Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

“I actually like kids.”
“You’ve never read a study from MIT that says giving your kid dance instruction is going to help
them do algebra better,” he admitted. “But you will give that kid dance instruction, and you will be
thrilled that that kid wants to do dance instruction, and it will make your day.”
Geoffrey Canada is right. All the research I talked about in this chapter is nonexperimental. I don’t
know if there’ll ever be a day when scientists figure out the logistics—and ethics—of randomly
assigning kids to years of ballet class and then waiting to see if the benefit transfers to mastering
algebra.
But, in fact, scientists 
have
done short-term experiments testing whether doing hard things teaches
a person to do other hard things.
Psychologist Robert Eisenberger at the University of Houston is the leading authority on this topic.
He’s run dozens of studies in which rats are randomly assigned to do something hard—like press a
lever twenty times to get a single pellet of rat chow—or something easy, like press that lever two
times to get the same reward. Afterward, Bob gives 
all
the rats a different difficult task. In experiment
after experiment, he’s found the same results: Compared to rats in the “easy condition,” rats who
were previously required to work hard for rewards subsequently demonstrate more vigor and
endurance on the second task.
My favorite of Bob’s experiments is among his most clever. He noticed that laboratory rats are
generally fed in one of two ways. Some researchers use wire-mesh hoppers filled with chow,
requiring rats to gnaw at the food pellets through small openings in the mesh. Other researchers just
scatter pellets on the floor of the cage. Bob figured that working for your supper, so to speak, might
teach rats to work harder on an effortful training task. In fact, that’s exactly what he found. He began
his experiment by training young rats to run down a narrow plank for a reward. Then, he divided the
rats into two groups. One group lived in cages with hopper feeders, and the other in cages where food
pellets were scattered about the floor. After a month of working to obtain food from the hopper, rats
performed better on the runway task than rats who instead merely wandered over to their food when
they were hungry.
Because his wife was a teacher, Bob had the opportunity to try short-term versions of the same
experiments with children. For instance, in one study, he gave pennies to second and third graders for
counting objects, memorizing pictures, and matching shapes. For some children, Bob rapidly
increased the difficulty of these tasks as the children improved. Other children were repeatedly given
easy versions of the same tasks.
All the children got pennies and praise.
Afterward, the children in both conditions were asked to do a tedious job that was entirely
different from the previous tasks: copying a list of words onto a sheet of paper. Bob’s findings were

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exactly the same as what he’d found with rats: children who’d trained on difficult (rather than easy)
tasks worked harder on the copying task.
Bob’s conclusion? With practice, industriousness can be learned.
In homage to the earlier work of Seligman and Maier on learned helplessness, where the inability
to escape punishment led animals to give up on a second challenging task, Bob dubbed this
phenomenon 
learned industriousness
. His major conclusion was simply that the association between
working hard and reward can be learned. Bob will go further and say that 
without
directly
experiencing the connection between effort and reward, animals, whether they’re rats or people,
default to laziness. Calorie-burning effort is, after all, something evolution has shaped us to avoid
whenever possible.
My daughter Lucy was still a baby when I first read Bob’s work on learned industriousness, and her
sister, Amanda, was a toddler. With both girls, I soon discovered I was ill-suited to play the role Bob
had in his experiments. It was difficult for me to create the necessary contingency for learning—in
other words, an environment in which the acknowledged rule was