Grit

"A failure establishes only this, that our determination to succeed was not strong enough."
- John Christian Bovee

I had a long talk yesterday with my ex-wife. We talk often. She still owns her small holistic nutrition business. She started the business from scratch over 10 years ago. She was down in the dumps when she called me. Her receptionist/business manager had given notice that she was quitting to help with a family business. On top of that her landlord had notified her that he was selling the building, meaning she would have to relocate. Business was slower than usual, and in combination with the other two things, it had her in a tizzy: too many problems, too pressed for time, and too worn down trying to keep her head above water.

She's twenty years from retirement and doesn't want to start fresh. She is single, forty-six, attractive (but aware her age will one day betray her), and manages to spend most of what she makes. She feels she has few options other than to do what she knows she has to: just power her way through the whole mess.
It's a familiar problem, not only for small business owners, but for anyone striving to get ahead. Why are some, like her, able to persevere and achieve success while so many others run out of steam?

Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, and Kelly (2007) think a major reason is that the successful ones have "grit" and they developed a scale to measure it. How "gritty" are you? Rate yourself on the following 4 of the 12 statements used in their scale: (a) I finish whatever I begin, (b) my interests don't change from year to year, (c) I have achieved a goal that took years of work, and (d) I am a hard worker. Give yourself a 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 where 1= not at all like me, and 5 = very much like me. Take the total and divide it by 4 to get your score.

 The average score on their 12 items is 3.41. If your score is above 3.41 you have above average grit, although you could expect your score would be different if you rated yourself on all 12 of their statements.

 They define grit as perseverance and passion for long-term goals. If you have lots of grit it means you work strenuously toward challenges and sustain your effort for years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress. They say gritty individuals approach achievement as a marathon; his or her advantage is stamina. When disappointment or boredom causes others to change trajectory and cut losses, the gritty individual stays the course.

Angela Duckworth and her colleagues reviewed historical evidence collected on variety of occupational groups as well as 6 different groups in their own research: two groups of adults, two groups of West Point military cadets, a group of Ivy graduates, and National Spelling Bee finalists. Surprisingly, personality type was not strongly related to success. We often think that successful people are extraverted, aggressive, agreeable, or conscientious. It turns out that only conscientiousness is correlated with success and even that relationship is very weak. Natural born intelligence and grit are the two most powerful predictors of success. Intelligence is more critical with complex jobs.

 The next time you feel overwhelmed and ready to throw in the towel, remember this research. Don't blame it on your personality, lack of money, or anything else you can't change right now. Take comfort in knowing all successful people suffer the same problems and worse. Dig deep for your grittiness and live well between your ears.

What are you really saying?

All good investigators, communicators, and poker players have at least one thing in common: They’ve learned to read faces. It helps them solve crime, shape opinion, and win money.

Whether you’re greeting a customer, hosting a party, briefing your staff, or simply having a conversation with an employee, spouse, or friend, the message on your face means as much as the words from your mouth. Psychologists have shown that accurate communication can be up to ninety percent dependent upon non-verbal cues—body language and facial expression—while as little as ten percent of the message is from the actual words.

Imagine being in total isolation and shown the words: I want you. The message is confusing until you hear and see the speaker. Is it a cop, your lover, your friend, or your enemy? Is the voice soft, loud, tender, or hesitating? Most importantly, would it help to see the speaker’s eyes, mouth, and expression on their face? Of course it would. The example illustrates two things: (1) non-verbal signals are vital to clear communication, and (2) texting or email is great for staying in touch but no substitute for a face to face meeting.

Do some conversations make you uneasy? Have you had a gut feeling you don’t understand? And finally, can you tell when the look on your face does not match your words.

If you answered yes even once, I recommend two books: Blink written in 2005 by Malcolm Gladwell, and Unmasking the Face by Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen. The first is entertaining but less instructive. The second is a how-to-read-faces manual written by world renowned experts. With illustrated pictures of faces, it explains what your face tells others, and what it tries to hide.

The authors identified forty-three distinct muscle movements our face can make. They catalogued them to form several hundred facial-muscle combinations and the message displayed by each. The shocker is that these face messages reveal the truth, and we send them out every second without much awareness. Once your face says something, it’s out there and there is no way to take it back. We can always apologize for hurtful or inaccurate words, but we never say, “I’m sorry my face just lied to you.”  We’d know it as an insincere apology since usually the face does not lie.

Most face messages can be read. The common ones are surprise, fear, disgust, anger, happiness, sadness, and deceit. We read them when the signals appear. For example, surprise registers as raised, curved eyebrows, wide-open eyes, and a dropped jaw with relaxed lips. If you don’t see this reaction when you tell your youngest associate she won employee of the year, it probably means she already knew. Someone told her. And if you see the reaction too late, a fraction of a second after you announced the news, it probably means that she wants you to believe she really is surprised.  In either case, her face didn’t properly match the occasion, she likely feels a bit awkward, and her gushing “thank you” lacks authenticity.

The good news here is because you read her face you created a teaching moment. You can tell her that the look on her face made you suspect she already knew. Tell her it is okay; that you understand.  Most importantly, you can explain that she shouldn’t feel compelled to make it look like a surprise just for your benefit. Explain that all it did was cloud the issue which cripples clear communication.

We’ve been learning to pick up on facial displays since babyhood, but we’re still not good at it. Untrained people are accurate about fifty percent of the time. Stroke victims and the deaf are more accurate. Their reduced ability to carry on a conversation makes them sensitive to subtle changes in people’s faces. Likewise, people from abusive homes or who work in dangerous careers or who occupy war zones, are often better face readers because it is critical that they sense what’s coming next—before it is too late.

Most of us don’t manage our faces well. Messages or feelings often flow from our face, despite efforts to control them. In their chapter on facial deceit, Ekman and Friesen say our body-language and face reflect our true emotions, which often contradict our words. Because we get so much practice talking, it is much easier to communicate—and mislead— with our words than with our face. The boss or politician can read from a prepared statement, the spouse can rehearse the explanation to their partner, and the sixteen year-old can practice explaining how the front bumper detached itself. They can rehearse the words, but their face gives them away. 

What might reveal deceit? It usually has to do with timing. Suppose you ask an interviewee if he’s ever been charged with a felony. Before he can neutralize his face, and in the split second it took him to answer “no”, his upper eyelids rise, the lower ones tense up, and his lips tighten and draw back. Did you catch it? It was a fear response. Fear of getting caught in a lie. The fear message flashed on his face before he could neutralize it. You can’t describe all you saw, but your gut says he’s lying.

But this is not about deceit. It is about honest communication. When your customers, spouse, or friends notice discrepancies between what you say and how you look they drift away because something—they may not know what— is not right. Make sure your words and face always say the same thing, and live well between your ears.

Night Lovers

“Darkness is sweet, night-time is king. Become who you want without risking a thing. Alone in the blackness, my palm on my head, I love it so much I have nothing to dread. The silence is soft, the darkness secure. Greatness starts here, if not for the light. As night turns to day wisdom fades too. Oh, night-time don’t leave me, I’m better with you. I see it all coming, my critics asleep. I make it all happen and then fall asleep.”

I wrote those words when I lived on my boat on the Sacramento River Delta. Anchored to the starboard side, I slept in a queen bed tucked in the stern of my twenty-eight foot cruiser. No place was more peaceful or holds sweeter memories. Tiny 12 volt swivel lights cast shadows across the cabin to be replaced by a flickering candle when I conserved my batteries or no shadows at all when my candle burnt out.

My quarters were tight. I knew its spaces like the back of my hand. If need be, I could slip off my reclining position in the bow, and in total darkness make my way to any half-eaten cookie, half smoked cigarette, half drank rum and coke, or anything else in that boat.

Damp, foggy, November nights on the delta were pitch black, inside and out. It was quiet as a tomb except for the soft rippling of the current against the hull. I felt secure for three reasons: It was night, I was in the middle of nowhere with my anchor light on, and I was never more than 2 to 5 steps from the gun in my bed. There were stories of piracy on the river. Some of them were true. But the kachik-kachik as I pumped a shell into the chamber of my Remington Wingmaster, 12 gauge shotgun was a dangerous sound for the uninvited if they ever put weight on my swim platform.  

I am a night person—through and through. Researching this column, I’ve concluded that two reasons weigh heavily on whether you are a day or a night person. The first, and most common, is our genetically determined circadian rhythm. Beyond that, at least for me, there are psychological reasons for loving the night; far stronger than any biological factor.  I can’t speak for those who don’t love the night—I simply don’t understand you. It’s not that I dislike the day; I just love the night.

The research on circadian rhythms indicates that morning people are governed more by social values, are less open to change, more agreeable, and more conscientious (Vollmer and Randler, 2012), while evening people are more individualistic, open to change, and slightly neurotic. In 1999, Roberts and Killonen reported that night people have higher intelligence scores, and Chelminski and his colleagues discovered night owls were also more likely to be depressed.

In 2009, D. Collins and his students at the University of Alberta found that the physical strength of morning people stayed level throughout the day but declined in the evening, while evening people became physically stronger throughout the day indicating that, “the early bird may get the worm but the night owl has more stamina.”  Similar results demonstrated that after 10.5 hours of wakefulness, night owls are able to concentrate more effectively than early birds.

The extent to which a few of us love the night is tied to more than just circadian rhythms. Over our lives we have learned we are safe at night. By sundown, the phone quits ringing, no one needs us, no one is in our face, and expectations of the daily grind end. Night is when freedom and contentment permeate the night lover’s being. Public turns to private, busy to calm, stressed to relaxed, and restraint becomes loose, so the night owls can live well between their ears, especially on their boat.

The rise of women and decline of men

“In politics, if you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman.” Margaret Thatcher

“I’m tough, I’m ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, okay.” Madonna

More women than ever before occupy positions of power, influence and wealth. Men, once dominant in these areas, are rapidly losing ground. Have women become more like men, have men lost some of their edge, or is it a little of both? What is causing the rise of women and decline of men?

             Researchers agree (e.g., Halpern, 2007) that men have traditionally been strong in physics, math, science, visual-spatial tasks, and gross motor skills. Women are better at language and fine motor skills (such as handwriting and remote controls), and in recent decades, they show improvement in science too. Recent brain research by Ruben Gur found that women control their emotions and decipher facial expressions and tonal differences better than men. Also, the area of the brain used to control aggression and anger are larger and more effective in women than in men. It’s not hard to imagine that in today’s world these characteristics are in greater demand in politics and business, thus giving women an edge.

Could personality or behavior differences account for the decline of men? Schwartz and Rubel (2005) confirmed that men in almost all cultures place a higher value on authority, wealth, controlling others, social power, success, ambition, and admiration for one’s abilities. Women place a higher value on social justice, equality, wisdom, world peace, protecting the environment, and being helpful, caring, loyal, and supportive. Again, in a more interdependent and complex world, these values are needed and they help propel women to positions of influence.

Schmitt and his colleagues (2008) studied personality differences in over 17,000 men and women from 55 different countries and concluded that women not only possessed these “softer” traits, they were also rated as harder working, more organized, and more persevering than men. Christina Hoff Sommers, in her 2013 book, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies Are Harming our Young Men, suggests we have socialized some of the most desirable masculine tendencies out of our boys and into our girls. Young men have also fallen behind in education.

In 2010 the Wall Street Journal reported that 53 percent of women graduate from university vs. 38 percent of men.  Among recent business graduates, the earning power of single women is 8 percent greater than for comparable men. According to Zimbardo and Duncan (2012), “Girls outperform boys now at every level, from elementary school through graduate school. By eighth grade only 20 percent of boys are proficient in writing and 24 percent proficient in reading. Young men’s SAT scores in 2011 were the worst they’ve been in 40 years. Boys are 30 percent more likely than girls to drop out of both high school and college. In Canada, five boys drop out of school for every three girls who do. Nationally, boys account for 70 percent of all the D and F grades given out at school.”

             Why have men's prospects for the good life eroded while women’s have gone into over-drive?

Sommers (2001), argues that a large part of the blame belongs at the feet of the powerful and pervasive feminist lobby which, for five decades, has driven corporations and governments to spend billions to create equal opportunity for women. In addition to highlighting discrepancies in pay and opportunity, feminism also told young women that it was okay for them to be more man-like. They were encouraged to display both masculine and feminine psychological characteristics (e.g., both assertiveness and sensitivity). It worked. Women kept their femininity, adopted some masculine traits, and became more outspoken, competitive, and ambitious.

Unfortunately, during this time, concern about violence appeared on everyone’s radar. The popular view was that boys’ aggressive play led to dangerous violence. There is scant evidence the two are connected, but none the less, because of societal concerns, boys were encouraged to be less aggressive, less pro-risk, less rough-and-tumble, and in general, less masculine. In contrast, girls were encouraged to adopt these characteristics. With the benefit of hindsight, we should have let boys keep their masculinity and also encouraged them to develop characteristics more often associated with females. But, society’s homophobic nature made the latter unlikely.

The net result is that young men are less like men once were, and feminine women have become ball-busting hard-chargers ready to take on the world. Men need to not only reclaim their masculinity and place greater value on education, they also have to develop better empathy and conversation skills so they can reverse their downward trend and live well between their ears.