Grit (43 page)

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.

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
doing deliberate practice”:
K. Anders Ericsson, professor of psychology at Florida State University, in conversation with the author, December 2005.

intentionally seek out challenges
:
Ericsson et al., “The Role of Deliberate Practice.”

“I'd try to hold 1: 14”:
Gaines, interview.

“that needs problem solving”
:
Roberto Díaz, president and CEO of the Curtis Institute of Music, in an interview with the author, October 7, 2015.

“every single piece of my game”
:
An additional 15 percent of his time, he says, is for playing pick-up, either one-on-one or three-on-three, so that the microrefinements he has worked on can be integrated into team play. And, finally, the last 15 percent is for organized games. “Kevin Durant,”
The Film Room Project
.

“there we were, stuck”
:
Ulrik Juul Christensen, executive chairman of Area9 and senior fellow at McGraw-Hill Education, in an interview with the author, July 15, 2015.

first studied in chess players
:
Herbert A. Simon and William G. Chase, “Skill in Chess: Experiments with Chess-Playing Tasks and Computer Simulation of Skilled Performance Throw Light on Some Human Perceptual and Memory Processes,”
American Scientist
61 (1973): 394–403. See also: Ericsson et al., “The Role of Deliberate Practice.”

“and corrected them”
:
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: With an Introduction and Notes
(New York: MacMillan Company, 1921), 14.

“no gains without pains”
:
Benjamin Franklin, “The Way to Wealth,” in
Memoirs of Benjamin Franklin
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1839), 7.

“a small number of practices”
:
Peter F. Drucker,
The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done
(New York: HarperCollins, 2006), ix.

“for years on end”
:
Atul Gawande, “The Learning Curve: Like Everyone Else, Surgeons Need Practice. That's Where You Come In,”
New Yorker
, January 28, 2002.

“that's what magic is to me”
:
David Blaine, “How I Held My Breath for 17 Minutes,” TED video, filmed October 2009,
http://www.ted.com/talks/david_blaine_how_i_held_my_breath_for_17_min
. See also Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney,
Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strenth
(New York: Penguin, 2011).

pored through published books
:
Barrie Trinkle, Carolyn Andrews, and Paige Kimble,
How to Spell Like a Champ: Roots, Lists, Rules, Games, Tricks, and Bee-Winning Tips from the Pros
(New York: Workman Publishing Company, 2006)

“studying as hard as I can”
:
James Maguire,
American Bee: The National Spelling Bee and the Culture of Word Nerds
(Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2006), 360.

deliberate
practice predicted:
Angela Duckworth et al., “Deliberate Practice Spells Success: Why Grittier Competitors Triumph at the National Spelling Bee,”
Social Psychological and Personality Science
2 (2011): 174–81. Getting quizzed also predicted doing well in competition, but when comparing kids who got quizzed the same amount of time to each other, I found that those who did more deliberate practice did better. In contrast, when comparing
kids who did the same amount of deliberate practice to each other, I found that more quizzing produced no advantage.

benefits to being quizzed
:
Henry L. Roediger and Jeffrey D. Karpicke, “The Power of Testing Memory: Basic Research and Implications for Educational Practice,”
Perspectives on Psychological Science
1 (2006): 181–210.

ten hours per week
:
Duckworth et al., “Spells Success,” 177.

come to a different conclusion
:
On the effortfulness of learning, see also Elizabeth L. Bjork and Robert Bjork, “Making Things Hard on Yourself, but in a Good Way: Creating Desirable Difficulties to Enhance Learning,” in
Psychology and the Real World: Essays Illustrating Fundamental Contributions to Society,
ed. Morton A. Gernsbacher et al. (New York: Worth Publishers, 2011), 56–64. See also Sidney K. D'Mello and Arthur C. Graesser, “Confusion” in
International Handbook of Emotions in Education
, ed. Reinhard Pekrun and Lisa Linnenbrink-Garcia (New York: Routledge, 2014), 289–310.

experienced as supremely effortful
:
Ericsson et al., “The Role of Deliberate Practice.”

“daily small deaths”
:
Graham, “I Am a Dancer.”

“you're concentrating and you're exhausted”
:
Judd Apatow, interviewed by Charlie Rose,
Charlie Rose
, July 31, 2009, republished in Apatow,
Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy
(New York: Random House, 2015), 26.

to keep doing it
:
K. Anders Ericsson, “How Experts Attain and Maintain Superior Performance: Implications for the Enhancement of Skilled Performance in Older Individuals,”
Journal of Aging and Physical Activity
8 (2000): 366–72.

“a feeling of spontaneity”
:
Karen Stansberry Beard, “Theoretically Speaking: An Interview with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on Flow Theory Development and Its Usefulness in Addressing Contemporary Challenges in Education,”
Educational Psychology Review
27 (2015): 358. Csikszentmihalyi has emphasized that what matters to the quality of our momentary experience is the
subjective
level of challenge and the
subjective
level of skill.

“just flows out by itself”
:
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Play and Intrinsic Rewards,”
Journal of Humanistic Psychology
15 (1975): 50.

“automatically without thinking”
:
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Flow: The Joy of Reading,” in
Applications of Flow in Human Development: The Collected Works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
(Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2014), 233.

“incompatible with deliberate practice”
:
K. Anders Ericsson and Paul Ward, “Capturing the Naturally Occurring Superior Performance of Experts in the Laboratory,”
Current Directions in Psychological Science
16 (2007): 349.

“by no means self-evident”
:
Csikszentmihalyi,
Applications of Flow
, xx.

“but its fruits are sweet”
:
Ibid.

“achieve what you desire”
:
Ibid.

“passion and world-class performance”
:
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and K. Anders Ericsson, “Passion and World-Class Performance” (presentation, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, August 2006).