Range - David Epstein Page 0,58
a 2006 silver medalist figure skater, wrote an advice column to retiring athletes. “Olympic athletes need to understand that the rules for life are different from the rules for sports,” she wrote. “Yes, striving to accomplish a single overarching goal every day means you have grit, determination and resilience. But the ability to pull yourself together mentally and physically in competition is different from the new challenges that await you. So after you retire, travel, write a poem, try to start your own business, stay out a little too late, devote time to something that doesn’t have a clear end goal.” In the wider world of work, finding a goal with high match quality in the first place is the greater challenge, and persistence for the sake of persistence can get in the way.
A recent international Gallup survey of more than two hundred thousand workers in 150 countries reported that 85 percent were either “not engaged” with their work or “actively disengaged.” In that condition, according to Seth Godin, quitting takes a lot more guts than continuing to be carried along like debris on an ocean wave. The trouble, Godin noted, is that humans are bedeviled by the “sunk cost fallacy.” Having invested time or money in something, we are loath to leave it, because that would mean we had wasted our time or money, even though it is already gone. Writer, psychology PhD, and professional poker player Maria Konnikova explained in her book The Confidence Game how the sunk cost mindset is so deeply entrenched that conmen know to begin by asking their marks for several small favors or investments before progressing to large asks. Once a mark has invested energy or money, rather than walking away from sunk costs he will continue investing, more than he ever wanted to, even as, to any rational observer, disaster becomes imminent. “The more we have invested and even lost,” Konnikova wrote, “the longer we will persist in insisting it will all work out.”
Steven Naifeh spent a decade researching Van Gogh’s life, so I asked him to fill out the grit questionnaire on the painter’s behalf. Van Gogh’s work ethic stretched belief. He was intoxicated with an image his father had used in a sermon of the sower, who must put in work now so that he can reap later. “Think of all the fields that were turned down by shortsighted people,” Dorus van Gogh preached. He invoked that image, Naifeh and Smith wrote, as “a paragon of persistence in the face of adversity.” At every job he had, Vincent was convinced that if he outworked everyone around him, he would succeed. But then he would fail. His interests whipsawed constantly. Even once he’d set himself on being an artist, he would devote all his energy to one style or medium only to completely disavow it soon thereafter. Naifeh and Smith used an elegant phrase to describe Van Gogh’s pliable passions: his “altered gospel.” The Grit Scale statement “I have been obsessed with a certain idea or project for a short time but later lost interest” is Van Gogh in a nutshell, at least up until the final few years of his life when he settled on his unique style and creatively erupted. Van Gogh was an example of match quality optimization, Robert Miller’s multi-armed bandit process come to life. He tested options with maniacal intensity and got the maximum information signal about his fit as quickly as possible, and then moved to something else and repeated, until he had zigzagged his way to a place no one else had ever been, and where he alone excelled. Van Gogh’s Grit Scale score, according to Naifeh’s assessment, was flush with hard work but low on sticking with every goal or project. He landed in the 40th percentile.
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Beginning in 2017, to my great honor, I was invited to work with veterans to review applications for the Pat Tillman Foundation, the organization I had begun speaking to in 2015 and that provides scholarships to veterans, active-duty military, and military spouses. A lot of applications come from ambitious West Point alumni.
The essays were fascinating and inspiring. Nearly every single one spoke of some formative lesson learned in Afghanistan, or on a domestic hurricane rescue team, or while translating languages under pressure, or as a spouse moving again and again and arranging services for other military spouses, or even while becoming increasingly frustrated with some aspect of military conflict or bureaucratic dysfunction. The