“I had this grit”: Kaufman, interview.
deemed insufficiently bright: I know two other people whose tested aptitude wasn’t particularly prognostic of what they would go on to achieve. The first is Darrin McMahon, an eminent historian at Dartmouth College. In Darrin’s book, Divine Fury: A History of Genius (New York: Basic Books, 2013), he points out that genius incites ambivalence. On one hand, the idea that a few of us stand above the rest by virtue of our God-given gifts holds timeless appeal. On the other hand, we love the idea of equality; we like to think we all have the same chance of succeeding in life. In a recent conversation on this topic, Darrin told me, “What we are seeing play out now is the democratization of genius. Part of us wants to believe that everyone can be a genius.” I was never a very good history student, and sometimes I was a very poor one. So I was more than a little surprised that I couldn’t put Darrin’s book down. It was beautifully written. The meticulous research and careful argumentation somehow did not get in the way of it telling a story. And then, at the very end, on page 243, I got to the acknowledgments: “I have undoubtedly suffered from many delusions in my life—and undoubtedly suffer from many still. But being a genius is not one of them.” Then Darrin says, with humor and affection, that when he was growing up, his parents saw to it that their son “never got too big for his britches.” And even more to the point, he recalls being tested as a child for his school’s gifted program. There were “shapes and pictures and the like,” but the only thing he remembers with certainty is “I didn’t pass.” Darrin remembers watching his classmates “trundle off each week to special classes for the specially endowed.” And then he reflects on whether getting labeled nongifted was, in the end, a blessing or a curse: “At an early age, I was told, with all the objectivity of science, that I was not the recipient of gifts. I might have just thrown in the towel then and there, but I am a stubborn sort, and I spent many years disputing the verdict, working away to prove to myself and to others, dammit, that I had not been slighted at birth.” Similarly, Michael Lomax was not easily identifiable as any kind of prodigy. Nevertheless, he has an illustrious résumé: he is president and CEO of the United Negro College Fund, a leadership position he has held for more than a decade. Before that, Michael was president of Dillard University. He has taught English at Emory University, Spelman College, and Morehouse College and was a two-time mayoral candidate for the city of Atlanta. “Honestly, I wasn’t considered the smartest kid,” Michael told me recently. When he was sixteen, his mother nevertheless wrote to the president of Morehouse College to ask whether her son could be admitted to its prep school. “Of course, there was no prep school at Morehouse!” Michael chuckled. The Morehouse president decided, on the basis of Michael’s outstanding grades, to admit him as a freshman to the college. “I got there. I hated it. I wanted to leave. I was number one in my class, but I wanted to transfer. I got it in my head that I would be a better fit at Williams College, so I applied. I had done everything, and they were about to admit me, and then the director of admissions said, ‘Oh, by the way, we need an SAT score.’?” Because he’d been admitted to Morehouse without a formal application, Michael had never taken the SAT before. “That test was make-or-break for me. I sat down and took it. And I didn’t do well. Williams didn’t admit me.” So Michael stayed at Morehouse and made the best of it, graduating Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in English. Later, he earned his master’s degree in English from Columbia University, and his PhD in American and African American literature from Emory University. Now sixty-eight years old, Michael told me, “At my age, I think it’s character more than genius. I know all kinds of very talented people who squander their great talents, or who are dissatisfied and unhappy because they think talent is enough. In fact, it ain’t even near enough. What I tell my kids, what I try to tell my grandchildren, and anybody I get a chance to mentor is this: It’s the sweat, it’s the hard work, it’s the persistence, it’s the determination. It is the getting up and dusting yourself off. That’s what it’s all about.” In anticipation of hate mail about this passage on gifted and talented programs, let me say this: I am wholeheartedly in favor of giving kids all the intellectual stimulation they can handle. At the same time, I urge opening those programs to all children who might benefit. Thirty years ago, Benjamin Bloom said it best: “We in this country have come to believe that we can tell who’s going to be a great musician by giving musical aptitude tests, who’s going to be a great mathematician by giving mathematics aptitude tests. Doing that counts some people in and others out far too early. . . . All the children should be given opportunities to explore fields that they might be interested in.” Ronald S. Brandt, “On Talent Development: A Conversation with Benjamin Bloom,” Educational Leadership 43 (1985): 33–35.
CHAPTER 3: EFFORT COUNTS TWICE
“The Mundanity of Excellence”: Daniel F. Chambliss, “The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers,” Sociological Theory 7 (1989): 70–86.
“dozens of small skills”: Ibid., 81.
“You need to jazz it up”: Ibid., 86.
“we have for athletic success”: Ibid., 78.
“distinguishes the best among our athletes”: Ibid, 78.
“It’s easy to do”: Ibid., 79.
“anatomical advantages”: Daniel F. Chambliss, professor of sociology at Hamilton College, in an interview with the author, June 2, 2015.
“how it came to be”: This is an informal translation, Friedrich Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches: Ein Buch für Freie Geister (Leipzig: Alfred Kr?ner Verlag, 1925), 135.
“out of the ground by magic”: Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 80.
“grows somewhat cool”: Ibid., 86.
“the cult of the genius”: Ibid.
“active in one direction”: Ibid.
“giftedness, inborn talents!”: Ibid.
human flourishing: Marty Seligman lays out the rationale for Positive Psychology in his presidential address to the American Psychological Association, reprinted in American Psychologist 54 (1999): 559–62.
talent is how quickly: The word talent is used differently by different people, but I think the most intuitive definition is the one I’ve offered here. For evidence that individuals do differ in the rate at which they acquire skills, see Paul B. Baltes and Reinhold Kliegl, “Further Testing of Limits of Cognitive Plasticity: Negative Age Differences in a Mnemonic Skill Are Robust,” Developmental Psychology 28 (1992): 121–25. See also Tom Stafford and Michael Dewar, “Tracing the Trajectory of Skill Learning with a Very Large Sample of Online Game Players,” Psychological Science, 25 (2014), 511–18. Finally, see the work of David Hambrick and colleagues on factors other than practice that likely influence skill acquisition; for example, see Brooke N. Macnamara, David Z. Hambrick, and Frederick L. Oswald, “Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education, and Professions: A Meta-Analysis,” Psychological Science 25 (2014): 1608–18. A critique of this meta-analysis by psychologist Anders Ericsson, whose work we explore in depth in chapter 7, is posted on his website: https://psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.hp.html.
“going to be the renaissance people”: “Oral History Interview with Warren MacKenzie, 2002 October 29,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-warren-mackenzie-12417.
“our true interest lay”: Ibid.