Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

people
had thoughts that influenced their behavior.
Instead, the received wisdom was that 
all
living animals simply respond mechanically to punishments
and rewards.
After a mountain of data had accumulated, ruling out every conceivable alternative explanation, the
scientific community was, at long last, convinced.
Having thoroughly plumbed the disastrous consequences of uncontrollable stress in the laboratory,
Marty grew more and more interested in what could be done about it. He decided to retrain as a
clinical psychologist. Wisely, he chose to do so under the wing of Aaron Beck, a psychiatrist and
fellow pioneer in understanding the root causes and practical antidotes for depression.
What followed was a vigorous exploration of the flip side of learned helplessness, which Marty
later dubbed 
learned optimism
. The crucial insight that seeded Marty’s new work was available from
the very beginning: While two-thirds of the dogs that had experienced uncontrollable shock later gave
up trying to help themselves, about a third remained resilient. Despite their earlier trauma, they kept
trying maneuvers that would bring relief from pain.
It was those resilient dogs that led Marty to study the analogous 
I won’t quit
response to adversity
in people. Optimists, Marty soon discovered, are just as likely to encounter bad events as pessimists.
Where they diverge is in their explanations: optimists habitually search for temporary and specific
causes of their suffering, whereas pessimists assume permanent and pervasive causes are to blame.
Here’s an example from the test Marty and his students developed to distinguish optimists from
pessimists: 
Imagine: You can’t get all the work done that others expect of you. Now imagine one
major cause for this event. What leaps to mind?
After you read that hypothetical scenario, you write
down your response, and then, after you’re offered more scenarios, your responses are rated for how
temporary (versus permanent) and how specific (versus pervasive) they are.
If you’re a pessimist, you might say, 
I screw up everything.
Or: 
I’m a loser.
These explanations
are all permanent; there’s not much you can do to change them. They’re also pervasive; they’re likely
to influence lots of life situations, not just your job performance. Permanent and pervasive
explanations for adversity turn minor complications into major catastrophes. They make it seem
logical to give up. If, on the other hand, you’re an optimist, you might say, 
I mismanaged my time
. Or:

---

I didn’t work efficiently because of distractions.
These explanations are all temporary and specific;
their “fixability” motivates you to start clearing them away as problems.
Using this test, Marty confirmed that, compared to optimists, pessimists are more likely to suffer
from depression and anxiety. What’s more, optimists fare better in domains not directly related to
mental health. For instance, optimistic undergraduates tend to earn higher grades and are less likely to
drop out of school. Optimistic young adults stay healthier throughout middle age and, ultimately, live
longer than pessimists. Optimists are more satisfied with their marriages. A one-year field study of
MetLife insurance agents found that optimists are twice as likely to stay in their jobs, and that they
sell about 25 percent more insurance than their pessimistic colleagues. Likewise, studies of
salespeople in telecommunications, real estate, office products, car sales, banking, and other
industries have shown that optimists outsell pessimists by 20 to 40 percent.
In one study, elite swimmers, many of whom were training for the U.S. Olympic trials, took
Marty’s optimism test. Next, coaches asked each swimmer to swim in his or her best event and then
deliberately told each swimmer they’d swum just a little 
slower
than was actually the case. Given the
opportunity to repeat their event, optimists did at least as well as in their first attempt, but pessimists
performed substantially worse.
How do grit paragons think about setbacks? Overwhelmingly, I’ve found that they explain events
optimistically. Journalist Hester Lacey finds the same striking pattern in her interviews with
remarkably creative people. “What has been your greatest disappointment?” she asks each of them.
Whether they’re artists or entrepreneurs or community activists, their response is nearly identical.
“Well, I don’t really think in terms of disappointment. I tend to think that everything that happens is
something I can learn from. I tend to think, ‘Well okay, that didn’t go so well, but I guess I will just
carry on.’ ”
Around the time Marty Seligman took his two-year hiatus from laboratory research, his new mentor
Aaron Beck was questioning his own training in Freudian psychoanalysis. Like most psychiatrists at
the time, Beck had been taught that all forms of mental illness were rooted in unconscious childhood
conflicts.
Beck disagreed. He had the audacity to suggest that a psychiatrist could actually talk directly to
patients about what was bothering them, and that the patients’ thoughts—their self-talk—could be the
target of therapy. The foundational insight of Beck’s new approach was that the