Range - David Epstein Page 0,129
at the incredible Vincent van Gogh: The Letters website (vangoghletters), courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum and the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands. Without another incredible source, I would not have known which letters to read: Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Van Gogh: The Life (New York: Random House, 2011). Naifeh and Smith took the extraordinary step of creating a searchable database of sources at vangoghbiography/notes.php. It was extremely helpful. Two other written sources that were helpful: N. Denekamp et al., The Vincent van Gogh Atlas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press and the Van Gogh Museum, 2016); and J. Hulsker, The Complete Van Gogh (New York: Harrison House/H. N. Abrams, 1984). Finally, two exhibitions: “Van Gogh’s Bedrooms” at the Art Institute of Chicago (2016), and the impressionism and post-impressionism collections at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.
“None of it registered”: Naifeh and Smith, Van Gogh: The Life.
“absolutely nothing of them”: Van Gogh letter to brother Theo, June 1884.
“own desires”; “happier and calmer”; “push on”: Naifeh and Smith, Van Gogh: The Life.
“must sit up”: Van Gogh letter to brother Theo, September 1877.
“up in Hell”: Émile Zola, Germinal, trans. R. N. MacKenzie (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2011).
“the bars of his cage”: Van Gogh letter to brother Theo, June 1880.
“I’m writing to you while drawing”: Van Gogh letter to brother Theo, August 1880.
Guide to the ABCs of Drawing: Naifeh and Smith, Van Gogh: The Life.
“you are no artist”; “you started too late”: Van Gogh letter to brother Theo, March 1882 (trans. Johanna van Gogh-Bonger).
“[He] made an astonishing discovery”: Naifeh and Smith, Van Gogh: The Life.
“Painting has proved less difficult”: Van Gogh letter to brother Theo, August 1882. The painting that Van Gogh made that day is Beach at Scheveningen in Stormy Weather. The painting was stolen from the Van Gogh Museum in 2002, but recovered more than a decade later.
An ecstatic review: The review, by G.-Albert Aurier, was titled “Les isolés: Vincent van Gogh.”
life expectancy in the Netherlands: The exact figure is 39.84 and comes from the online publication Our World in Data (ourworldindata).
Gauguin . . . at the age of thirty-five: The Great Masters (London: Quantum Publishing, 2003).
“failed on an epic scale”: J. K. Rowling, text of speech, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” Harvard Gazette, June 5, 2008, online ed.
Nobel laureate economist Theodore Schultz: T. W. Schultz, “Resources for Higher Education,” Journal of Political Economy 76, no. 3 (1968): 327–47.
found a natural experiment: O. Malamud, “Discovering One’s Talent: Learning from Academic Specialization,” Industrial and Labor Relations 64, no. 2 (2011): 375–405.
Scots quickly caught up: O. Malamud, “Breadth Versus Depth: The Timing of Specialization in Higher Education,” Labour 24, no. 4 (2010): 359–90.
more mistakes: D. Lederman, “When to Specialize?,” Inside Higher Ed, November 25, 2009.
“The benefits to increased match quality”: Malamud, “Discovering One’s Talent.”
Steven Levitt . . . leveraged his readership: S. D. Levitt, “Heads or Tails: The Impact of a Coin Toss on Major Life Decisions and Subsequent Happiness,” NBER Working Paper No. 22487 (2016).
“the willingness to jettison”: Levitt, in the September 30, 2011, Freakonomics Radio program, “The Upside of Quitting.”
“Teachers tend to leave schools”: C. K. Jackson, “Match Quality, Worker Productivity, and Worker Mobility: Direct Evidence from Teachers,” Review of Economics and Statistics 95, no. 4 (2013): 1096–1116.
Psychologist Angela Duckworth conducted the most famous study: A. L. Duckworth et al., “Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92, no. 6 (2007): 1087–1101. (The entire incoming class comprised 1,223 freshman cadets, so Duckworth surveyed nearly every one.) Table 3 gives a nice summary of the amount of variance accounted for by grit in results from West Point, the Scripps National Spelling Bee, Ivy League students’ grades, and adult educational attainment. Additionally, Duckworth made her work very accessible in her book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (New York: Scribner, 2016).
Duckworth learned that: An incisive piece on grit and the Whole Candidate Score is: D. Engber, “Is ‘Grit’ Really the Key to Success?,” Slate, May 8, 2016.
“I worry I’ve contributed”: A. Duckworth, “Don’t Grade Schools on Grit,” New York Times, March 26, 2016.
“necessarily limited”: Duckworth et al., “Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals.”
32 of 1,308: M. Randall, “New Cadets March Back from ‘Beast Barracks’ at West Point,” Times Herald-Record, August 8, 2016.
“young and foolish”: R. A. Miller, “Job Matching and Occupational Choice,” Journal of Political Economy 92, no. 6 (1984): 1086–1120.
“tasks we don’t have the guts to quit”: S. Godin, The Dip: A Little Book