Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

wholeheartedly
in favor
of giving kids all the intellectual stimulation they can handle. At the same time, I urge opening those programs to all children who might
benefit. Thirty years ago, Benjamin Bloom said it best: “We in this country have come to believe that we can tell who’s going to be a
great musician by giving musical aptitude tests, who’s going to be a great mathematician by giving mathematics aptitude tests. Doing
that counts some people in and others out far too early. . . . All the children should be given opportunities to explore fields that they
might be interested in.” Ronald S. Brandt, “On Talent Development: A Conversation with Benjamin Bloom,” 
Educational
Leadership
43 (1985): 33–35.
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 Kröner 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.

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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,