Exactly how do life experiences change personality?
One reason we change is that we learn something we simply didn’t know before. For instance, we might learn through trial and error that repeatedly swapping out one career ambition for another is unfulfilling. That’s certainly what happened to me in my twenties. After running a nonprofit, then pursuing neuroscience research, then management consulting, then teaching, I learned that being a “promising beginner” is fun, but being an actual expert is infinitely more gratifying. I also learned that years of hard work are often mistaken for innate talent, and that passion is as necessary as perseverance to world-class excellence.
Likewise, we learn, as novelist John Irving did, that “to do anything really well, you have to overextend yourself,” to appreciate that, “in doing something over and over again, something that was never natural becomes almost second nature,” and finally, that the capacity to do work that diligently “doesn’t come overnight.”
Other than insights about the human condition, what else is there that changes with age?
What changes, I think, are our circumstances. As we grow older, we’re thrust into new situations. We get our first job. We may get married. Our parents get older, and we find ourselves their caretakers. Often, these new situations call on us to act differently than we used to. And, because there’s no species on the planet more adaptable than ours, we change. We rise to the occasion.
In other words, we change when we need to. Necessity is the mother of adaptation.
Here’s a trivial example. Somehow, my youngest daughter, Lucy, reached the age of three without learning to use the potty. My husband and I had done our best to bribe, cajole, and trick her into leaving diapers behind. We’d read all the books about all the right things to do, and we’d tried to do all those things—or at least we tried as energetically as is possible for working parents with other things on their to-do lists. To no avail. Lucy’s will proved stronger than ours.
Soon after her third birthday, Lucy changed preschool classrooms: from the toddler classroom, where almost all the children were still in diapers, to the “big kid” classroom, which didn’t even have a changing table. The first day I dropped her off in the new room, her eyes widened to saucers, scanning this new environment—a little bit afraid, I think, and more likely than not wishing she could stay in her old room, where she’d grown comfortable.
I’ll never forget picking Lucy up that afternoon. She smiled at me proudly and announced she’d used the potty. And then, in so many words, she told me she was done with diapers. And she was. Potty training happened in a single moment in time. How? Because when a child lines up for the potty with all the other children and sees that she’s expected to take her turn, she does exactly that. She learns to do what she needs to do.
Bernie Noe, the headmaster of the Lakeside School in Seattle, recently shared the following story about his own daughter. It illustrates the maturity principle to a T. Noe’s family lives on campus, and as a teenager, his daughter was late to school almost every day. One summer, his daughter got a job folding clothes at the local American Eagle. On her first day, the store manager said, “Oh, by the way, the first time you’re late, you’re fired.” She was stunned. No second chances? All her life, there’d been patience, understanding, and second chances.
So then what happened?
“It was amazing,” Noe remembered. “Quite literally, it was the most immediate behavior change I’ve ever seen her make.” Suddenly, his daughter was setting two alarms to make sure she was on time, or early, to a job where being late was simply not tolerated. As a headmaster tasked with shepherding young people along toward maturity, Noe considers his power to do so somewhat limited. “If you’re a business, you don’t care whether a kid thinks they’re special. What you care about is ‘Can you deliver? If you can’t deliver, hey, we don’t have any use for you.’?”
Lectures don’t have half the effect of consequences.
What the maturity principle comes down to, I think, is this. Over time, we learn life lessons we don’t forget, and we adapt in response to the growing demands of our circumstances. Eventually, new ways of thinking and acting become habitual. There comes a day when we can hardly remember our immature former selves. We’ve adapted, those adaptations have become durable, and, finally, our identity—the sort of person we see ourselves to be—has evolved. We’ve matured.
Taken together, the data I’ve collected on grit and age are consistent with two different stories. One story says that our grit changes as a function of the cultural era in which we grow up. The other story says that we get grittier as we get older. Both could be true, and I have a suspicion that both are, at least to an extent. Either way, this snapshot reveals that grit is not entirely fixed. Like every aspect of your psychological character, grit is more plastic than you might think.
* * *
If grit can grow, how does that happen?
I get emails and letters almost every day from people who wish they had more grit. They lament that they never stuck with anything in order to get really good at it. They feel they’ve squandered their talents. They desperately want a long-term goal, and they want to pursue that goal with passion and perseverance.
But they don’t know where to begin.
A good place to start is to understand where you are today. If you’re not as gritty as you want to be, ask yourself why.
The most obvious answer people come up with goes something like this: “I guess I’m just lazy.”
Here’s another: “I’m just a flake.”
Or: “I’m congenitally incapable of sticking with things.”
All of these answers, I think, are wrong.
In fact, when people drop out of things, they do so for a reason. Actually, they do so for different reasons. Any of the following four thoughts might go through your head right before you quit what you’re doing:
“I’m bored.”
“The effort isn’t worth it.”
“This isn’t important to me.”
“I can’t do this, so I might as well give up.”
There’s nothing wrong—morally or otherwise—with thoughts like these. As I tried to show in this chapter, paragons of grit quit goals, too. But the higher the level of the goal in question, the more stubborn they are about seeing it through. Most important, paragons of grit don’t swap compasses: when it comes to the one, singularly important aim that guides almost everything else they do, the very gritty tend not to utter the statements above.
* * *
A lot of what I’ve learned about how grit grows comes from interviewing men and women who epitomize the qualities of passion and perseverance. I’ve included snippets of those conversations throughout this book so that you, too, can peer inside the mind and heart of a grit paragon and see whether there’s a belief, attitude, or habit worth emulating.
These stories of grit are one kind of data, and they complement the more systematic, quantitative studies I’ve done in places like West Point and the National Spelling Bee. Together, the research reveals the psychological assets that mature paragons of grit have in common. There are four. They counter each of the buzz-killers listed above, and they tend to develop, over the years, in a particular order.