Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

This is
all you can do
to 
Who knows what you can do?
At that moment, Scott started wondering, for the very
first time: 
Who am I? Am I a learning disabled kid with no real future? Or maybe something else?
And then, to find out, Scott signed up for just about every challenge his school had to offer. Latin
class. The school musical. Choir. He didn’t necessarily excel in everything, but he 
learned
in all.
What Scott learned is that he wasn’t hopeless.
Something that Scott found he 
did
learn fairly easily was the cello. His grandfather had been a
cellist in the Philadelphia Orchestra for nearly fifty years, and Scott had the idea that his grandfather
could give him lessons. He did, and the summer that Scott first picked up the cello, he began
practicing eight or nine hours a day. He was fiercely determined to improve, and not only because he
enjoyed the cello: “I was so driven to just show someone, anyone, that I was intellectually capable of
anything. At this point I didn’t even care what it was.”
Improve he did, and by the fall, he earned a seat in his high school orchestra. If the story ended
there and then, it might not be about grit. But here’s what happened next. Scott kept up—and even
increased—his practicing. He skipped lunch to practice. Sometimes he skipped classes to practice.
By senior year, he was second chair—he was the second-best cellist in the orchestra—and he was in
the choir, too, and winning all kinds of awards from the music department.
He also started doing well in his classes, many of which were now honors classes. Almost all of
his friends were in the gifted and talented program, and Scott wanted to join them. He wanted to talk
about Plato and do mental puzzles and learn more than he was already learning. Of course, with his
IQ scores from childhood, there was no such possibility. He remembers the school psychologist
drawing a bell-shaped curve on the back of a napkin and pointing to its peak—“This is average”—
then moving to the right—“This is where you’d have to be for gifted and talented classes”—and then
moving to the left—“And this is where you are.”
“At what point,” Scott asked, “does achievement trump potential?”
The school psychologist shook his head and showed Scott the door.
That fall, Scott decided he wanted to study this thing called “intelligence” and come to his own
conclusions. He applied to the cognitive science program at Carnegie Mellon University. And he was
rejected. The rejection letter did not specify why, of course, but given his stellar grades and
extracurricular accomplishments, Scott could only conclude that the impediment was his low SAT
scores.
“I had this grit,” Scott recalls. “I said, ‘I’m going to do it. I don’t care. I’m going to find a way to
study what I want to study.’ ” And then Scott auditioned for Carnegie Mellon’s opera program. Why?
Because the opera program didn’t look very hard at SAT scores, focusing instead on musical aptitude
and expression. In his first year, Scott took a psychology course as an elective. Soon after, he added
psychology as a minor. Next, he transferred his major from opera to psychology. And then he
graduated Phi Beta Kappa.

---

Like Scott, I took an IQ test early in my schooling and was deemed insufficiently bright to benefit
from gifted and talented classes. For whatever reason—maybe a teacher asked that I be retested—I
was evaluated again the following year, and I made the cut. I guess you could say I was borderline
gifted.
One way to interpret these stories is that talent is great, but 
tests
of talent stink. There’s certainly
an argument to be made that tests of talent—and tests of anything else psychologists study, including
grit—are highly imperfect.
But another conclusion is that the focus on talent distracts us from something that is at least as
important, and that is effort. In the next chapter, I’ll argue that, as much as talent counts, effort counts
twice.

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Chapter 3
EFFORT COUNTS TWICE
Not a day goes by that I don’t read or hear the word 
talent
. In every section of the newspaper—from
the sports page to the business section, from profiles of actors and musicians in the weekend
supplement, to front-page stories of rising stars in politics—allusions to talent abound. It seems that
when anyone accomplishes a feat worth writing about, we rush to anoint that individual as
extraordinarily “talented.”
If we overemphasize talent, we underemphasize everything else. In the extreme, it’s as if, deep
down, we hold the following to be true:
For instance, I recently listened to a radio commentator draw a comparison between Hillary and
Bill Clinton. He observed that both are unusually good communicators. But while her husband, Bill,
is a gifted politician, Hillary has to contort herself into the role. Bill is a natural; Hillary merely a
striver. The unsaid but obvious implication is that she’ll never quite be his equal.
I’ve caught myself doing it, too. When someone really, really impresses me, I might reflexively say
to myself: