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Chapter 2: Distracted By Talent
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Grit, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Passion, Perseverance, and Success
Developing Grit
Psychology and Human Development
Grit and Society
Summary
Analysis
American media and popular culture almost always explain achievement through talent. Even Duckworth still thinks “What a genius!” when people impress her. She asks why people are unconsciously biased toward talent. The sociologist Dan Chambliss, who spent six years studying competitive swimming, noted that the best swimmers succeed because they learn and perfect dozens of small habits. But most laypeople attribute incredible athletic ability to natural talent, because they simply can’t explain how it’s possible. It’s true that some swimmers have natural anatomical advantages, and some improve faster during training. But Chambliss insists that greatness is really just the sum of many smaller, totally achievable accomplishments.
In the last chapter, Duckworth showed that there is a widespread bias toward explaining success in terms of talent and not hard work. Now, she explores where this bias comes from. She suggests that its source is ignorance: people don’t understand where greatness comes from, so they assume it must just be natural and inherent. But if the bias toward talent comes from ignorance, then this also means that the bias is easy to correct: people just have to learn about how champions and high achievers actually develop their expertise. Of course, one way for them to learn that is through research. Chambliss’s study, like the surveys that Duckworth described at the end of the first chapter, offers clear-cut evidence that effort makes a greater difference in performance than talent does.
Themes
Still, talent is an appealing explanation. Upon seeing the retired gold medalist Mark Spitz swim, even Dan Chambliss felt like Spitz was somehow extraordinary. Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th-century German philosopher, wrote that people don’t like learning about all the effort that goes into extraordinary accomplishments. They focus on the idea of genius or talent, Nietzsche argued, to protect their own vanity. If successful people are just magical geniuses, then ordinary people can’t possibly compete with them. But Nietzsche thought that, in reality, genius is a not a quality but a craft—something people achieve over time through serious, dedicated work.
Chambliss’s reaction to Mark Spitz—like Duckworth’s tendency to think “what a genius!” when people impress her—shows how strong the bias toward talent truly is. Nietzsche helps explain why it’s so strong: it protects people’s feelings. If people admit that genius is really the product of hard work, then they have to justify why they haven’t also worked hard enough to achieve it. For instance, if Chambliss recognizes that Mark Spitz just practices a lot, he is admitting that he also could have been a champion swimmer if he had done the same. This implies that he didn’t try hard enough and that his failure to achieve greatness is his fault. In contrast, if he attributes Spitz’s success to inborn talent, Chambliss can feel that his own lack of swimming success is just bad luck, and not his own fault. Finally, Nietzsche’s view of genius as a craft is a useful metaphor for understanding why grit contributes to success. A craft requires constant dedication over years, and talent doesn’t make people into master artisans unless they also put in these years of practice. Grit is like the artisan’s commitment to their craft.
Themes
Duckworth remembers when her graduate school advisor, the influential but intimidating Marty Seligman, told her that she didn’t have any good ideas. She was collecting lots of data, Seligman said, but she had no theory to explain it. After the meeting, Duckworth broke down crying but realized that Seligman was right: she still didn’t know how talent, effort, and skill combined to create achievement.
While Seligman’s comments might have seemed insensitive, Duckworth admits that they were accurate. In fact, she has reached a point in her book similar to the point she reached before her meeting with Seligman: she has laid out plenty of evidence for grit’s importance but not yet provided an overarching theory of how it factors into achievement. Duckworth’s meeting with Seligman also points to the difficulty of doing effective research: psychologists have to balance collecting data with effectively analyzing it. Throughout the book, Duckworth tries to maintain this balance by always backing her arguments up with data but avoiding the temptation to get caught up in the details of specific studies.
Themes
Now, a decade later, Duckworth finally does have a theory. It consists of two principles. The first is “talent × effort = skill.” (This means that talent is the rate at which people’s skills develop when they put effort into improving them.) The second is that “skill × effort = achievement.” (This means that achievement comes from people applying their skills to real challenges.) Of course, Duckworth’s theory isn’t perfect—circumstances and luck also affect achievement. But it does explain why effort matters more than talent. Effort both “builds skill” and “makes skill productive.”
Duckworth’s theory points out that achievement is really a two-step process: people first build skills, then apply them. Talent isn’t the same as skill—rather, talent refers to inherent abilities, while skill refers to specific knowledge relevant to one’s work. For instance, someone can be artistically talented but still have to learn specific drawing or painting skills. Readers also might find it strange that Duckworth’s equations don’t mention grit. However, grit is just the personality trait that determines how much effort people are likely to put into their projects. Thus, if effort counts twice, so does grit.
Themes
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Duckworth illustrates her theory with several examples. The master potter Warren MacKenzie was in his 90s when Duckworth interviewed him. He made around 50 pots a day but only thought a few were good—meaning they were beautiful and useful enough to sell and count as true art. He measured his achievement as an artist by the number of good pots he created. Over the years, as he improved, more of his pots were good—thus, “talent × effort = skill.” And as his skill improved, he created more good pots overall—thus, “skill × effort = achievement.”
Regardless of his innate artistic talents, MacKenzie had to build his skill as a potter through years of hard work. When more and more of his pots became good enough to sell, this meant that his skills were improving. Next, he still had to effortfully apply his pottery skills in order to actually produce sellable pots. Thus, making pots was both the way MacKenzie trained his pottery skills and the way he applied them to achieve success as an artist.
Themes
The award-winning novelist John Irving constantly rewrites his books. In high school, he struggled in English classes and barely graduated. Teachers viewed him as stupid and lazy, but really, he had severe dyslexia. Today, he still reads with his finger. But he says that fighting dyslexia taught him the stamina that is key to his rewriting today. In fact, Duckworth comments, “precociously talented” people often don’t learn this kind of stamina. Like MacKenzie, Irving built his skill through effort, and he became a master novelist by applying these skills.
Irving’s dyslexia and trouble in high school show that he has managed to succeed despite having very little natural writerly talent. In fact, he even suggests that his lack of talent helped him because it taught him to work harder (or made him grittier). His constant rewriting is evidence of this work ethic. This is consistent with Duckworth’s finding from her study of Ivy League students: early in life, people with more talent don’t have to put in as much effort in order to succeed, so they often don’t develop grit in the long term.
Themes
Will Smith, the actor and musician, has always attributed his accomplishments to his work ethic. He once joked that he’s “not afraid to die on a treadmill.” In fact, in the 1940s, Harvard researchers put 130 male undergraduates on a steep treadmill to test their stamina. For decades after, the researchers contacted the men every other year to learn about their careers, social lives, and mental health. The psychiatrist George Vaillant revived the study and contacted all the participants when they were in their sixties. He found that, even after adjusting for physical fitness, the men’s running time on the treadmill predicted their success in adulthood. (Ironically, Vaillant told Duckworth that he doesn’t think of himself as high-grit at all—except when it comes to pursuing the study.)
The treadmill study shows that stamina—or people’s willingness to exert themselves physically and mentally—predicts a series of positive life outcomes. In simpler terms, it shows that effort predicts achievement—which is similar to Duckworth’s central argument in this book. By correcting for physical fitness, Vaillant ensured that he was just measuring mental stamina, which is closely connected to grit. Of course, this study shows that one half of grit—perseverance—matters a great deal. But it doesn’t say anything about passion, which is the other half of the equation.
Themes
Woody Allen famously said that “eighty percent of success in life is showing up.” Duckworth comments that if she had run the Harvard study, she would have measured the participants’ grit by inviting them to return and run the treadmill again. This is because commitment is the key to effort. People who stop trying give up on improving their skills. According to Duckworth’s theory, if person A is “twice as talented but half as hardworking” as person B, both will achieve the same level of skill, but person B will achieve much more over their lifetime. Effort, Duckworth reiterates, turns talent into skill and “makes skill productive.”
In her version of the treadmill study, Duckworth would have also tested long-term perseverance—or returning to the same challenge over and over, which is an even more essential ingredient of grit than short-term perseverance (like staying on the treadmill for an extra minute). Duckworth’s rough comparison between two hypothetical people shows roughly how much more important effort is than talent. Essentially, Duckworth’s equations suggest that talent’s effect on success is linear, whereas effort’s is exponential.
Themes
