The Winning Edge: Grit, Not Frenzy

[Daniel E.]

Are You a Guitar Player or Club Owner?
by Cal Newport, PhD, Study Hacks blog

A Bluegrass Slog
I recently began taking bluegrass guitar lessons.

It hasn?t been easy.

The style is precise, which means that it requires an abundance of repetitious practicing. A typical session might proceed as follows:

1. Listen to the same 10 - 30 second stretch of a song again and again, deconstructing the lead painfully, note by note, using your ear and a lot of trial and error.
2. Play this section of the lead again and again for another 30 minutes to an hour ? rarely getting through more than a few phrases without a mistake that forces you to start over.

Repeat this enough times, with an increasingly complicated progression of songs, and a weekly check-in with a teacher to correct subtle mistakes in your technique, and you?ll eventually be able to make your way through some basic bluegrass tunes without embarrassing yourself. In other words, the path to becoming even a passable amateur is long and demanding.

I?m sharing these observations because I think they provide an interesting metaphor for the task of building a remarkable life...

Grit vs. Frenzy
As I described above, learning to play bluegrass guitar is not a lot of fun. This being said, however, it?s also not that demanding on your life: its daily time requirements are reasonable and it generates no stress. Furthermore, the effort will eventually provide big rewards, such as the experience of passing around the lead with a group of talented bluegrass musicians.

Compare this goal with the related pursuit of running the music club where such musicians play. Unlike learning the guitar, running a club is infamously demanding: It requires long, exhausting hours, and injects unhealthy amounts of stress into your life. Furthermore, the rewards don?t compare to those experienced by the admired musicians entrancing the crowd.

Here?s the important point: most people are more comfortable becoming a club owner, even though the guitar player enjoys less stress and more rewards.

I don?t mean this in the literal sense that most people want to start music clubs. Instead, I?m referring to the idea that most people are more comfortable with the club owner-style work frenzies than they are with the guitar player-style grit.

For example, to draw an analogy to college?
Most students are more comfortable trying to survive lots of classes and activities than they are investing the deep concentration ? spent with a pint in a quiet bar or a notebook under a tree ? required to become an A* student in a single subject.

This holds true even though the latter path is less stressful, more engaging, and opens up more exciting post-grad opportunities.

And, in the workplace?
Most employees are more comfortable getting ahead by taking on more work than their peers and reducing their e-mail response time to the single digits than they are mastering, bit by bit, a skill that?s incredibly valuable in their field.

This holds true even though the latter is the key to an enjoyable career, and the former can provide only standard-paced promotions (and ulcers).

The Guitar Player Paradox
I?m intrigued by this observation that we prefer stress over hard focus. My current hypothesis proposes two explanations:

First, the club owner strategy is more predictable ? you can?t go wrong working harder, even if its rewards are distilled.

Second, and perhaps more important, hard focus, at first, can be incredibly uncomfortable ? so much so that we?d rather accept 12 hour days of regular work than spend 2 hours on intense concentration. The good news is that, as Haruki Murakami taught us, hard focus is a practiced skill. If you improve this ability enough, the guitar player path might eventually seem less onerous.

I plan on exploring this paradox in more detail in the near future, as I wonder if it might hold the key to jump-starting a remarkable life. In the mean time, you should ask yourself a simple question:

Who are you trying to become, the guitar player or the club owner?

Cal Newport, PhD is the author of How to Become a Straight-A Student and How to Win at College.

 

[Daniel E.]

Re: Are You a Guitar Player or Club Owner? (grit vs. frenzy)

The Winning Edge
Psychology Today Magazine
By Peter Doskoch
November 2005

Passion and perseverance may be more important to success than mere talent. In a world of instant gratification, grit may yield the biggest payoff of all.

In the summer of 1994, in the tallest of Princeton University's ivory towers, Andrew Wiles was completing one of the most extraordinary odysseys in the history of math. For more than three decades, Wiles had been obsessed with Fermat's Last Theorem, a seemingly simple problem that had stumped mathematicians for 350 years. French mathematician Pierre de Fermat had noted that although there are plenty of solutions to the equation X2 + Y2 = Z2 (for example, 32 + 42 = 52), there is no corresponding solution if the numbers are cubed instead of squared. In fact, Fermat scribbled in the margin of a book that he had "truly marvelous" proof that the equation Xn + Yn = Zn has no solution if n is any number greater than 2. Unfortunately, he never put his proof on paper.

Wiles was 10 years old when he encountered the theorem. "It looked so simple, and yet all the great mathematicians in history couldn't solve it. I knew from that moment that I had to." When classmates were flocking to rock concerts, he was studying how geniuses of prior eras approached the problem. He abandoned the quest after college in order to focus on his budding academic career, but his obsession was rekindled in 1986, when a fellow mathematician showed that proving a certain mathematical hypothesis—this one unsolved for a mere 30 years—would also prove Fermat's theorem. He set aside all but the few classes he was teaching—and revealed his quest to no one but his wife. To disguise his single-mindedness, he rationed the publication of previously completed work.

Despite long hours of focus—his only source of relaxation was playing with his two young children—the next few years produced little concrete progress. "I wasn't going to give up. It was just a question of which method would work," says Wiles. In 1993, after seven straight years of intense work—more than 15,000 hours—Wiles stepped up to the podium at a conference in England and, over the course of three lectures, presented his completed proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.

A media frenzy followed. The shy mathematician found himself named one of People magazine's 25 Most Intriguing People of the Year, alongside Oprah and Princess Diana. But a handful of peer reviewers poring over the 200-page proof found several small errors. Wiles set to work addressing them. After a full year of frustrating struggle, Wiles had the insight that allowed him to fix them.

Wiles' intellect is inarguably impressive; one of his colleagues told The New York Times that only 1 in 1,000 professional mathematicians were capable of understanding Wiles' work. However, the Princeton professor himself attributes his accomplishment not to his brains but to his persistence. "For me, it was the main thing," he says.

It is likely that somewhere, at this very moment, a parent or coach is declaring to a discouraged child that "quitters never win." But perseverance has come to seem like quaint lip service against the tide of interest in talent and aptitude, flashier gifts that nature, or genes, seem to inarguably confer.

And yet grit may turn out to be at least as good a gauge of future success as talent itself. In a series of provocative new studies at the University of Pennsylvania, researchers find that the gritty are more likely to achieve success in school, work and other pursuits—perhaps because their passion and commitment help them endure the inevitable setbacks that occur in any long-term undertaking. In other words, it's not just talent that matters but also character. "Unless you're a genius, I don't think that you can ever do better than your competitors without a quality like grit," says Martin E. P. Seligman, director of the university's Positive Psychology Center.

Indeed, experts often speak of the "10-year rule"—that it takes at least a decade of hard work or practice to become highly successful in most endeavors, from managing a hardware store to writing sitcoms—and the ability to persist in the face of obstacles is almost always an essential ingredient in major achievements. The good news: Perhaps even more than talent, grit can be cultivated and strengthened.

How Much Does Talent Count?

"Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up," opined Thomas Edison, a man almost as famous for lauding perspiration as he is for inventing the lightbulb. If effort is the bedrock of success, what role do intelligence and other abilities play? "IQ counts for different amounts depending on the task and situation," emphasizes intelligence expert Robert Sternberg, dean of arts and sciences at Tufts University.

Many large-scale analyses, however, suggest that a mere 25 percent of the differences between individuals in job performance—and a third of the difference in grade point average—can be attributed to IQ (personality factors, creativity and luck are said to contribute to the other 75 percent). Angela Duckworth, a graduate student at Penn who, together with Seligman, has conducted several key studies on grit, argues that the precise number isn't as important as knowing that intelligence accounts for only a fraction of success.

If 25 percent seems surprisingly low, that's partly because the hard work and determination that go into accomplishing Something Important are overshadowed by those rare but delightful lightning strikes of inspiration, mythologized as the visit of the Muse. "Unfortunately, no one comes in my window and whispers poems to me," laments David Baker, director of creative writing at Denison University and author of seven books of poetry, including Midwest Eclogue. "Poets work hard. I may work on a single poem for weeks or months and write 60 or 70 drafts—only to decide that draft 22 was the good one."

Related articles:
Got Grit? Start with Mindset
http://forum.psychlinks.ca/positive...nough-not-smart-enough-not-pretty-enough.html