Grit (26 page)

Author and activist James Baldwin once put it this way: “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have
never failed to imitate them.” This is one of Dave Levin’s favorite quotes, and I’ve watched him begin many KIPP training workshops with it.

A psychologist in my lab, Daeun Park, recently found this to be exactly the case. In a yearlong study of first- and second-grade classrooms, she found that teachers who gave special privileges to higher-performing students and emphasized how they compared to others
inadvertently inculcated a fixed mindset among the young students. Over the year, students of teachers who acted this way grew to prefer games and problems that were easy, “so you can get a lot right.” By year’s end, they were more likely to agree that “a person is a certain amount smart, and stays pretty much the same.”

Similarly, Carol and her collaborators are finding that children develop more of a fixed mindset when their
parents react to mistakes as though they’re harmful and problematic. This is true even when these parents
say
they have a growth mindset. Our children are watching us, and they’re imitating what we do.

The same dynamics
apply in a corporate setting. Berkeley professor Jennifer Chatman and her collaborators recently surveyed employees of Fortune 1000 companies about mindset, motivation, and well-being. They found that, in each company, there was a consensus about mindset. In fixed-mindset companies, employees agreed with statements like “When it comes to being successful, this company seems to believe that people have a certain amount of talent, and they really can’t do much to change it.” They felt that only a few star performers were highly valued and that the company wasn’t truly invested in other employees’ development. These respondents also admitted to keeping secrets, cutting corners, and cheating to get ahead. By contrast, in growth-mindset cultures, employees were 47 percent more likely to say their colleagues were trustworthy, 49 percent more likely to say
their company fosters innovation, and 65 percent more likely to say their company supports risk taking.

How do
you
treat high achievers? How do you react when others disappoint you?

My guess is that no matter how much you embrace the idea of growth mindset, you often default to a fixed mindset. At least, this is the case for Carol, Marty, and me. All of us know how we’d
like
to react when, say, someone we’re supervising brings us work that falls short of expectations. We’d like our knee-jerk reflex to be calm and encouraging. We aspire to have an
Okay, what is there to learn here?
attitude toward mistakes.

But we’re human. So, more often than we’d like, we get frustrated. We show our impatience. In judging the person’s abilities, we allow a flicker of doubt to distract us momentarily from the more important task of what they could do next to improve.

The reality is that most people have an inner fixed-mindset pessimist in them right alongside their inner growth-mindset optimist. Recognizing this is important because it’s easy to make the mistake of changing what we say
without
changing our body language, facial expressions, and behavior.

So what should we do? A good first step is to watch for mismatches between our words and actions. When we slip up—and we
will
—we can simply acknowledge that it’s hard to move away from a fixed, pessimistic view of the world. One of Carol’s colleagues, Susan Mackie, works with CEOs and encourages them to give names to their inner fixed-mindset characters. Then they can say things like “Oops. I guess I brought Controlling Claire to the meeting today. Let me try that again.” Or: “Overwhelmed Olivia is struggling to deal with all the competing demands, can you help me think this through?”

Ultimately, adopting a gritty perspective involves recognizing that people get better at things—they
grow.
Just as we want to cultivate the ability to get up off the floor when life has knocked us down, we
want to give those around us the benefit of the doubt when something they’ve tried isn’t a raging success. There’s always tomorrow.

I recently called Bill McNabb for his perspective. Since 2008, Bill has served as the CEO of Vanguard, the world’s largest provider of mutual funds.

“We’ve actually
tracked senior leaders here at Vanguard and asked why some did better in the long run than others. I used to use the word ‘complacency’ to describe the ones who didn’t work out, but the more I reflect on it, the more I realize that’s not quite it. It’s really a belief that ‘I can’t learn anymore. I am what I am. This is how I do things.’ ”

And what about executives who ultimately excelled?

“The people who have continued to be successful here have stayed on a growth trajectory. They just keep surprising you with how much they’re growing. We’ve had people who, if you looked at their résumé coming in, you’d say, ‘Wow, how did that person end up so successful?’ And we’ve had other people come in with incredible credentials, and you’re wondering, ‘Why did they not go further?’ ”

When Bill discovered the research on growth mindset and grit, it confirmed his intuitions—not just as a corporate leader but as a father, former high school Latin teacher, rowing coach, and athlete. “I really do think people develop theories about themselves and the world, and it determines what they do.”

When we got to the question of where, exactly, any of us begin formulating these theories, Bill said, “Believe it or not, I actually started out with more of a fixed mindset.” He chalks up that mindset, partly, to his parents enrolling him, while he was still in elementary school, in a research study at a nearby university. He remembers taking a whole battery of intelligence tests and, at the end, being told, “You did really well, and you’re going to do really well in school.”

For a while, an authoritative diagnosis of talent, in combination
with early success, boosted his confidence: “I took great pride in finishing tests faster than anyone else. I didn’t always get one hundred percent, but I usually came close, and I took great pleasure in not working that hard to achieve what I did.”

Bill attributes his switch to a growth mindset to joining the crew team in college. “I’d never rowed before, but I found I liked being on the water. I liked being outside. I liked the exercise. I sort of fell in love with the sport.”

Rowing was the first thing Bill wanted to do well that didn’t come easily: “I was not a natural,” he told me. “I had a lot of failures early on. But I kept going, and then eventually, I started getting better. Suddenly, it began to make sense: ‘Put your head down and go hard. Hard work really, really matters.’ ” By the end of his freshman season, Bill was in the junior varsity boat. That didn’t sound so bad to me, but Bill explained that, statistically, this placement suggested there was no chance of ever making varsity. That summer, he stayed on campus and rowed all summer.

All that practice paid off. Bill was promoted to the “stroke seat” of the junior varsity boat, making him the one who sets the pace for the other seven rowers. During the season, one of the varsity rowers was injured, and Bill had the opportunity to show what he could do. By his account, and also the team captain’s, he did terrifically well. Still, when the injured rower recovered, the coach demoted Bill again.

“That coach had a fixed mindset—he just couldn’t believe that I’d improved as much as I did.”

There were more ups and downs, but Bill’s growth mindset kept getting affirmed. “Because I’d come so damn close to quitting and yet hung in there, and because things eventually did work out, I learned a lesson I’d never forget. The lesson was that, when you have setbacks and failures, you can’t overreact to them. You need to step back, analyze them, and learn from them. But you also need to stay optimistic.”

How did that lesson help Bill later in life? “There have been times
in my career where I felt discouraged. I’d watch someone else get promoted before me. I’d want things to go a certain way, and they’d go the opposite. At those points, I’d say to myself, ‘Just keep working hard and learning, and it will all work out.’ ”

“What doesn’t kill me
makes me stronger,” Nietzsche once said. Kanye West and Kelly Clarkson echo the same sentiment, and there’s a reason we keep repeating it. Many of us can remember a time when, like Bill McNabb, we were confronted with challenge and yet emerged on the other side
more confident than when we began.

Consider, for example, the Outward Bound program, which sends adolescents or adults into the wilderness with experienced leaders, usually for a few weeks. From its inception a half century ago, the premise of Outward Bound—so named for the moment a ship leaves harbor for the open seas—has been that challenging outdoor situations develop “
tenacity in pursuit” and “undefeatable spirit.” In fact, across dozens of studies, the program has been shown to increase independence, confidence, assertiveness, and the belief that what happens in life is largely under your control. What’s more, these
benefits tend to increase, rather than diminish, in the six months following participation in the program.

All the same, it’s undeniable that what doesn’t kill us sometimes makes us
weaker
. Consider the dogs who were shocked repeatedly with no control. A third of the dogs were resilient to this adversity, but there was no evidence that any of the dogs in the uncontrollable stress condition benefited from the experience in any way. On the contrary, most
were much more vulnerable to suffering in the immediate aftermath.

So, it appears that sometimes what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and sometimes it does the opposite. The urgent question becomes: When? When does struggle lead to hope, and when does struggle lead to hopelessness?

A few years ago,
Steve Maier and his students designed an experiment nearly identical to the one he and Marty Seligman had conducted forty years earlier: One group of rats received electric shocks, but if they turned a small wheel with their front paws, they could turn off the shock until the next trial. A second group received the exact same dose of electric shocks as the first but had no control over their duration.

One crucial difference was that, in the new experiment, the rats were only five weeks old—that’s adolescence in the rat life cycle. A second difference was that the effects of this experience were assessed five weeks later, when the rats were fully mature adults. At that point, both groups of rats were subjected to uncontrollable electric shocks and, the next day, observed in a social exploration test.

Here’s what Steve learned. Adolescent rats who experienced stress they could
not
control grew up to be adult rats who, after being subjected to uncontrollable shocks a second time, behaved timidly. This was not unusual—they learned to be helpless in the same way that any other rat would. In contrast, adolescent rats who experienced stress they
could
control grew up to be more adventurous and, most astounding, appeared to be inoculated against learned helplessness in adulthood. That’s right—when these “resilient rats” grew up, the usual uncontrollable shock procedures no longer made them helpless.

In other words, what didn’t kill the young rats, when by their own efforts they could
control
what was happening, made them stronger for life.

When I learned about Steve Maier’s new experimental work, I just had to talk to him in person. I got on a plane to Colorado.

Steve walked me around his laboratory and showed me the special cages equipped with little wheels that, when turned, cut off the current to the electric shock. Afterward, the graduate student who ran the experiment on adolescent rats that I just described gave a talk on
the brain circuits and neurotransmitters involved. Finally, when Steve and I sat down together, I asked him to explain, from this experiment and everything else he’d done in his long and distinguished career, the neurobiology of hope.

Steve thought for a moment. “Here’s the deal in a few sentences. You’ve got lots of places in the brain that respond to aversive experiences. Like the amygdala. In fact, there are a whole bunch of limbic areas that
respond to stress.”

I nodded.

“Now what happens is that these limbic structures are regulated by higher-order brain areas, like the prefrontal cortex. And so, if you have an appraisal, a thought, a belief—whatever you want to call it—that says, ‘Wait a minute, I can do something about this!’ or ‘This really isn’t so bad!’ or whatever, then these inhibitory structures in the cortex are activated. They send a message: ‘Cool it down there! Don’t get so activated. There’s something we can do.’ ”

I got it. But I still didn’t understand, fully, why Steve had gone to the trouble of experimenting with adolescent rats.

“The long-term story needs some more explanation,” he continued. “We think there is plasticity in that circuitry. If you experience adversity—something pretty potent—that you overcome on your own during your youth, you develop a different way of dealing with adversity later on. It’s important that the adversity be pretty potent. Because these brain areas really have to wire together in some fashion, and that doesn’t happen with just minor inconveniences.”

So you can’t
just
talk someone into believing they can master challenges?

“That’s right. Just telling somebody they can overcome adversity isn’t enough. For the rewiring to happen, you have to activate the control circuitry at the same time as those low-level areas. That happens when you experience mastery at the same time as adversity.”

And what about a life history of challenge
without
control?

“I worry a lot about kids in poverty,” Steve said. “They’re getting a lot of helplessness experiences. They’re not getting enough mastery experiences. They’re not learning: ‘I can do this. I can succeed in that.’ My speculation is that those earlier experiences can have really enduring effects. You need to learn that there’s a contingency between your actions and what happens to you: ‘If I do something, then something will happen.’ ”