Jeff Selingo has a helpful summary of some recent research that attempts to add some nuance to our “grit”-crazy times:

“Things like grit and 10,000 hours are mindsets that are very misleading because they are consequences not causes — they are lagging indicators of performance,” said Todd Rose, who is the author of The End of Average, a book that illustrates how averages are flawed in understanding human achievement.

Since September, Ogas and Rose have interviewed three dozen people who have achieved success in their fields, from sommeliers to poker players. “When we spent the time to understand how they got better, each master had his or her own unique path,” Ogas said.

Now, these researchers are interviewing masters, and relying on self-constructed narratives for their research. That seems prone to some distortion.

But it reminds me that grit studies suffer from the same distortion as well. The typical grit-speriment involves giving people a task to complete, and seeing how well they complete it. By definition, the biggest predictor of who successfully completes the task is “grit”, which is largely a measure of whether people stick with tasks. It’s tautological, really.

Don’t believe me? Here’s question #2 and # 3 on Duckworth’s Grit Scale. Both questions are taken as negative indicators of grit (e.g. the more you agree with these the less grit you have).

2. New ideas and projects sometimes distract me from previous ones.*

• Very much like me
• Mostly like me
• Somewhat like me
• Not much like me
• Not like me at all

3. My interests change from year to year.*

• Very much like me
• Mostly like me
• Somewhat like me
• Not much like me
• Not like me at all

If new projects distract you, or you evolve in your interests over time, then you have no grit. And scarily, that’s something we’re supposed to fix.

In contrast, here’s a question that identifies the existence of grit. Higher identification means more grit:

9. I finish whatever I begin.

• Very much like me
• Mostly like me
• Somewhat like me
• Not much like me
• Not like me at all

Now, I know that Duckworth’s research is more nuanced than this. But here’s what I see in a lot of research around grit these days:

1. Questionaire: Do you finish things you start, even if they suck?
2. [Put student in sucky experience]
3. Result: Students that say they stick with sucky things stick with sucky things!

Slightly better than this (but not by much) is the intervention approach:

1. Questionaire: Do you finish things you start, even if they suck?
2. Intervention: Did you know that only bad and unsuccessful people quit things?
3. [Put student in sucky experience]
4. Result: Students told quitting things is a sign of a weak personality quit less!

I’m surprised people don’t comment on this more. Traditional psychological experiments tend to be about the completion of contrived and inflexible tasks, because you want to measure the same dependent variable for everyone. So, for example, we can look at the fact people with more grit stuck with bootcamp at higher rates. But given that military life might not be for everyone, surely some of the people who dropped out made better decisions than some of the people who stayed in. Since the dependent variable isn’t “success”, but rather “not changing goals based on new experience”, we find that people in our goal-adherent group don’t change goals much. (I’m shocked!)

The whole thing really does seem like one big tautology, an effect of how experiments and institutions are designed instead of any profound insight into human nature. (I wonder if grit is coming up on its own Verbal Behavior moment.)

But let’s move on.

Finding the Unique Path

What the newer researchers found is that most people that mastered something did not get there by a straight path. In effect, a very normal path to success was quitting a way that failed for them.

The example that spoke to me the most was this:

Take the wine connoisseur who spent hours studying for the test to become a master sommelier without success. “Then he realized he was able to recognize wines through his facial reactions when he tasted them. When using this method, he aced the test and spent a fraction of the time studying,” Ogas said.

What we’re talking about here is learning, of course. And again, this is not learning styles we are discussing. What this person realized were the explanations he had been banging his head against on how to discern wine weren’t working for him. He needed a different route, a different way into the understanding.

And so instead of persevering, he switched tactics. Is everyone going to be able to use his path to understanding? Probably not. People are different. But some might.

I can’t help but see this through the lens of Choral Explanations. In that article we noticed that the way proficient programmers came to understand things on help sites was *not* by banging their head against the best explanation, but by scanning a number of alternate explanations until something “clicked”.

This differs from the current “gritty textbooks” approach to teaching. In this approach we give the students what we feel is the ONE BEST EXPLANATION of something in a textbook, and have them bang their head against it. If they don’t get it, well, they just have to try harder.

And at the end of forcing students to learn something the ONE RIGHT THING the ONE RIGHT WAY, we discover an amazing statistical fact — students that don’t have “grit” to do things this way fail.

But who does this pattern really indict?