Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

New York Times
puzzle editor Will Shortz told me that his mother was “a writer and a lover of
words,” and that her mother, in turn, had been a crossword fan. An inclination toward language,
Shortz speculated, could very well be in his genes.
But the unique path he walked was not just a matter of genetic destiny. Not very long after he
learned to read and write, Shortz came across a puzzle book. “I was just entranced by it,” he recalls.
“I just wanted to make my own.”
Predictably, that first puzzle book—the initial trigger for his curiosity—was followed by a slew of
others. “Word puzzles, math puzzles, you name it. . . .” Soon enough, Shortz knew all of the major
puzzle makers by name, acquiring the complete Dover Books collection of his hero Sam Loyd, as
well as the works of a half-dozen other puzzle makers whose names are as familiar to Shortz as they
are foreign to me.
Who bought all those books?
His mother.
What else did she do?
“I remember when I was very young my mom had a bridge club over, and to keep me quiet for the
afternoon she took a piece of paper, ruled it into squares, and showed me how to enter long words
across and up and down. And I was happy all afternoon making my little puzzles. When the bridge
club left, my mother came in and numbered the grid for me and showed me how to write clues. So that
was my first crossword.”
And then Shortz’s mother did what few mothers—including me—would have the initiative or
know-how to do: “My mom encouraged me to sell my puzzles once I started making them, because as
a writer, she submitted articles for publication to magazines and newspapers. Once she saw this
interest that I had, she showed me how to submit my work.
“I sold my first puzzle when I was fourteen, and I became a regular contributor to Dell puzzle
magazines when I was sixteen.”
Shortz’s mother was clearly on the lookout for what might pique her son’s interest: “My mom did a
lot of great things,” he told me. “For instance, I loved listening to radio and pop music and rock music
when I was a kid. When she saw this interest, she got a guitar from a neighbor and set it on the bunk
bed above my bed. I had the opportunity, if I wanted it, to pick up the guitar and start playing.”
But the desire to make music was nothing compared to the desire to make puzzles. “After nine
months, when I had never touched the guitar, she took it back. I guess I liked listening to music, but I
had no interest in playing it.”
When Shortz enrolled at Indiana University, it was his mom who found the individualized program
that enabled Shortz to invent his own major: to this day, Shortz remains the only person in the world
to hold a college degree in enigmatology—the study of puzzles.
What about Jeff Bezos?
Jeff’s unusually interest-filled childhood has a lot to do with his unusually curious mother, Jackie.

---

Jeff came into the world two weeks after Jackie turned seventeen years old. “So,” she told me, “I
didn’t have a lot of preconceived notions about what I was supposed to do.”
She remembers being deeply intrigued by Jeff and his younger brother and sister: “I was just so
curious about these little creatures and who they were and what they were going to do. I paid attention
to what interested each one—they were all different—and followed their lead. I felt it was my
responsibility to let them do deep dives into what they enjoyed.”
For instance, at three, Jeff asked multiple times to sleep in a “big bed.” Jackie explained that
eventually
he would sleep in a “big bed,” but not yet. She walked into his room the next day and
found him, screwdriver in hand, disassembling his crib. Jackie didn’t scold him. Instead, she sat on
the floor and helped. Jeff slept in a “big bed” that night.
By middle school, he was inventing all sorts of mechanical contraptions, including an alarm on his
bedroom door that made a loud buzzing sound whenever one of his siblings trespassed across the
threshold. “We made so many trips to RadioShack,” Jackie said, laughing. “Sometimes we’d go back
four times in a day because we needed another component.
“Once, he took string and tied all the handles of the kitchen cupboards together, and then, when you
opened one, all of them would pop open.”
I tried to picture myself in these situations. I tried to picture 
not
freaking out. I tried to imagine
doing what Jackie did, which was to notice that her oldest son was blooming into a world-class
problem solver, and then merrily nurture that interest.
“My moniker at the house was ‘Captain of Chaos,’ ” Jackie told me, “and that’s because just about
anything that you wanted to do would be acceptable in some fashion.”
Jackie remembers that when Jeff decided to build an infinity cube, essentially a motorized set of
mirrors that reflect one another’s images back and forth ad infinitum, she was sitting on the sidewalk
with a friend. “Jeff comes up to us and is telling us all the science behind it, and I listen and nod my
head and ask a question every once in a while. After he walked away, my friend asked if I understood
everything. And I said, ‘It’s not important that I understand everything. It’s important that I listen.’ ”
By high school, Jeff had turned the family garage into a laboratory for inventing and
experimentation. One day, Jackie got a call from Jeff’s high school saying he was skipping classes
after lunch. When he got home, she asked him where he’d been going in the afternoons. Jeff told her
he’d found a local professor who was letting him experiment with airplane wings and friction and
drag, and—“Okay,” Jackie said. “I got it. Now, let’s see if we can negotiate a legal way to do that.”
In college, Jeff majored in computer science and electrical engineering, and after graduating,
applied his programming skills to the management of investment funds. Several years later, Jeff built
an Internet bookstore named after the longest river in the world: Amazon.com. (He also registered the
URL www.relentless.com; type it into your browser and see where it takes you. . . . )
“I’m always learning,” Will Shortz told me. “I’m always stretching my brain in a new way, trying to
find a new clue for a word, search out a new theme. I read once—a writer said that if you’re bored
with writing, that means you’re bored with life. I think the same is true of puzzles. If you’re bored
with puzzles, you’re bored with life, because they’re so diverse.”
Pretty much every grit paragon I’ve talked to, including my own dad, says the same thing. And in
examining one large-scale study after another, I find that the grittier an individual is, the fewer career
changes they’re likely to make.

---

In contrast, we all know people who habitually throw themselves headlong into a new project,
developing a fierce interest, only to move on after three or four or five years to something entirely
different. There seems no harm in pursuing a variety of different hobbies, but endlessly dating new
occupations, and never settling down with just one, is a more serious matter.
“I call them short-termers,” Jane Golden told me.
Jane has been promoting public art in my home city of Philadelphia for more than thirty years as
the director of the revered Mural Arts Program. At last count, she’s helped convert the walls of more
than 3,600 buildings into murals; hers is the single largest public art program in the country. Most
people who know her would describe her commitment to mural arts as “relentless,” and Jane would
agree.
“Short-termers come work here for a little while and then they move on, and then they go
somewhere else, and then somewhere else again, and so on. I’m always sort of looking at them like
they’re from another planet because I’m like, ‘How’s that? How do you not lock in to something?’ ”
Of course, it’s Jane’s unwavering focus that needs explaining, not the limited attention spans of the
short-termers who come and go. Fundamentally, the emotion of boredom, after doing something for a
while, is a very natural reaction. All human beings, even from infancy, tend to look away from things
they’ve already seen and, instead, turn their gaze to things that are new and surprising. In fact, the
word