Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

interest
comes from the Latin 
interesse
, which means “to differ.” To be interesting is, literally,
to be different. We are, by our natures, neophiles.
Even though getting tired of things after a while is common, it’s not inevitable. If you revisit the
Grit Scale, you’ll see that half the items ask about how consistent your interests are over long
stretches of time. This links back to the fact that grit paragons don’t just discover something they
enjoy and develop that interest—they also learn to 
deepen
it.
As a young woman, Jane thought she’d become a painter. Now she battles bureaucratic red tape
and raises money and deals with neighborhood politics. I wondered whether she’d sacrificed her life
to a cause she felt was more meaningful but less interesting. I wondered if she’d given up novelty.
“When I stopped painting, it was very difficult,” Jane told me. “But then I discovered that growing
the Mural Arts Program could be a creative endeavor. And that was great, because I’m a very curious
person.
“From the outside, you might see my life as mundane: ‘Jane, you’re just running the Mural Arts
Program and you’ve been doing that forever.’ I would say, ‘No, listen, today I went to a maximum
security prison. I was in North Philly. I went to church. I was in a boardroom. I met with a deputy
commissioner. I met with a city council person. I worked at an artists’ residency program. I saw kids
graduating.’ ”
Then Jane used a painter’s analogy: “I’m like an artist who looks at the sky every morning and
sees a variety of really brilliant colors where other people would just see blue or gray. I’m seeing in
the course of a single day this tremendous complexity and nuance. I see something that is ever
evolving and rich.”
For help understanding the ever-deepening interests of experts, I turned to the psychologist Paul
Silvia.
Paul is a leading authority on the emotion of interest. He began our conversation by pointing out
that babies know just about zilch when they’re born. Unlike other animals, which have strong instincts
to act in certain ways, babies need to learn almost everything from experience. If babies 
didn’t
have a

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strong drive for novelty, they wouldn’t learn as much, and that would make it less likely they’d
survive. “So, interest—the desire to learn new things, to explore the world, to seek novelty, to be on
the lookout for change and variety—it’s a basic drive.”
How, then, do we explain the enduring interests of grit paragons?
Like me, Paul has found that experts often say things like “The more I know, the less I understand.”
Sir John Templeton, for example, who pioneered the idea of diversified mutual funds, made the motto
of his philanthropic foundation “How little we know, how eager to learn.”
The key, Paul explained, is that novelty for the beginner comes in one form, and novelty for the
expert in another. For the beginner, novelty is anything that hasn’t been encountered before. 
For the
expert, novelty is nuance.
“Take modern art,” Paul said. “A lot of pieces could seem very similar to a novice that seem very
different to an expert. Novices don’t have the necessary background knowledge. They just see colors
and shapes. They’re not sure what it’s all about.” But the art expert has comparatively enormous
understanding. He or she has developed a sensitivity to details that the rest of us can’t even see.
Here’s another example. Ever watch the Olympics? Ever listen to the commentators say things, in
real time, like “Oh! That triple lutz was just a little short!” “That push-off was perfectly timed”? You
sit there and wonder how these commentators can perceive such microscopic differences in the
performance of one athlete versus another without watching the video playback in slow motion. I
need that video playback. I am insensitive to those nuances. But an expert has the accumulated
knowledge and skill to see what I, a beginner, cannot.
If you’d like to follow your passion but haven’t yet fostered one, you must begin at the beginning:
discovery.
Ask yourself a few simple questions: