Most variables of life have a peak usefulness in some amount and then it falls off on both sides.
This means applying more "grit" is useful in life, until some point where more grit becomes less useful.
To make things more complicated, the amount of grit also depends on and interacts with all other variables of life.
So not only the optimal amount of grit varies constantly, but you also get a fractal of local maxima and minima along the way. Basically your "how much grit I need for optimal performance" graph looks like the outline of a mountain.
So given that situation, discussing whether "grit predicts success" is kind of silly, isn't it. If life was this simple, we wouldn't evolve these big brains to account for everything at once and constantly balance and rebalance the equation in attempt to find equilibrium.
EDIT: Maybe we need to run a survey and find out the mean grit we have as a society, and then mandate, say 1% more grit and measure global outcomes. So please draw on this line how much grit you have between 0 and 100. The graph is log, because actual grit varies between 0 and +Infinity.
It would only be silly if most people were somewhere near the optima already, which I doubt. Most people are probably lacking that trait, with very few on the right hand side of that peak.
If we're talking about what you can control: point yourself in the right direction then work your ass off. It's possible to succeed while lacking one of these two properties, but it becomes much less likely.
I can't think of anything where have more to infinity is always better. At some point your need is satiated and starts becoming a detriment.
You're welcome to bring examples, but I've found often those examples don't consider the counter-forces as you increase the "goodness" in one direction, you increase the "badness" for another factor.
Case in point team size. Bigger team, better, faster, stronger. But the combinatorial explosion of communications (everyone talks to everyone) in the team actually renders big teams inoperable.
So the solution is to elect a leader/representative, and then form a team of teams only of those representatives.
You solved the combinatorial explosion of communications, but you added indirection (teams talk to each other through the broken phone of their leaders).
And so on and so on. You never can identify a single thing you can do forever "more" of, and get just benefits.
It's like a spring. There's a balance in the middle. The more you stretch, the harder it gets. The more you push, the harder it gets. The trick is finding the middle.
High intelligence is not strongly correlated with success, in fact it's unfortunately correlated with things like increased chance of depression and suicide. Very high intelligence often comes as a result of some other deficiency in that person's life, for example they're socially withdrawn, highly reflective, and prefer to be alone with a book.
Attractiveness makes people think higher of you, and your intelligence. But excessive attractiveness causes people to think you're superficial and focused on your beauty, rather than your intelligence. They may also objectify you, or be intimidated by you.
Every coin has two sides. Every coin.
As for categories like "excellent judgment" etc. these only can be identified post-factum from the results. I.e. it's a circular definition to say "this successful person making judgments correlates with his ability to make successful judgments". So I'm not sure that gives is a clue what to do, or what to be to get there. "Just make excellent judgments, damn it!" :-)
I frequently hear claims that high intelligence is not correlated strongly positively with success, though that seems to be disputed by longitudinal studies like SMPY.
People say that extremely high intelligence is less correlated with happiness then less extreme high intelligence, not (the topic of your linked article) "the potential to make great contributions to society in adulthood"
General intelligence - if you are too intelligent you might become arrogant and have difficulties putting yourself in other people's shoes.
Attractiveness - you might focus so much in your appearance that other parts of your life get left behind. Think on the Hollywood stars that end up with a crappy life somehow. I've also seen women that are too attractive being chased by aggressive men, which becomes very inconvenient for them.
Good judgement and rapport building are qualities that usually require avoiding the extremes, so I don't think it applies here.
Counterpoint: these are measurements that can be factorized into dimensions in which you can go too far. In fact, you can't actually keep going to infinity in these measurements because you will hit roadblocks in the underlying factors.
General intelligence and excellent judgment will contain neuroticism. Too much of that and you get analysis paralysis.
General intelligence and rapport building contain empathy. Too much of that and you become weighed down by feeling everyone else's feelings.
Attractiveness might help you in general but there are issues like jealousy or not being taken seriously by technical people, so it's still a trade off.
I can see why people wouldn't like this comment, but maybe contemplate what it would take to rid the world of psychopaths. There is no known cure for a lack of empathy. Do the ends justify the means, and would anybody but a psychopath desire such a cleansing?
People don't like it because medical terminology tends to morph in the public dictionary as a caricature of the original meaning. A psychopath doesn't mean an evil person with delusions who committed significant crimes.
We have some evidence psychopaths handle large scale organizations better, because empathy has evolved for close relationships with small number of people. Doesn't mean they're cruel, rather they think differently about it.
Also psychopathy is both dynamic (can change during the course of a lifetime) and a spectrum (non-binary). In general if we'll be open and non-discriminating towards our racial and so on features, we need to also allow for various thinking models, and address problems only directly when they occur.
Only if you believe psychopathy is being "messed up" which, as I said, in strictly medical sense, is not that clear.
Remember homosexuality was also classified as a mental illness until relatively recently.
What if it turns out modern society need psychopaths to operate properly? I know, an odd notion given the popular meaning of "psychopath", but once again... the popular meaning is kind of arbitrary and self-defeating.
The semantic treadmill is tiring. We constantly need to invent new words for the same concepts.
And the most damaging moment in this transition is when original connotations get coupled with later meanings. I.e. "psychopaths do not use empathy" gets equated with "psychopath bad and dangerous".
It's a bit like the argument that if you're not religious, you're amoral, as you have no emotional reason (fear & shame of God) to be moral. Which is obviously not the case.
“People with a history of some lifetime adversity reported better mental health and well-being outcomes than not only people with a high history of adversity, but also than people with no history of adversity.” (Seery et al., 2010, p. 1025)
> because actual grit varies between 0 and +Infinity.
The article itself mentions that we measure it in a scale from 1 to 5.
Also, that’s a whole lot of assertions you got there, and most of them look very wrong. IQ (to quote the most obvious) is pretty much always good to have, and the more the better.
Yeah I'd say "1 to 5" is a "log, discretized scale". :-)
Anyway, I don't mean all my assertions to be correct, the scale was tongue in cheek for example. I hope to promote interesting debate.
IQ, BTW, is a fundamentally flawed characteristic. It exists in public consciousness as some universal measure of intelligence. It isn't. Intelligence is multidimensional, not a line. And second, the tests are culturally specific, and somewhat arbitrary in retrospect. Buuut, anyway, that's a debate for another time :)
However flawed our current measurement systems of IQ are, IQ is a monotonic predictor (i.e. its correlation with several measures of success is strongest with lineal functions that with functions with local minima). That is to say, better results on any IQ tests are good news.
Is it really. I'd love to see the data. You see, I find it incredibly unlikely you can flatly correlate IQ across all its range with "measures of success".
I totally buy that having IQ below, say, 95, is bad news for you in life in general. But is having IQ 130 guaranteed good news over someone who has 105 for ex.? That's the key, which would differentiate my model from the model you cite.
Case in point, for some reason Mensa is full of people who seem entirely unremarkable, except for the fact they are in Mensa. You can find 140 IQ truck drivers etc. there (not to malign truck drivers, but we have to be objective you wouldn't put them in the top 0.1% of success despite in the top 0.1% of IQ).
> I totally buy that having IQ below, say, 95, is bad news for you in life in general. But is having IQ 130 guaranteed good news over someone who has 105 for ex.?
As others have said in the comments, there’s no guarantee, we are talking statistics here. The data of the several IQ studies that you can easily find online show correlations between IQ and other factors that people think of as measures of success.
> You can find 140 IQ truck divers etc.
And homeless, and everything in between. And the last time I checked, here were I live (catalonia) the data showed that about 70% of people with high IQ would not finish high school without repeating a full year. And yet, things like future income positively correlate with IQ.
Success is a very personal concept, but for most people it shares some similarities, and there’s factors that always help, whatever your definition (like having income to cover your needs).
My point is that if you try to fit a convex curve to the data, you’ll see that it’s not as good as a linear fit, meaning that there’s no specific place in the IQ scale where you’d be better off with a lower score, even if a lot of people with high IQ wish they were (which is understandable).
As for your comment about Mensa (or any other high IQ association), the problem is a rather common one. In all kind of associations (school parents, political groups, etc..) the people most involved tend to be the ones that have less going on with the rest of their lives, that’s why they are so involved in the first place. It’s just way weirder with Mensa because of the meaning of the “entry requirements”.
Most of the 'how to succeed' advice is a mix of survivorship bias with 'necessary but not sufficient' traits. (You can apply a lot of grit at a fast food restaurant and never become a thousandaire.)
Turns out that having both grit and a large family nest egg too reduce the consequences of failure go a long way together. But maybe they're rare to have together: the safety net reduces the need for grit.
>Most of the 'how to succeed' advice is a mix of survivorship bias with 'necessary but not sufficient' traits.
Plus a lot of rich-person-worship (1) and self-glorification (2).
(1) The press version: "Econ Tusk is rich, and he got there by working 22 hours a day, exercizing for 1 1/2hour, and taking a single 30 minute power nap. The secret of his success? Endless grit. It doesn't have anything to do with striking it rich by building a payment app as a regular nerd (that might just as well have gotten nowhere), and then diverting his efforts into media-friendly geek-wet-dream VC instruments that are perfect as opportunities of government contracts and subsidies".
(2) The interview/autobiography version: "How did I made it? I gave it all I've got, risked everything, and worked hard every day. Sure, it only 2 two years before we were bought and I made 100s of millions, working was mostly maginal helping our first employees in building the MVP, business meetings, bossing people around, and having the 'vision', the risk was minimal because I had an MBA and/or CS skills I could use to get a job anytime, and everything was paid by VCs anyway, but it was all grit I tell you".
> Prosperity theology (sometimes referred to as the prosperity gospel, the health and wealth gospel, the gospel of success, or seed faith)[A] is a religious belief among some Protestant Christians that financial blessing and physical well-being are always the will of God for them, and that faith, positive speech, and donations to religious causes will increase one's material wealth.[1]
The prosperity gospel is like something Karl Marx devised as a one-off example to illustrate his theory on the religions late stage capitalism creates.
> The standard one [story] is a comforting tale about grit in the face of adversity – overcoming obstacles, honing skills, working hard – which then inevitably affords entry to the Promised Land. ... But you can also tell a different story, which is more about luck than pluck, and whose driving forces are less your own skill and motivation, and more the happy circumstances you emerged from and the accommodating structure you traversed.
As a child of South African parents I find this quite offensive.
Elon Musk, with his brother received a $28,000 investment from their father in their first business. That's a lot, but not more than many kids receive toward their college education. When they started they could only afford one computer, so the site was up during the day and down at night so he could write the software.
Not nothing, but hardly ridiculous inherited wealth either.
I somewhat agree that a gritty person shouldn’t keep a fast food job, but some of the Uber drivers I meet are incredibly gritty. They work incredibly long hours and grind on multiple apps. They have well thought out strategies for how to make as much as they can per hour and have plans for how they will invest their money.
I admire the heck out of em but I can see most people don’t want that life. I have no doubt that kind of work ethic could be wasted in the wrong environment but a successful person should have both grit and the ability to find an environment where they can use it to get ahead.
I’d even argue that corporate America as whole rarely rewards grit with a couple exceptions.
"some of the Uber drivers I meet are incredibly gritty."
That's exactly the point. There's a huge number of people bringing a hell of a lot of hustle to just keeping their head above water.
There was a brilliant blog post a couple years ago pointing out that perfect competition - from the perspective of the gig worker on the ground - is fundamentally dystopian. When you're providing a commoditized service (like driving a car) in perfect competition, you've got nowhere to go but working harder or smarter. Which quickly means that everyone in the market is working just as hard and smart, bringing maximum hustle (or, if you prefer, grit) just to hang on.
The road to success: either "be the first, be the best, or cheat." I was on the transom of a mega yacht at Atlantis on Paradise Island and a tourist walking along the dock asked me how he can get one for himself. I shrugged, I wouldn't know, I only worked on it and said "work hard, I guess." He said that he works in IT, works his butt off, and does ok but will never have that type of wealth. But my assertion isn't quite the truth. It is more simple than my first statement. "Buy low and sell high." It helps coming from wealth however most of the Americans who own yachts are self made often coming from middle class or lower families. They started the process of buying low and selling high in the 60s and 70s. Most of the people I've met who own a yacht share a characteristic, they are passionate about making the deal. It is almost like they aren't passionate about making money but rather getting something below its market value and selling it above its market value.
> It is almost like they aren't passionate about making money but rather getting something below its market value and selling it above its market value.
I'd say that's exactly the case. It's a game for them and the money gained is just an additional motivation and something that makes them do it more and more... the hook plus the drugs included in one package, I guess.
And I'm talking far beyond just stock market games. I am talking anything and everything that makes money, including just hearing about a struggling business, buying all its assets and then reselling them at 500% profit in a matter of week.
Grit + a large nest egg can effectively buy success in many markets.
If a millionaire decides that they will run a successful restaurant come hell or high water then that is what will happen as they're now spending double the typical startup cost of a new restaurant they can be quite bad at it and still be successful.
Think I realised a while ago that nothing predicts success. That's not to say that success is only luck, it has requirements, but not predictors. Hard work, grit, skill, luck, privilege etc are all required in combinations that result in a baseline sum, but nothing will predict success.
Success is almost by definition a hindsight measure. You can only work backwards from it, but never guarantee a forward path into it.
> I realised a while ago that nothing predicts success ... never guarantee a forward path into it
Guarantee, no. Anyone could be hit by a bus tomorrow. But it is clear that one can greatly increase their odds of success. For example, learning a job skill. Learning how to manage money. Living below your means. Associate with successful people instead of losers. Ditching the victim mentality.
One can also greatly decrease odds of success by, say, dropping out, playing video games all day, hittin' the crack pipe, etc., and adopting the victim mentality.
you probably can't become destitute and homeless if you're the son of a US president, but you can certainly squander your well above average chance of also becoming president.
I think what you're saying is that you and your peers have a shared definition of success, and within that, there are well-known ways to improve the likelihood of reaching that goal.
Certainly having goals (particularly ones that retain a healthy, well-rounded lifestyle) can help people avoid negative outcomes.
I think you're being a little bit weasly here. They do have a shared definition of success and you are part of that, as am I. The definition does not have to be identical to be useful.
And you have a point there. Certainly people have different concrete definitions (and wishes) for success. I'm not your average struggle porn/ you can also be successful-morons :)
Nothing is guaranteed in life. Working towards something just tips the scale of luck in your favor.
Luck is still a factor, it's just a matter of minimizing it.
Some people work their asses off starting a company, and it never takes off, and some dude who barely knows how to program runs into someone at a party and gets hired for a million dollars to build a dumb website.
> Some people work their asses off starting a company, and it never takes off, and some dude who barely knows how to program runs into someone at a party and gets hired for a million dollars to build a dumb website.
This should be written somewhere with huge letters and be the final end of that otherwise endless discussion.
People in HN are really baffling to me in how they underplay luck and overplay effort all the time. And I've seen what you said, on both extremes, like 50 times in my life so far at least.
Yep, more or less. There's also this phenomena (that I have no doubt has a name in Wikipedia but I don't know it) that leads to our brain conflating "I made it! I made money!" with "I am super good at EVERYTHING!".
I don't why that is. A lot of us know that the ego is our brain's top priority but nobody really knows why is that the case.
This also leads to rich people producing various misguided essays in which they are asserting stuff that's way outside their area of expertise -- but since they are rich and popular, many people gulp them as a holy gospel and repeat them ad infinitum...
Eventually we go full circle and start seeing what is the topic of the OP: that there are a lot of widely believed adages without them ever being well-supported by any evidence.
> Success is almost by definition a hindsight measure.
The same goes for natural selection. "Survival of the fittest" is always defined retrospectively. You'll never know what is truly advantageous at the moment. The only possible strategy is just to try anything.
Not only a hindsight measure, but also a very individual measure. Society usually defines success as some combination of wealth and fame, but everyone can choose another definition of success for themselves.
Say someone defines success for themselves as "becoming the number 1 basketball player in the world", then gets into the top 10 and becomes rich and famous because of it. They might internally consider themselves a failure, even though they are very successful in the eyes of everyone else.
(a) term-of-art statistics example: the X independent variable represents low to high blood alcohol level which is a predictor for car crashes (represented by Y). A high blood alcohol of 0.20% is a better predictor of drivers causing car crashes than the amount of salt eaten in a meal.
(b) colloquial usage: Nothing "predicts" car crashes because my uncle Jim drank a whole bottle of vodka and didn't hit anybody when driving home -- while a Tesla self-driving car with no blood alcohol at all crashed into a tree! Predictions about car crashes are bogus.
Another way to look at it: (a) is often about aggregates and groups (aka statistics) but (b) is about personal anecdotes or obersvations where n=1. This means they will disagree because they're talking about different things.
EDIT reply to : >Well, it's hardly "colloquial" usage, more like conversational, dictionary, typical, etc.
... is : "(of language) used in ordinary or familiar _conversation_; not formal or literary."
That matches what you said.
>The comment didn't seem like it was grounded in maths/stats terminology.
Yes, and that was actually the main point of my comment. This thread's Nautilus article of "predict" refers to research studies which talks talks about statistical predictor variables ("grit" being the X axis independent variable). The gp comment copies the word "predict" in his own comment but uses it in a non-statistical meaning and readers may not be aware of the silent switch in usage. (Equivocation.)
E.g. Do SAT test scores "predict" income level? It can be "yes" or "no" depending on which meaning of "predict" one is using.
Well, it's hardly "colloquial" usage, more like conversational, dictionary, typical, etc. The comment didn't seem like it was grounded in maths/stats terminology.
I read the comment as being about an individual rather than a population, which illustrates the problem: predicting individual success is (nearly?) impossible even if population data is consulted. Probably due to chaotic processes and the impossibility of understanding all relevant variables, exacerbated by the confusion of correlation with causation i.e. post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies.
Here we go again: looking for "success" cargo-cult signals, now with more "science!" to demand "evidence" from every unscientific/ambiguous/difficult-to-measure area and facet of life and reality, rather than improving fundamentals for increasing chances in something that has a good deal of probability involved. Felix Dennis wrote about this for a good chapter or so in his book with the ironic name: "How to Get Rich." I would consider the words of a billionaire to carry slightly-more weight than those of self-help gurus or thin, soundbite blog posts.
Effort / "working-hard" has no value unless it is effectively directed at something.
That is like listening to advice from Elon Musk, good advice but he always forgets that all the advice is worthless, if your father doesn't have a precious gem mine in Africa .... Bottom line will always be:
"Being born rich, is the only guarantee to succes. Everything else is pure luck."
You are either born rich, or lucky enough to hit the lottery.
I fully agree, but the parent mentions an important word: probability. Combined with your luck, and kept going by grit, you most surely have a recipe for success.
If everyone has 0.01% chance to become a millionaire (chance - that might not happen, or someone does not aspire to be). Then simple probability tells us that a person with grit that does not quit at the first attempt but tries 20 times, has a 0.2% chance.
“I’m a great believer in luck. I find that the harder I work, the more I have of it.” is a relevant quote :)
the point is that the child of a billionaire starts off with a 100% chance of being a millionaire. the rest of us can try for 50x or 100x longer than avg but the odds of getting to that level are still miniscule. and if that's the case it makes the whole endeavor seem rather arbitrary
It is not minuscule. For middle class people, the route to millionaire status is very doable. Live below your means, and regularly invest the difference.
For poor people, the route is to learn a valuable skill, move into the middle class, then apply the above.
That just moves the goal posts by a level, doesn't it? What's the chance you have a low stress upbringing that allows you to work towards such goals? Parents who are supportive and believe in that middle class dream, teachers who don't give up on you when you misbehave, enough comfort to not have to focus on immediate concerns?
You can't rationally compare the life chances of someone whose parents are billionaires - with access to that network, and the best schooling, and discussions about investing over dinner - with someone born in a shack without a book in the house.
An incredibly tiny number of people will be able to do well from a near-zero start. And most will do it by being aggressively self-serving narcissists.
Everyone else is going to have a much tougher time.
A reasonable attitude, but one that you would only arrive at if you were fortunate enough to pick the right books to begin with. Or the right teachers.
The point is you have a choice, and you're old enough to know if following your parents' advice is a good idea or not. At 18 it's time to grow up and take responsibility for your life.
Have you never someone who thought they had to please their parents well into adulthood?
On one hand, yes, on paper you are free when you are 18.
On the other hand, you can't be free without some sort of confidence that you'll be ok if you don't do what your parents say. And if your parents are the domineering kind, they'll have made good use of your first 18 years to keep you in their orbit.
Real life is complicated, not everyone has clarity, especially at that age.
Young people reject their parents all the time. A pervasive issue in parenting is the kids refuse to listen to the parents. Movies about it are quite popular - see "Dirty Dancing", "Saturday Night Fever", on and on and on.
I'm not buying the lack of agency of young people. It's just another excuse for choosing the easy way.
If you are not where you want to be in life, have you done anything today to move towards that goal? If you've done nothing, then choose better. It's your life, not mine. Complaining about not being a billionaire's son is a waste of your life.
If you're in the US, of sound mind and body, and over 18, there's never been a time in history with more opportunity for you. If you refuse to see it, nobody can help you. But just think about all those migrants with nothing walking thousands of miles with the hope of getting into the US.
I know a fair few of those people, except they didn't walk to the west, they sailed. Basically my parents, and my aunts and uncles.
Like I said elsewhere, it's a good attitude that you can do it, but it's not actually realistic that you can. People learn this the hard way in sports for example. We aren't all going to starting QB, there's only 32 of those jobs.
> "Dirty Dancing", "Saturday Night Fever"
Movies from back before the drawbridge came up.
> Complaining about not being a billionaire's son is a waste of your life.
Well I actually went to school with a billionaire's kid, and I never thought I'd rather have his life. Nor did anyone else.
There's also a fair bit of gap between "oh why am I not a prince" and "everything I'm good at or want to do will cost me a huge amount of debt".
> What do they know that you don't?
People are mistaken about how other countries are all the time. Do you think Western defectors to the communist blocks were never disappointed?
Keep in mind not everyone knows everything, even after they turn 18.
If you think there's so much opportunity, why is it that people are complaining about the lack of it? Perhaps they've actually tried to search for them and couldn't find any?
Yes, they pretty much are. Extremely complicated, organic, robots. But that is not the point. Your choices depend on your personality and abilities, which in turn depend on your upbringing and experiences.
And you would be wrong every single time because free will is an illusion.
That aside, people always make the best choices they can – no one chooses to chose badly. You can't blame them for not making a better choice since you can't expect anyone to do something they cannot.
I can't tell you the number of nights I told myself "I should go to bed early" knowing I would get a good nights sleep and do better at work the next day but chose to stay up late playing video games.
I chose to choose badly, I knew better, and I accept the blame (and consequences).
(This also comes into play when I make food/exercise choices btw. I certainly do not make the best choices I can on a daily basis)
No you didn't, you were unable to make the better choice (likely because of limited willpower). No mentally healthy person intentionally makes bad choices, that would be self-harm.
I think the more apt phrase is "I lack the discipline".
I do think there is a level of fooling myself when do choose badly, thinking "It'll be fine, no big deal", when down deep I know it will cause a problem.
Mentally healthy people make bad choices all the time, knowing they will pay for it later, but wanting to enjoy "the now".
I think you’re getting close to arguing that there is no free will and that everything in the universe is therefore luck or randomness. Perhaps one way to look at it is that even if humans philosophically are robots, the ones who sacrifice more (via hard work) deserve different, better outcomes.
This is true. It takes money, knowledge, and connections to make money. It's like a virtuous cycle / differential equation (rate of increase proportional to the amount). A homeless person becoming a billionaire is highly-improbable vs. Steve Job's kids.
> if your father doesn't have a precious gem mine in Africa
“This is a pretty awful lie,” Elon tweeted. “I left South Africa by myself when I was 17 with just a backpack & suitcase of books. Worked on my Mom’s cousin’s farm in Saskatchewan & a lumber mill in Vancouver. Went to Queens Univ with scholarship & debt, then same to UPenn/Wharton & Stanford.”
In a follow-up tweet, Elon said his father “didn’t own an emerald mine & I worked my way through college, ending up ~$100k in student debt.”
His mother Maye responded on Twitter in December 2019 in defense of Elon.
“To add to the truth, we went to Boston Chicken in Philadelphia for Thanksgiving because we couldn’t afford a turkey. And we spent three weeks making our rent-controlled apartment livable in Toronto,” Maye tweeted.
> “We were very wealthy,” says Errol. “We had so much money at times we couldn't even close our safe.”
Elon is cherry picking some true details to paint a misleading picture. I'm sure he did work in that lumber mill, and living with his mom at times of his life might have been a financial struggle. But the basic point, that he started out in business with family financial resources that the overwhelming majority of humans will never have, remains true.
If you pay close attention, Elon does this form of deception by selection quite often. It's one of the things that switched me from cheering him on for tesla, spacex, to now more critical and guarded.
>But the basic point, that he started out in business with family financial resources that the overwhelming majority of humans will never have, remains true.
What does all that matter if you leave home at 17 with access to none of it? I'm not saying that's true, but it's what Elon implied and wasn't covered in your explanation how how his rebuttal is deceptive.
I myself have no doubt that he has his parents to thanks in large part for his success. But I would pin that on genetics rather than direct connections in his case. Personality traits like grit, intelligence, and ruthlessness are quite heritable, correlate with getting rich, and I think people forget about that when getting worked up about rich people's kids succeeding disproportionately.
Well I mean Errol quite literally funded his first company.
But also, Errol had a very successful engineering business. There's no question that was a huge influence and advantage to Elon. He got an informal exposure to engineering at home that would be better than the universities available in some impoverished places.
The evidence for grit is nonexistent. What correlates most strongly with successful entrepreneurship is having upper middle class or better parents. This is because they provide a better education, literal seed funding, and if nothing else, allow someone to take more risk knowing they won't end up homeless.
I think what you're missing is that to be successful you need someone to invest in you and your ideas. Whether it's your parents or a VC that point still remains true. However you still need to put in the work. So advice from Musk is still valuable in a way. Not all his advice though lol. You need to pick and choose what's relevant or applicable to your situation and that i think requires wisdom and discernment.
Absolutely conflating apples and oranges. Elon seems to have been luckier by being part of the PayPal Mafia, similar, in a sense, to the w00w00 group. He may have absolutely no idea how or why he got where he did by the choices, beliefs, and circumstances he encountered. Felix Dennis OTOH was a wise, old hippie who had an appreciation for honest introspection.
> Felix was lucky to be born in time to ride that hippie wave.
"In 1969, Dennis wrote a world exclusive for OZ, the first ever review of Led Zeppelin's debut album." - talk about right place, right time. From there, he gets promoted to co-editor, gets hugely famous through a court case, which lets him start his own publishing company, and the rest is history.
(I'd say there was a lot of luck involved but he also seems to have reasonably good judgement and foresight to take advantage of it.)
Dennis didn’t get rich off the Oz trial. In fact, he was pretty penniless for a good two years after the trial, and he did not have the kind of fame that he could capitalize on (the judge in the trial had infamously called him a dim-witted young man). What started his road to vast riches was noticing that Bruce Lee films were popular, and starting a new magazine called Kung Fu Monthly that, even though it was a pretty primitive rag, managed to cash in on the fad.
This emerald mine story is commonly quoted by Elon Musk’s detractors but it is misinformation and has been explicitly labeled a myth by journalists who investigated it (https://www.insidehook.com/article/history/errol-musk-elon-f...). In terms of hard evidence, it’s not even clear that his father actually owned a mine, or what qualifies as a “mine”, or what its output was, or what his father’s income was from this mine. Most mines are small operations that amount to digging on a bit of land, with varying degrees of profit (or unprofitability), and not some massive corporate operation digging out those giant town-sized holes in the planet.
I also know plenty of people who weren’t born rich and became successful via hard work and talent. It is pretty evident that their life priorities, work ethic, and other qualities are very different from the average person. To reduce their lifelong efforts and sacrifices to luck is really just a completely false narrative used by people today to undermine the idea of a meritocracy, since that’s necessary to ethically justify large redistributive policies, by labeling someone’s fortune as “unearned”. It’s the same reason why Musk’s detractors repeatedly reach for this emerald mine story without a shred of evidence.
> Since Musk and Kimbal weren’t going to get any funding with a mere proof-of-concept, they had to build out the company using their own capital, and there wasn’t much of it. When Zip2 launched, Musk only had $2,000 in the bank. Kimbal had a bit more, having recently sold his share in a College Pro Painters franchise, but most of their startup costs were covered by their father, Errol Musk, who gave them $28,000 to get going.
Elon's "rebuttal" around this point is highly deceptive. Yes, his life with his mom was hard at times. But his dad did in actual fact have a half share in a Zambian emerald mine for 6 years. He was wealthy before that however, due to his engineering company.
So the truth is essentially "both." Did Elon struggle and have to show some grit at times? Yes. Did he get access to initial capital that many people wouldn't? Yes.
>rather than improving fundamentals for increasing chances in something that has a good deal of probability involved
In order to do that you have to figure out which 'something has a good deal of probability involved' in the first place and that is what those pesky demands for evidence attempt to figure out.
There is a nominalization here, very typical of US people: Talking about success like it is one thing, and the same thing for everybody.
The fact is that there are as many different definitions of success as different people in the world.
For some people success is being free to travel the world without constraints or having lots of friends or having sex with lots of people. For others is raising a healthy family and spending lots of time with them. For other people is having power over others, other people want to have a second or third house. Other people want to have more money that they could spend. Or being famous. Other people want to get something significant that merits a Nobel Price.
There is this delusion that you could have it all, you could make yourself rich without working or risking anything, have all the time on the world, travel and be famous.
There is no such a thing. I have met elite sport people that are the best in the world, rich and famous, but they really hate being famous. They have very little time or freedom, and if they want to travel anywhere, specially in South America, Asia or Africa everybody knows they are rich and they can be kidnapped or blackmailed at any time. They can not trust the people around them, unless is family or old friends(or people as rich as them).
I have met very rich business people that don't have free time at all. The money they earn, the wife or children waste. Children getting addictions like drugs or alcohol because their parents send them to internship and demand from them only work and more hard work.
I have met travelers that have traveled dozens of countries, but were incapable of raising a family and always short of money because they stop working as soon as they have enough for discovering a new place.
For me personally success is learning, traveling the world and having free time. I sacrificed money in order to get what I wanted.
I got what I wanted, but had to sacrifice other things for it. Over time I got back most of the things I sacrificed, like money, probably thanks to the people I met along the way, but I did lose it first.
If success is only "economical success", most people from the US are way richer than 90% of the people in the world. They have non economic wealth like rule of law and legal security that in countries like China, most of Africa or in some countries in South America does not exist.
The article is largely talking about academic success (with one or two exceptions) which imo is much easier to normalize across countries.
The context to this article is that "grit" is used as one of the characteristics that charter schools and other educational programs in the US try to maximize in low performing areas. If "grit" can't be measured, or if it's just another way of describing another attribute (e.g., contentiousness, which is the article uses - or persistence, which is what you find in many academic articles), then there isn't much of a point of trying to maximize it in academic contexts.
All of this assumes that school performance is something that educators want to increase. This may not necessarily be true in every country and in every context, but it should be true in most of them (and certainly in the US, where a lot of local governments are funding programs using these concepts).
I had to look that up - I think the psycolical term differs quite a lot from the dictionary definition - but I certainly see some similarity between "grit" and something like:
> There's a big psychometrics literature on conscientiousness. Start there
I've spent some time diving into the OCEAN model and its factor analysis. Do you have any recommendations for references, books or papers, that offer a good introduction to the subject assuming statistical fluency?
'Conscientiousness' and 'Grit' I think are different attributes.
Conscientious people are like your 'nice Grandparents': they are consistent, orderly, pay their bills, are pleasant, predictable, file their taxes, recycle, don't steal.
Gritty people are those who mount the psychological effort necessary to take on a challenging problem, and have the wherewithal to keep going when things get rough.
To me the bit of confusion might arise between: 'Grit' and 'stubbornness' i.e. continue down an actually bad path and 'Grit' and 'Lack of Self Awareness' i.e. people utterly underestimating their ability, or the complexity of a domain. 'Fake it tell you make it' is actually a helpful characteristic in some areas, but in others it's not.
I do believe that 'grit' and 'conscientiousness' are both positive attributes in people who start companies, but that 'conscientiousness' is probably a more important attributes in most of the employees.
From the article: "Conscientiousness was twice as useful at predicting success as grit was." I have no doubt it's a better predictor for general life outcomes and especially academic outcomes. Doing a degree is mostly a grind.
I've literally just explained the difference to you.
From Google:
"Grit is the perseverance and passion to achieve long–term goals. Sometimes you will hear grit referred to as mental toughness."
"Conscientiousness is the personality trait of being careful, or diligent. Conscientiousness implies a desire to do a task well, and to take obligations to others seriously. Conscientious people tend to be efficient and organized as opposed to easy-going and disorderly."
They are not the same thing, though obviously the characteristics overlap.
People in creative disciplines can have 'high grit' but often very low conscientiousness and be successful.
As someone exposed a little bit to the music industry, I'm amazed by the level of determination people have in the face of rejection, and and at the same time, a lot of careless, inconsistent and risky behaviours in their life. Hard drug use, unstable relationships etc. - those are all 'low conscientious' things. But grit off the scale.
Tons of people are 'highly conscientious' and have little grit. Your bus driver, 12 year vet, never missed work? Probably highly conscientious, and likely low on grit. In fact, most working class people doing thoughtful and diligent, consistent work, but who have no greater goals or ambitions and avoid risk are probably low in grit.
You explained the difference between the broad google definitions but that doesn't change my point that grit seems to be a strict subset of the actual definition conscientiousness which includes not only orderliness (which we both agree is unrelated to grit) but other things like achievement striving and industriousness (which appear to me to be the same thing as grit).
You could have an artist that's low in orderliness but high in industriousness or high in achievement striving. Does grit add anything novel beyond these existing facets of conscientiousness?
Grit may not predict success, but insufficient grit might still sometimes play a role in career challenges.
There seems to be a whole subgenre of HN posts along the lines of "I decided college was a waste of time for someone as uniquely gifted as me, so I self studied and have never had a problem getting hired for my next contract. Now I want to work at a FAANG, but they ask me to code a breadth first search. Why is the hiring process so broken?"
Although it's always somewhat context-sensitive, with both figures you could learn how much signal to derive from the latter.
If we learned that grit wasn't necessarily an indicator of success, then it'd arguably be a bit callous of successful people to project grit, given that plenty of other people go through hard times without being able to achieve similar outcomes.
Hmm, shying away from hard problems sometimes hurts you, sometimes it saves you. It all depends on context. I have had great success being really lazy and selective where to actually invest my time and had better results than people who would just work their ass off always.
School is an "ideal" learning environment - in that to do well all you need to do is digest the information as presented. This requires some baseline cognitive ability and the conciensiousness to actually absorb all the information required of you. In this context you probably don't need a lot of perseverance.
On the other hand most challenging fields are adverse learning environments - where the objective may be open-ended, feedback is few and misleading, and information on the state of the world is mostly inferred. To succeed in this type of environment you probably need a lot more intrinsic drive and tolerance for failure.
School is also an adverse learning environment. Your definition of succeeding at school is too narrow - digesting information isn’t enough to be a success at school. For example, you need to balance social/peer success with academic success which can be tricky. Teachers’ behaviors and expectations differ greatly so you need to quickly develop models of their motivations. You also need to optimize/direct your efforts - there is only a finite number of hours in the day and attempting to “win” at school by simply digesting facts can only work for a tiny minority. In fact, when I think of my peers in school who I would considered to have “succeeded” the most in that environment, none did do solely by being able to digest facts - most were only slightly better than average academically but succeeded in other ways.
That depends on your definition of failure, and is confused by factors like inheriting wealth... I know at least one world leader who doesn't have any grit at all...
In theory you should be able to condition on inherited wealth as well to remove that as a confounding factor (yeah this is a bit causally inspired), so I'd be curious if that's been done here.
Are you aware of similar critiques of growth/fixed mindset? It’s very popular in my kid’s school, but I’ve heard other parents say that the pedagogical strategies that are ostensibly based on it (not stratifying kids based on ability level) are bunk. I’m interested in knowing more about the pros/cons.
I would argue that Carol Dweck argues that if you believe and are motivated, you can achieve. The criticism is that while motivation and belief i.e. grit is important -- it is only half the story. Countless studies have proven what really drives academic success -- financially well off parents who emphasize education and provide time/money/resources to help their children succeed.
"What the team found was there is a correlation between someone having more of a growth mindset and doing well academically. However, the correlation is small and the findings do not support claims that growth mindset interventions have profound effects on academic achievement." [1]
"The attempted replication of Dweck’s work that is about to be published concerned the 1998 study on praise and part of the 2007 study. Bates and his student Yue Li conducted a series of studies in a group of more than 600 Chinese students. Their results were mixed but mostly found no effect." [2]
This article lays out the evidence: identifying something people can (in theory) change about themselves will be popular. If the thesis were “people with violet eyes are more successful”, well, not much you can do about that without (likely dangerous) medical intervention. But if you have enough grit you can work on your grit.
On the other hand something like “grit” is inspirational to people who like that kind of thing (“I’m going to improve my grit”), scammers (“Take my course on improving your grit”), and the comfortably well off who can use it as an excuse not to worry about the less fortunate (“Not my problem if they lack grit. I worked on mine and look at the result!”).
PS: as with so many cases, the US ignores international ISO standards when grading sandpaper grit.
I'm so tired of stories about "grit." Take it from someone who got into Harvard after the death of one parent and the mental breakdown of another: everyone's got a breaking point. I happened to experience my breaking point after I got into an Ivy League school, but all those traumas were cumulative.
What we are experiencing in this country is a strip-mining of infrastructure, support, and education. Then instead of stories about reinvestment in our next generation, we're fed pablum about 'grit.' "Oh, I set your house on fire? Here's this awesome story about someone who got a PhD even after her house burned down." We're looking at the wrong problem.
It seems like the attempt to gather compelling evidence ends up skipping over foundational elements. After all, if someone quits consistently then progress is likely to be difficult. The idea of grit potentially also connects with two other potentially interesting related ideas:
First there is Victor Frankl's observation that those who were expected to survive in the concentration camps were the people who were young adults, healthy, well fed, smart, and quick. However, these people often reacted very badly to sudden change, chaos, and the lack of obvious opportunities and would end up dead in a week or two as much from hopelessness as privation. Meanwhile people who were skinny, weak, sick, and wounded often survived one trauma after another because they had something they were determined to live for--often family, sometimes cherished places or work. Something they longed to return to could keep them going.
Second there is the actually rather robustly documented phenomenon of John Henryism in which people suffering from discrimination or lack of opportunity find success by expending tremendous effort only to fall victim to illness early in life as the tolls from their exertions accumulate. This is a good example of how the grit to success story could have a serious downside that should be considered even if the success side might actually be realistically and meaningfully obtainable.
As the Chinese say: "Luck is a combination of opportunity and hard work".
You can work hard, yes, but you also need to walk into an opportunity to exploit your hard work, for ultimate success.
Developing skills to see a better opportunity matters. Some people just grind away at it without thinking, and some pause and re-evaluate. Think more, work less. Don't be a dumb work ant.
In programming, I found that when I was younger, I did that a lot. I kept coding and rewriting. Now that I am older, I think for days before I start something, and it usually results in less starting from scratch. I try to play things out, visualize, etc. The code does not just work the first time because I am "lucky".
I’m enjoying the top comments! They seem to fail in perceiving “success” is about building something know one knows they needed before it becomes necessary. It’s called “skating to where the puck will be”.
Building requires endurance (which is “grit-in-itself”) in overcoming the status quo, which, in this context, seems to be people who think massive fortunes are caused by predestined massive affordances, and not by any free determination from the character of the individual. It’s as if the presence of uncertainty in determining where their life will be in the future is obviated.
There are several meta analyses you can find on Google Scholar that show a weak to moderate relationship between grit and educational success.
The issue appears to be that there are conflicts over what grit actually represents in this context and whether Duckworth's scale is a good measure (and if she's overselling her findings).
These are very relevant questions, but they're very different from grit != success, or that grit doesn't matter.
I think some people here might be reacting to a title that confirms their preconceptions and are missing one of the main points of the article - that conscientiousness is probably a stronger, more well-defined and more reliable predictor of success than grit.
I think you can improve grit or conciensiousness practicing "not-doing". I have no research to support this, but if i think of something i find meditating or slowing down can help when I'm facing adversity.
Grit is just the statistics of trying over and over.
It’s a truism that can’t be refuted: trying something multiple times increases the likelihood by some amount that one will succeed (when compared to fewer attempts).
Angela Duckworth is but one evangelist, among many others. It's its own phenomenon: academicans (see: people whose self-worth is predicated on the popularity of their ideas) preaching their new gospel -- itself just a spin-off of some old, not-that-enlightening observations. But! If you sell it with enough passion and vigor and conviction, it sure does rile the masses into believing.
> “My lab has found that this measure beats the pants off I.Q., SAT scores, physical fitness and a bazillion other measures to help us know in advance which individuals will be successful in some situations,”
Need more be said? Science is itself a self-perpetuating industry. Statistics and findings can be massaged into whatever you want to see -- that's simply abusing our propensity to recognize patterns, to its utmost extreme.
More new, novel, monkey-go-ape patterns to fuss about. More books to sell. More speeches to give. More money to make.
Here's a hot-take, that won't drive unneeded publicity and revenue towards another idea salesman: the more you persevere -- i.e the more grit you have -- the more chances you get to succeed.
Please please, there's no need to write a PhD dissertation a la "A meta-analytic synthesis of the grit literature."[0]
Absolutely absurd.
[0] Credé, M., Tynan, M.C., & Harms, P.D. Much ado about grit: A meta-analytic synthesis of the grit literature. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 113, 492-511 (2017).
Until there's data, there's no evidence the TV remote turns on the TV.
Until there's data, there's no evidence that hot grills burn my hand if I place it on one.
This is the sort of crap that tries to apply the scientific method like a hammer and seeing nothing but nails.
The absence of data for a plausible relationship doesn't make it impossible, it makes it currently unknown either way. This nuance in the explanations of the limits of current knowledge is often lost on black&white thinking, overly-rational individuals who give the impression something is impossible or unlikely because it is currently unknown.
Grit is hard to measure in quantifiable terms so I have my doubts about the methodology of the studies referenced here that are making claims about it. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a good differentiator for relative success. That is, it may not be a perfect predictor of success in itself, but it is a contributor. And relative to someone with all other factors held equal, the person with more grit will be more successful. That’s not really controversial or in need of “evidence”, as it is self-evident.
This means applying more "grit" is useful in life, until some point where more grit becomes less useful.
To make things more complicated, the amount of grit also depends on and interacts with all other variables of life.
So not only the optimal amount of grit varies constantly, but you also get a fractal of local maxima and minima along the way. Basically your "how much grit I need for optimal performance" graph looks like the outline of a mountain.
So given that situation, discussing whether "grit predicts success" is kind of silly, isn't it. If life was this simple, we wouldn't evolve these big brains to account for everything at once and constantly balance and rebalance the equation in attempt to find equilibrium.
EDIT: Maybe we need to run a survey and find out the mean grit we have as a society, and then mandate, say 1% more grit and measure global outcomes. So please draw on this line how much grit you have between 0 and 100. The graph is log, because actual grit varies between 0 and +Infinity.