Tag: david brooks

Winners Always Finish: a review of the famous Grit study by Angela Duckworth

Behavioral psychology concepts tend to explode onto the scene like Billboard #1 songs. And then they’re discarded just as quickly. Only a few have staying power: Mikhail C’s description of flow and why it’s so good to get lost in your work. Carol Dweck’s concept of a growth mindset and the value of believing that failure isn’t a permanent condition.

To those two (and some others), I would add Angela Duckworth’s famous grit study. Like all psychology findings that stick around, it has a catchy keyword and it reveals a truth about human behavior that is both intuitive and surprising. Whether you’re gritty or not, you want more of it, and you especially want your kids to have it.

So I finally read the original research paper because I’m a nerd who is obsessed with habits, and I believe grit can be a habit.

The brief summary: “don’t give up and you’ll eventually succeed.” But there’s a lot more to the study and its findings. As academic research papers go, it was a fun one to read. I wanted to share some of the nuances and insights with you.

So what is grit?

Grit is “perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Grit entails working strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress”

Winners always finish

Many people think that grit is about working hard and not quitting. But grit is also about FOLLOWING THROUGH on what you start. Gritty people commit to one pursuit, to the exclusion of others. They finish what they begin. That’s what makes them winners.

Follow-through is “evidence of purposeful continuous commitment to certain types of activities versus sporadic efforts in diverse areas”

“whereas the importance of working harder is easily apprehended, the importance of working longer without switching objectives may be less perceptible […] eg, a prodigy who practices intensively yet moves from piano to saxophone to voice will likely be surpassed by an equally gifted but grittier child”

The concept of follow through seems to be ignored when we talk about grit.

More notes and excerpts

  • if you’re conscientious, chances are you’re also gritty
  • grit is not correlated with general intelligence. in fact there is some evidence that it’s inversely correlated
  • high achievers [are] triply blessed by “ability combined with zeal and with capacity for hard labour”
  • forget 10 years of practice, 20 is even better: “over 10 years of daily deliberate practice set apart expert performers from less proficient peers and that 20 years of dedicated practice was an even more reliable predictor of world-class achievement”
  • grit increases with age and level of education (graduate students had the most grit…)
  • grit isn’t everything, especially when young. the authors specifically state, “a strong desire for novelty and a low threshold for frustration may be adaptive earlier in life: Moving on from dead-end pursuits is essential to the discovery of more promising paths”
  • but grit predicted things like: drop out rates during Westpoint’s summer Beast Barracks; performance at the National Spelling Bee; GPAs at the top universities; graduation rates at inner city schools

and just because it’s interesting:

“Participants (at the National Spelling Bee Finals) studied for the spelling bee an average of 2.25 hours per day on weekends and 1.34 hours per day on weekdays”

Angela gives a TED talk, embedded below. It’s interesting, although it’s not a summary of her research:

If you like these talks here’s my list of TED talks and notes.

More thoughts on grit

I’m reminded of Rule 50 from The Little Book of Talent: “Build grit, love the grind”

I’m reminded of David Brooks who says that love is both transcendent magic and a gritty commitment.

Paul Tough, in a podcast (it might have been an episode of This American Life), says that the ideal stage to start teaching grit is adolescence, when people first become “meta cognitive”. And to build grit, a close attachment to a parental figure is important (I suppose for the sense of safety and security?).

Thanks for reading! What psych studies / research papers are your favorites?

List #3: David Brooks and the 4 Commitments that define you: “It’s the things you chain yourself to that set you free”

David Brooks is my favorite big thinker, a more grounded version of Alain de Botton. A longer essay about David Brooks and his work is coming, but for this week’s edition of Nerdy Lists I want to introduce his Four Commitments.

The people we admire most, Brooks says, make FOUR commitments: to family & friends, to a lifelong vocation, to a belief system, and to a local community. These commitments are hard to make and even harder to sustain, but they define us. People who make them are moral exemplars, our modern day heroes who improve the world and inspire everyone around them, both in person and from a distance. People like Atul Gawande and Dorothy Day and Stephen Lerner.

Brooks shared these commitments in his Commencement Address at Dartmouth:

David Brooks’s Four Commitments

“In the realm of emotion they have a web of unconditional love. In the realm of intellect, they have a set, permanent philosophy about how life is. In the realm of action, they have commitments to projects that can’t be completed in a lifetime. In the realm of morality, they have a certain consistency and rigor that’s almost perfect.” – David Brooks in The Atlantic

1. To Spouse and Family

Love humbles you. It is both a gritty commitment (like washing dishes) and transcendent magic. And love is not zero-sum: the more you love, the more you can love.

2. To Career and Vocation

A vocation is something “that summons you”. You feel drawn to it, called towards it, despite pressures and obstacles that would push you away. The most important passions are often found, importantly, not by looking within, but by looking at the world and seeing where there is a void, where people need help.

3. To Faith and Philosophy

4. To Community and Village

I wonder if Brooks would make an exception for strong online communities. It would be interesting to get his take on self organizing groups like Wikipedia and bitcoin and reddit.

And how do you become like these role models?

  • Through habits: fake it til you make it. Organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous are very good at helping you do this
  • Like St. Augustine: continually examine and question yourself
  • By imitation: surround yourself with admirable people and mimic them!

“It’s the things you chain yourself to that set you free”

Thanks for reading! What are your favorite lists? Here’s the collection :)

The 10 articles I read every month because they change(d) my life: David Brooks, Steve Pavlina, Robert Greene and more

Reading makes a full man, conversation a ready man, and writing an exact man. – Francis Bacon

I enjoy reviewing content, whether books, articles, videos, quotes. In part I do this is because my memory is a sieve that frays and dents with every birthday. I also do this because the more I return to a piece, the more I internalize its lessons, like a karate student practicing the perfect kick. My hunch, probably already proven in a neuroscience study somewhere, is that when you memorize text, like an actor memorizes monologues, the knowledge somehow gets inside you and changes you.

Below are ten pieces of content I return to every month. A calendar event reminds me to do so. The actual number is closer to twenty. The remainder we’ll save for a future post.

1. David Brooks’s 2015 Dartmouth Commencement Address: The 4 Types of Commitments [YouTube]

“It’s the things you chain yourself to that set you free”

2. Richard Hamming: You and Your Research [link]

But if you want to be a great scientist you’re going to have to put up with stress. You can lead a nice life; you can be a nice guy or you can be a great scientist.

3. Paul Graham: How to do what you love [link]

A comparatively safe and prosperous career with some automatic baseline prestige is dangerously tempting to someone young

4. William McPherson: Falling [link]

“the truly poor often look weary”

5. David Brooks: The Heart Grows Smarter [link]

“It was the capacity for intimate relationships that predicted flourishing in all aspects of these men’s lives.”

6. Paul Buchheit: Applied Philosophy, a.k.a. “Hacking” [link]

wherever and whenever there were people, there was someone staring into the system, searching for the truth…these are the people that created the governments, businesses, religions, and other machines that operate our society, and they necessarily did it by hacking the prior systems.

7. Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power [Kindle]

Law 5 So much depends on reputation. Guard it with your life.

8. Steve Pavlina: Broadcast Your Desires [link]

“Of course there will be consequences to broadcasting your desires, but one of those consequences is that you’re more likely to actually get what you want. All the seemingly negative consequences become irrelevant and meaningless when you’re enjoying the manifestation of your desires.”

9. Dale Carnegie: How to Win Friends and Influence People [link]

If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.

10. James Clear: Leadership at Scale [link]

I have come to realize that if I’m serious about making an impact with my work, about helping as many people as possible, and about putting a small dent in my corner of the universe — writing will carry my work and ideas further than just about anything else.

A must-read for Overachievers and their parents: David Brooks on parenting

Despite the lack of an overt tiger mom and family, I somehow adopted the Overachiever’s mindset at a young age. It took two decades and untold mistakes before I was able to step back and try to understand what happened with any honesty or empathy. And in this Katie Couric interview, David Brooks gave an incredible response to a question about overachievers and parents:

A lot of parents especially in our demographic love their children passionately, also desperately want their children to do really well in life, get into college, get great careers, and so these two forces collide to mean intense attention, intense effort, intense care and love for the child, but also intense anxiety about them not doing well, not getting into the right college, not getting the right job and intense love and relief when they do something well. So the kids are bombarded in a world in which when they do something well they get super bursts of love and when they don’t do something well there’s a little withdrawal and they begin to feel conditional love…I’ll love you as long as you’re on my balance beam but if you get off my balance beam you’re in trouble and we’ll cut you off, and I see this in my students, that the will for unconditional love terrifies them, it leads them to lack of internal criteria to make up their own decisions, it makes them in the most concrete sense have two majors, one for mom & dad and one for me, and they live under this inability to really lead their own lives, because the final act of parenting is letting go and I see some of the parents not come to convocation because they don’t like the job choice, and I’ve seen some very strange things in our culture, in our high-achieving high-pressure culture

This! Minute 54. Try to watch the whole thing. If you’re busy and pressed for time, you can listen to it at 1.25 or 1.5x to speed things up :)

David Brooks on the importance of character and the Greek versus Biblical moral codes

David Brooks is one of my favorite living nonfiction writers. His writing is a rare mix of humility, simplicity and breadth. He thinks deeply about what makes a good person and a good life, questions that are impossible to answer and invaluable to understand yet commonly ignored.

His op-ed The Service Patch is a particular favorite. To quote:

Many of these students seem to have a blinkered view of their options. There’s crass but affluent investment banking. There’s the poor but noble nonprofit world. And then there is the world of high-tech start-ups, which magically provides money and coolness simultaneously. […] In whatever field you go into, you will face greed, frustration and failure. You may find your life challenged by depression, alcoholism, infidelity, your own stupidity and self-indulgence. So how should you structure your soul to prepare for this? Simply working at Amnesty International instead of McKinsey is not necessarily going to help you with these primal character tests. […] It’s worth noting that you can devote your life to community service and be a total schmuck. You can spend your life on Wall Street and be a hero. Understanding heroism and schmuckdom requires fewer Excel spreadsheets, more Dostoyevsky and the Book of Job.

It resonates with the deepest-felt dilemmas of my 20s, which themselves were the result of questions I ignored in my teens, in the pursuit of Ivy League acceptance letters and resume-varnishing job offers.

David Brooks gave the below talk on character at the Aspen Ideas Fest. I took extensive notes with a reminder to review them often. I wanted to share them with you.

Here is how I’d summarize the below

  1. we are mostly good people who aren’t taught about character and its importance in our lives
  2. the Greek character code is based on honor and strength and excellence
  3. the Biblical code is based on humility and love and kindness
  4. it’s the struggle with this duality that makes us who we are
  5. to build character, focus on the right habits, surround yourself with the right people and be organized
  6. religion plays an important role, giving us “awareness of something bigger than yourself”

And here are the full notes:

David Brooks — The Character Code @ Aspen Ideas Fest — REVIEW OFTEN

  • David grew up in Greenwich Village to liberal Jewish parents who hung out with hippies
  • he went to UChicago — “the school where fun goes to die”, a “Baptist school where atheist professors teach Jewish students St. Thomas Aquinas”
  • “world full of good people who don’t have a good vocabulary for character”
  • imagine a world where you have the neutron, gravity, neutrino, but no system to fit them together
  • study asked college students to name a moral dilemma, most couldn’t; when pushed, fell back on a “motive-ism” — what feels right for me is right for me, what feels right for you is right for you
  • existence of uber moms — weigh less than their children; kids raised in this atmosphere are trained in everything, but the most important — character — they’re on their own
  • there’s a character code from history, that we’ve forgotten
    • (a lot of warfare history that I left out)
    • what motivated Athenian decisions?
      • grew up with ideology, inspired by Homer (they quoted him like Christians quote Bible today)
      • an Honor Code based on how transitory/fleeting life is, how deeply insignificant an individual life can be
      • you should fight against that insignificance, behave courageously to achieve eternal fame and glory
    • THE GREEK CODE — “Homeric man risks life to win honor”
      1. extremely competitive; if won Olympic medal, free meals for life
      2. asserts self, brags and shows off
      3. prowess, be excellent at something and display it to the world
      4. lack of self-doubt, very proud
    • the Homeric code, inspired many: Alexander the Great, Napoleon, American founders; Alexander Hamilton called desire for glory “the ruling passion of the noblest minds”
    • seen in sports heroism, all politicians, action movies — brave, strong, never self-doubt
  • there is another code — Moses and the Bible, Jesus
    • Moses is meekest man on Earth
    • bad public speaker, quiet shepherd
    • when anointed by God, he said “you’ve got the wrong guy”
    • Jesus, sermon on the Mount, turns every Greek virtue on its head
    • loftiness of spirit by caring for downtrodden
    • achieve greatness by demonstrating meekness
    • power through dependence on God
    • strength through vulnerability
    • wisdom by accepting ignorance
  • GREEK versus BIBLICAL model
  • Western Civilization tries to fuse the two
    • chivalry — Greek emphasis on honor with Christian emphasis on love
    • Abraham Lincoln personifies — ambition with submission
    • George H.W. Bush — ran for President, but raised not to talk about himself, when he did so in campaigning, his Mom would call him and say, “George, you’re talking about yourself”
  • Joseph Soleveitchik and the two Adams (for more, see Wikipedia), the majestic versus the covenantal; both willed by God, competitive versus cooperative
  • in merging these two strains, we’ve lost them both
    • first, we don’t teach Western Civ anymore
    • lost touch with Heroic code because it’s elitist
    • lost touch with Biblical code because we’re uncomfortable with sin, assumption “that we have it baked into us”
  • “good people who are a little formless”
  • people living this duality
    • Atul Gawande in a famously self-confident profession (surgery), but incredible motivation/modesty to see unpleasant facts; does something daring but starting from feeling of weakness
    • Jim Collins — sort of a moral philosopher, “always celebrating a certain sort of hero”
      • celebrates the quiet unassuming CEO — boring, anal types
      • promotes a sort of moral code — diligent, prepared, Level 5 leaders “extreme personal humility with extreme personal will”
    • Clayton Christensen — spent an hour each day asking, “what is my life about”
  • humility is: not thinking too highly OR too much about yourself, understanding your own weakness and that life is about struggle
  • how do we instill these qualities?
    • “you can’t change your mind and then your behavior, if we did that, New Years resolutions would work”
    • get the little habits right; when they asked Greg Maddux “how’d your day go”, he responded “67 of 73” (as in, 67 pitches left his hand how he wanted, had no control after that)
    • being organized, neat
    • being around exemplars; we are mimic machines — baby at 43 minutes old wagged her tongue in response to a wagging tongue
    • we’re formed by institutions
  • religion has an important role to play
    • grace, gratitude, awareness of something bigger than yourself
    • St Augustine in Confessions said he spent 4 years beating himself up for stealing an apple when he was 14
    • generally most impressive characters he knew were either deeply religious or grew up in religious atmosphere