Grit (42 page)

Ditto for IQ
:
Richard E. Nisbett et al., “Intelligence: New Findings and Theoretical Developments,”
American Psychologist
67 (2012): 130–59.

enjoying the great outdoors
:
Niels G. Waller, David T. Lykken, and Auke Tellegen, “Occupational Interests, Leisure Time Interests, and Personality: Three Domains or One? Findings from the Minnesota Twin Registry.” In
Assessing Individual Differences in Human Behavior: New Concepts, Methods, and Findings
, ed. David John Lubinski and René V. Dawis (Palo Alto, CA: Davies-Black Publishing, 1995): 233–59.

having a sweet tooth
:
Fiona M. Breen, Robert Plomin, and Jane Wardle, “Heritability of Food Preferences in Young Children,”
Physiology & Behavior
88 (2006): 443–47.

end up a chain-smoker
:
Gary E. Swan et al., “Smoking and Alcohol Consumption in Adult Male Twins: Genetic Heritability and Shared Environmental Influences,”
Journal of Substance Abuse
2 (1990): 39–50.

getting skin cancer
:
Paul Lichtenstein et al. “Environmental and Heritable Factors in the Causation of Cancer—Analyses of Cohorts of Twins from Sweden, Denmark, and Finland,”
New England Journal of Medicine
343 (2000): 78–85.

carry a tune
:
Elizabeth Theusch and Jane Gitschier, “Absolute Pitch Twin Study and Segregation Analysis,”
Twin Research and Human Genetics
14 (2011): 173–78.

dunk a basketball
:
Lisa M. Guth and Stephen M. Roth, “Genetic Influence and Athletic Performance,”
Current Opinion in Pediatrics
25 (2013): 653–58.

solve a quadratic equation:
Bonamy Oliver et al., “A Twin Study of Teacher-Reported Mathematics Performance and Low Performance in 7-Year-Olds,”
Journal of Educational Psychology
96 (2004): 504–17.

“I could only swim breaststroke”
:
Chambliss, interview.

“I had horribly bad coaches”
:
Chambliss, interview. The tremendous importance of teacher quality to trajectories of academic achievement is documented in Eric A. Hanushek, “Valuing Teachers: How Much Is a Good Teacher Worth?”
Education Next
11 (2011), 40–45.

researchers in London
:
Personal communication with Robert Plomin, June 21, 2015. For a review of heritability of personality traits, see Turkheimer, Pettersson, and Horn, “Phenotypic Null Hypothesis.” It's worth noting that there are behavioral genetics studies that do not rely on twins, and also that heritability is a topic too complex to fully summarize here. In particular, there are interactions between different genes, between genes and the environment, and epigenetic effects. Relatedly, there is an ongoing debate as to the proportion of environmental influence that can be attributed to parenting. Definitively teasing apart the effects of parenting from genetic heritage is difficult. Chiefly, this is because you can't randomly swap human children to live with different parents. However, you can do exactly that with rat pups and their moms. You can, for example, randomly assign rat pups to grow up with very nurturing mothers or very negligent ones. Neurobiologist Michael Meaney has done exactly that, and he has found that nurturing rats—who lick and groom and nurse their pups more than average—raise pups who are less stressed when dealing with challenging situations. The effects last into adulthood, and in fact, rat pups who are born to low-lick moms but, within twenty-four hours of birth, are switched to be raised by high-lick moms, grow up to be high-lick moms themselves. See Darlene Francis, Josie Diorio, Dong Liu, and Michael J. Meaney, “Nongenomic Transmission Across Generations of Maternal Behavior and Stress Responses in the Rat,”
Science
286 (1999): 1155–58.

traits are polygenic
:
Christopher F. Chabris et al., “The Fourth Law of Behavioral Genetics,”
Current Directions in Psychological Science
24 (2015): 304–12.

at least 697 different genes
:
Andrew R. Wood et al., “Defining the Role of Common Variation in the Genomic and Biological Architecture of Adult Human Height,”
Nature Genetics
46 (2014): 1173–86.

as many as twenty-five thousand different genes
:
“A Brief Guide to Genomics,” National Human Genome Research Institute, last modified August 27, 2015,
http://www.genome.gov/18016863
.

Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale
:
The Wechsler tests are now published by Pearson's Clinical Assessment.

in the last fifty years
:
Information on the Flynn effect comes from personal communications with James Flynn from 2006 to 2015. For more information on the Flynn effect, see James R. Flynn,
Are We Getting Smarter?: Rising
IQ in the Twenty-First Century
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012).See also Jakob Pietschnig and Martin Voracek, “One Century of Global IQ Gains: A Formal Meta-Analysis of the Flynn Effect (1909–2013),”
Perspectives on Psychological Science
10 (2015): 282–306. In this analysis of 271 independent samples, totaling almost four million people from thirty-one countries, a few key findings emerged: IQ gains are ubiquitous and positive over the past century; gains have varied in magnitude by domain of intelligence; gains have been less dramatic in recent years; and, finally, candidate causes include, in addition to social multiplier effects, changes in education, nutrition, hygiene, medical care, and test-taking sophistication.

the social multiplier effect:
William T. Dickens and James R. Flynn, “Heritability Estimates Versus Large Environmental Effects: The IQ Paradox Resolved,”
Psychological Review
108 (2001): 346–69.

Grit and age
:
These data are originally reported in Duckworth et al., “Grit,” 1092.

more conscientious, confident, caring, and calm
:
Avshalom Caspi, Brent W. Roberts, and Rebecca L. Shiner, “Personality Development: Stability and Change,”
Annual Review of Psychology
56 (2005): 453–84.

“the maturity principle”
:
Ibid., 468.

“doesn't come overnight”
:
Shaywitz,
Overcoming Dyslexia
, 347.

“you're late, you're fired”
:
Bernie Noe, head of school, Lakeside School, Seattle, in an interview with the author, July 29, 2015.

interest without purpose
:
Ken M. Sheldon, “Becoming Oneself: The Central Role of Self-Concordant Goal Selection,”
Personality and Social Psychology Review
18 (2014): 349–65. See psychologist Ken Sheldon's work on enjoyment and importance as the two components of what he calls autonomously motivated goals. Ken points out that all of us have responsibilities we must fulfill out of obligation or necessity. But no matter how much we think we care about externally motivated goals, their accomplishment rarely fulfills us in the way that interesting and purposeful goals do. A lot of the people in Ken's studies are highly educated and very comfortably upper-middle-class yet sorely lacking in autonomously motivated goals. They tell Ken they feel like they're in the passenger seat of their own lives. By following these individuals over time, Ken's learned that they're less likely to accomplish their goals; even when they do achieve them, they derive less satisfaction from having done so. Recently, I collected data from hundreds of adults, ages twenty-five to seventy-five and found that Ken's measure of autonomous motivation correlates positively with grit.

“follow your passion”
:
Indiana University, “Will Shortz's 2008 Commencement Address,” CSPAN,
http://www.c-span.org/video/?205168-1/indiana-university-commencement-address
.

“to follow my passion”:
Princeton University, “Jeff Bezos' 2010 Baccalaureate Remarks,” TED,
https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_bezos_gifts_vs_choices
.

“won't be able to stick with it”
:
Taylor Soper, “Advice from Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos: Be Proud of Your Choices, Not Your Gifts,”
GeekWire
, October 13, 2013,
http://www.geekwire.com/2013/advice-amazon-founder-jeff-bezos-proud-choices-gifts
.

asks the same questions
:
Hester Lacey, “The Inventory,” published weekly in the
Financial Times
.

“I love what I do”
:
Hester Lacey, journalist for the
Financial Times,
in an interview with the author, June 2, 2015.

fits their personal interests
:
Mark Allen Morris, “A Meta-Analytic Investigation of Vocational Interest-Based Job Fit, and Its Relationship to Job Satisfaction, Performance, and Turnover” (PhD dissertation, University of Houston, 2003).

happier with their lives
:
Rong Su, Louis Tay, and Qi Zhang, “Interest Fit and Life Satisfaction: A Cross-Cultural Study in Ten Countries” (manuscript in preparation).”

perform
better:
Christopher D. Nye, Rong Su, James Rounds, and Fritz Drasgow, “Vocational Interests and Performance: A Quantitative Summary of over 60 Years of Research,”
Perspectives on Psychological Science
7 (2012), 384–403.

very real constraints
:
See Cal Newport,
So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love
(New York: Hachette Book Group, 2012). Cal points out that getting very good at something and therefore making yourself valuable to others often precedes identifying what you do as your passion.

“strength of [our] interest”
:
William James,
Talks to Teachers on Psychology; and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals
(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1916), 114.

“engaged” at work
:
Gallup,
State of the Global Workplace: Employee Engagement Insights for Business Leaders Worldwide
(Washington, DC: Gallup, Inc., 2013).

food could be this good
:
Julie & Julia,
dir. Nora Ephron, Columbia Pictures, 2009.

“I was hooked, and for life”
:
Marilyn Mellowes, “About Julia Child,” PBS, June 15, 2005,
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/julia-child-about-julia-child/555
.

“I could really fall in love with”
:
Rowdy Gaines, Olympic gold medalist swimmer, in an interview with the author, June 15, 2015.

“I'm glad I went this way”
:
Marc Vetri, chef, in an interview with the author, February 2, 2015.

writing a cookbook for Americans
:
Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme,
My Life in France
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006).

“zero interest in the stove”:
Ibid., 3.

“to find my true passion”
:
Mellowes, “About Julia Child.”

“No Career Direction”
:
“Fleeting Interest in Everything, No Career Direction,” Reddit, accessed June 17, 2015,
https://www.reddit.com/r/jobs/comments/1asw10/fleeting_interest_in_everything_no_career
.

“They're holding out for perfection”
:
Barry Schwartz, Dorwin Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College, in an interview with the author, January 27, 2015.

around middle school
:
Douglas K. S. Low, Mijung Yoon, Brent W. Roberts, and James Rounds. “The Stability of Vocational Interests from Early Adolescence to Middle Adulthood: A Quantitative Review of Longitudinal Studies.”
Psychological Bulletin
131 (2005): 713–37.

with the outside world
:
Much of the content in this chapter on the development of interests comes from an interview between the author and Ann Renninger, Eugene M. Lang Professor of Educational Studies at Swarthmore College, on July 13, 2015. For an in-depth review, the interested reader is referred to K. Ann Renninger and Suzanne Hidi,
The Power of Interest for Motivation and Engagement
(London: Routledge, 2015).

“to
force
an interest”:
Rob Walker, “25 Entrepreneurs We Love: Jeff Bezos,
Amazon.com
,”
Inc.
magazine, April 2004, 150.

“one piece of information led to another”
:
Mike Hopkins, NASA astronaut and colonel in the U.S. Air Force, in an interview with the author, May 12, 2015.

“I started wanting to make that”
:
Vetri, interview.

“I'll always need you”
:
Marc Vetri,
Il Viaggio Di Vetri: A Culinary Journey
(New York: Ten Speed Press, 2008), ix.

“at the things they love”
:
Amy Chua,
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
(New York: Penguin, 2011), 213.

120 people who achieved
:
Benjamin Bloom,
Developing Talent in Young People
(New York: Ballantine, 1985).

“the early years”
:
Ibid. I would like to point out here that while interest typically precedes the effortful practice we will discuss in the next chapter, it's also been shown that investing effort into an endeavor can reciprocally increase passion. See Michael M. Gielnik et al., “ ‘I Put in Effort, Therefore I Am Passionate': Investigating the Path from Effort to Passion in Entrepreneurship,”
Academy of Management Journal
58 (2015): 1012–31.