I read a lot, but I forget even more. Frustrated with the forgetting, I began to save my favorite readings into Evernote: Blog posts. Book excerpts. Forum threads. Poems. But once inside Evernote, all this wisdom was lost in the crowd, rarely to be discovered again. I didn’t have a reliable way to remind myself of what to review and when. Didn’t allow for serendipity or habit.
So I created a Personal Bible.
It’s a Microsoft Word document of my favorite text from over the years. Passages and sentences and excerpts that I want to read and re-read and absorb and marinate in. Whenever I have an aha! moment with text, I add it to my collection. From David Brooks columns to Malcolm Gladwell passages, from bucket lists to the Beatitudes, from writing advice to religious anecdotes. I try to read from it every day. Sometimes just a few sentences.
If we use the computer as an analogy, this document helps me keep life’s important lessons loaded onto my mind’s RAM. Lying just beneath conscious thought, available for quick and ready access.
I load the Word doc onto my Kindle and update it monthly. You may find some gems that you like. Better yet, I hope you’re inspired to create your own. If you do, please share it with me. I’d love to see what you curate for yourself.
Sometimes you read an article and wish you’d read it much earlier. Kinda like when I visited Japan in 2012 and regretted immediately that it took 28 years to visit.
This is one of those instances. Paul Saffo’s essay is a classic with great examples and insights. Read the original at Harvard Business Review. Below I rephrase his 6 rules to aid my own understanding (a practice that I find helpful).
Rule 1: Don’t predict AN outcome; predict a RANGE of likely outcomes
A good boundary is one made up of elements lying on the ragged edge of plausibility. They are outcomes that might conceivably happen but make one uncomfortable even to contemplate.
Rule 2: Visualize the S Curve – specifically, when you think growth will take off, and when it will slow or come to an end
Consider Columbus’s 1492 voyage. His discovery falls at the inflection point of Western exploration. Columbus was not the first fifteenth-century explorer to go to the New World—he was the first to make it back
Rule 3: Embrace the strange, the outliers. Very often that’s the future
The first Grand Challenge, which offered a $1 million prize, was held in March 2004. Most of the robots died in sight of the starting line, and only one robot got more than seven miles into the course. The Challenge’s ambitious goal looked as remote as the summit of Everest. But just 19 months later, at the second Grand Challenge, five robots completed the course.
Rule 4: Strong opinions, weakly held
In forecasting, as in navigation, lots of interlocking weak information is vastly more trustworthy than a point or two of strong information […] once researchers have gone through the long process of developing a beautiful hypothesis, they have a tendency to ignore any evidence that contradicts their conclusion.
Rule 5: Study the past…then go further
The recent past is rarely a reliable indicator of the future—if it were, one could successfully predict the next 12 months of the Dow or Nasdaq by laying a ruler along the past 12 months and extending the line forward. But the Dow doesn’t behave that way, and neither does any other trend. You must look for the turns, not the straightaways, and thus you must peer far enough into the past to identify patterns.
Rule 6: Forecasts are a tool to be used sparingly and strategically
But the Berlin Wall came crashing down in the fall of 1989, and with it crumbled the certainty of a forecast rooted in the assumption of a world dominated by two superpowers. A comfortably narrow cone dilated to 180 degrees, and at that moment the wise forecaster would have refrained from jumping to conclusions and instead would have quietly looked for indicators of what would emerge from the geopolitical rubble
If you like to think about and study the future, a quick plug for Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock [Amazon]. Published in 1970, its specific conclusions are dated but the questions that he asks and the methods that he uses are not.
Behavioral psychology concepts tend to explode onto the scene like Billboard #1 songs. And then they’re discarded just as quickly. Only a few have staying power: Mikhail C’s description of flow and why it’s so good to get lost in your work. Carol Dweck’s concept of a growth mindset and the value of believing that failure isn’t a permanent condition.
To those two (and some others), I would add Angela Duckworth’s famous grit study. Like all psychology findings that stick around, it has a catchy keyword and it reveals a truth about human behavior that is both intuitive and surprising. Whether you’re gritty or not, you want more of it, and you especially want your kids to have it.
So I finally read the original research paper because I’m a nerd who is obsessed with habits, and I believe grit can be a habit.
The brief summary: “don’t give up and you’ll eventually succeed.” But there’s a lot more to the study and its findings. As academic research papers go, it was a fun one to read. I wanted to share some of the nuances and insights with you.
So what is grit?
Grit is “perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Grit entails working strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress”
Winners always finish
Many people think that grit is about working hard and not quitting. But grit is also about FOLLOWING THROUGH on what you start. Gritty people commit to one pursuit, to the exclusion of others. They finish what they begin. That’s what makes them winners.
Follow-through is “evidence of purposeful continuous commitment to certain types of activities versus sporadic efforts in diverse areas”
“whereas the importance of working harder is easily apprehended, the importance of working longer without switching objectives may be less perceptible […] eg, a prodigy who practices intensively yet moves from piano to saxophone to voice will likely be surpassed by an equally gifted but grittier child”
The concept of follow through seems to be ignored when we talk about grit.
More notes and excerpts
if you’re conscientious, chances are you’re also gritty
grit is not correlated with general intelligence. in fact there is some evidence that it’s inversely correlated
high achievers [are] triply blessed by “ability combined with zeal and with capacity for hard labour”
forget 10 years of practice, 20 is even better: “over 10 years of daily deliberate practice set apart expert performers from less proficient peers and that 20 years of dedicated practice was an even more reliable predictor of world-class achievement”
grit increases with age and level of education (graduate students had the most grit…)
grit isn’t everything, especially when young. the authors specifically state, “a strong desire for novelty and a low threshold for frustration may be adaptive earlier in life: Moving on from dead-end pursuits is essential to the discovery of more promising paths”
but grit predicted things like: drop out rates during Westpoint’s summer Beast Barracks; performance at the National Spelling Bee; GPAs at the top universities; graduation rates at inner city schools
and just because it’s interesting:
“Participants (at the National Spelling Bee Finals) studied for the spelling bee an average of 2.25 hours per day on weekends and 1.34 hours per day on weekdays”
Angela gives a TED talk, embedded below. It’s interesting, although it’s not a summary of her research:
I’m reminded of Rule 50 from The Little Book of Talent: “Build grit, love the grind”
I’m reminded of David Brooks who says that love is both transcendent magic and a gritty commitment.
Paul Tough, in a podcast (it might have been an episode of This American Life), says that the ideal stage to start teaching grit is adolescence, when people first become “meta cognitive”. And to build grit, a close attachment to a parental figure is important (I suppose for the sense of safety and security?).
Thanks for reading! What psych studies / research papers are your favorites?
Jiro and Rene run Michelin-starred restaurants and are among the most respected chefs in the world. For twelve minutes they drink tea and talk about mastery. I wanted to share parts of their conversation. You can tell both chefs have built great habits of hard work and good attitude and pushing, always pushing.
Jiro: If you start saying “I don’t like this” or “this isn’t the job for me” you won’t become an expert in anything
Rene: When did you feel like you were finally a master?
Jiro: 50.
Rene: Did [you] ever want to stop?
Jiro: No. Never. I never considered that question. The only question was, “how can I get better?”
Rene: What makes you happiest?
Jiro: I can work. That’s the first and most important thing. I can work. After that, it’s especially great if you enjoy what you do.
Jiro: If you don’t learn to love your work and remind your brain to make new steps every day, there can be no progress.
Jiro: [on Rene] You are stubborn, right? If you aren’t a strong willed person, you can’t get to this. And you are sensitive, too. Both have to be there to become like this.
Jiro: The people who are truly at the top won’t say they want to retire after they are 70 or 80. They just fasten their belts after that.
Two masters discussing what they do best. A highly recommended video. 12 minutes long. Simply filmed, well executed.
I probably review this talk by mathematician Richard Hamming once a month if not more often. Here are my favorite excerpts:
Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime.
If you do not work on an important problem, it’s unlikely you’ll do important work. Great scientists have thought through, in a careful way, a number of important problems in their field, and they keep an eye on wondering how to attack them.
…there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing – not much, but enough that they miss fame.
I strongly prefer to work on my own and without noise or bother from outside. But it’s a valuable reminder: socializing (both yourself and your work) can lead to greater career success. As with all things, the difficulty probably lies in balancing between the two poles.
But if you want to be a great scientist you’re going to have to put up with stress. You can lead a nice life; you can be a nice guy or you can be a great scientist.
The habits that emerge: Allow time for deep thinking. Know the important problems in your field. Keep the door open. Adapt to stress.
