Before he could reread Hoff’s last chapter on rejection slips, Bob received notice that he was eligible to be drafted for combat in Vietnam. He had no great desire to go; in fact, he had a great desire not to. So he repurposed himself—quickly—as a graduate student in experimental psychology. Over the next few years, while running rats in mazes, he found time, when he could, to draw. Then, just before earning his doctorate, he had the realization that research psychology wasn’t his calling: “I remember thinking that my defining personality characteristic was something else. I’m the funniest guy you ever met—that’s the way I thought of myself—I’m funny.”
For a while, Bob considered two ways of making humor his career: “I said, okay, I’m going to do stand-up, or I’m going to be a cartoonist.” He threw himself into both with gusto: “All day I would write routines and then, at night, I would draw cartoons.” But over time, one of these two mid-level goals became more attractive than the other: “Stand-up was different back then. There weren’t really comedy clubs. I’d have to go to the Borscht Belt, and I didn’t really want to. . . . I knew my humor was not going to work like I wanted it to for these people.”
So Bob dropped stand-up comedy and devoted his entire energy to cartoons. “After two years of submitting, all I had to show for it were enough New Yorker rejection slips to wallpaper my bathroom.” There were small victories—cartoons sold to other magazines—but by that time Bob’s top-level goal had become a whole lot more specific and ambitious: He didn’t just want to be funny for a living, he wanted to be among the best cartoonists in the world. “The New Yorker was to cartooning what the New York Yankees were to baseball—the Best Team,” Bob explains. “If you could make that team, you too were one of the best.”
The piles of rejection slips suggested to Bob that “try, try again” was not working. He decided to do something different. “I went to the New York Public Library and I looked up all the cartoons back to 1925 that had ever been printed in the New Yorker.” At first, he thought maybe he didn’t draw well enough, but it was plain to see that some very successful New Yorker cartoonists were third-rate draftsmen. Then Bob thought that something might be awry with the length of his captions—too short or too long—but that possibility wasn’t supported, either. Captions were generally brief, but not always, and anyway, Bob’s didn’t seem unusual in that respect. Then Bob thought maybe he was missing the mark with his type of humor. No again: some successful cartoons were whimsical, some satirical, some philosophical, and some just interesting.
The one thing all the cartoons had in common was this: they made the reader think.
And here was another common thread: every cartoonist had a personal style that was distinctively their own. There was no single “best” style. On the contrary, what mattered was that style was, in some very deep and idiosyncratic way, an expression of the individual cartoonist.
Paging through, literally, every cartoon the New Yorker had ever published, Bob knew he could do as well. Or better. “I thought, ‘I can do this, I can do this.’ I had complete confidence.” He knew he could draw cartoons that would make people think, and he knew he could develop his own style: “I worked through various styles. Eventually I did my dot style.” The now-famous dot style of Bob’s cartoons is called stippling, and Bob had originally tried it out back in high school, when he discovered the French impressionist Georges Seurat.
After getting rejected from the New Yorker about two thousand times between 1974 and 1977, Bob sent in the cartoon, below. It was accepted.
Robert Mankoff, the New Yorker, June 20, 1977, The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank.
The next year, he sold thirteen cartoons to the New Yorker, then twenty-five the following year, then twenty-seven. In 1981, Bob received a letter from the magazine asking if he’d consider becoming a contract cartoonist. He said yes.
* * *
In his role as editor and mentor, Bob advises aspiring cartoonists to submit their drawings in batches of ten, “because in cartooning, as in life, nine out of ten things never work out.”
Indeed, giving up on lower-level goals is not only forgivable, it’s sometimes absolutely necessary. You should give up when one lower-level goal can be swapped for another that is more feasible. It also makes sense to switch your path when a different lower-level goal—a different means to the same end—is just more efficient, or more fun, or for whatever reason makes more sense than your original plan.
On any long journey, detours are to be expected.
However, the higher-level the goal, the more it makes sense to be stubborn. Personally, I try not to get too hung up on a particular rejected grant application, academic paper, or failed experiment. The pain of those failures is real, but I don’t dwell on them for long before moving on. In contrast, I don’t give up as easily on mid-level goals, and frankly, I can’t imagine anything that would change my ultimate aim, my life philosophy, as Pete might say. My compass, once I found all the parts and put it together, keeps pointing me in the same direction, week after month after year.
* * *
Long before I conducted the first interviews that put me on the trail of grit, a Stanford psychologist named Catharine Cox was, herself, cataloging the characteristics of high achievers.
In 1926, Cox published her findings, based on the biographical details of 301 exceptionally accomplished historical figures. These eminent individuals included poets, political and religious leaders, scientists, soldiers, philosophers, artists, and musicians. All lived and died in the four centuries prior to Cox’s investigation, and all left behind records of accomplishment worthy of documentation in six popular encyclopedias.
Cox’s initial goal was to estimate how smart each of these individuals were, both relative to one another and also compared to the rest of humanity. In pursuit of those estimates, she combed through the available evidence, searching for signs of intellectual precocity—and from the age and superiority of these accomplishments she reckoned each person’s childhood IQ. The published summary of this study—if you can call a book of more than eight hundred pages a summary—includes a case history for each of Cox’s 301, arranged in order from least to most intelligent.
According to Cox, the very smartest in the bunch was the philosopher John Stuart Mill, who earned an estimated childhood IQ score of 190 by learning Greek at age three, writing a history of Rome at age six, and assisting his father in correcting the proofs of a history of India at age twelve. The least intelligent in Cox’s ranking—whose estimated childhood IQs of 100 to 110 are just a hair above average for humanity—included the founder of modern astronomy, Nicolaus Copernicus; the chemist and physicist Michael Faraday; and the Spanish poet and novelist Miguel de Cervantes. Isaac Newton ranks squarely in the middle, with an IQ of 130—the bare minimum that a child needs in order to qualify for many of today’s gifted and talented programs.
From these IQ estimates, Cox concluded that, as a group, accomplished historical figures are smarter than most of us. No surprise there.
A more unexpected observation was how little IQ mattered in distinguishing the most from the least accomplished. The average childhood IQ of the most eminent geniuses, whom Cox dubbed the First Ten, was 146. The average IQ of the least eminent, dubbed the Last Ten, was 143. The spread was trivial. In other words, the relationship between intelligence and eminence in Cox’s sample was exceedingly slight.
Cox’s First Ten (Most Eminent Geniuses)
Sir Francis Bacon
Napoleon Bonaparte
Edmund Burke
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Martin Luther
John Milton
Isaac Newton
William Pitt
Voltaire
George Washington
Cox’s Last Ten (Least Eminent Geniuses)
Christian K. J. von Bunsen
Thomas Chalmers
Thomas Chatterton
Richard Cobden
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Georges J. Danton
Joseph Haydn
Hugues-Félicité-Robert de Lamennais
Giuseppe Mazzini
Joachim Murat
If intellectual talent wasn’t the determinant of whether a person ascended to the First Ten or was relegated to the Last Ten, then what was? While poring over thousands of pages of biographical data, Cox and her assistant also evaluated sixty-seven different personality traits for a subset of one hundred geniuses. Cox deliberately chose a rainbow of traits—in fact, she covered the full range of what modern psychologists consider to be important—to allow for the fullest possible exploration of the differences that set apart the eminent from the rest of humanity and, further, the First Ten from the Last Ten.
For most of the sixty-seven indicators, Cox found only trivial differences between the eminent and the general population. For instance, eminence had little to do with extroversion, cheerfulness, or sense of humor. And not all the high achievers had earned high marks in school. Rather, what definitively set apart the eminent from the rest of humanity were a cluster of four indicators. Notably, these also distinguished the First Ten from the Last Ten—the super-eminent from the merely eminent. Cox grouped these together and called them “persistence of motive.”
Two indicators could easily be rephrased as passion items for the Grit Scale.
Degree to which he works with distant objects in view (as opposed to living from hand to mouth). Active preparation for later life. Working toward a definite goal.
Tendency not to abandon tasks from mere changeability. Not seeking something fresh because of novelty. Not “looking for a change.”
And the other two could easily be rewritten as perseverance items for the Grit Scale.
Degree of strength of will or perseverance. Quiet determination to stick to a course once decided upon.
Tendency not to abandon tasks in the face of obstacles. Perseverance, tenacity, doggedness.
In her summary comments, Cox concluded that “high but not the highest intelligence, combined with the greatest degree of persistence, will achieve greater eminence than the highest degree of intelligence with somewhat less persistence.”
* * *
However you scored on the Grit Scale, I hope it prompted self-reflection. It’s progress just clarifying your goals, and the extent to which they are—or aren’t—aligned toward a single passion of supreme importance. It’s also progress to better understand how well you’re currently able to persevere in the face of life’s rejection slips.
It’s a start. Let’s continue, in the next chapter, to see how grit can and does change. And, then, in the rest of the book, let’s learn how to accelerate that growth.
* * *
I. If, for example, you scored 4.1, you’re grittier than about 70 percent of the adults in our sample.
Chapter 5
GRIT GROWS
“How much of our grit is in our genes?”
I’m asked some version of this question pretty much anytime I give a talk on grit. The nature-nurture question is a very basic one. We have an intuitive sense that some things about us—like our height—are pretty much determined in the genetic lottery, while other things—like whether we speak English or French—are a result of our upbringing and experience. “You can’t train height” is a popular expression in basketball coaching, and many people who learn about grit want to know if it’s more like height or more like language.
To the question of whether we get grit from our DNA, there is a short answer and a long one. The short answer is “in part.” The long answer is, well, more complicated. In my view, the longer answer is worth our attention. Science has made huge strides in figuring out how genes, experience, and their interplay make us who we are. From what I can tell, the inherent complexity of these scientific facts has led, unfortunately, to their continually being misunderstood.
To begin, I can tell you with complete conviction that every human trait is influenced by both genes and experience.
Consider height. Height is indeed heritable: genetic differences are a big reason why some people are really tall, some really short, and a bunch of people are of varying heights in between.
But it’s also true that the average height of men and women has increased dramatically in just a few generations. For instance, military records show that the average British man was five feet five inches tall about 150 years ago, but today that average is five feet ten inches. Height gains have been even more dramatic in other countries; in the Netherlands, the average man now stands almost six foot one—a gain of more than six inches over the last 150 years. I am reminded of these dramatic generational gains in height whenever I get together with my Dutch collaborators. They bend down solicitously, but it still feels like standing in a forest of redwoods.
It’s unlikely that the gene pool has changed all that dramatically in just a few generations. Instead, the most powerful height boosters have been nutrition, clean air and water, and modern medicine. (Incidentally, generational gains in weight have been even more dramatic, and again, that seems to be the consequence of eating more and moving around less rather than changes in our DNA.) Even within a generation, you can see the influence of environment on height. Children who are provided healthy food in abundance will grow up taller, whereas malnourishment stunts growth.
Likewise, traits like honesty and generosity and, yes, grit, are genetically influenced and, in addition, influenced by experience. Ditto for IQ, extroversion, enjoying the great outdoors, having a sweet tooth, the likelihood that you’ll end up a chain-smoker, your risk of getting skin cancer, and really any other trait you can think of. Nature matters, and so does nurture.
* * *
Talents, in all their varieties, are also genetically influenced. Some of us are born with genes that make it easier to learn to carry a tune, or dunk a basketball, or solve a quadratic equation. But against intuition, talents are not entirely genetic: the rate at which we develop any skill is also, crucially, a function of experience.
For instance, sociologist Dan Chambliss swam competitively in high school but stopped when it seemed clear he wasn’t going to make it as a nationally ranked swimmer.
“I’m small,” he explained, “and my ankles won’t plantar flex.” Come again? “I can’t point my toes. I can only flex them. It’s an anatomical limitation. Which means, basically, at the elite level, I could only swim breaststroke.” After our exchange, I did a little research on plantar flexion. Stretching exercises can improve your range of motion, but the length of certain bones does make a difference in how flexible your feet and ankles are.
Still, the biggest impediment to improving wasn’t anatomy; it was how he was coached: “In retrospect, I look back now and can see I had horribly bad coaches in a couple of crucial places. One of my high school coaches—I had him for four years—literally taught me zero. Nothing. He taught me how to do a breaststroke turn, and he taught me incorrectly.”
What happened when Dan did, finally, experience good coaching, in part from hanging around the national and Olympic coaches he was studying?
“Years later, I got back into the pool, got in shape again, and swam a two-hundred-yard individual medley as fast as I did in high school.”
Again, same story. Not just nature, and not just nurture. Both.
* * *
How do scientists know, with unwavering conviction, that both nature and nurture play a role in determining things like talent and grit? Over the past few decades, researchers have been studying identical and fraternal twins, raised in the same family or raised in different families. Identical twins have all the same DNA, while fraternal twins, on average, only share about half. That fact, and a whole lot of fancy statistics (well, not that fancy—more mundane, really, once a good teacher explains them to you), allows researchers to infer, from how similar the twins grow up to be, the heritability of a trait.
Very recently, researchers in London let me know they’d administered the G
rit Scale to more than two thousand pairs of teenage twins living in the United Kingdom. This study estimated the heritability of the perseverance subscale to be 37 percent and the passion subscale to be 20 percent. These estimates are on par for heritability estimates for other personality traits, and in the simplest terms, this means that some of the variation in grit in the population can be attributed to genetic factors, and the rest can be attributed to experience.
I hasten to add that there isn’t just one gene that explains the heritability of grit. On the contrary, dozens of research studies have shown that almost all human traits are polygenic, meaning that traits are influenced by more than one gene. Many more, in fact. Height, for example, is influenced by, at last count, at least 697 different genes. And some of the genes that influence height influence other traits as well. In total, the human genome contains as many as twenty-five thousand different genes, and they tend to interact with one another and with environmental influences in complicated, still poorly understood, ways.
In sum, what have we learned? First: grit, talent, and all other psychological traits relevant to success in life are influenced by genes and also by experience. Second: there’s no single gene for grit, or indeed any other psychological trait.
* * *
I’d like to make a third, important point: heritability estimates explain why people differ from the average, but they say nothing about the average itself.
While the heritability of height says something about variability—why in a given population some people are taller and some shorter—it says nothing about how average height has changed. This is important because it provides evidence that the environment we grow up in really does matter, and it matters a lot.
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