Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (Chapter 4 Review)

It starts with the author doing a presentation, and she explained to a person that grit is more about stamina than intensity.

She then talks about the grit scale that she made, and how enthusiasm is common, but endurance is rare.

There’s this guy called Jeff Gettleman. He wanted to go to East Africa. He soon visited East Africa for a bit. He visited it again, but didn’t know what to do there.

He went to Oxford not knowing what career path to choose. In the end he chose journalism and worked in many places until he got the Africa job.

A guy named Pete Carroll said you need a live philosophy. He is a football coach. The author explains a system where you put your bigger goals on top, and extend it down smaller and smaller until it gets to daily stuff. She says grit is about chasing the same top goal for a long time.

There are some people who knows what their top goal is, but doesn’t know the let goals that will help reach it. The author also points out how people have different goal pyramids that aren’t related with each other.

Warren Buffett says that you have three steps to figure out where you need to go in life. The first is to list 25 career goals. The second is to choose just five that interest you the most. Then you look back at the other 20 you didn’t choose and avoid them. The author tried and she said it was very hard.

A person named Roz Chast said that the rejection rate for newspaper cartoonists are 90%, but Bob Mankoff said it was only her.

Bob Mankoff is a newspaper cartoonist who went to an art school, and after he saw how good the people there were, he felt bad and stopped drawing for three years.

After reading a book, he started to draw again. He got rejected 2000 times, but got accepted in the end and sold many drawings to the paper.

A person named Catharine Cox did a study about if IQ mattered to accomplishments in life. She listed a bunch of geniuses, and found there were only little differences between them and normal people. The fact that they were famous had nothing to do with them being introverted or cheerfulness or if they’re funny or not.

She said that they were there ones most persistent about their work. She also said that high but not highest intelligence, mixed with big persistence, will give you more recognition than the highest intelligence with less persistence.