Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

What a genius!
I should know better. I do. So what’s going on? Why does an unconscious
bias toward talent persist?
A few years ago, I read a study of competitive swimmers titled “The Mundanity of Excellence.” The
title of the article encapsulates its major conclusion: the most dazzling human achievements are, in
fact, the aggregate of countless individual elements, each of which is, in a sense, ordinary.
Dan Chambliss, the sociologist who completed the study, observed: “Superlative performance is
really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which
have been carefully drilled into habit and then are fitted together in a synthesized whole. There is
nothing extraordinary or superhuman in any one of those actions; only the fact that they are done
consistently and correctly, and all together, produce excellence.”
But mundanity is a hard sell. When finishing up his analyses, Dan shared a few chapters with a
colleague. “You need to jazz it up,” his friend said. “You need to make these people more
interesting. . . .”
When I called Dan to probe a few of his observations, I learned that he’d become fascinated with
the idea of talent—and what we really mean by it—as a swimmer himself and, for several years
afterward, as a part-time coach. As a young assistant professor, Dan decided to do an in-depth,

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qualitative study of swimmers. In total, Dan devoted six years to interviewing, watching, and
sometimes living and traveling with swimmers and coaches at all levels—from the local swim club
to an elite team made up of future Olympians.
“Talent,” he observed, “is perhaps the most pervasive lay explanation we have for athletic
success.” It is as if talent were some invisible “substance behind the surface reality of performance,
which finally distinguishes the best among our athletes.” And these great athletes seem blessed “with
a special gift, almost a ‘thing’ inside of them, denied to the rest of us—perhaps physical, genetic,
psychological, or physiological. Some have ‘it,’ and some don’t. Some are ‘natural athletes,’ and
some aren’t.”
I think Dan is exactly right. If we can’t explain how an athlete, musician, or anyone else has done
something jaw-droppingly amazing, we’re inclined to throw up our hands and say, “It’s a gift!
Nobody can teach you that.” In other words, when we can’t easily see how experience and training
got someone to a level of excellence that is so clearly beyond the norm, we default to labeling that
person a “natural.”
Dan points out that the biographies of great swimmers reveal many, many factors that contribute to
their ultimate success. For instance, the most accomplished swimmers almost invariably had parents
who were interested in the sport and earned enough money to pay for coaching, travel to swim meets,
and not the least important: access to a pool. And, crucially, there were the thousands of hours of
practice in the pool over years and years—all spent refining the many individual elements whose sum
create a single flawless performance.
Though it seems wrong to assume that talent is a complete explanation for dazzling performance,
it’s also understandable. “It’s easy to do,” Dan explained, “especially if one’s only exposure to top
athletes comes once every four years while watching the Olympics on television, or if one only sees
them in performances rather than in day-to-day training.”
Another point he makes is that the minimal talent needed to succeed in swimming is lower than
most of us think.
“I don’t think you mean to say that any of us could be Michael Phelps,” I said. “
Do
you?”
“No, of course not,” Dan replied. “To begin with, there are certain anatomical advantages that you
really can’t train for.”
“And,” I continued, “wouldn’t you say that some swimmers improve more than others, even if
they’re trying equally hard and getting the same coaching?”
“Yes, but the main thing is that greatness is doable. Greatness is many, many individual feats, and
each of them is doable.”
Dan’s point is that if you had a time-lapse film of the hours and days and weeks and years that
produced excellence, you could see what he saw: that a high level of performance is, in fact, an
accretion of mundane acts. But does the incremental mastery of mundane individual components
explain everything? I wondered. Is that all there is?
“Well, we all love mystery and magic,” he said. “I do, too.”
Then Dan told me about the day he got to watch Rowdy Gaines and Mark Spitz swim laps. “Spitz
won seven gold medals in the ’72 Olympics and was the big thing before Michael Phelps,” he
explained. “In ’84, twelve years after retirement, Spitz showed up. He’s in his mid-thirties. And he
gets into the water with Rowdy Gaines, who at that time held the world record in the one hundred
free. They did some fifties—in other words, two lengths of the pool, just sprints, like little races.
Gaines won most of them, but by the time they were halfway through, the entire team was standing
around the edge of the pool just to watch Spitz swim.”

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Everyone on the team had been training with Gaines, and they knew how good he was. They knew
he was favored to win Olympic gold. But because of the age gap, nobody had swum with Spitz.
One swimmer turned to Dan and said, pointing to Spitz, “My god. He’s a fish.”
I could hear the wonder in Dan’s voice. Even a student of mundanity, it seems, is easily lulled into
talent explanations. I pressed him a bit. Was that sort of majestic performance something divine?
Dan told me to go read Nietzsche.
Nietzsche? The