Range, page 15
It is just a small step. When Defense Secretary Ash Carter visited West Point in 2016 for student meetings, he was flooded with concerns from very gritty cadets about rigid career paths that did not allow them to adjust to their own development. Carter had pledged to drastically reshape the Army’s “industrial era” personnel management from the strict “up-or-out” model to one that allows officers a shot to improve their own match quality as they grow.
When they were high school graduates, with few skills and little exposure to a world of career options, West Point cadets might easily have answered “Not like me at all” to the Grit Scale statement “I often set a goal but later choose to pursue a different one.” A few years later, with more knowledge of their skills and preferences, choosing to pursue a different goal was no longer the gritless route; it was the smart one.
* * *
• • •
Intuitively, grit research appeals to me. In the nonscientific, colloquial use of the word, I tend to think I have a lot of it. After running track and playing football, basketball, and baseball at a large public high school—and I’m only five foot six—I walked on to a Division I track team in college as an 800-meter runner.
I was not close to the worst 800 runner on my college team freshman year; I was the worst, by a landslide. I was allowed to keep practicing with the team because as long as you are not chosen for travel, it doesn’t cost anybody anything, not even the pair of shoes the recruits got. When the traveling team went to South Carolina to train over spring break, I stayed on the eerily quiet campus rather than going home, to train without distraction. I stuck with it for two miserable years of vomit-inducing workouts and ego-bruising races, while blue-chip recruits quit and were replaced by others. There were plenty of days (and weeks, and an entire month or three) when I felt like I should probably quit. But I was learning about the kind of training that worked for me, and I was improving. In my senior season, I cracked the university’s all-time top ten list indoors, was twice All-East, and part of a relay that set the university record. The only other guy in my class who held a university record was my gritty roommate, the other walk-on. Nearly the entire recruited class from our year quit. Hilariously, I was awarded the Gustave A. Jaeger Memorial Prize for the athlete who “achieved significant athletic success in the face of unusual challenge and difficulty”—my “unusual challenge and difficulty” just being that I epically stunk at first. After the presentation, the head coach, with whom I’d had little direct conversation as a walk-on, shared that he had felt sorry for me watching workouts my freshman year.
There’s nothing particularly special about that story—it exists on every team. But I think it is indicative of my approach to work. Nonetheless, I scored at the 50th percentile on the Grit Scale compared to American adults at large. I racked up points for assessing myself as a very hard worker who is not discouraged by setbacks, but I missed a lot of points for confessing that “my interests change from year to year,” and, like so many West Point graduates, I sometimes “set a goal but later choose to pursue a different one.” When I was seventeen and positive that I was going to go to the U.S. Air Force Academy to become a pilot and then an astronaut, I probably would have self-assessed at the very top of the Grit Scale. I got all the way to Chicago-area congressman Sidney Yates agreeing to provide a nomination.
But I never did any of that. Instead, at the last minute I changed my mind and went elsewhere to study political science. I took a single poli-sci class, and ended up majoring in Earth and environmental sciences and minoring in astronomy, certain I would become a scientist. I worked in labs during and after college and realized that I was not the type of person who wanted to spend my entire life learning one or two things new to the world, but rather the type who wanted constantly to learn things new to me and share them. I transitioned from science to journalism; my first job was as a midnight-shift street reporter in New York City. (Nothing happy that’s going in the New York Daily News happens between midnight and 10 a.m.) Growing self-knowledge kept changing my goals and interests until I landed in a career the very lifeblood of which is investigating broad interests. When I later worked at Sports Illustrated, determined students would ask me whether it was better to study journalism or English to work at SI. I told them I had no clue, but that a statistics or biology course never hurt anyone.
I don’t think I have become less passionate or resilient over time, nor do I think that all those former West Point cadets who left the Army lost the drive that got them there in the first place. It makes sense to me that grit would be powerfully predictive for cadets trying to get through their rigorous orientation, or for a sample of schoolchildren or spelling bee contestants. Very young people often have their goals set for them, or at least have a limited menu to choose from, and pursuing them with passion and resilience is the main challenge. The same goes for 800 runners. One of the compelling aspects of sports goals is how straightforward and easily measurable they are. On the final weekend of the 2018 Winter Olympics, Sasha Cohen, a 2006 silver medalist figure skater, wrote an advice column to retiring athletes. “Olympic athletes need to understand that the rules for life are different from the rules for sports,” she wrote. “Yes, striving to accomplish a single overarching goal every day means you have grit, determination and resilience. But the ability to pull yourself together mentally and physically in competition is different from the new challenges that await you. So after you retire, travel, write a poem, try to start your own business, stay out a little too late, devote time to something that doesn’t have a clear end goal.” In the wider world of work, finding a goal with high match quality in the first place is the greater challenge, and persistence for the sake of persistence can get in the way.
A recent international Gallup survey of more than two hundred thousand workers in 150 countries reported that 85 percent were either “not engaged” with their work or “actively disengaged.” In that condition, according to Seth Godin, quitting takes a lot more guts than continuing to be carried along like debris on an ocean wave. The trouble, Godin noted, is that humans are bedeviled by the “sunk cost fallacy.” Having invested time or money in something, we are loath to leave it, because that would mean we had wasted our time or money, even though it is already gone. Writer, psychology PhD, and professional poker player Maria Konnikova explained in her book The Confidence Game how the sunk cost mindset is so deeply entrenched that conmen know to begin by asking their marks for several small favors or investments before progressing to large asks. Once a mark has invested energy or money, rather than walking away from sunk costs he will continue investing, more than he ever wanted to, even as, to any rational observer, disaster becomes imminent. “The more we have invested and even lost,” Konnikova wrote, “the longer we will persist in insisting it will all work out.”
Steven Naifeh spent a decade researching Van Gogh’s life, so I asked him to fill out the grit questionnaire on the painter’s behalf. Van Gogh’s work ethic stretched belief. He was intoxicated with an image his father had used in a sermon of the sower, who must put in work now so that he can reap later. “Think of all the fields that were turned down by shortsighted people,” Dorus van Gogh preached. He invoked that image, Naifeh and Smith wrote, as “a paragon of persistence in the face of adversity.” At every job he had, Vincent was convinced that if he outworked everyone around him, he would succeed. But then he would fail. His interests whipsawed constantly. Even once he’d set himself on being an artist, he would devote all his energy to one style or medium only to completely disavow it soon thereafter. Naifeh and Smith used an elegant phrase to describe Van Gogh’s pliable passions: his “altered gospel.” The Grit Scale statement “I have been obsessed with a certain idea or project for a short time but later lost interest” is Van Gogh in a nutshell, at least up until the final few years of his life when he settled on his unique style and creatively erupted. Van Gogh was an example of match quality optimization, Robert Miller’s multi-armed bandit process come to life. He tested options with maniacal intensity and got the maximum information signal about his fit as quickly as possible, and then moved to something else and repeated, until he had zigzagged his way to a place no one else had ever been, and where he alone excelled. Van Gogh’s Grit Scale score, according to Naifeh’s assessment, was flush with hard work but low on sticking with every goal or project. He landed in the 40th percentile.
* * *
• • •
Beginning in 2017, to my great honor, I was invited to work with veterans to review applications for the Pat Tillman Foundation, the organization I had begun speaking to in 2015 and that provides scholarships to veterans, active-duty military, and military spouses. A lot of applications come from ambitious West Point alumni.
The essays were fascinating and inspiring. Nearly every single one spoke of some formative lesson learned in Afghanistan, or on a domestic hurricane rescue team, or while translating languages under pressure, or as a spouse moving again and again and arranging services for other military spouses, or even while becoming increasingly frustrated with some aspect of military conflict or bureaucratic dysfunction. The crux was that some unanticipated experience had led to an unexpected new goal or the discovery of an unexplored talent.
Applicants who receive funding join the community of Tillman Scholars, the group of high achievers whose concern about changing directions later than their peers helped inspire this book. Discussing late specialization was practically a catharsis for their anxiety about having taken time to do and learn things they were grateful to have done and learned.
No one in their right mind would argue that passion and perseverance are unimportant, or that a bad day is a cue to quit. But the idea that a change of interest, or a recalibration of focus, is an imperfection and competitive disadvantage leads to a simple, one-size-fits-all Tiger story: pick and stick, as soon as possible. Responding to lived experience with a change of direction, like Van Gogh did habitually, like West Point graduates have been doing since the dawn of the knowledge economy, is less tidy but no less important. It involves a particular behavior that improves your chances of finding the best match, but that at first blush sounds like a terrible life strategy: short-term planning.
CHAPTER 7
Flirting with Your Possible Selves
FRANCES HESSELBEIN GREW UP in the mountains of western Pennsylvania, among families drawn by steel mills and coal mines. “In Johnstown, 5:30 means 5:30,” she often says. So if the executives, military officers, and legislators who line up outside the door of her Manhattan office seeking leadership advice want their full hour, they’d better be on time. Even with her hundredth birthday behind her, she is in the office every weekday with more work than she can finish. Hesselbein is fond of telling visitors that she has had four professional positions, all president or CEO, and never applied for one. In fact, she attempted to turn down three of them. When she guessed where life would take her, she was pretty much always wrong.
In high school, she dreamed of a bookish life as a playwright. After graduation, she enrolled in the University of Pittsburgh’s Junior College, “Junior Pitt.” She loved experimenting with different classes, but her father fell ill during her first year. Hesselbein was seventeen, the oldest of three, stroking her father’s cheek in the hospital when he passed away. She kissed him on the forehead and promised to take care of the family. She finished the semester, and then dropped out to work as an adman’s assistant at the Penn Traffic Company department store.
Soon she got married, and had a son just in time for her husband, John, to report to the Navy during World War II. John served as a combat aircrew photographer, and upon return set up a studio, doing everything from high school portraits to documentary films. Hesselbein had a protean job she called “helping John.” When a customer wanted a photo of a dog to look like a painting, she grabbed oil paints and colored it, voilà.
Hesselbein adored Johnstown’s rich diversity, but it afforded some ugly lessons. As part of the newly formed Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission, John responded to acts of discrimination in town, like a barbershop that would not cut black customers’ hair. “I don’t have the right tools,” the barber complained. John’s response: “Then you will have to buy the right tools.” When John confronted a teacher who kicked two black children off a playground, the teacher called him a “traitor.” Hesselbein decided then that a community that valued inclusiveness should answer “yes” to the question, “When they look at us, can they find themselves?”
When Hesselbein was thirty-four, a prominent woman in the community stopped by her home and asked her to lead Girl Scout Troop 17 as a volunteer. The previous leader had left to become a missionary in India, and other neighbors had turned down the request. So did Hesselbein, three times. She had an eight-year-old boy, and professed to know nothing about little girls. Finally, the woman said that the group of thirty ten-year-old girls from modest families who met in a church basement would just have to be disbanded. Hesselbein agreed to stand in for six weeks, until a real leader was found.
In preparation, she read up on the Girl Scouts. She learned that the organization was founded eight years before women could vote in the United States, and that the founder had reminded girls that they could be “a doctor, a lawyer, an aviatrix, or a hot-air balloonist.” Hesselbein thought back to second grade, when she announced that she wanted to be a pilot and her classmates laughed. So she showed up in the church basement to start her six weeks. She ended up staying with Troop 17 for eight years, until they graduated high school.
Afterward, Hesselbein kept picking up Girl Scout roles she neither sought nor intended to keep. She was in her midforties when she left the country for the first time, for an international Girl Scout meeting in Greece. More trips followed—India, Thailand, Kenya. Hesselbein realized she loved volunteering.
She was asked to chair the local United Way campaign at a time when that role was as foreign for women as aviatrix had been. It was a volunteer job, so she figured she had nothing to lose. But when she appointed as her vice chairman the president of the local United Steelworkers of America, suddenly the United Way president decided that wasn’t such a good idea and he had better check with Bethlehem Steel, a major supporter. Hesselbein stood fast, and managed to get both the company and the union behind her. That year, little Johnstown, Pennsylvania, had the highest per capita giving of any United Way campaign in the country. Of course, it was a temp role as far as Hesselbein was concerned, so the following year she handed it off.
In 1970, a trio of Johnstown business leaders who supported the Girl Scouts invited Hesselbein to lunch. They told her that they had chosen a new executive director of the local Girl Scout council. The previous one had left and the council was in serious financial trouble.
“How wonderful, who is it?” she asked.
“You,” they replied.
“I would never take a professional job,” she told them. “I am a volunteer.”
One of the businessmen was on the United Way board, and he said that if Hesselbein did not take the job and straighten out the finances, the Girl Scouts would lose the United Way partnership. She agreed to fill in for six months only, and then to step aside for an experienced professional. At fifty-four, she began what she calls her first professional job. She devoured management books, and a month in realized that the work fit her. She stayed for four years.
But even as her work was going well, the backdrop was dire. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, society changed dramatically. The Girl Scouts did not. Girls were preparing for college and careers in unprecedented numbers, and they needed information on thorny topics like sex and drugs. The organization was in existential crisis. Membership fell off a cliff. The CEO position went vacant for nearly an entire year. In 1976, the search committee invited Hesselbein to New York City for an interview. Previous Girl Scout CEOs had staggering leadership credentials. Captain Dorothy Stratton had been a psychology professor, university dean, founding director of the U.S. Coast Guard Women’s Reserve, and the first personnel director at the International Monetary Fund. The most recent chief executive was Dr. Cecily Cannan Selby, who at sixteen entered Radcliffe College and later used her physical biology PhD from MIT to apply wartime technology to the study of cells. Selby’s national leadership positions spanned industry and education. Hesselbein, meanwhile, had been the head of a local Girl Scout council, one of 335 around the country. She planned to spend her life in Pennsylvania, so she politely turned down the interview.
But John accepted it. He said that she could decline the job but he would drive her there to do it in person. Since she was not interested in the job, she felt at ease when the committee asked her what she would do as hypothetical CEO. Hesselbein described the total transformation of an organization steeped in tradition: activities reworked to stay relevant—heavy on math, science, and technology; the hierarchical leadership structure dismantled in favor of “circular management.” Rather than rungs on a ladder, staff at all levels would be beads on concentric bracelets, with multiple contacts who could advance ideas from local councils toward the national decision makers at the center. Finally, the organization would be inclusive: when girls of all backgrounds looked at Girl Scouts, they would have to find themselves.
