Grit (40 page)

CHAPTER 2: DISTRACTED BY TALENT

in the classroom
:
The school I taught at was created by Teach For America alumnus Daniel Oscar, and in my view, the best teacher in the school was a guy named Neil Dorosin. Both Daniel and Neil are still in the vanguard of education reform.

“I was a little behind”
:
David Luong, in an interview with the author, May 8, 2015.

learning came easy
:
Karl Pearson,
The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton
, vol. 1 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1930), 66.

“capacity for hard labor”
:
Francis Galton,
Hereditary Genius
(London: Macmillan, 1869), 38. It’s important to note here that Galton’s fascination with heredity was misguided. While his conclusions about the importance of zeal and hard work and ability have been supported by modern research, his erroneous conclusions about heredity and race have not.

“
eminently
important difference”:
Charles Darwin, Letter to Francis Galton, December 23, 1869. Frederick Burkhardt et al., ed.,
The Correspondence of Charles Darwin
, vol. 17, 1869 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 530.

supernatural intelligence
:
See Leonard Mlodinow,
The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey from Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos
(New York: Pantheon Books, 2015), 195. Catharine Morris Cox, “The Early Mental Traits of Three Hundred Geniuses,” in
Genetic Studies of Genius,
vol. 2, ed. Lewis M. Terman, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1926), 399.

“no great quickness”
:
Charles Darwin,
The Autobiography of Charles Darwin
(London: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1958), 140–41.

data presented itself
:
Adam S. Wilkins, “Charles Darwin: Genius or Plodder?”
Genetics
183 (2009): 773–77.

“The Energies of Men”
:
William James, “The Energies of Men,”
Science
25 (1907): 321–32.

that our talents vary
:
Talents are, of course, plural. For interested readers, see Howard Gardner,
Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences
(New York: Basic Books, 1983). Also, Ellen Winner,
Gifted Children: Myths and Realities
(New York: Basic Books, 1996). Robert J. Sternberg and James C. Kaufman, “Human Abilities,”
Annual Review of Psychology
49 (1998): 479–502.

twice as likely to single out effort
:
Survey of America’s Inner Financial Life,
Worth Magazine
, November 1993.

about athletic ability
:
“CBS News Poll: Does Practice Make Perfect in Sports?,” CBS News website, April 6, 2014,
www.cbsnews.com/news/cbs-news-poll-does-practice-make-perfect-in-sports
.

endorse “intelligence”
:
The
60 Minutes
/
Vanity Fair
Poll,
Vanity Fair
, January 2010.

more likely to succeed
:
Chia-Jung Tsay and Mahzarin R. Banaji, “Naturals and Strivers: Preferences and Beliefs About Sources of Achievement,”
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
47 (2011): 460–65.

naturals were rated higher
:
Chia-Jung Tsay, “Privileging Naturals Over Strivers: The Costs of the Naturalness Bias,”
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
(2015).

favor the natural
:
Ibid.

“technical skills can flourish”
:
“Juilliard Pre-College,” The Juilliard School, accessed August 10, 2015,
http://www.juilliard.edu/youth-adult-programs/juilliard-pre-college

a self-fulfilling prophecy
:
Robert Rosenthal, “Pygmalion Effect,” in
The Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology
, ed. Irving B. Weiner and W. Edward Craighead (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2010), 1398–99.

“I wanted to get better”
:
Chia-Jung Tsay, assistant professor at the University College London School of Management, in an interview with the author, April 8, 2015.

“The War for Talent”
:
Elizabeth Chambers et al., “The War for Talent,”
McKinsey Quarterly
3 (1998): 44–57.

became a best-selling book
:
Ed Michaels, Helen Handfield-Jones, and Beth Axelrod,
The War for Talent
(Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2001).

“What do we mean by
talent
?”:
Ibid., xii.

“like comparing SAT scores”
:
John Huey, “How McKinsey Does It,”
Fortune
, November 1993: 56–81.

on being “bright”
:
Ibid., 56.

The War on Common Sense
:
Duff McDonald, “McKinsey’s Dirty War: Bogus ‘War for Talent’ Was Self-Serving (and Failed),”
New York Observer
, November 5, 2013.

Gladwell has also critiqued
:
Malcolm Gladwell, “The Talent Myth,”
New Yorker
, July 22, 2002.

largest corporate bankruptcy
:
Clinton Free, Norman Macintosh, and Mitchell Stein, “Management Controls: The Organizational Fraud Triangle of Leadership, Culture, and Control in Enron,”
Ivey Business Journal
, July 2007,
http://iveybusinessjournal.com/publication/management-controls-the-organizational-fraud-triangle-of-leadership-culture-and-control-in-enron/
.

firing the bottom 15 percent
:
Ibid.

“always a step or two behind”
:
Scott Barry Kaufman, director of the Imagination Institute, in an interview with the author, May 3, 2015. Also see
www.scottbarrykaufman.com
.

“I was so driven”
:
Scott Barry Kaufman, “From Evaluation to Inspiration: Scott Barry Kaufman at TEDxManhattanBeach,” YouTube video, posted January 6, 2014,
https://youtu.be/HQ6fW_GDEpA
.

“does achievement trump potential?”
:
Ibid.

“I had this grit”
:
Kaufman, interview.

deemed insufficiently bright
:
I know two other people whose tested aptitude wasn’t particularly prognostic of what they would go on to achieve. The first is Darrin McMahon, an eminent historian at Dartmouth College. In Darrin’s book,
Divine Fury: A History of Genius
(New York: Basic Books, 2013), he points out that genius incites ambivalence. On one hand, the idea that a few of us stand above the rest by virtue of our God-given gifts holds timeless appeal. On the other hand, we love the idea of equality; we like to think we all have the same chance of succeeding in life. In a recent conversation on this topic, Darrin told me, “What we are seeing play out now is the democratization of genius. Part of us wants to believe that everyone can be a genius.” I was never a very good history student, and sometimes I was a very poor one. So I was more than a little surprised that I couldn’t put Darrin’s book down. It was beautifully written. The meticulous research and careful argumentation somehow did not get in the way of it telling a story. And then, at the very end, on page 243, I got to the acknowledgments: “I have undoubtedly suffered from many delusions in my life—and undoubtedly suffer from many still. But being a genius is not one of them.” Then Darrin says, with humor and affection, that when he was growing up, his parents saw to it that their son “never got too big for his britches.” And even more to the point, he recalls being tested as a child for his school’s gifted program. There were “shapes and pictures and the like,” but the only thing he remembers with certainty is “I didn’t pass.” Darrin remembers watching his classmates “trundle off each week to special classes for the specially endowed.” And then he reflects on whether getting labeled nongifted was, in the end, a blessing or a curse: “At an early age, I was told, with all the objectivity of science, that I was not the recipient of gifts. I might have just thrown in the towel then and there, but I am a stubborn sort, and I spent many years disputing the verdict, working away to prove to myself and to others, dammit, that I had not been slighted at birth.” Similarly, Michael Lomax was not easily identifiable as any kind of prodigy. Nevertheless, he has an illustrious résumé: he is president and CEO of the United Negro College Fund, a leadership position he has held for more than a decade. Before that, Michael was president of Dillard University. He has taught English at Emory University, Spelman College, and Morehouse College and was a two-time mayoral candidate for the city of Atlanta. “Honestly, I wasn’t considered the smartest kid,” Michael told me recently. When he was sixteen, his mother nevertheless wrote to the president of Morehouse College to ask whether her son could be admitted to its prep school. “Of course, there was no prep school at Morehouse!” Michael chuckled. The Morehouse president decided, on the basis of Michael’s outstanding grades, to admit him as a freshman to the college. “I got there. I hated it. I wanted to leave. I was number one in my class, but I wanted to transfer. I got it in my head that I would be a better fit at Williams College, so I applied. I had done everything, and they were about to admit me, and then the director of admissions said, ‘Oh, by the way, we need an SAT score.’ ” Because he’d been admitted to Morehouse without a formal application, Michael had never taken the SAT before. “That test was make-or-break for me. I sat down and took it. And I didn’t do well. Williams didn’t admit me.” So Michael stayed at Morehouse and made the best of it, graduating Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in English. Later, he earned his master’s degree in English from Columbia University, and his PhD in American and African American literature from Emory University. Now sixty-eight years old, Michael told me, “At my age, I think it’s character more than genius. I know all kinds of very talented people who squander their great talents, or who are dissatisfied and unhappy because they think talent is enough. In fact, it ain’t even
near
enough. What I tell my kids, what I try to tell my grandchildren, and anybody I get a chance to mentor is this: It’s the sweat, it’s the hard work, it’s the persistence, it’s the determination. It is the getting up and dusting yourself off. That’s what it’s all about.” In anticipation of hate mail about this passage on gifted and talented programs, let me say this: I am
wholeheartedly
in favor of giving kids all the intellectual stimulation they can handle. At the same time, I urge opening those programs to all children who might benefit. Thirty years ago, Benjamin Bloom said it best: “We in this country have come to believe that we can tell who’s going to be a great musician by giving musical aptitude tests, who’s going to be a great mathematician by giving mathematics aptitude tests. Doing that counts some people in and others out far too early. . . . All the children should be given opportunities to explore fields that they might be interested in.” Ronald S. Brandt, “On Talent Development: A Conversation with Benjamin Bloom,”
Educational Leadership
43 (1985): 33–35.

CHAPTER 3: EFFORT COUNTS TWICE

“The Mundanity of Excellence”:
Daniel F. Chambliss, “The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers,”
Sociological Theory
7 (1989): 70–86.