Grit(96)

“it’s a basic drive”: Paul Silvia, associate professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, in an interview with the author, July 22, 2015.

enduring interests: Paul J. Silvia, “Interest—the Curious Emotion,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 17 (2008): 57–60.

“how eager to learn”: See www.templeton.org.

“they’re not sure what it’s all about”: Silvia, interview.

“How to Solve the New York Times Crossword Puzzle”: Will Shortz, “How to Solve the New York Times Crossword Puzzle,” New York Times Magazine, April 8, 2001.

“with a slightly new turn”: James, Talks to Teachers, 108.





CHAPTER 7: PRACTICE


grittier kids at the National Spelling Bee: Duckworth et al., “Grit.”

“be better than the last”: Lacey, interview.

world expert on world experts: Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016). See also, K. Anders Ericsson, “The Influence of Experience and Deliberate Practice on the Development of Superior Expert Performance,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, ed. K. Anders Ericsson et al. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006). K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-R?mer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100 (1993): 363–406.

their rate of improvement slows: See K. Anders Ericsson and Paul Ward, “Capturing the Naturally Occurring Superior Performance of Experts in the Laboratory,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 16 (2007): 346–50. See also Allen Newell and Paul S. Rosenbloom, “Mechanisms of Skill Acquisition and the Law of Practice,” in Cognitive Skills and Their Acquisition, ed. John R. Anderson (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1981), 1–56. Grit paragons tell me, in so many words, that if you had a magnifying glass, you’d see that learning curves are not smooth at all. Instead, there are “mini” plateaus—getting stuck on a problem for hours, days, weeks or even longer, and then suddenly a breakthrough. Ninety-six-year-old MacArthur Fellow and poet Irving Feldman put it to me this way: “Learning isn’t an evenly rising slope, but a series of leaps from plateau to plateau.”

ten thousand hours of practice: Ericsson et al., “The Role of Deliberate Practice.”

“make a mature dancer”: Martha Graham, “I Am a Dancer,” on Edward R. Murrow’s This I Believe, CBS, circa 1953. Republished on NPR, “An Athlete of God,” January 4, 2006, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5065006.

“seasoned press dispatcher”: Bryan Lowe William and Noble Harter, “Studies on the Telegraphic Language: The Acquisition of a Hierarchy of Habits,” Psychological Review 6 (1899): 358. Also relevant is John R. Hayes, “Cognitive Processes in Creativity,” in Handbook of Creativity, ed. John A. Glover, Royce R. Ronning, and Cecil R. Reynolds (New York: Springer, 1989), 135–45.

is just a rough average: See K. Anders Ericsson, “The Danger of Delegating Education to Journalists: Why the APS Observer Needs Peer Review When Summarizing New Scientific Developments” (unpublished manuscript, 2012), https://psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.hp.html.

“not doing deliberate practice”: K. Anders Ericsson, professor of psychology at Florida State University, in conversation with the author, December 2005.

intentionally seek out challenges: Ericsson et al., “The Role of Deliberate Practice.”

“I’d try to hold 1: 14”: Gaines, interview.

“that needs problem solving”: Roberto Díaz, president and CEO of the Curtis Institute of Music, in an interview with the author, October 7, 2015.

“every single piece of my game”: An additional 15 percent of his time, he says, is for playing pick-up, either one-on-one or three-on-three, so that the microrefinements he has worked on can be integrated into team play. And, finally, the last 15 percent is for organized games. “Kevin Durant,” The Film Room Project.

“there we were, stuck”: Ulrik Juul Christensen, executive chairman of Area9 and senior fellow at McGraw-Hill Education, in an interview with the author, July 15, 2015.

first studied in chess players: Herbert A. Simon and William G. Chase, “Skill in Chess: Experiments with Chess-Playing Tasks and Computer Simulation of Skilled Performance Throw Light on Some Human Perceptual and Memory Processes,” American Scientist 61 (1973): 394–403. See also: Ericsson et al., “The Role of Deliberate Practice.”

“and corrected them”: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: With an Introduction and Notes (New York: MacMillan Company, 1921), 14.

“no gains without pains”: Benjamin Franklin, “The Way to Wealth,” in Memoirs of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1839), 7.

“a small number of practices”: Peter F. Drucker, The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), ix.

“for years on end”: Atul Gawande, “The Learning Curve: Like Everyone Else, Surgeons Need Practice. That’s Where You Come In,” New Yorker, January 28, 2002.

“that’s what magic is to me”: David Blaine, “How I Held My Breath for 17 Minutes,” TED video, filmed October 2009, http://www.ted.com/talks/david_blaine_how_i_held_my_breath_for_17_min. See also Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strenth (New York: Penguin, 2011).