Range - David Epstein Page 0,57

a Division I track team in college as an 800-meter runner.

I was not close to the worst 800 runner on my college team freshman year; I was the worst, by a landslide. I was allowed to keep practicing with the team because as long as you are not chosen for travel, it doesn’t cost anybody anything, not even the pair of shoes the recruits got. When the traveling team went to South Carolina to train over spring break, I stayed on the eerily quiet campus rather than going home, to train without distraction. I stuck with it for two miserable years of vomit-inducing workouts and ego-bruising races, while blue-chip recruits quit and were replaced by others. There were plenty of days (and weeks, and an entire month or three) when I felt like I should probably quit. But I was learning about the kind of training that worked for me, and I was improving. In my senior season, I cracked the university’s all-time top ten list indoors, was twice All-East, and part of a relay that set the university record. The only other guy in my class who held a university record was my gritty roommate, the other walk-on. Nearly the entire recruited class from our year quit. Hilariously, I was awarded the Gustave A. Jaeger Memorial Prize for the athlete who “achieved significant athletic success in the face of unusual challenge and difficulty”—my “unusual challenge and difficulty” just being that I epically stunk at first. After the presentation, the head coach, with whom I’d had little direct conversation as a walk-on, shared that he had felt sorry for me watching workouts my freshman year.

There’s nothing particularly special about that story—it exists on every team. But I think it is indicative of my approach to work. Nonetheless, I scored at the 50th percentile on the Grit Scale compared to American adults at large. I racked up points for assessing myself as a very hard worker who is not discouraged by setbacks, but I missed a lot of points for confessing that “my interests change from year to year,” and, like so many West Point graduates, I sometimes “set a goal but later choose to pursue a different one.” When I was seventeen and positive that I was going to go to the U.S. Air Force Academy to become a pilot and then an astronaut, I probably would have self-assessed at the very top of the Grit Scale. I got all the way to Chicago-area congressman Sidney Yates agreeing to provide a nomination.

But I never did any of that. Instead, at the last minute I changed my mind and went elsewhere to study political science. I took a single poli-sci class, and ended up majoring in Earth and environmental sciences and minoring in astronomy, certain I would become a scientist. I worked in labs during and after college and realized that I was not the type of person who wanted to spend my entire life learning one or two things new to the world, but rather the type who wanted constantly to learn things new to me and share them. I transitioned from science to journalism; my first job was as a midnight-shift street reporter in New York City. (Nothing happy that’s going in the New York Daily News happens between midnight and 10 a.m.) Growing self-knowledge kept changing my goals and interests until I landed in a career the very lifeblood of which is investigating broad interests. When I later worked at Sports Illustrated, determined students would ask me whether it was better to study journalism or English to work at SI. I told them I had no clue, but that a statistics or biology course never hurt anyone.

I don’t think I have become less passionate or resilient over time, nor do I think that all those former West Point cadets who left the Army lost the drive that got them there in the first place. It makes sense to me that grit would be powerfully predictive for cadets trying to get through their rigorous orientation, or for a sample of schoolchildren or spelling bee contestants. Very young people often have their goals set for them, or at least have a limited menu to choose from, and pursuing them with passion and resilience is the main challenge. The same goes for 800 runners. One of the compelling aspects of sports goals is how straightforward and easily measurable they are. On the final weekend of the 2018 Winter Olympics, Sasha Cohen,