Authors: Angela Duckworth
Grit (41 page)
“dozens of small skills”
:
Ibid., 81.
“You need to jazz it up”
:
Ibid., 86.
“we have for athletic success”
:
Ibid., 78.
“distinguishes the best among our athletes”
:
Ibid, 78.
“It’s easy to do”
:
Ibid., 79.
“anatomical advantages”
:
Daniel F. Chambliss, professor of sociology at Hamilton College, in an interview with the author, June 2, 2015.
“how it came to be”
:
This is an informal translation, Friedrich Nietzsche,
Menschliches, Allzumenschliches: Ein Buch für Freie Geister
(Leipzig: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 1925), 135.
“out of the ground by magic”
:
Friedrich Nietzsche,
Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 80.
“grows somewhat cool”
:
Ibid., 86.
“the cult of the genius”
:
Ibid.
“giftedness, inborn talents!”
:
Ibid.
human flourishing
:
Marty Seligman lays out the rationale for Positive Psychology in his presidential address to the American Psychological Association, reprinted in
American Psychologist
54 (1999): 559–62.
talent is how quickly
:
The word
talent
is used differently by different people, but I think the most intuitive definition is the one I’ve offered here. For evidence that individuals do differ in the rate at which they acquire skills, see Paul B. Baltes and Reinhold Kliegl, “Further Testing of Limits of Cognitive Plasticity: Negative Age Differences in a Mnemonic Skill Are Robust,”
Developmental Psychology
28 (1992): 121–25. See also Tom Stafford and Michael Dewar, “Tracing the Trajectory of Skill Learning with a Very Large Sample of Online Game Players,”
Psychological Science
, 25 (2014), 511–18. Finally, see the work of David Hambrick and colleagues on factors other than practice that likely influence skill acquisition; for example, see Brooke N. Macnamara, David Z. Hambrick, and Frederick L. Oswald, “Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education, and Professions: A Meta-Analysis,”
Psychological Science
25 (2014): 1608–18. A critique of this meta-analysis by psychologist Anders Ericsson, whose work we explore in depth in chapter 7, is posted on his website:
https://psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.hp.html
.
“going to be the renaissance people”
:
“Oral History Interview with Warren MacKenzie, 2002 October 29,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution,
www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-warren-mackenzie-12417
.
“our true interest lay”
:
Ibid.
“40 or 50 pots in a day”
:
Warren MacKenzie, potter, in an interview with the author, June 16, 2015.
“continue to engage the senses”
:
Warren MacKenzie, Artist’s Statement, Schaller Gallery,
https://www.schallergallery.com/artists/macwa/pdf/MacKenzie-Warren-statement.pdf
.
“the most exciting things”
:
“Oral History,” Archives of American Art.
“in my work today”
:
Ibid.
“first 10,000 pots are difficult”
:
Alex Lauer, “Living with Pottery: Warren MacKenzie at 90,” Walker Art Center blog, February 16, 2014,
http://blogs.walkerart.org/visualarts/2014/02/16/living-with-pottery-warren-mackenzie-at-90
.
“Garp was a natural storyteller”
:
John Irving,
The World According to Garp
(New York: Ballantine, 1978), 127.
“the great storyteller”
:
Peter Matthiessen, quoted in “Life & Times: John Iriving,”
New York Times
,
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/15/lifetimes/irving.html
.
Garp “could make things up”
:
Irving,
Garp,
127.
“my lack of talent”
:
John Irving,
The Imaginary Girlfriend: A Memoir
(New York: Ballantine, 1996), 10.
SAT verbal score was 475
:
Sally Shaywitz,
Overcoming Dyslexia: A New and Complete Science-based Program for Reading Problems at Any Level
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 345–50.
“lazy” and “stupid”
:
Ibid., 346.
“frequently misspelled words”
:
Irving,
Imaginary Girlfriend
, 9.
“slowly—and with my finger”
:
Shaywitz,
Overcoming Dyslexia
, 346.
“you have to overextend yourself”
:
Ibid., 347.
“no matter how difficult it is”
:
Ibid.
“Rewriting is what I do best”
:
John Irving, “Author Q&A,” Random House Online Catalogue, 2002.
“to have to go slowly”
:
Shaywitz,
Overcoming Dyslexia
, 347.
“sickening work ethic”
:
60 Minutes
, CBS, December 2, 2007,
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/will-smith-my-work-ethic-is-sickening
. A lyric in one of Will Smith’s raps goes: “If you say you’re going to run three miles, and you only run two, I don’t ever have to worry about losing in nothing to you.” See “Will Smith Interview: Will Power,”
Reader’s Digest
, December 2006.
“or I’m going to die”
:
Tavis Smiley, PBS, December 12, 2007.
“healthy young men”
:
Clark W. Heath,
What People Are: A Study of Normal Young Men
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1945), 7.
for only four minutes
:
Katharine A. Phillips, George E. Vaillant, and Paula Schnurr, “Some Physiologic Antecedents of Adult Mental Health,”
The American Journal of Psychiatry
144 (1987): 1009–13.
“strength of will”
:
Heath,
Normal Young Men
, 75.
“becomes too severe”
:
Ibid., 74.
“with mental health”
:
Phillips, Vaillant, and Schnurr, “Some Physiologic Antecedents,” 1012.
“I’m not all that persistent”
:
George Vaillant, professor at Harvard Medical School and former director of the Grant Study, in an interview with the author, April 8, 2015.
“never write the play or book”
:
William Safire, “On Language; The Elision Fields,”
New York Times
, August 13, 1989.
“Eighty percent of success in life is showing up”
:
Ibid.
less than they’d expected
:
Consumer Reports
, “Home Exercise Machines,” August 2011.
“beating on your craft”
:
Today
show, NBC, June 23, 2008.
CHAPTER 4: HOW GRITTY ARE YOU?
Grit Scale
:
The original twelve-item Grit Scale, from which this ten-item version is adapted, was published in Duckworth et al., “Grit.” The correlation between these two versions of the scale is
r
= .99. Note also that, as you’ll learn in chapter 9, I’ve revised item 2, adding, “I don’t give up easily” to “Setbacks don’t discourage me.”
how your scores compare
:
Data for these norms are from Duckworth et al., “Grit” Study 1. Note that there are numerous limitations of any measure, including self-report questionnaires like the Grit Scale. For an extended discussion, see Angela L. Duckworth and David S. Yeager, “Measurement Matters: Assessing Personal Qualities Other Than Cognitive Ability for Educational Purposes,”
Educational Researcher
44 (2015): 237–51.
“work in East Africa”
:
Jeffrey Gettleman, East Africa bureau chief for the
New York Times
, in an interview with the author, May 22, 2015.
“it was the easiest to fulfill the requirements”:
Abigail Warren, “Gettleman Shares Anecdotes, Offers Advice,”
Cornell Chronicle
, March 2, 2015,
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/03/gettleman-shares-anecdotes-offers-advice
.
“I wanted to make it a part of my life”
:
Gettleman, interview.
“who wants to work for a boring newspaper?”
:
Max Schindler, “New York Times Reporter Jeffrey Gettleman ’94 Chronicles His Time in Africa,”
Cornell Daily Sun
, April 6, 2011.
“I was pretty lost academically”
:
Gettleman, interview.
“have a life philosophy”
:
Pete Carroll, head coach of the Seattle Seahawks, in an interview with the author, June 2, 2015.
they have ever been done before
:
For more on Pete’s perspective, see Pete Carroll,
Win Forever: Live, Work, and Play Like a Champion
(New York: Penguin, 2010). Some of the quotations in this section, and later in the book, are from interviews with the author between 2014 and 2015. Others are from Pete’s book or public talks.
“drive all my actions”
:
Carroll,
Win Forever
, 73.
“and filling binders”
:
Ibid., 78.
goals in a hierarchy
:
Material in this chapter on the hierarchical structure of goals from Angela Duckworth and James J. Gross, “Self-control and Grit: Related but Separable Determinants of Success.”
Current Directions in Psychological Science
23 (2014): 319–25. On goal hierarchies more generally, see Arie W. Kruglanski et al., “A Theory of Goal Systems,” in
Advances in Experimental Social Psychology
34 (2002): 331–78. And, finally, for a review of goal-setting theory, see Edwin A. Locke and Gary P. Latham, “Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation: A 35-Year Odyssey,”
American Psychologist
57 (2002): 705–17.