Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

The Power of Interest for Motivation and
Engagement
(London: Routledge, 2015).
“to
 
force
 
an interest”:
 Rob Walker, “25 Entrepreneurs We Love: Jeff Bezos, 
Amazon.com
,” 
Inc.
magazine, April 2004, 150.
“one piece of information led to another”
:
Mike Hopkins, NASA astronaut and colonel in the U.S. Air Force, in an interview with
the author, May 12, 2015.
“I started wanting to make that”
:
Vetri, interview.
“I’ll always need you”
:
Marc Vetri, 
Il Viaggio Di Vetri: A Culinary Journey
(New York: Ten Speed Press, 2008), ix.
“at the things they love”
:
Amy Chua, 
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
(New York: Penguin, 2011), 213.
120 people who achieved
:
Benjamin Bloom, 
Developing Talent in Young People
(New York: Ballantine, 1985).
“the early years”
:
Ibid. I would like to point out here that while interest typically precedes the effortful practice we will discuss in the
next chapter, it’s also been shown that investing effort into an endeavor can reciprocally increase passion. See Michael M. Gielnik et
al., “ ‘I Put in Effort, Therefore I Am Passionate’: Investigating the Path from Effort to Passion in Entrepreneurship,” 
Academy of
Management Journal
58 (2015): 1012–31.
Encouragement during the early years
:
For related work, see Stacey R. Finkelstein and Ayelet Fishbach, “Tell Me What I Did
Wrong: Experts Seek and Respond to Negative Feedback,” 
Journal of Consumer Research
39 (2012): 22–38.
“perhaps the major quality”
:
Bloom, 
Developing Talent
, 514.
erode intrinsic motivation
:
Robert Vallerand, Nathalie Houlfort, and Jacques Forest, “Passion for Work: Determinants and
Outcomes,” in 
The Oxford Handbook of Work Engagement, Motivation, and Self-Determination Theory
, ed. Marylène Gagné
(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014), 85–105.
injured physically and to burn out
:
Jean Côté, Professor of Psychology at Queen’s University, in an interview with the author, July
24, 2015. See also, Jean Côté, Karl Erickson, and Bruce Abernethy, “Play and Practice During Childhood,” in 
Conditions of
Children’s Talent Development in Sport
, ed. Jean Côté and Ronnie Lidor (Morgantown, WV: Fitness Information Technology, 2013),
9–20. Côté, Baker, and Abernethy, “Practice and Play in the Development of Sport Exercise,” in 
Handbook of Sport Psychology
,
ed. Gershon Tenenbaum and Robert C. Eklund (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2007), 184–202.
different motivational needs
:
Robert J. Vallerand
, The Psychology of Passion: A Dualistic Model
(Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press, 2015). Vallerand has found that passion leads to deliberate practice, and that autonomy support from teachers and
parents leads to passion.
“I just wanted to make my own”
:
Will Shortz, crossword puzzle editor for the 
New York Times
, in an interview with the author,
February 28, 2015.
“my first crossword”
:
Elisabeth Andrews, “20 Questions for Will Shortz,” 
Bloom Magazine
, December 2007/January 2008, 58.
“I sold my first puzzle”
:
Shortz, interview.
“what I was supposed to do”
:
Jackie Bezos, in an interview with the author, August 6, 2015. Jackie also told me that Jeff’s early love
of space has never waned. His high school valedictory speech was about colonizing space. Decades later, he created Blue Origin to
establish a permanent presence in space: 
www.blueorigin.com
.
“because they’re so diverse”
:
Shortz, interview.
“call them short-termers”
:
Jane Golden, founder and executive director of the Mural Arts Program, in an interview with the author,
June 5, 2015.
“it’s a basic drive”
:
Paul Silvia, associate professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, in an interview
with the author, July 22, 2015.
enduring interests
:
Paul J. Silvia, “Interest—the Curious Emotion,” 
Current Directions in Psychological Science
17 (2008): 57–60.

---

“how eager to learn”
:
See 
www.templeton.org
.
“they’re not sure what it’s all about”
:
Silvia, interview.
“How to Solve the
 
New York Times
 
Crossword Puzzle”
:
Will Shortz, “How to Solve the 
New York Times
Crossword Puzzle,”
New York Times Magazine
, April 8, 2001.
“with a slightly new turn”
:
James, 
Talks to Teachers
, 108.
CHAPTER 7: PRACTICE
grittier kids at the National Spelling Bee
:
Duckworth et al., “Grit.”
“be better than the last”
:
Lacey, interview.
world expert on world experts
:
Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, 
Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
(New York:
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016). See also, K. Anders Ericsson, “The Influence of Experience and Deliberate Practice on the
Development of Superior Expert Performance,” in 
The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance
, ed. K.
Anders Ericsson et al. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006). K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens
Tesch-Römer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” 
Psychological Review
100 (1993): 363–
406.
their rate of improvement slows
:
See K. Anders Ericsson and Paul Ward, “Capturing the Naturally Occurring Superior
Performance of Experts in the Laboratory,” 
Current Directions in Psychological Science
16 (2007): 346–50. See also Allen Newell
and Paul S. Rosenbloom, “Mechanisms of Skill Acquisition and the Law of Practice,” in 
Cognitive Skills and Their Acquisition
, ed.
John R. Anderson (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1981), 1–56. Grit paragons tell me, in so many words, that if you had
a magnifying glass, you’d see that learning curves are not smooth at all. Instead, there are “mini” plateaus—getting stuck on a
problem for hours, days, weeks or even longer, and then suddenly a breakthrough. Ninety-six-year-old MacArthur Fellow and poet
Irving Feldman put it to me this way: “Learning isn’t an evenly rising slope, but a series of leaps from plateau to plateau.”
ten thousand hours of practice
:
Ericsson et al., “The Role of Deliberate Practice.”
“make a mature dancer”
:
Martha Graham, “I Am a Dancer,” on Edward R. Murrow’s 
This I Believe
, CBS, circa 1953. Republished
on NPR, “An Athlete of God,” January 4, 2006, 
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5065006
.
“seasoned press dispatcher”
:
Bryan Lowe William and Noble Harter, “Studies on the Telegraphic Language: The Acquisition of a
Hierarchy of Habits,” 
Psychological Review
6 (1899): 358. Also relevant is John R. Hayes, “Cognitive Processes in Creativity,” in
Handbook of Creativity
, ed. John A. Glover, Royce R. Ronning, and Cecil R. Reynolds (New York: Springer, 1989), 135–45.
is just a rough average
:
See K. Anders Ericsson, “The Danger of Delegating Education to Journalists: Why the APS Observer Needs
Peer 
Review 
When 
Summarizing 
New 
Scientific 
Developments” 
(unpublished 
manuscript, 
2012),
https://psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.hp.html
.
“
not