and Complete Science-based Program for Reading Problems at Any Level (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 345–50.

“lazy” and “stupid”: Ibid., 346.

“frequently misspelled words”: Irving, Imaginary Girlfriend, 9.

“slowly—and with my finger”: Shaywitz, Overcoming Dyslexia, 346.

“you have to overextend yourself”: Ibid., 347.

“no matter how difficult it is”: Ibid.

“Rewriting is what I do best”: John Irving, “Author Q&A,” Random House Online Catalogue, 2002.

“to have to go slowly”: Shaywitz, Overcoming Dyslexia, 347.

“sickening work ethic”: 60 Minutes, CBS, December 2, 2007, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/will-smith-my-work-ethic-is-sickening. A lyric in one of Will Smith’s raps goes: “If you say you’re going to run three miles, and you only run two, I don’t ever have to worry about losing in nothing to you.” See “Will Smith Interview: Will Power,” Reader’s Digest, December 2006.

“or I’m going to die”: Tavis Smiley, PBS, December 12, 2007.

“healthy young men”: Clark W. Heath, What People Are: A Study of Normal Young Men (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1945), 7.

for only four minutes: Katharine A. Phillips, George E. Vaillant, and Paula Schnurr, “Some Physiologic Antecedents of Adult Mental Health,” The American Journal of Psychiatry 144 (1987): 1009–13.