Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

philosopher
? What would a nineteenth-century German philosopher have to say
that might explain Mark Spitz? As it turns out, Nietzsche, too, had thought long and hard about the
same questions.
“With everything perfect,” Nietzsche wrote, “we do not ask how it came to be.” Instead, “we rejoice
in the present fact as though it came out of the ground by magic.”
When I read that passage, I thought of the young swimmers watching their icon Spitz exhibit form
that almost didn’t seem human.
“No one can see in the work of the artist how it has 
become
,” Nietzsche said. “That is its
advantage, for wherever one can see the act of becoming one grows somewhat cool.” In other words,
we 
want
to believe that Mark Spitz was born to swim in a way that none of us were and that none of
us could. We don’t want to sit on the pool deck and watch him progress from amateur to expert. We
prefer our excellence fully formed. We prefer mystery to mundanity.
But why? What’s the reason for fooling ourselves into thinking Mark Spitz didn’t 
earn
his
mastery?
“Our vanity, our self-love, promotes the cult of the genius,” Nietzsche said. “For if we think of
genius as something magical, we are not obliged to compare ourselves and find ourselves lacking. . . .
To call someone ‘divine’ means: ‘here there is no need to compete.’ ”
In other words, mythologizing natural talent lets us all off the hook. It lets us relax into the status
quo. That’s what undoubtedly occurred in my early days of teaching when I mistakenly equated talent
and achievement, and by doing so, removed effort—both my students’ and my own—from further
consideration.
So what is the reality of greatness? Nietzsche came to the same conclusion Dan Chambliss did.
Great things are accomplished by those “people whose thinking is active in 
one
direction, who
employ everything as material, who always zealously observe their own inner life and that of others,
who perceive everywhere models and incentives, who never tire of combining together the means
available to them.”
And what about talent? Nietzsche implored us to consider exemplars to be, above all else,
craftsmen: “Do not talk about giftedness, inborn talents! One can name great men of all kinds who
were very little gifted. They 
acquired
greatness, became ‘geniuses’ (as we put it). . . . They all
possessed that seriousness of the efficient workman which first learns to construct the parts properly
before it ventures to fashion a great whole; they allowed themselves time for it, because they took
more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole.”
In my second year of graduate school, I sat down to a weekly meeting with my advisor, Marty
Seligman. I was more than a little nervous. Marty has that effect on people, especially his students.

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Then in his sixties, Marty had won just about every accolade psychology has to offer. His early
research led to an unprecedented understanding of clinical depression. More recently, as president of
the American Psychological Association, he christened the field of Positive Psychology, a discipline
that applies the scientific method to questions of human flourishing.
Marty is barrel-chested and baritone-voiced. He may study happiness and well-being, but 
cheerful
is not a word I’d use to describe him.
In the middle of whatever it was I was saying—a report on what I’d done in the past week, I
suppose, or the next steps in one of our research studies—Marty interrupted. “You haven’t had a good
idea in two years.”
I stared at him, openmouthed, trying to process what he’d just said. Then I blinked. Two years? I
hadn’t even been in graduate school for two years!