by Alfie Kohn
So what does all this mean in terms of how we regard “self-discipline”? Our answer will depend on how we decide to define the term. If we’re using it to include something autonomous or integrated, then it can be beneficial, at least in moderation: A twelve-year-old tears himself away from Facebook to help his parent clean the house. It’s not his favorite activity, but he understands and fully embraces the value of pitching in and therefore does so willingly.
But that scenario may be the exception in our culture. As the education scholar Nel Noddings observed, “Most self-discipline is an internalization of the stern and watchful other”44—a controlling and not very healthy affair. My sense is that most people who use the term have never really thought about this distinction. Even those who are well meaning may therefore find themselves endorsing introjection because they assume that self-discipline is a good thing, period.
The failure to distinguish between different versions also confuses certain claims made about the topic. Here’s one example: A number of researchers, most prominently Roy Baumeister, have maintained that self-control is like a muscle. It requires energy and is therefore subject to being depleted. If you use it for one thing, you’ll have, at least temporarily, less capacity to use it for another. At first it appears that there’s a fair amount of evidence in support of this “strength” model. In different experiments, people who had been told to avoid thinking about a white bear, or to stop themselves from eating sweets, or to suppress their emotional responses to a movie, seemed to have less self-control later (for example, to stifle laughter or limit their alcohol consumption) or simply less inclination to persevere at physically or mentally taxing tasks.45
Does that mean self-control is something that can be used up? Apparently so, if we assume it comes in only one flavor. But our analysis changes once we realize that people exert self-control in different ways and for different reasons. Depletion may well take place when people introject a demand to do something, but it doesn’t seem to happen under autonomy-supportive conditions that promote integrated self-regulation. Then, self-control doesn’t run out, and it’s possible to keep going at a subsequent task without apparent fatigue. In fact, when people experience their motivation as autonomous, they may have more vitality than when they started.46
Incidentally, this isn’t the only reason to be skeptical of the strength model of self-control. Its accuracy also seems to depend on whether people believe it’s accurate—that is, whether they assume self-control is a limited resource.47 But my larger point is that we should question not only how self-control or self-discipline works but also whether all versions of it are desirable. If we overlook the differences in how we (and our children) internalize a commitment to do something, or if we deny that it’s possible to be overly controlled, we end up endorsing the idea too quickly and too broadly. And we lose sight of the fact that control from within isn’t inherently more humane, or otherwise preferable, than control from without.
GRIT
It’s long been known that cognitive ability isn’t the only factor that determines how children will fare in school and in life. That recognition got a big boost in 1996 with science writer Dan Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence, in which he discusses the importance of self-awareness, altruism, personal motivation, empathy, and the ability to love and be loved. But a funny thing has happened to the message since then. When you hear about the limits of IQ these days, it’s usually in the context of a conservative narrative that emphasizes not altruism or empathy but something that sounds very much like the Protestant work ethic. More than smarts, we’re told, what kids need to succeed is old-fashioned grit and perseverance, self-discipline and willpower. The goal is to make sure they’ll be able to resist temptation, override their unconstructive impulses, put off doing what they enjoy in order to grind through whatever they’ve been told to do—and keep at it for as long as it takes.48
The term “grit” was popularized by Angela Duckworth, a former student of Martin Seligman’s at the University of Pennsylvania. She uses the term to denote the sort of self-discipline that’s required to make people persist at something over a long period of time. There is no pretense of objectivity in her work: Duckworth is selling grit rather than dispassionately investigating its effects. “As educators and parents,” she and her colleagues wrote in her first paper on the topic, “we should encourage children to work not only with intensity but also with stamina.”49 This is essentially the same message that’s been drummed into us from Aesop’s fables, Benjamin Franklin’s aphorisms, Christian denunciations of sloth, and of course the nineteenth-century chant invented to make children do their homework: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”
“Grittier individuals, by staying the course, may sometimes miss out on new opportunities,” Duckworth acknowledges. But she doesn’t see this as a problem. In fact, grit, as she defines and defends it, means doing “a particular thing in life and choos[ing] to give up a lot of other things in order to do it.”50 For example, she has no use for children who experiment with several musical instruments. “The kid who sticks with one instrument is demonstrating grit,” she says. “Maybe it’s more fun to try something new, but high levels of achievement require a certain single-mindedness.”51
This comment is revealing for a couple of reasons. First, while Duckworth has conducted research on the subject, her recommendations ultimately emerge not from evidence but from the fact that she personally thinks people should spend all their time trying to improve at one thing rather than exploring, and becoming reasonably competent at, several things. This may facilitate improvement at the single activity one pursues, but if you happen to favor breadth and variety, Duckworth offers no reason why you should accept her preference for a life of specialization—or, by extension, why you should endorse the idea of grit, which is rooted in that preference.
Second, the phrase “maybe it’s more fun to try something new, but . . . ” may well be at the core of this way of thinking. One suspects that sticking with one thing has been commended to us not in spite of the fact that it’s less fun but because it’s less fun. Grit seems closely connected to the value of deprivation. Hard, unpleasant labor isn’t just thought to be necessary for reaching a goal; it’s regarded as a virtue in itself. Conversely, doing what you enjoy is seen as less admirable and perhaps morally deficient. (More about this later.)
When you read them carefully, Duckworth’s experiments don’t offer much in the way of independent support for those familiar exhortations to work hard and never quit. What’s most striking about her publications, in fact, are their problematic premises and the critical distinctions they ignore.
1. Not everything is worth doing, let alone doing for extended periods.
At what activities are we encouraged to display grit? The question is never posed and, indeed, what’s celebrated (by Duckworth as well as others who have eagerly grabbed hold of the concept52) is the very fact of persisting—apparently at anything. This is reminiscent of platitudes about “following your dream,” as if a dream to become famous were equivalent to a dream to end child malnutrition. The amorality of the concept enables the immorality of some individuals who exemplify it.53 Most tyrants, after all, have grit to spare. To put it differently, glorifying the idea of grit gets things backward. We, as well as our children, should first decide what one ought to do, and why. Then we can talk about what’s helpful for doing it effectively: careful planning, a capacity for working with others, courage, a balance between self-confidence and humility, and, yes, persistence—among many other qualities. But there’s nothing admirable about grit, per se. In fact, this would be a better world if people who were up to no good had less of it.
2. Persistence can be counterproductive and unhealthy.
Sometimes it pays to stick with something over the long haul, and few of us want to see our kids throw in the towel at the first sign of difficulty. But, as with self-control more generally, grit can sometimes be inappropria
te and unhealthy, even if the activity isn’t morally objectionable. On certain occasions it just doesn’t make sense to persist with a problem that resists solution, to keep working toward a goal that’s almost certainly unattainable, to continue at a task that no longer provides any satisfaction. When people do keep going under these conditions, they may be displaying a “refusal to disengage” that’s both counterproductive (in terms of outcome) and pathological (in terms of motivation). Let’s look at each of these in turn.
Anyone who talks about grit as an unalloyed good may need to be reminded of the proverbial Law of Holes: When you’re in one, stop digging. Gritty people sometimes exhibit “nonproductive persistence”; they try and try again, even though the result may be either unremitting failure or “a costly or inefficient success that could have been surpassed easily by alternative courses of action,” as one group of psychologists explained. The latter category includes certain strategies in warfare, certain methodologies in science, and certain decisions in investing.54 Even if you don’t crash and burn by staying the course, you may not fare nearly as well as if you had stopped, reassessed, and tried something else. As the authors of a book called Mastering the Art of Quitting point out, “A culture that only trumpets the virtue of staying the course . . . prevents us from moving on and setting new goals.” We benefit from the “freedom to explore an activity and to abandon it when it turn[s] out not to be a good fit.”55
Moreover, the advantages of knowing when not to persist extend not only to the outcomes of a decision but to the effects on the individual who made it. One line of research shows that “people who can disengage from unattainable goals enjoy better well-being, have more normative patterns of cortisol secretion, and experience fewer symptoms of everyday illness than do people who have difficulty disengaging from unattainable goals.”56 That’s a powerful qualification to all those simple claims that persistence is desirable.
Just as the effects of displaying unqualified grit may not always be optimal, the motives for doing so raise important psychological questions. What matters isn’t just how long one persists, or at what, but why one does so. Do I remain at a soul-sucking job because of a realistic concern that I won’t be hired anywhere else? Or is it because I’m loath to admit defeat or afraid of being thought a failure? Do I continue trying to master French cooking or golf (in the absence of evidence that I have any gift for it) because I have a passion for the activity? Or does my persistence reflect an inability to change course, a compulsive conviction that one must always finish anything one starts? (The fear that I’ll be labeled a quitter may not be unrealistic if a strong social norm supports persisting no matter what. An accumulation of declarations that “grit is good” may help to create and reinforce just such a norm, thereby contributing to unhealthy reasons for persisting.)
Interestingly, those who stick with something out of genuine enjoyment may experience less need for self-discipline. They don’t have to grit their teeth to keep doing it, and it doesn’t matter if they’re not the sort of person who scores high on Duckworth’s “grit scale.” The essayist Annie Dillard, discussing the commitment to being a writer, commented, “You don’t do it from willpower; you do it from an abiding passion.” In fact, it’s not unlike being a parent, she added. “If you have a little baby crying in the middle of the night, and if you depend only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, that baby will starve. You do it out of love.”57
Quality of life is affected not only by what we do (that is, our behavior) but also by why we do it. That truth keeps surfacing throughout this book, proving relevant to issues ranging from overparenting to internalization. Theorists who stay at the surface, focused only on what can be seen and measured, will just want to know how much grit someone tends to display. They won’t bother to ask whether she does so because of her love of what she’s doing or because of a desperate (and anxiety-provoking) need to prove her competence. As long as kids are pushing themselves, we’re supposed to nod our approval.
Thus, as the epigraph to one of her articles, Duckworth chose this quote from the actor Will Smith: “I’m not afraid to die on a treadmill. I will not be outworked, period. You might have more talent than me . . . but if we get on the treadmill together, there are two things: You’re getting off first, or I’m going to die. It’s really that simple.”58 This declaration will strike many of us as frankly disturbing—an example of the dark side of persistence. It seems to illustrate a pathological fear of losing, a compulsive need to triumph over others, the rigid overcompensation that so often underlies macho boasting.59 To Duckworth, however, Smith won’t get off the damn treadmill and is therefore a model to be celebrated.
To know when to pull the plug requires not only wisdom and a capacity to adopt a long-term perspective but also a measure of gumption. Because continuing to do what one has been doing often represents the path of least resistance, it can take guts to cut one’s losses and say ¡Basta! And that’s as important a message to teach one’s children as is the usefulness of perseverance. Most of us want to encourage our kids to find something they love doing—and to help to spark that love (of writing, perhaps, to take Dillard’s example). That’s very different from telling them they ought to finish whatever they start, no matter how miserable it makes them.
3. There’s less to the benefits of grit than meets the eye.
Duckworth’s primary rationale for promoting grit is that it will produce “high levels of achievement.” That may sound commendable, but take a moment to reflect on other possible goals one might have—for example, helping children to lead a life that’s happy and fulfilling, morally admirable, creative, or characterized by psychological health. Any of those objectives would almost certainly lead to prescriptions quite different from “Do one thing and never give up.”
Moreover, if you look closely at Duckworth’s research, the benefits of grit she claims to have demonstrated turn out to be either circular or simply dubious. In one of her studies, she found that freshman cadets at West Point who scored high on her grit questionnaire (“I finish whatever I begin”) were less likely to quit during the grueling summer training program.60 This experiment does serve the narrow purpose of establishing the validity of the items on her questionnaire but otherwise seems to prove only that people who are persistent persist.
Another pair of studies looked at an elite group of middle schoolers who qualified for the National Spelling Bee. Duckworth reported that they performed better in that competition if they were higher in grit, “whereas spellers higher in openness to experience—defined as preferring using their imagination, playing with ideas, and otherwise enjoying a complex mental life—perform[ed] worse.” She also found that the most effective preparation strategy was “solitary deliberate practice activities” rather than, say, reading books.61
What’s striking here aren’t the findings themselves but the lesson Duckworth seems to derive from them. If enjoying a complex mental life (or reading for pleasure) interferes with performance in a one-shot contest to see who can spell more obscure words correctly—and if sufficient grittiness to spend time alone memorizing lists of words helps to achieve that goal—this is regarded as an argument in favor of grit. Presumably it also argues against having a complex mental life or engaging in “leisure reading.”
(Ironically, if we were interested in how well kids can spell—by which I mean (a) most kids, not just champion spellers, and (b) as judged by their actual writing rather than in the contrived format of a spelling bee—other research has found that reading, apart from its other benefits, is actually more effective than drill and practice.62 But to a proponent of grit, reading is less onerous, demands less self-discipline, and is therefore less admirable.)
The relevant issue, just as with the choice between learning how to play one musical instrument versus several of them, is more about ends than means. How important is it that kids who are exceptionally good spellers win more championships? Should we favor any strategy or perso
nality feature that contributes to that objective (or to anything that could be described as “higher achievement”) regardless of what it involves and what it displaces?
The outcome measure that Duckworth uses most often as a marker for achievement is school performance. Her argument is that self-discipline, and grit in particular, result in better grades. Her first experiment, which attracted considerable media attention, found that, among eighth graders at one magnet school with competitive admissions, self-discipline was a stronger predictor of academic success than IQ scores were, and that this attribute explained why girls, at least at that particular school, got better grades than boys did.63 Teachers gave more A’s to students who reported, for example, that they tended to put off doing what they enjoy until they finished their homework.
Again, though, what exactly should we conclude from that fact? Suppose it had been discovered that the students with the best grades were those who nodded and smiled at everything their teacher said. Would that argue for encouraging kids to become better at brown-nosing? Or might it instead call into question the usefulness of grades as a variable? What if it had been discovered that self-discipline on the part of adults was associated with more positive evaluations from their supervisors at work? We’d have to conclude that employees who did what their bosses wanted, regardless of whether it was satisfying or sensible, elicited a favorable verdict from those same bosses. But so what?
Good grades, in other words, are often just a sign of approval by the person with the power in a classroom. But even when they serve other functions, grades suffer from low levels of validity and reliability.64 Moreover, students who pursue higher grades—in many cases, perhaps, with an impressive show of grit—tend to be less interested in what they’re learning, more likely to think in a superficial fashion (and less likely to retain information), and inclined to prefer the easiest possible task whenever they have a choice—because the goal isn’t to explore ideas but to do whatever is necessary to snag the A (see p. 85).
