grit

angela duckworth

Chapter 1

This chapter described the rigors of getting through the Westpoint academy and how a score they’d used to select people, the Whole Candidate Score. It was widely accepted and validated, but still couldn’t account for the people who were meant to succeed but dropped out their first semester. 

The ones who succeeded were always those with a combination of determination and direction.

When Duckworth came up with her grit scale, it didn’t at all map onto the Whole Candidate Score.

Chapter 2

This chapter talks about our fixation on talent over effort. One of the first who felt this way was stupid Francis Galton, who in 1869 published his first scientific study on the origins of high achievement. 

She talks about a study where people value talent over effort, having one musician playing two parts of the same song anonymously and having judges say which one they liked better when they were told one was talented while the other was skilled. 

It’s a naturalness bias hiding prejudice against those who’ve achieved what they have because they worked for it, giving preference to those who got there through sheer talent.

It’s well known that we’ll give more attention to those showing potential because we expect them to excel, and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy which undermines the hard work of those who get good a different way. 

She talks about the interview process for her consulting firm being a critical thinking exercise where she was posed a question, and answered it by using bullshit and coming up with fake numbers. 

She talks about Gladwell,  and how their cultivating of talent led to a culture with a big head, a narcissistic culture with people whose deep insecurity caused them to feel the need to constantly show off. They had a process known as rank and yank that would annually drop the lowest performing 15% of the workforce. It rewarded deception and discouraged integrity. 

What she found when teaching was that those who needed nudging just needed one champion, one person to believe in them, and they can do great things. 

Chapter 4

This chapter talks about grit being more about stamina than intensity. It’s about how skipping around from one kind of pursuit to the next is not what gritty people do. It’s not about just falling in love, but staying in love.

I scored a 3.7 on the grit scale, and like most my perseverance outscored my passion. Staying focused on consistent goals over time is more of a struggle than working hard and bouncing back from setbacks.

The reason people don’t like the word passion when applied to grit is because they connote passion with infatuation, but it’s more about consistency. Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare. What gives people this endurance, in part, is direction. A sense of where you wanted to be. Maybe this direction doesn’t make itself obvious to you, but you can create it. You can have it all in ten years. You’ll have to overcome the things people avoid, like difficulty, demoralization, and discouragement. Passion should, similarly, not connote fireworks, because fireworks are explosive and short-lived.

To figure out your passion you can create a goal hierarchy, something we all naturally do anyway. We set our daily low-order goals as a means to an end and keep our sights vaguely set on our faraway high level goals. When you start to get to “just because” answers, you know you’re at the top when asked why you’re doing something. The “ultimate concern.”

Angela also discusses the downfalls of what’s called “positive fantasizing,” wherein we indulge in futures we don’t bother figuring out how to get to, something that leads to future disappointment in life. 

To figure out your passion, but for real this time, you should write out your 25 career goals, then just circle the top priority goals. The others are distractions. Think, ‘to what extent do these goals serve a common purpose?’ 

When studying historians, those past accomplished grit paragons, a researcher discovered the relationship between intelligence and eminence is small. 

It doesn’t take the highest intelligence to achieve eminence, just highish intelligence with great persistence. 

Chapter 5

Many people are interested in the nature/nurture relationship in grit. The answer, as always, is that it’s both. Average height spiking in the last century, for instance, is less about genetics than it is more of the population getting the right food, air, water and medicine. 

Twin studies are part of what allows researchers to hone in on the true heritability of a gene. But again, with 25,000 genes, and a staggering number of interactions, its still muddy. The Flynn effect, similarly, describes why it appears we’ve gotten so much more intelligent in the last century, when really, IQ measures abstract thinking, and the ability of more people overall to be afforded time to think abstractly has had a social multiplying effect on the populations abstract thinking. Look up WAIS information from Murdoch’s book.

Grit appears to increase with age, possibly because the era of the Great Generation was raised with values and norms to sustain passion and perseverance. But more likely, its about maturity. We become more conscientious, confident, caring and calm with life experience. 

Being a spark plug is fun, but what’s more fun than being a promising beginner is the gratification of expertise. Usually, too, it’s necessity that helps us adapt. And we adapt fast.

The things we need are Passion, then Practice, then Purpose, then finally Hope (or patience). 

Chapter 6

This chapter discusses passion, and how you’ll find that you won’t stick with stuff that you’re not passionate about. 

“If you lost everything tomorrow, what would you do?”

Research shows that people are more satisfied with their jobs when they’re doing something that fits their personal interests. People who enjoy interacting with people are not happy when they work alone at a computer all day. They should be doing sales or teaching. 

Most paragons even find their passion in a meandering deluge of exploration. We all have this mythology that falling in love with a career should be sudden and swift, much like love-disguised limerence feels.

Passion for your work is a little bit discovery, followed by a lot of development, and then a lifetime of deepening. 

It’s easy to get bored with stuff and pivot to a new interest. In fact, interest comes from the Latin “interesse” which means “to differ.”

People are important in cultivating passion because they provide stimulation and information that is essential to actually liking something more and more. Not to mention the positive feedback loop makes us feel happy, competent, and secure. 

Another important cultivator in passion is play. Play comes first. We need to goof around and trigger and retrigger interest. 

The puzzle make per Shortz is the only person in the world to hold a college degree in enigmatology. 

A writer said if you’re bored with writing, you’re bored with life.

Babies need curiosity and novelty otherwise they wouldn’t survive. 

For the beginner, novelty is anything that hasn’t been encountered before. For experts, novelty is nuance. 

We need to ask ourselves more questions like ‘What do i like to think about? Where does my mind wander? What do I really care about? What matters most to me? How do i enjoy spending my time? What do i find absolutely unbearable?

Begin with what you’re surest on and go from there. 

Next, find a direction that feels right. Not one that is truly right. 

Finally, don’t be afraid to erase an answer that isn’t working out.