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Chapter 8: Purpose
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
Many people define hope as expecting the future to be better than the present. Grit requires hope, but specifically hope “that our own efforts can improve our future.” Duckworth remembers struggling in her first college neurobiology course, despite studying hard. She failed her first two tests, but when her teaching assistant suggested she drop the course rather than risk getting an F, she resolved to stay in the class and try even harder instead. She managed to ace the final and get a B in the class.
Duckworth distinguishes between a passive kind of hope, which involves blind faith in some external power, with a more active one, which is really about believing in oneself. This is kind of hope is one of perseverance’s key elements. Her anecdote demonstrates how this kind of hope can drive people to succeed, even when the odds are stacked against them: if she hadn’t believed in herself, she never would have mobilized all of her available resources to pass the class.
Themes
In the 1960s, psychology students Marty Seligman and Steve Maier gave dogs electric shocks but let half of them reduce the length of the shocks by pressing on a panel. The next day, the dogs who had control over their shocks were more likely to successfully escape further shocks by leaping over a barrier. But a third of the dogs from the other group also jumped the barrier.
Seligman and Maier’s experiment demonstrates that the kind of hope Duckworth discusses in this chapter depends to a significant extent on experience. Specifically, it shows that living things that have some control over the adversity they face are more likely to believe in their own ability to confront future problems, so they actively look for ways to improve their situations—they’ve learned to embody hope because they believe in their ability to change their circumstances for the better.
Themes
Seligman and Maier’s experiment shows that suffering makes people hopeless only when they believe they can’t control it. Duckworth compares herself to the minority of dogs who couldn’t control their shocks but still jumped the barrier: she failed repeatedly but still maintained a sense of hope that she could succeed in the future. In fact, while Seligman and Maier’s experiment confirmed that helplessness is something people and animals learn, the opposite is also true: people can also learn optimism. When optimists suffer, they blame “temporary and specific causes,” but pessimists blame “permanent and pervasive causes.” For instance, if pessimists don’t submit work on time, they might think of themselves as hopeless losers, while optimists would blame their own poor time management and try to fix it.
If Seligman and Maier’s results can be fairly extrapolated to humans, then their experiment suggests that a sizable minority of people share Duckworth’s stubborn hope and optimism. However, as Duckworth notes, it also means that anyone can develop the same optimism if their experiences reinforce their sense of control over adversity. Clearly, people who want to become grittier and more optimistic ought to seek out such experiences. As Duckworth explains it here, optimism is essentially the belief in one’s own power to overcome obstacles—so it’s no wonder that optimists tend to overcome more obstacles (and pessimists fewer).
Themes
Unsurprisingly, optimists have better mental health than pessimists. But they also do better in school and work, live longer, and bounce back from setbacks faster. In their interviews, Duckworth and Hester Lacey have both noticed that successful, high-grit people are usually optimistic: they see failure as a learning experience, not a disappointment. In fact, Seligman’s mentor, Aaron Beck, realized that mental illness often depends on the way people interpret their circumstances. In response, he helped develop cognitive behavioral therapy, a highly effective method that depends on helping people change the way they interpret their negative experiences.
The evidence that Duckworth cites in this section strongly supports Seligman and Maier’s conclusions: people who learn optimism tend to be grittier and more successful because they treat failure as an obstacle to overcome. In contrast, pessimists avoid failure—which, as Duckworth’s analysis of deliberate practice suggested, is the best opportunity to improve many skills. Meanwhile, Beck’s research on mental illness shows how, much like purpose, hope often depends primarily on the way people think—and his innovations in cognitive-behavioral therapy show that it’s possible to change these thoughts through structured interventions. While Duckworth clearly doesn’t think that everyone needs therapy to become grittier, it clearly demonstrates that doing so is possible.
Themes
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In graduate school, Duckworth attended a meeting with Seligman and Wendy Kopp, the founder and CEO of Teach For America (an organization that sends college graduates to teach in under-resourced US schools). Duckworth, Seligman, and Kopp hypothesized that optimistic teachers were likely to be grittier and more successful. They gave 400 new teachers questionnaires to measure grit, optimism, and happiness. A year later, they measured students’ academic growth and confirmed that grittier, happier, and more optimistic teachers were more effective. Reflecting on this data and her own experience as a teacher, Duckworth concludes that people are more likely to succeed when they keep looking for solutions to the challenges they face.
Duckworth’s Teach For America research again reaffirms the principle that optimism fosters grit and therefore leads to success. Of course, it also shows how Duckworth has combined her interests and sense of purpose into research that fulfills her overarching life goal of helping young people through psychology. Teaching is an important case study for understanding grit because of the way it affects others. Effective, optimistic teachers not only help their students learn better, but can also pass on their attitudes—including their grit.
Themes
In the late 1960s, after reading Seligman and Maier’s work, psychology student Carol Dweck started wondering why some people become optimists and others become pessimists. To answer this question, she put a group of pessimistic middle schoolers in a math program. After each session, half the students always received praise, while the other half were always told to try harder. At the end of the program, the students in the second group put far more effort into challenging math problems. This suggests that pessimism is really about the way people interpret failure—and not just how much they fail.
Duckworth has already established that people learn optimistic and pessimistic worldviews depending on their experiences. But Dweck’s research helps illuminate what particular kinds of experiences lead to each mindset—and what kinds of experiences people should seek out (and create for others) in order to foster optimism. Dweck’s schoolroom experiment shows that, at least among children, optimism and pessimism are remarkably flexible: students can switch from pessimism to optimism in a short period of time if trusted adults teach them to view challenges as an opportunity to grow. Of course, this implies that the opposite is also true: if children learn to feel proud of succeeding and ashamed of failing at every task they face, they are less likely to seek out challenges and grow.
Themes
Through decades of research, Dweck learned that people have varying theories about how traits like intelligence work. Some people have a fixed mindset—for instance, they think that an individual’s intelligence doesn’t change over time. But others have a growth mindset—they believe that people can improve their intelligence through effort. When people with fixed mindsets fail, they often simply decide that they’re “not good enough.” In fact, growth mindsets have all the same benefits as optimism. In several studies, Duckworth has repeatedly found that a growth mindset strongly correlates with grit.
The fixed and growth mindsets are similar, but not identical, to optimism and pessimism. While people with a fixed mindset might not always be pessimists, they are essentially pessimistic about the possibility of improving their basic talents. Similarly, while people with a growth mindset might not always be cheery or bounce back from obstacles, they fundamentally believe in their capacity for improvement. In other words, they have the precise kind of hope that Duckworth thinks is key to grit. Crucially, the principles behind the growth mindset aren’t just more conducive to optimism and success—they’re also true, at least according to all of the psychological research that Duckworth has compiled in this book. Namely, as a matter of scientific fact, people can improve their skills (including their intelligence). Thus, simply understanding current psychological research is likely to push people toward a growth mindset.
Themes
Dweck’s research suggests that people develop fixed or growth mindsets based on how authority figures responded to their successes and failures. For instance, at the KIPP network of charter schools, teachers help students develop a growth mindset by praising them for their effort (rather than their skill) and encouraging them to challenge themselves. How authority figures act is even more important than what they say. Psychologist Daeun Park has found that teachers teach their students a fixed mindset by comparing high performers to the rest of the class. And Dweck has found that parents who treat mistakes as harmful problems also teach their children a fixed mindset. In fact, even large companies tend to follow either a fixed or a growth mindset, depending on how they’re managed.
Dweck’s research has important implications: if children learn their worldviews based on how authority figures treat them, then adults—especially parents and educators—can make a significant difference in young people’s lives by modeling grit, optimism, and a growth mindset. Arguably, they also have a responsibility to do so. In fact, Duckworth’s comment about large corporations suggests that this modeling effect might not end with childhood: institutions’ mindsets can shape how their members view themselves and respond to challenges well into adulthood. And KIPP demonstrates how such institutions apply psychology research in order to function more effectively.
Themes
Duckworth argues that most people “default to a fixed mindset,” even if they want to believe in a growth mindset. Everyone has both an inner pessimist and an inner optimist, and people can tip the balance toward the optimist by trying to catch and correct themselves when they slip into a fixed mindset. Ultimately, a growth mindset is necessary to truly develop grit.
The bias towards fixed mindsets partially explains the tendency many people have to associate skill with natural talent rather than effort. In turn, the benefits of growth mindsets also explain many other differences between ordinary people and gritty people—including gritty people’s tendency to view deliberate practice as less strenuous. To develop grit, Duckworth suggests, people have to tip their inner scales toward optimism, which she argues is absolutely possible. It just requires substantial effort.
Themes
Bill McNabb, CEO of the investment company Vanguard, told Duckworth that his most successful employees are the ones who continue growing over time. Actually, McNabb started life with a fixed mindset—for a long time, he was proud of putting in less effort but doing better than his peers. But when he started rowing in college, he learned that hard work was actually the key to success. By practicing endlessly, he even made it onto the varsity team. He realized that learning from challenges and staying optimistic are the keys to growth.
McNabb’s explanation illustrates the benefits of a growth mindset and the clear dangers of a fixed one. Both are self-fulfilling prophecies: people who believe in growth give themselves the tools to grow, while those who believe in fixed ability tend to stay at the same level. McNabb also shows how people who face, confront, and successfully grow from challenges can switch from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset over time. Finally, his comments demonstrate how organizations can build effective, cohesive cultures that help their members develop grit.
Themes
Nietzsche famously said that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” In other words, some challenges help people grow. For example, wilderness programs like Outward Bound make adolescents more independent and confident. But other challenges make people weaker—like the “pessimistic” dogs from Seligman and Maier’s experiment. Duckworth asks why: which challenges strengthen people, and which ones weaken them? Recently, Maier repeated his electric shock experiment with adolescent rats. When rats who had no control over their shocks grew into adults, they were timid and helpless. But rats who did control their shocks were actually more resilient and adventurous. This suggests that challenges make us stronger when we can control them.
Like fixed and growth mindsets, people’s early experiences with difficult challenges are also self-fulfilling prophecies. Namely, people who overcome challenges early on learn to enthusiastically tackle other challenges later in life. But people who don’t overcome early challenges end up learning to give up when they face serious challenges. The implications are clear: young people need appropriate challenges—meaning ones that are difficult with their existing abilities but can be overcome if they work to improve those abilities. In fact, such challenges are exactly like the stretch goals necessary for deliberate practice. Because they’re difficult (but not unachievable), such challenges both help people grow and teach them to believe in their capacity for growth.
Themes
To better understand Maier’s research, Duckworth visited him. Maier explained that stress automatically activates primitive limbic areas in the brain, and then higher-order areas like the prefrontal cortex decide how to respond to this stress. If someone overcomes significant adversity in their youth, their cortex learns to respond to stress by saying, essentially, “I can do this.” But when someone grows up feeling helpless, the cortex learns that it can’t do anything about adversity.
Maier’s research identifies the neurological reasons that some challenges help people grow. His results also support Duckworth’s recommendations for building hope through cognitive and behavioral change. While this might not seem immediately relevant to the reader’s life, its long-term implications are clear: if researchers can understand how the brain learns attitudes like optimism and pessimism, they can design medical interventions to rewire these attitudes.
Themes
Meanwhile, many people never experience adversity at all—especially the kind of high achievers whom Duckworth calls “fragile perfects” because they “know how to succeed but not how to fail.” But not all high achievers are like this. For instance, Duckworth’s student Kayvon Asemani succeeded in high school but struggled in his first two semesters at the University of Pennsylvania. Yet he’s also optimistic and gritty: he refused to change his major and insisted on taking challenging classes instead.
“Fragile perfects” risk either plateauing or crashing. Because they don’t know how to grow from their failures, either they stop pushing themselves to grow at all or they completely fall apart when they encounter difficult challenges. But there’s also a third option: “fragile perfects” can believe in themselves and view the first major setbacks they face as opportunities to develop grit.
Themes
Duckworth summarizes the argument of this chapter: a fixed mindset makes people pessimistic about their ability to overcome adversity, which leads them to avoid challenges. But a growth mindset makes people approach adversity with optimism, which leads them to embrace and learn from challenges. To develop hope, Duckworth argues, people should do three things. First, they should remember that talent and intelligence aren’t fixed because the brain changes and adapts over people’s lives. Second, they should “practice optimistic self-talk.” Highly pessimistic people should try cognitive behavioral therapy. And third, people should seek help from others. For instance, the mathematician Rhonda Hughes succeeded in her male-dominated field because her committed mentors encouraged her to keep trying.
Optimism, hope, and the growth mindset are really three different terms for the same kind of constructive attitude towards challenges. By choosing this attitude, which is backed up by all the available scientific evidence, people set the foundation for the perseverance that is crucial to developing true grit. Duckworth’s advice for fostering hope echoes her advice about developing purpose: people ought to reevaluate their lives from a new perspective, and it’s easier to do this with help from other people. Indeed, this foreshadows Duckworth’s last three chapters, which are about how people can help spread grit to others.
Themes
