Grit by Angela Duckworth

accretion of mundane acts. But does the incremental mastery of mundane individual components explain everything? I wondered. Is that all there is?
    â€œWell, we all love mystery and magic,” he said. “I do, too.”
    Then Dan told me about the day he got to watch Rowdy Gaines and Mark Spitz swim laps. “Spitz won seven gold medals in the ’72 Olympics and was the big thing before Michael Phelps,” he explained. “In ’84, twelve years after retirement, Spitz showed up. He’s in his mid-thirties. And he gets into the water with Rowdy Gaines, who at that time held the world record in the one hundred free. They did some fifties—in other words, two lengths of the pool, just sprints, like little races. Gaines won most of them, but by the time they were halfway through, the entire team was standing around the edge of the pool just to watch Spitz swim.”
    Everyone on the team had been training with Gaines, and they knew how good he was. They knew he was favored to win Olympic gold. But because of the age gap, nobody had swum with Spitz.
    One swimmer turned to Dan and said, pointing to Spitz, “My god. He’s a fish.”
    I could hear the wonder in Dan’s voice. Even a student of mundanity, it seems, is easily lulled into talent explanations. I pressed him a bit. Was that sort of majestic performance something divine?
    Dan told me to go read Nietzsche.
    Nietzsche? The philosopher ? What would a nineteenth-centuryGerman philosopher have to say that might explain Mark Spitz? As it turns out, Nietzsche, too, had thought long and hard about the same questions.
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    â€œWith everything perfect,” Nietzsche wrote, “we do not askhow it came to be.” Instead, “we rejoice in the present fact as though it cameout of the ground by magic.”
    When I read that passage, I thought of the young swimmers watching their icon Spitz exhibit form that almost didn’t seem human.
    â€œNo one can see in the work of the artist how it has become ,” Nietzsche said. “That is its advantage, for wherever one can see the act of becoming onegrows somewhat cool.” In other words, we want to believe that Mark Spitz was born to swim in a way that none of us were and that none of us could. We don’t want to sit on the pool deck and watch him progress from amateur to expert. We prefer our excellence fully formed. We prefer mystery to mundanity.
    But why? What’s the reason for fooling ourselves into thinking Mark Spitz didn’t earn his mastery?
    â€œOur vanity, our self-love, promotesthe cult of the genius,” Nietzsche said. “For if we think of genius as something magical, we are not obliged to compare ourselves and find ourselves lacking. . . . To call someone ‘divine’ means: ‘here there is no need to compete.’ ”
    In other words, mythologizing natural talent lets us all off the hook. It lets us relax into the status quo. That’s what undoubtedly occurred in my early days of teaching when I mistakenly equated talent and achievement, and by doing so, removed effort—both my students’ and my own—from further consideration.
    So what is the reality of greatness? Nietzsche came to the same conclusion Dan Chambliss did. Great things are accomplished by those “people whose thinking isactive in one direction, who employ everythingas material, who always zealously observe their own inner life and that of others, who perceive everywhere models and incentives, who never tire of combining together the means available to them.”
    And what about talent? Nietzsche implored us to consider exemplars to be, above all else, craftsmen: “Do not talk aboutgiftedness, inborn talents! One can name great men of all kinds who were very little gifted. They acquired greatness, became ‘geniuses’ (as we put it). . . . They all possessed that seriousness of the efficient workman which