Grit(95)

“engaged” at work: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace: Employee Engagement Insights for Business Leaders Worldwide (Washington, DC: Gallup, Inc., 2013).

food could be this good: Julie & Julia, dir. Nora Ephron, Columbia Pictures, 2009.

“I was hooked, and for life”: Marilyn Mellowes, “About Julia Child,” PBS, June 15, 2005, http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/julia-child-about-julia-child/555.

“I could really fall in love with”: Rowdy Gaines, Olympic gold medalist swimmer, in an interview with the author, June 15, 2015.

“I’m glad I went this way”: Marc Vetri, chef, in an interview with the author, February 2, 2015.

writing a cookbook for Americans: Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme, My Life in France (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006).

“zero interest in the stove”: Ibid., 3.

“to find my true passion”: Mellowes, “About Julia Child.”

“No Career Direction”: “Fleeting Interest in Everything, No Career Direction,” Reddit, accessed June 17, 2015, https://www.reddit.com/r/jobs/comments/1asw10/fleeting_interest_in_everything_no_career.

“They’re holding out for perfection”: Barry Schwartz, Dorwin Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College, in an interview with the author, January 27, 2015.

around middle school: Douglas K. S. Low, Mijung Yoon, Brent W. Roberts, and James Rounds. “The Stability of Vocational Interests from Early Adolescence to Middle Adulthood: A Quantitative Review of Longitudinal Studies.” Psychological Bulletin 131 (2005): 713–37.

with the outside world: Much of the content in this chapter on the development of interests comes from an interview between the author and Ann Renninger, Eugene M. Lang Professor of Educational Studies at Swarthmore College, on July 13, 2015. For an in-depth review, the interested reader is referred to K. Ann Renninger and Suzanne Hidi, The Power of Interest for Motivation and Engagement (London: Routledge, 2015).

“to force an interest”: Rob Walker, “25 Entrepreneurs We Love: Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com,” Inc. magazine, April 2004, 150.

“one piece of information led to another”: Mike Hopkins, NASA astronaut and colonel in the U.S. Air Force, in an interview with the author, May 12, 2015.

“I started wanting to make that”: Vetri, interview.

“I’ll always need you”: Marc Vetri, Il Viaggio Di Vetri: A Culinary Journey (New York: Ten Speed Press, 2008), ix.

“at the things they love”: Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (New York: Penguin, 2011), 213.

120 people who achieved: Benjamin Bloom, Developing Talent in Young People (New York: Ballantine, 1985).

“the early years”: Ibid. I would like to point out here that while interest typically precedes the effortful practice we will discuss in the next chapter, it’s also been shown that investing effort into an endeavor can reciprocally increase passion. See Michael M. Gielnik et al., “?‘I Put in Effort, Therefore I Am Passionate’: Investigating the Path from Effort to Passion in Entrepreneurship,” Academy of Management Journal 58 (2015): 1012–31.

Encouragement during the early years: For related work, see Stacey R. Finkelstein and Ayelet Fishbach, “Tell Me What I Did Wrong: Experts Seek and Respond to Negative Feedback,” Journal of Consumer Research 39 (2012): 22–38.

“perhaps the major quality”: Bloom, Developing Talent, 514.

erode intrinsic motivation: Robert Vallerand, Nathalie Houlfort, and Jacques Forest, “Passion for Work: Determinants and Outcomes,” in The Oxford Handbook of Work Engagement, Motivation, and Self-Determination Theory, ed. Marylène Gagné (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014), 85–105.

injured physically and to burn out: Jean C?té, Professor of Psychology at Queen’s University, in an interview with the author, July 24, 2015. See also, Jean C?té, Karl Erickson, and Bruce Abernethy, “Play and Practice During Childhood,” in Conditions of Children’s Talent Development in Sport, ed. Jean C?té and Ronnie Lidor (Morgantown, WV: Fitness Information Technology, 2013), 9–20. C?té, Baker, and Abernethy, “Practice and Play in the Development of Sport Exercise,” in Handbook of Sport Psychology, ed. Gershon Tenenbaum and Robert C. Eklund (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2007), 184–202.

different motivational needs: Robert J. Vallerand, The Psychology of Passion: A Dualistic Model (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015). Vallerand has found that passion leads to deliberate practice, and that autonomy support from teachers and parents leads to passion.

“I just wanted to make my own”: Will Shortz, crossword puzzle editor for the New York Times, in an interview with the author, February 28, 2015.

“my first crossword”: Elisabeth Andrews, “20 Questions for Will Shortz,” Bloom Magazine, December 2007/January 2008, 58.

“I sold my first puzzle”: Shortz, interview.

“what I was supposed to do”: Jackie Bezos, in an interview with the author, August 6, 2015. Jackie also told me that Jeff’s early love of space has never waned. His high school valedictory speech was about colonizing space. Decades later, he created Blue Origin to establish a permanent presence in space: www.blueorigin.com.

“because they’re so diverse”: Shortz, interview.

“call them short-termers”: Jane Golden, founder and executive director of the Mural Arts Program, in an interview with the author, June 5, 2015.