Re: PQ Grit Kit 2 2K
Brie Hoffler
While courage is hard to measure, it is directly proportional to your level of grit. More specifically, your ability to manage fear of failure is imperative and a predicator of success. The supremely gritty are not afraid to tank, but rather embrace it as part of a process. They understand that there are valuable lessons in defeat and that the vulnerability of perseverance is requisite for high achievement. Teddy Roosevelt, a Grand Sire of Grit, spoke about the importance of overcoming fear and managing vulnerability in an address he made at the Sorbonne in 1907. He stated:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strived valiantly; who errs, who comes again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.
I think I now understand the reason I reject the generalist label and resonate far more with the specialist label. The generalist/specialist distinction is an extrinsic coordinate system for mapping human potential. This system itself is breaking down, so we have to reconstruct whatever meaning the distinction had in intrinsic terms. When I chart my life course using such intrinsic notions, I end up clearly a (reconstructed) specialist.
The keys to this reconstruction project are: the much-abused idea of 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, the notion of grit, and an approach to keeping track of your journey through life in terms of an intrinsic coordinate system. Think of it as replacing compass or GPS-based extrinsic navigation with accelerometer and gyroscope-based inertial navigation.
The generalist/specialist distinction constitutes an extrinsic coordinate system. We think of our environment as containing breadth and depth dimensions. The breadth dimension is chopped up by disciplinary boundaries (whether academic, trade-based or business-domain based), while the depth dimension is chopped up by markers of validated progressive achievement. What you get is a matrix of domains of endeavor: bounded loci within which you can sustain deepening practice of some skilled behavior.
The boundedness is key. Mathematicians do not suddenly discover, in the 10th year of their practice, that they need advanced ballroom dancing skills to progress further. Ballroom dancers do not suddenly encounter a need for advanced aircraft engine maintenance skills after a few years of practice. Based on your strengths, you can place fairly safe bets early on about what you will/will not need to do if you make your home somewhere in the matrix.
Extrinsically situated creativity with reference to some global, absolute scheme of generalist/specialist dimensions is unworkable. At best we can hope for local, relative schemes and an idea of intrinsically situated individual lives.
The problem with this generalist/specialist extrinsically situated creativity model is that the extrinsic frames of references are getting increasingly dynamic, chaotic and murky. To the point that the distinction is becoming useless. Nobody seems to know which way is up, which way is down, and which way is sideways. If you guess and get lucky, the answers may change next year, leaving you disoriented once more.
Unfortunately, this is worse than useless. In the labor market for skilled capabilities, and particularly in academia, multi-disciplinarity is the equivalent of gerrymandering or secession on an already deeply messed-up political map. Instead of votes, you are grubbing for easily won markers of accomplishment. Its main purpose (in which it usually fails) is to create a new political balance of power rather than unleash human potential more effectively.
So given that most excitement centers around short-lived fruitfly non-disciplines, how do people even manage to log 10,000 deliberate practice hours in any coherent journey to mastery? Can you jump across three or four fruit-fly domains over the course of a decade and still end up with mastery of something, even if you cannot define it?
We are used to describing movement in terms of x, y and z coordinates, with respect to the Greenwich meridian, the Equator and sea level. Our sense of space is almost entirely based on such extrinsic coordinate systems (or landmarks within them). Things that we understand via spatial metaphors naturally tempt us into metaphoric coordinate systems like the depth/breadth one we just talked about. In academic domains, for instance, you could say the world is mapped with reference to an origin that represents a high-school graduate, with disciplinary majors and years of study forming the two axes that define further movement.
This predictability allows you to form reasonable expectations for decades of investment, and make decisions based on your upfront assessment of your strengths, and expectations about how those strengths will evolve as you age.
There are domains where the boundedness is very weak indeed. The upfront visible boundedness is a complete illusion. Marketing is one such domain. You might get into it because you love creative messaging or talking to people. You may discover the idea of positioning two years into the journey and realize that creativity in messaging is a sideshow, and the real job is somewhat tedious analysis of the mental models of prospects. A further two years down the road, you may discover that to level-up your game once more, you need to become a serious quantitative analytics ninja and database geek.
When I went free-agent a few months ago, most of my consulting leads I had coming in had to do with marketing work. This did not surprise me, but it certainly surprised my father and several close friends, who assumed I was doing some sort of technical consulting work around computational modeling and scientific computing.
Grit has external connotations of extreme toughness, a high apparent threshold for pain, and an ability to keep picking yourself up after getting knocked down. From the outside, grit looks like the bloody-minded exercise of extreme will power. It looks like a super-power.
They think I must possess superhuman willpower because they make a very simple projection error: they think it is hard for me because it would be hard for them. Well of course things are going to take superhuman willpower if you go after them with the wrong strengths.
So what does the inside view of grit look like? I took a shot at describing the subjective feel in my last post on the Tempo blog. It simply feels like mindful learning across a series of increasingly demanding episodes that build on the same strengths.
But the subjective feel of grit is not my concern here. I am interested in objective, intrinsically measurable aspects of grit that can serve as an internal inertial navigation system; a gyroscope rather than GPS.
The only truly new behavior you need is increased introspection. And yes, this will advantage some people over others. To avoid running faster and faster until you die of exhaustion, you need to develop an increasingly refined understanding of this landscape as you progress. You twist and turn as you walk (not run) primarily to find the path of least resistance on the landscape of your strengths.
For someone believing that intrinsic motivation [1] is much more important than extrinsic motivation I truly liked this article. I think that intrinsic systems will always require some additional skill for not getting lost in such spaces.
God help you if you are already laden with mortgage payments and a family to provide for before you hit that beginning point required for effective disciplinary navigation. Even if you then go on to figure out your strengths, social and financial ties might be enough to warp your perceptions of the true long term path of least resistance. This maybe why its so enamoring for people to see someone whose system is fully operational even if they can intellectually identify with what you are saying.
Also it would be inspiring to see how we can use the amateur/professional distinction in this new surrounding (from a point of view of being accidental/substandard/unreliable vs. being a professional/expert/accountable, because it is much harder or even near to impossible to know what the standard is).
In light of this post, the vast number of successful writers with a graduate degree might be explained not by a correlation between those who are compelled to go to grad school and those interested in writing but by the fact that a Phd is four years of nothing but reworking, self-referencing, and releasing.
Relatedly, if you spend a lot of time in classrooms, you will see why national surveys continue to report that 70 percent of high school students see themselves as bored or disengaged. Many classes are terribly unengaging places, with lots of worksheets and little connection to an authentic purpose. The places where many of these schools seem most alive are actually in their extracurriculars--in plays, musical performances, student newspapers--where students have the opportunity to connect to a real domain, where there are opportunities for repetition and practice, but where it is linked to an adult world that students want to emulate and join. The best disciplinary classes have the same characteristics--students are learning how to be historians, thinking like mathematicians, doing real world projects--but these are relatively few and far between. There are two ways to see this situation: 1) that students in most contemporary classes should increase their grit and perseverance; or 2) that many classes need to be made more interesting and engaging places that are more connected to authentic purposes. While some might subscribe to the eat-your-broccoli theory of school reform, I tend to think that, in the long run, schools will be more successful if they are places that students would actually want to attend.
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