Is there anything grit – a combination of perseverance and passion – can’t help you do? Angela Duckworth, the celebrated grit researcher, has written a hefty book Grit that claims the answer is no while proving the answer is yes.
First, the two ingredients: perseverance and passion. Duckworth rehashes arguments you have heard before that sustained effort matters more than raw talent. Malcolm Gladwell told us in Outliers that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to get world-class good at any specific skill. Carol Dweck’s research finds that people who think that their effort will make them better (called a growth mindset) are more likely to put in the time practicing and overcome the inevitable struggles than are people who think ability levels are fixed at birth. The other piece to grit is passion, by which Duckworth means that you commit to your interests for long periods of time.
Duckworth’s narrative about passion deserves careful exploration. People with passion, Duckworth finds, typically have a clear sense of their life’s purpose, meaning that they structure their professional life around one unchanging overarching interest or goal that they are motivated towards for some reason beyond just satisfying themselves. Duckworth shares her own purpose as “use psychological science to help kids thrive” (65). This purpose could motivate a whole career, and clearly has impact beyond oneself, as does this purpose from a wine expert: “to help people understand their own palates” (146). Yet she also approvingly shares passion statements as vague as “do things better than they have ever been done before” (61) or as narrow as “pitch the best I possibly can day after day, year after year” (63).
Purpose is Duckworth’s entry into the moral claim that being gritty makes you force for good in the world, that for gritty people, “all this is worth it because, ultimately, their efforts pay dividends to other people” (144). She concedes that Hitler and Stalin were “gritty villains,” and asks “how many millions of innocent people have perished at the hands of demagogues whose stated intention was to contribute to the well-being of others?” (149) The italics (hers) as well as her choice of “villains” suggest that in Duckworth’s conception, these dictators are really just cartoon bad guys, knowing that their goals are transparently evil and trying to cover those goals with a facade. The supposed problem here is that when they sound purposeful they are lying. Unexplored here is whether someone with an honest sense of purpose can in fact harm society.
Let’s open this can of worms. Right now there are gritty engineers pioneering new ways to extract fuel from the earth, and gritty activists trying to stop them. Their efforts are attempting to negate each other. They can’t both be forces for good. This New Yorker article tells a heartbreaking tale of a truly gritty teacher whose passion for seeing his kids succeed blinded him to the fact that what he was doing to help them was violating the law, and ultimately harming those same kids’ futures. And in an even more clear-cut case of negative societal consequences, from The New York Times Magazine, much blame for the current obesity and public health epidemic can be laid squarely at the feet of a lot of very dedicated, gritty food engineers working for an array of companies who were motivated day in and day out to satisfy the tastes of their customers, and who were paid day in and day out because their companies knew that designing a taste customers literally couldn’t resist was great for business.
The world’s ills are not caused by insufficiently purpose-motivated workers. Some are caused by people with such strong passion they become convinced that the ends justify the means. Meanwhile others are caused by a corporate structure with a single focus on profit, and enabled by employees who confuse being good at making their firm money with accomplishing positive things for the world’s people. Duckworth adds to this confusion with the happy fiction that feeling yourself to be having a positive impact is the same as actually having one.
Or what about people, like Duckworth herself, who tell themselves a clear purpose statement, while their actions just don’t align with that stated purpose? For an author supposedly about using psychological science to help kids thrive, Duckworth makes inexplicable editorial choices. She doesn’t aim the book at young people themselves, and here’s what she has to say to the large sector professionally and often passionately devoted to helping kids thrive: “school’s hard, but for many kids it’s not intrinsically interesting” (225). Thanks.
Instead, she spends a lot of her book on parenting tips, even though she admits that there is, at present, “no research yet on parenting and grit” (201). And she spends the brunt of the book telling stories about gritty people. We meet one parent of a successful athlete who is so gritty himself that his nickname is Grit (204). Cute. Here’s one story (of many) told about Grit: despite a travel-heavy work schedule, he cared about being with his family. When a flight home was cancelled, he rented a car to drive to another city to take three flights and then a rental car to make it home by the next morning (205). As this story demonstrates, grit sometimes seems to mean what all people would try to do if they had the money, as she admits “there is a worrisome correlation between family income and grit…” (237). Yet she does not explore anything readers can do or policies readers can advocate to narrow that gap. The above story about papa Grit is actually introduced in the context of illuminating the age-old dilemma of whether parents should be more supportive or more demanding. Her answer is both; parents should help kids make the most of their interests while simultaneously holding firm on building skills that will be crucial for the kids’ maturity (241).
Another of her case studies, a football player, is introduced to readers with a triumphant paragraph including: “And he was selected Most Valuable Player of Super Bowl XXIX, during which he completed a record-breaking six touchdown passes” (202). And yet, as she makes clear elsewhere in the book, Duckworth not only didn’t see that game, she never once saw that athlete play a game of football.
Why is this book so stuffed with flagrantly oversimplified, non-scientific parenting advice and breathlessly admiring parables of gritty athletes that came not from the psychological lab, or even her own personal interests, but from wikipedia? I only figured it out when she glowingly portrayed JPMorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon and indulged his urge to remind readers of the overused Theodore Roosevelt quote about “daring greatly” (254): this book isn’t about using psychological science to help kids, it’s her entry ticket into a starring role on the corporate motivational speaking circuit. That’s why she focuses on purpose at all when she notes that purpose is only understood in adulthood. It’s why she spends so much of the book on stories of white male athletes. It’s why she stays far away from any hint of public policy implication to her findings. And it’s why her discussion of purpose tells you that being a force for good in the world is as simple as convincing yourself that you already are one (166).
I have nothing against smart people with a research background taking advantage of a chance to get paid. Better her than Gladwell, after all. Still, there is a strong cautionary tale here: it’s very easy to mislead yourself about what your effort is accomplishing, to pursue wealth and fame while telling yourself you are in it for the kids. Grit can make you efficient and highly skilled, but it can’t make you reflective about whether you are efficiently and skillfully accomplishing the goals you say you care about, or whether those goals are even worth pursuing in the first place. What a perfect message for her newfound corporate audience.
-Stephen Bonnett
Opening American Mind 