Cody told him, “I don’t know. . . . I want to go to a good school. Maybe somewhere like Princeton.” And then immediately, he took it back: “There’s no way a school like Princeton would accept me.”
“Why wouldn’t Princeton take you?” Cody’s brother asked him. “You’re doing all right in school. If you work harder, if you keep pushing yourself, you can get to that level. You have nothing to lose by trying.”
“That’s when a switch flipped in my head,” Cody said. “I went from ‘Why bother?’ to ‘Why not?’ I knew I might not get into a really good college, but I figured, if I try, I have a chance. If I never try, then I have no chance at all.”
The next year, Cody threw himself into his schoolwork. By junior year he was earning straight As. As a senior, Cody set about finding the best college in the country for computer science and engineering. He changed his dream school from Princeton to MIT. During this transformative period, he met Chantel Smith, an exceptionally wise math teacher who all but adopted him.
It was Chantel who paid for Cody’s driving lessons. It was Chantel who collected a “college dorm fund” to pay for the supplies he’d need once he moved. It was Chantel who mailed sweaters, hats, gloves, and warm socks to him for the cold Boston winters, who worried about him every day, who welcomed him home each holiday break, who stood by Cody at his grandmother’s funeral. It was in Chantel’s home that Cody first experienced waking on Christmas morning to presents with his name on them, where he decorated Easter eggs for the first time, and where, at the age of twenty-four, he had his first family birthday party.
MIT wasn’t entirely smooth sailing, but the new challenges came with an “ecosystem of support,” as Cody put it. Deans, professors, older students in his fraternity, roommates, and friends—compared to what he’d experienced growing up, MIT was a haven of attention.
After graduating with top honors, Cody stayed on to get his master’s in electrical engineering and computer science, earning a perfect GPA while doing so and, at the same time, fielding offers from doctoral programs and Silicon Valley recruiters.
In deciding between an immediately lucrative career and graduate school, Cody did some hard thinking about how he’d gotten to where he was. Next fall, he’ll begin a PhD program in computer science at Stanford. Here’s the first sentence from his application essay: “My mission is to utilize my passion for computer science and machine learning to benefit society at large, while serving as an example of success that will shape the future of our society.”
So, Cody Coleman did not have a psychologically wise mother, father, or grandparent. I wish he had. What he did have was a brother who said the right thing at the right time, an extraordinarily wise and wonderful high school math teacher, and an ecosystem of other teachers, mentors, and fellow students who collectively showed him what’s possible and helped him to get there.
Chantel refuses to take credit for Cody’s success. “The truth is that Cody has touched my life more than I’ve touched his. He’s taught me that nothing is impossible and no goal is beyond reach. He’s one of the kindest human beings I have ever met, and I couldn’t be prouder when he calls me ‘Mom.’?”
A local radio station recently interviewed Cody. Toward the end of the conversation, Cody was asked what he had to say to listeners struggling to overcome similar life circumstances. “Stay positive,” Cody said. “Go past those negative beliefs in what’s possible and impossible and just give it a try.”
Cody had these final words: “You don’t need to be a parent to make a difference in someone’s life. If you just care about them and get to know what’s going on, you can make an impact. Try to understand what’s going on in their life and help them through that. That’s something I experienced firsthand. It made the difference.”
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I. When I hear that, I sometimes interrupt with a précis of Steve Maier’s research showing that, in fact, finding a way out of the suffering is what does the strengthening.
Chapter 11
THE PLAYING FIELDS OF GRIT
One day, when she was about four years old, my daughter Lucy sat at the kitchen table, struggling to open a little box of raisins. She was hungry. She wanted those raisins. But the top of that box stubbornly resisted her efforts. After a minute or so, she put down the unopened box with a sigh and wandered off. I was watching from another room, and I nearly gasped. Oh god, my daughter has been defeated by a box of raisins! What are the odds she’ll grow up to have any grit?
I rushed over and encouraged Lucy to try again. I did my best to be both supportive and demanding. Nevertheless, she refused.
Not long after, I found a ballet studio around the corner and signed her up.
Like a lot of parents, I had a strong intuition that grit is enhanced by doing activities like ballet . . . or piano . . . or football . . . or really any structured extracurricular activity. These activities possess two important features that are hard to replicate in any other setting. First, there’s an adult in charge—ideally, a supportive and demanding one—who is not the parent. Second, these pursuits are designed to cultivate interest, practice, purpose, and hope. The ballet studio, the recital hall, the dojo, the basketball court, the gridiron—these are the playing fields of grit.
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The evidence on extracurricular activities is incomplete. I cannot point to a single study in which kids have been randomly assigned to play a sport or musical instrument, compete on the debate team, hold an after-school job, or work on the school newspaper. If you think about it for a moment, you’ll realize why. No parent wants to volunteer their kids to do things (or not) by the flip of a coin, and for ethical reasons, no scientist can really force kids to stay in (or out) of activities.
Nevertheless, as a parent and as a social scientist, I would recommend that, as soon as your child is old enough, you find something they might enjoy doing outside of class and sign them up. In fact, if I could wave a magic wand, I’d have all the children in the world engage in at least one extracurricular activity of their choice, and as for those in high school, I’d require that they stick with at least one activity for more than a year.
Do I think every moment of a child’s day should be scripted? Not at all. But I do think kids thrive when they spend at least some part of their week doing hard things that interest them.
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Like I said, the evidence for such a bold recommendation is incomplete. But the research that has been done is, in my view, highly suggestive. Put it all together, and you have a compelling case for kids learning grit at the elbow of a wise ballet instructor, football coach, or violin teacher.
For starters, a few researchers have equipped kids with beepers so that, throughout the day, they can be prompted to report on what they’re doing and how they feel at that very moment. When kids are in class, they report feeling challenged—but especially unmotivated. Hanging out with friends, in contrast, is not very challenging but super fun. And what about extracurricular activities? When kids are playing sports or music or rehearsing for the school play, they’re both challenged and having fun. There’s no other experience in the lives of young people that reliably provides this combination of challenge and intrinsic motivation.
The bottom line of this research is this: School’s hard, but for many kids it’s not intrinsically interesting. Texting your friends is interesting, but it’s not hard. But ballet? Ballet can be both.
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