Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

I won’t quit! I can figure this out!
For the rest of the semester, I not only tried harder, I tried things I hadn’t done before. I went to
every teaching assistants’ office hours. I asked for extra work. I practiced doing the most difficult
problems under time pressure—mimicking the conditions under which I needed to produce a flawless
performance. I knew my nerves were going to be a problem at exam time, so I resolved to attain a
level of mastery where nothing could surprise me. By the time the final exam came around, I felt like I
could have written it myself.
I aced the final. My overall grade in the course was a B—the lowest grade I’d get in four years,
but, ultimately, the one that made me the proudest.
Little did I know when I was foundering in my neurobiology class that I was re-creating the
conditions of a famous psychology experiment.
Let me wind back the clock to 1964. Two first-year psychology doctoral students named Marty
Seligman and Steve Maier are in a windowless laboratory, watching a caged dog receive electric
shocks to its back paws. The shocks come randomly and without warning. If the dog does nothing, the
shock lasts five seconds, but if the dog pushes its nose against a panel at the front of the cage, the
shock ends early. In a separate cage, another dog is receiving the same shocks at exactly the same
intervals, but there’s no panel to push on. In other words, both dogs get the exact same dosage of
shock at the exact same times, but only the first dog is in control of how long each shock lasts. After
sixty-four shocks, both dogs go back to their home cages, and new dogs are brought in for the same
procedure.
The next day, one by one, all the dogs are placed in a different cage called a shuttle box. In the
middle, there’s a low wall, just high enough that the dogs can leap the barrier if they try. A high-
pitched tone plays, heralding an impending shock, which comes through the floor of the half of the
shuttle box where the dog is standing. Nearly all the dogs who had control over the shocks the
previous day learn to leap the barrier. They hear the tone and jump over the wall to safety. In contrast,
two-thirds of the dogs who had 
no
control over the shocks the previous day just lie down
whimpering, passively waiting for the punishments to stop.
This seminal experiment proved for the first time that it isn’t suffering that leads to hopelessness.
It’s suffering you think you can’t control.
Many years after deciding to major in the subject I was failing, I sat in a graduate student cubicle a
few doors down from Marty’s office, reading about this experiment on learned helplessness. I quickly
saw the parallels to my earlier experience. The first neurobiology quiz brought unexpected pain. I
struggled to improve my situation, but when the midterm came, I got shocked again. The shuttle box
was the rest of the semester. Would I conclude from my earlier experience that I was helpless to

---

change my situation? After all, my immediate experience suggested that two disastrous outcomes
would be followed by a third.
Or would I be like the few dogs who, despite recent memories of uncontrollable pain, held fast to
hope? Would I consider my earlier suffering to be the result of particular mistakes I could avoid in the
future? Would I expand my focus beyond the recent past, remembering the many times I’d shrugged off
failure and eventually prevailed?
As it turns out, I behaved like the one-third of dogs in Marty and Steve’s study that persevered. I
got up again and kept fighting.
In the decade following that 1964 experiment, additional experiments revealed that suffering without
control reliably produces symptoms of clinical depression, including changes in appetite and physical
activity, sleep problems, and poor concentration.
When Marty and Steve first proposed that animals and people can 
learn
that they are helpless,
their theory was considered downright absurd by fellow researchers. Nobody at the time took
seriously the possibility that dogs could have thoughts that then influenced their behavior. In fact, few
psychologists entertained the possibility that