Hidden Brain - Episode 26: Grit

Episode Date: April 5, 2016

Grit is a quality that parents strive to teach to their children, and teachers strive to teach their students. This week on Hidden Brain, we explore grit, and ask, does it also have a downside?

New R-S-P-R-A-C-H-E or Stalker Verius Kroen. Everybody knows that effort matters. What was revelatory to me was how much it mattered. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantin. What is it that makes extraordinary people successful? Is it talent, genius, luck? Or is Angela Duckworth suggests? Is it grit?, is a grit.

There is a fluency and an ease with which true mastery and expertise always expresses itself whether it be in writing, whether it be in a mathematical proof, but I think the question is, you know, where does that fluency and mastery come from? Today on Hidden Brain, we explore this quality that Angela says is responsible for so much excellence and achievement. And then we ask, does grit also have a downside? Sometimes people with high grit might not do the logical, rational thing because they're grit compels them to keep going. Angela Dacqua is a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She first became interested in grit while working as a math teacher for middle school and high school students.

Angela told me that when she started teaching, she noticed right away which kids were the quickest learners, the most naturally talented you might say. These were the kids who, when she explained the concept once, were immediately raising their hands to answer questions. You know, I immediately thought to myself as a young and, you know, wrong teacher that, okay, those are the kids by the end of the year are going to have progressed the farthest. Because I had other kids for whom it's like, I put up the first problem, I showed to them, I put up the second problem, I showed them a different way,

I sit down with them, and okay, the fourth time, the fifth time, and it's not I put up the first problem, I showed to them, I put up the second problem, I show them a different way, I sit down with them, and okay the fourth time, the fifth time, and it's not as easy for them. I thought well those kids are destined to be at the very bottom of the class, and I'm not saying that that wasn't at all true. There were some quick learners who did well, and there were some kids for whom math was more difficult who did poorly, but there were more exceptions that I could have ever imagined. By the end of the year, when I looked at the final grades and I thought, wow, you know, this girl, this boy,

wow, they did a lot better than I thought they were gonna do and gosh, you know, these other kids, so I thought we're gonna do fantastically well. Hmm, they didn't do well. So I think that the thing that was revelatory to me was not that effort matters. Everybody knows that effort matters. What was revelatory to me was not that effort matters. Everybody knows that effort matters. What was revelatory to me was how much it mattered.

Since her days as a schoolteacher, Angela has made an academic career of studying this one character trait. And that is grid, the combination of passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. I found it interesting that Angela focused on the subject, because in our society it seems that there is this image of the genius Who doesn't really have to work very hard? I think the popular imagination has it right and wrong I think if you have the intuition that somebody like Einstein or Picasso that they you know had a certain

ability or a sensitivity a Sensibility, I think that's right. I don't think Einstein was just like another guy on the street and Norris Picasso. So I think having some intuition that there is an ability part of the achievement talent is one way to name that. I think that's right. I don't want to be the one to say that Einstein

wasn't talented Norris Picasso. But that other thing that they did, which was to work furiously hard, with that kind of obsessive love for a very narrow and the end, you know, domain, in which they decided to go forward and not kind of diversify and do six things, 12 things. I think that's also important, and that second thing, you know, really being able to focus for a long time on something that you love and it's so Important to you that it kind of wakes you up every day and is the last thing you think about before you go to bed I think that's also true. So the popular intuition isn't wildly off. It's importantly incomplete

One of the most interesting things Angela told me is that it might be a psychological reason why we want to think of genius as being effortless. There is a fluency and an ease with which true mastery and expertise always expresses itself, whether it be in writing, whether it be in a mathematical proof, whether it be in a dance that you see on stage, really in every domain. But I think the question is, where does that fluency and mastery come from? And those hours and hours of laborious effort, of misfires, of poorly written drafts,

of falling on your butt when you're trying to do a turn, those things are hidden. And I think there's motivation for the performer to hide that. So if I showed you, Sean Carmye, 197 drafts of the manuscript that finally got produced, what effect would that have when you then read the 198 draft? Nietzsche, the German philosopher, said that when there is excellence, if we know when it became,

if we know it's messy origins, we immediately grow cool, Nietzsche said, we wanted to come out of the ground as if by magic. And I think the motivation from the performer has a parallel motivation from the audience. You know, why does the audience want to hide the effort? Here in Nietzsche had a very observant insight, which is to say that if we believe that what you can do is because you have a gift that I don't do Here in each of says I do not have to compete here. The audience can relax shoulders back sit into your chair And just marvel at something where you don't even have any obligation to try yourself to match the performance

That is so interesting So in other words when you present geniuses being effortless at some level It's more pleasurable to the audience than if you present geniuses being the product of very, very hard work. I think that's absolutely true. I mean, one of my favorite thinkers on this topic is a sociologist at Hamilton named Dan Chamblis. Now Dan is, you know, well into adulthood now, but he was a competitive swimmer all throughout

high school into college and even in his first couple of years I think of being an assistant professor was still coaching and he spent six years with swimmers at all levels of you know from the local club swim team to You know Olympic hopefuls and I think one of the things that he you know Observe that surprised him was that how how Excellence is really the confluence of many, many, many small acts. Each of them doable, each of them able to be honed with practice. When you put it all together, there is a kind of mystery to it or a magic to it. He titled his article on this, The Mundaneity of Excellence, to suggest that really, if you

ask the question when it became, you do get to this kind of like oh okay 10,000 small acts each of them Very doable none of them terribly interesting But when I was talking to him more recently about his older work He started to describe what it was like to watch spits the great, you know, American swimmers And he said you know when you when you got into the pool I mean it was like it was like he was a fish and I could hear the awe in his voice It was you, like describing somebody who really was super human.

And, you know, I think we both then had the insight that all of us, no matter what we study and how much we know intellectually that it is effort and it is practice. And, you know, there are many unglamorous hours that don't get caught on camera. We sort of have this, you know, craving for that magic and mystery.

You did a study a few years ago that looked at winners of the spelling bee, and you discovered something about the students and young people who did very well in the spelling bee. What did you find? I did that study on the spelling bee finalists with a psychologist, probably well known to your listeners, named Anders Erickson, so the very popular version of his work

is the 10,000 hour rule of practice. But what Anders would say, I think, in his own words, is that it's the quality of practice, in addition to the quantity that really matters. He calls the highest quality of practice, deliberate practice. And that's what he's found experts to do in all physical and intellectual domains that he's studied. So Anders and I got together and we asked a question

which is what is the kind of practice that kids who are in the national spelling B finals do? What kinds of things do they do? And which of these kinds of practice activities is the most effective? And what personality traits predict what kind of practice kids will engage in? So we found is that kids do three things

to win the spelling bee broadly. They read a lot, which they love to do, and they rated about as effortless and as about as enjoyable as eating ice cream. They also get quizzed by mom or dad, you know, by computer. So your mom says, Usbaka, you say,

Usbaka, you are SPRA, CH-H-E, Urspraka, which I believe is a crack spelling and is certainly the winning word for the year that we studied Spellers. And then the final thing that we categorize from like looking at the journals that we ask kids to sort of keep something of a diary just to tell us what kinds of things they were doing

and how long they were doing and how it felt. And the last category would be deliberate practice, usually done alone, working on things that you can't do, like word origins that are not familiar to you, trying to respel words and write vertically on a page, words that you've misspelled before, the honing in on your weaknesses that is really crucial to the kind of deliberate practice that Anders has found in other experts. And what we found is that the quantity of deliberate practice was far more predictive of how far you would actually get in final competition when you compare it

to the other two kinds of practice. And the phenomenology that's a fancy and awful jargonny word for saying the feeling of practice really different among these three. So if you look at deliberate practice, it's that which kids found to be the most effortful of the three kinds of practice and the least enjoyable. Finally, we found that of all the personality traits that we looked at, grit was the best predictor of how much deliberate practice you'd actually

get done. So stitching this all together, we see a narrative where very gritty individuals may accumulate more of this very high quality, effortful, not always enjoyable practice. It makes them better and it pays off in their achievement. As I read that paper, I had a moment of great sadness because it felt not just that you were finding that deliberate practice produced these wonderful results, but also what you just said, which is that deliberate practice was the least enjoyable part of the practice. We would like to think that people who work hard are doing it partly because they just really enjoyed what they're doing and that it's enjoyable to be working hard, but you're finding something that's much more, I don't know if the word is Calvinist, but the Puritans would approve of this message,

the idea that very, very hard work that's painful, boring, difficult, unpleasant, yields great rewards. Yeah, there's a lot of nuance to this question of, you know, is it awful? Is it, there's a kind of paraphrasing of Aristotle that the roots of knowledge are bitter, only the fruit is sweet. I mean, that is certainly, you know, one way to read the results of the Spelling Bee Study. But I just want to get a little more nuance in that, because I think you're now, Shankar, the frontier

of what I know, and I think really of what science knows. I think it's a debate about whether it has to be that way or is just often that way. I will say that when I talk to world-class athletes and people who are at the top of their game in terms of writing or in other domains. Many, many, many of them will express this kind of, yes, it is bitter, but there's this other part of it that I love, that's sweet. It's more of a means to an end,

but I also am hearing some contrary voices, and so that's where we really wanna understand, because if we can make the hardest, most effortful and most effective practice into an experience that is more palatable than I think that we'll go a really long way towards getting people to do more of it. Angela talked about the source of her own grip. It came from her dad at the family breakfast table. Being Asian by upbringing, my dad would often say things like,

life is suffering. I mean, he would just say it out of the blue. Breakfast, please pass the know, life is suffering. I mean, he would just sort of say it out of the blue. Like breakfast, you know, it's like, please pass the milk, life is suffering. And I think there is a part of grit, which is like dealing with that, you know? It's, you know, whatever color you are, whatever socioeconomic status you are, whatever you want to do with your life,

you know, there's going to be some amount of friction to overcome to really get somewhere. On the other hand, I just want to say this too, because I think it often gets lost in, I just want to say this too, because I think it often gets lost in that one syllable that I call this thing, which is that there's nobody that I've ever interviewed who I would consider a paragon of grit who does not passionately,

like ardently, love what they do and get a thrill from it, get a sort of visceral and intrinsic satisfaction from thinking about it, from doing it. No chef that I've ever interviewed, no musician, no academic, no CEO. So we have to reconcile these two accounts, and I think they're both true, and I think it might be reconciled in the fact that that CEO who loves what they do might not love 20% of what they do, but they love the overall project.

Routy gains the Olympic swimmer who actually was, you know, subsequent to spits, but, you know, great American swimmer Gold Medalist and a world record holder in the freestyle said that he loved swimming and you could feel it in his voice when you talk to him. But then I said, well, what was practiced like? He's like, oh, what is waking up at four in the morning, walking in the dark in the cold in a bathing suit, to jump into a pool and to push yourself physically to the point of pain, like not fun, but I love swimming.

You talked a second ago about how as members of the audience, we derived a certain pleasure from imagining that performers are naturally gifted, that the genius comes effortlessly. And I'm wondering at some level, if the same thing is also true in our observations of people who are gritty, that we want to see some people as just being naturally gritty. We say Angela Duckworth is a gritty person. If she stopped doing psychology today and started doing something else tomorrow, she would

excel at that, and we can marvel at Angela because Angela just has this quality of grittiness about her. And this leads us to a depressing idea, which is that grit really is the domain of just a few people who happen to have it. Is that true? I don't believe that grit isn't either you have it or you don't. I don't believe that it's entirely genetic. You know, you have the gene for grit or you don't have the gene for grit. I don't believe that it's entirely genetic. You have the gene for grid, or you don't have the gene for grid. I don't believe that whatever your grid is today means that that's what your grid is going to be tomorrow. Now in terms of what you could do then,

if it's true that there's a window here, there's something that we can do about our own grid, I believe that so many things that we would call character or virtue really are as both William James and as Aristotle said, habits, and then you could ask, like, where does the habit of being passionate and persevering about something come from? I really think that you can trace the origins of grit

to four psychological assets, which again, themselves can be acquired, practiced, cultivated. One is an interest. I mean, you can't be gritty about something that you're not interested in. So understanding your own interest, cultivating them, deepening interest. The second thing is the capacity to do deliberate practice.

Part of that is knowing what deliberate practice is and what it's not and being willing to do it. Part of it is habit. The third thing that I find that's a psychological asset of gritty people that I think can be acquired or cultivated is a sense of purpose. I mean, there isn't a single paragon of grit that I've interviewed. And I'm not saying that there aren't those out there who might be this way.

But I've interviewed person after person who I think exemplifies passion and perseverance. And to a one, they have a sense of how what they do day in day out, is meaningful and beneficial to people who are not them, a beyond the self outlook, a beyond the self purpose. And you might think, oh, what about athletes? It's kind of selfish, or even interviewed a wine master named Antonio Golognian, I was thinking, like, what is more selfish than basically tasting wine all day, and writing about it.

And he said, I wake up every day with a mission and he can see he's like, I know I'm not curing cancer, but I really believe that if I can help people appreciate wine, it will enrich their lives in a small way. So a sense of purpose, I think, can be cultivated. And then finally, there's hope. And we haven't talked too much about that, but I think the hope to keep going when hope seems lost. I mean, you can trace this back to growth mindset, to having an optimistic,

explanatory style for negative events, but I do believe hope and purpose and a capacity to practice and interest all these things can be cultivated. Angela Sashi works hard to cultivate grit in her own children. I'll say for both of my daughters, you know, they, you know, themselves struggle, I think as all children do, even daughters of someone who studies grit, to do things that are frustrating and hard, to do things to come home from a ballet class, and to know in your heart that the girl next to you

was better than you, right? And to stay motivated and to stay engaged, and to like still try to love ballet and come back to the class the next day. You know, that was really hard for them. The thing that actually like ended up being maybe most useful in our family, my husband and I, we called the hard thing rule. And what we did was we said, look, you know, from a very early age, we knew that we wanted our kids to develop the capacity for perseverance and to develop a passion. We didn't want to like, to rob them of the opportunity

to really direct themselves. So we said, everybody in our family has to do a hard thing. That's the first of three parts. So a hard thing in our family means it requires deliberate practice on a regular basis. So kind of signing up for pottery class where you just have fun once a week.

That's not a hard thing because there's no deliberate. But doing viola, or going out for the track team, that is. So my husband said, I'm a real estate developer. Trust me, it's a hard thing every day. I said the same thing about my career. And then my daughter is actually the younger one, Lucy, really struggled to find something that she really wanted

to do. I'll tell you that the second part of the hard thing rule is that, okay, so the first part is it requires a little practice, it's hard in that way. The second part is you can't quit until the tuition payment is up. You can't quit, you know, in the middle of the seat. You can't quit until the final track meet. You cannot quit. So it gave, I think, our kids that little push to say like, I don't want to do it today, but I'm not going to quit in the middle.

I'm going to quit at a natural ending point. And the third thing, really, to get back to that intrinsic motivation was that, yes, you can quit at the end of the semester when the tuition payment is up, but not until you've figured out a new hard thing, so you have to kind of go from one right to the other, and nobody picks any of these hard things except for you. So I did let my kids, even when they were in kindergarten, pick their hard thing.

And yes, they had to stick with it until this semester was over, and yes, it had to require deliberate practice. So I feel like, did we do it perfectly? Is it the best rule? I don't know, but I think it reconciles like the kind of tiger mom, this intuition that we have to assist our kids

to do things that they don't want to do in the moment, but also preserves their autonomy, which I think is so important. Angela Duckworth is a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. She's also founder and scientific director of the character lab. Her new book, Grit, the Power of Passion and Persever and perseverance is out this spring. OK, so grit is clearly great. It helps you get stuff done be successful. But is it possible to be too gritty?

Sometimes people with high grit might not do the logical rational thing because their grit compels them to keep going. When we come back, the dark side of grit. So I've always thought that grit was a wonderful thing. Something I've wanted to cultivate in myself, something I wanted to pass along to my daughter. That is, until I talked to Gayle Lucas. My name is Gayle Lucas and I am a senior research associate at the Institute for Creative Technologies, which is part of University of Southern California.

From an early age, Gayle knew she was a very gritty individual. My mom often talks about this time when she made a learning book for me when I was pretty young about five or six and we were at the beach and this was something she wanted me to do during the summer to continue my learning. And I got so into it that I didn't stop to go to the beach or do anything fun with the neighborhood kids. I just sat there and I finished my book because I started it and I pushed right through it.

Gail's grit has certainly benefited her in many ways. She's had a successful academic career. But also, I think I missed out on the beach a little bit. So when Gail Lucas went on to study the potential downside of grit, she knew something about this already. Sometimes people with high grit might not do the logical, rational thing because their grit compels them to keep going. sometimes people with high grit might not do the logical rational thing because their grit compels them to keep going.

In one study gale conducted, participants were asked to play an online game that presented them with a choice. They could quit and get a dollar or keep playing for the chance to win two dollars. However, if they lost, they would get nothing. Gritty people and non-gritty people both made the rational choice to keep going if they were winning because their chances of getting two dollars were looking pretty good. But if they were losing the grittier people were more likely to make that choice to stay in the game risk not getting the dollar to win the two dollars even though they were losing and it was a very low likelihood that

they were gonna end up pulling it off at the end. Gay Lucas and her colleagues also showed how being gritty might make it hard for you to take timed exams like the SAT. That's because you're supposed to give up when you don't know the answer to a question. You just skip it, go on to the next question. So we made by definition some problems that couldn't be solved. We used an anagrams task, so unscramble words, and this is standard in some of the psychology literature where there's these

anagrams that are used that are unsolvable. They don't scramble to any word whatsoever. And so we knew which items were worth persisting on, the ones that were solvable, and the ones that were not worth persisting on because there's no way you could actually solve them. And what we showed was that grittier individuals weren't able to get through as many and they were persisting on these ones that were unsolvable to a greater extent than the less gritty individuals. And so really what you're finding then is that the grittier individuals, they stick at these difficult problems so long that they actually hurt themselves. Exactly. And that's something that we hope people take away from our research and knowing that this is again strategy and taking strategic choices on when to move on to something else is what

we would like to teach. We think gritty people should learn alongside becoming gritty and being gritty. It's certainly we don't want them to abandon being gritty, but we'd like them to see the benefits that sometimes stopping it with something and going on and moving on is the more beneficial path. Geltz as she knows from personal experience, how grit can be harmful. I was married and I stuck in that relationship for nine years. I ended up getting a divorce and I persisted in that relationship to the very final end

and perhaps longer than was good for either my partner or myself. Gail Sashie was so gritty about her marriage, she didn't see leaving as an option. And so now in hindsight I can see that maybe I did more damage by staying in a relationship that wasn't the right one longer than I should have. Our society looks down on quitting. We don't stop to ask whether it's sometimes a good idea to quit. Gail applied the same drive and determination she had as a child, focused on academics at the beach to her marriage.

There's a stigma around getting divorced. There's a stigma around getting divorced. There's a stigma around saying, well, I quit this. There's a stigma around choosing a different job and saying I wasn't cut out for this job. And so it's hard as a gritty person to not just go along with that because everything supports that, rather than really taking that look as am I hurting myself?

Am I going about this the wrong way? And it's only after having such big failures, having such big instances where I hurt myself and people that I really loved and cared about that I could start opening my eyes and seeing that, that I didn't make the connection between the little child on the book and focused on that to my marriage,

because everybody else and everything else was telling me in society that it's good to stick with what you're doing and don't give up. So there really are two kinds of grit. One is the good kind, it overcomes obstacles, fights through distractions. Albert Einstein and Mark Spitz and Angela Duckworth herself are shining examples. The other kind of grit is obstinate, against all evidence to the contrary it presses on, it ignores signals that failure is imminent, digs deeper into the hole. Let's give this grit another name, stubbornness. But here's the thing, I don't think it's easy to tell whether you're looking at grit or stubbornness before you know how something

turns out. If I try my hand at the piano and don't get very far after a few years, should I demonstrate grit and press on, or should I acknowledge my lack of musical talent and tell myself I'm banging my head against a war. It's the same thing with those volunteers in Gayle Lucas' experiment. They're given unsolvable anagrams, but the thing is, they don't know the anagrams are unsolvable. There are certainly difficult problems that can be solved if you stick to them. I found it striking that both Gayle Lucas and Angela Duckworth talked about grit in the

context of marriage, but came to opposite conclusions, Gail felt her stubbornness kept her in a bad marriage longer than she should have stayed. But Angela told me that grit predicts stable marriages. When two people are gritty, they are likely to weather ups and downs. Is stubbornness just the name we give to grit when things turn out badly? The same thing is true when you look at historical figures. Isaac Newton revolutionized the world of mathematics and physics.

He exemplified grit in inventing calculus. But Newton also wasted much of his life on alchemy. He spent hours on what Angela Duckworth would call deliberate practice trying to turn elements into gold or looking for hidden scientific truths in scripture. Work by the psychologist Philip Tetlock and others suggest that grit and stubbornness might be two sides of the same coin. The people who press on when times are hard and the people who stubbornly bang their heads

against a wall, these might be the same people. We call them gritty or call them stubborn after we know how things turned out in the end. The Hidden Brain podcast is produced by Karam Agra-Kalasun, Maggie Pennman and Max Nestrak. Find more of Hidden Brain on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Sign up for our newsletter by emailing us at hiddenbrain at npr.org. I'm Shankar Vitantam and this is NPR. you