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Overview
Grit, the ability to persevere against all odds, is widely recognized as the key to success. But how can grit be cultivated and sustained? In this myth-shattering book, David DeSteno reveals that the most powerful tools we can draw upon to achieve our toughest goals are not willpower or self-denial, but our prosocial emotions—gratitude, compassion, and pride. In fact, this undervalued toolkit evolved specifically to help us resist immediate temptations in favor of long-term gains. DeSteno breaks down the long-overlooked mechanisms of perseverance built into our brains and shows how we can work with our emotions, instead of denying them, to achieve our goals. And he shows how we can do it with greater ease and deeper satisfaction than we would have thought possible.
“As inspiring as it is practical.” —Arianna Huffington, author of Thrive and The Sleep Revolution
“Revolutionary.” —Chade-Meng Tan, author of Joy on Demand and Search Inside Yourself
“Anyone who hopes to live a more meaningful and fulfilling life should read this book.” —Peter Salovey, professor of psychology and president, Yale University, and discoverer of emotional intelligence
“A beautifully written and very important book.” —Paul Bloom, professor of Psychology at Yale University and author of Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion
“If you think the key to self-control is overriding your emotions, think again. Moral emotions can strengthen your willpower—and this fascinating book uses the latest social science to explain how.” —Adam Grant, author of Give and Take, Originals, and Option B with Sheryl Sandberg
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780544703124 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins Publishers |
| Publication date: | 11/21/2023 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 236 |
| Sales rank: | 906,948 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
INTRODUCTION
Me want cookie . . . but me wait. For almost anyone who was or lived with
a child sometime in the past forty years, the first part of that
sentence calls up images of a blue, fuzzy, grammatically challenged,
adorably gluttonous Muppet: Cookie Monster. But the second part
caught me off guard when I first heard it. Cookie, as his name implies,
was traditionally an embodiment of immediate gratification.
Sure, once in a while he was tweaked to accommodate the concerns
of the time. When the healthiness of kids’ diets was in question,
Cookie’s penchant for sweets was changed to include fruit. When
the dangers of food allergies in schools became apparent, he made
sure his cookies were nut-free. Yet across the years, one trait remained
constant: impulsivity. When Cookie wanted something,
he wanted it now. But in 2013, during Sesame Street’s forty-fourth
season, that changed; but me wait became part of Cookie’s Muppet
mantra and, as a result, part of a new generation’s early education.
Self-Control, Success, and the Road Not Taken
This change is evidence of our society’s continuing obsession
with success. And when it comes to achieving that success, whether
it’s at the office, in managing finances, in bettering health, or even
in pursuing an unlikely dream, decades of research has revealed that
self-control is key. By that, I mean the ability to resist urges for immediate
gratification in order to obtain greater rewards in the future.
Best-selling books such as Willpower, How Children Succeed,
and Grit all promise insight into how perseverance and patience can
affect our lives for the better. Not to be outdone, magazines from
the Atlantic to People routinely feature articles on the benefits of
self-control and how to obtain it.
I don’t mean to criticize this emphasis on self-control and valuing
the future. To the contrary, I think we need it. And while the
idea of self-control’s benefits isn’t new — we can see it extolled in
moral tales and treatises going back for centuries — what is new is
that this idea has moved from philosophy and theology into empirical
proof. The benefits of self-control aren’t a matter of opinion
anymore; they’re quantifiable. And what can be quantified can,
in theory, be maximized. The million-dollar question, of course, is
How? How can self-control be enhanced?
It’s here that I fear we have gone astray. For almost fifty years
we’ve been developing science-based strategies meant to help us
reach our goals. Yet on average, we are no better at delaying immediate
gratification than we were in the 1960s. If anything, our impatience
and desire for immediate satisfaction are on the rise. As
individuals and as a society, we’re spending more on impulse buys
and conveniences rather than saving for a rainy day or retirement.
We’re diverting our attention to games or social media on our
smartphones rather than focusing it on learning and honing skills
we need. We’re satisfying our sweet tooth and, as a result, expanding
our waists simply to gain momentary pleasures at a great cost to our
future well-being. And at a more macro level, many of us are resist-
ing choices such as spending a bit more for clean or renewable energy
that, though somewhat costlier in the moment, will help avoid
greater problems down the road. In short, we’re planning less for
the future, not caring as much about what that future will bring.
And while it’s undoubtedly true that each of these examples of impatience
and shortsightedness stems from many factors, underlying
them all is a growing bias toward pleasure in the moment.
On any given day, most people fail to stick with their daily goals
about 20 percent of the time — a percentage that climbs quickly if
they’re busy, tired, or stressed. That means almost one out of every
five times we try to work harder, eat better, save more, or prepare for
a test or performance evaluation, we’re going to fail to do it in favor
of something else that’s more fun in the moment. And when decisions
involve important goals — the ones that truly matter to people
— the success rate is even worse. Only 8 percent of New Year’s resolutions
are kept throughout the year. While 25 percent fail in the
first week. The result is that most of us frequently end up feeling
powerless to stick to our goals and, even worse, upset with ourselves
for loafing, splurging, bingeing, or otherwise giving in to a desire
for some short-term pleasure that will ultimately cost us.
This raises an intriguing and troubling question: If delaying gratification
and valuing the future are so important, and if we’ve been
using science-backed strategies for decades to help us do it, why are
most of us still so bad at it? One would think that our minds would
come equipped with tools to meet the challenges posed by a lack of
impulse control. After all, that’s one hallmark of evolutionary development:
the mind and body retain features that help us to thrive.
So, either the development of the human mind has a gaping hole,
as the need for self-control has been around since our species’s beginning,
or we’re doing something wrong. And as a scientist who
for decades has studied how humans make decisions, I can confirm
that it’s the latter.
Our minds do come equipped with the necessary tools to succeed,
but we’re forsaking them. We still have serious problems
delaying gratification, developing dedication, and cultivating perseverance
because our notion of how self-control works is flawed.
Put simply, we’re seeing only half the picture. When we’re forced
to choose strategies for success, we tend to favor cognitive ones —
stoic approaches characterized by reason, deliberation, and force of
will. If you read those bestsellers I mentioned, page through popular
magazines, or even peruse scientific papers, you’ll find the same
underlying message: rationality trumps emotion. To stand firm
in the face of challenges and temptations, we’re told to use what
psychologists term executive function — that part of the mind that
manages and controls “subordinate” processes such as memory, attention,
and feelings. The term executive wasn’t picked by accident.
This aspect of the mind is, in essence, the boss; it gives the orders
that the rest of the mind is supposed to follow. Executive function
allows people to plan, to reason, and to use willpower to keep focused,
accept sacrifices, and ignore or suppress emotional responses
that might get in the way of reaching their long-term aspirations.
And cognitive strategies such as these — ones based on reason and
analysis as opposed to emotions — are believed to maintain the perseverance
required to succeed.
But the fact that a given set of tools sometimes works doesn’t
imply that it will always work. Nor does it imply that they’re the best
tools for the job. In the case of our reliance on cognitive tools such
as willpower, I believe we’ve created a predicament. We’ve ended
up with a set of tools that, while effective at times, is inefficient and
fragile. More troubling, under certain circumstances these tools can
even be harmful. The upshot of using them is that we’re often setting
ourselves up for failure while increasing the likelihood of damage
to our physical and mental well-being over the long run.
The False Choice
For centuries philosophers, psychologists, and people in general
pitted cognition — those supposedly rational, logical mechanisms
of the mind that feel like you can guide them — against emotion —
those supposedly irrational and capricious components that seem
to emerge unbidden — when trying to understand how we make decisions.
And for most of that time we’ve tended to trumpet the former
while stigmatizing the latter.
This one-to-one mapping of reason to virtue and emotion to
vice doesn’t reflect reality, however. It sets up a false choice. As
we’ll see in the chapters that follow, the mind has emotions because,
more often than not, they help us. In psychological parlance,
they’re adaptive. They nudge, or sometimes thrust, our decisions in
ways meant to help us achieve our goals, not to thwart them. We
often miss this essential truth when we fail to recognize that the decision-
making machinery of the human mind is quite complex. It
often must manage competing goals, some of which are focused on
present outcomes and others on future ones. If it’s true — as most
researchers in the field believe — that emotions did evolve to be
adaptive, then it follows that some must be attuned to short-term
needs and wants while others are attuned to costs and benefits coming
down the line. Yet when it comes to self-control, almost all studies
of emotion have focused on those feelings relevant to the short
term — emotions such as anger, lust, and desire, which favor satisfaction
of an immediate craving or impulse.
Even among psychologists, the prevailing view of how we
should develop self-restraint, diligence, grit, and the like can be
boiled down to something quite simple: cognition is good, emotions
are bad. Most believe that the best way for people to resist
eating the second piece of chocolate cake, spending their paycheck
on an impulse buy, or watching a movie when they should be working
is for their mental executive to marshal its army of cognitive
tools and overcome emotions bent on satisfying cravings for immediate
pleasure. As a result, experts and friends tell us to use reason to
convince ourselves that saving money or going to the gym is worthwhile.
To use techniques such as distraction to keep ourselves or our
kids from reaching back into the cookie jar. And, if necessary, to use
willpower to make ourselves stick to the plan.
Unfortunately, when these strategies are used too frequently
or under demanding conditions, they often fail. For example, each
time a person uses willpower and executive function to resist temptations
in relatively quick succession, those tools become less effective.
Likewise, strategies based on distracting oneself from a
short-term desire become more difficult to implement the closer
any desired object looms — a perverse fact given that this is when
we need self-control most. We’re never told to use an emotion itself
to achieve a challenging goal. This is unfortunate, even tragic,
because emotions can be such powerful tools for maintaining selfcontrol.
On balance, they’re both easier to use and more robust
than the cognitive tools we’re told to reach for.
Sure, emotions can lead us astray. We’ve all felt the distracting
pull of pleasure when confronting a difficult task. We’ve felt listless
when depressed or eager for a quick fix or guilty pleasure. We’ve felt
angry and wanted to lash out even when we know doing so might
be harmful to others and ourselves. Yet we’re making a profound
mistake if we assume that just because some emotions can lead us
into temptation, all emotions will. If emotions always guided our
decisions in problematic ways, we wouldn’t have them; they would
have been left in the evolutionary dustbin long ago.
In truth, emotions are among the most powerful and efficient
mechanisms we have to guide good decisions. They’re the first such
mechanisms we developed, too. Emotional responses existed long
before we acquired the cognitive abilities to plan ahead — abilities
that reside in the frontal lobe of modern humans — yet still faced the
challenges posed by short-term desires (for example, to eat all the
food rather than share with our fellows). The trick to success, then,
comes in understanding that emotions don’t only happen to us; we
can use them to help achieve our goals — if we develop the wisdom
to call upon the right emotions to meet the challenges at hand.
When it comes to long-term success, the “right” emotions are
principally these: gratitude, compassion, and pride. These emotions,
unlike basic feelings of happiness, sadness, anger, or fear, are
intrinsically tied to social life, and that provides the key to their effectiveness.
At base, social living regularly requires a willingness to
accept costs in the moment to ensure better days ahead. We didn’t
originally develop self-control so that we could study for exams, save
for retirement, or go to the gym. For most of our evolutionary history,
none of that mattered or even existed. What did matter to survive
and thrive was having strong social bonds — relationships that
would encourage people to lend support to others in need while
knowing full well that their sacrifices would be returned if and when
required in the future. Establishing and maintaining such relationships
required behaving morally. It meant being fair, being honest,
being generous, being diligent, and being loyal. In short, morality
itself was adaptive; being perceived to have good character marked
a person as capable of overcoming a desire to be overly selfish and,
therefore, as a person with whom it was safe to partner. And as we’ll
see, it’s precisely the emotions of gratitude, compassion, and pride
that make us more willing to behave in these valued ways.
Think about the last time you felt any of these three states — really
felt them. They probably pushed you to accept some type of
immediate cost. Gratitude has led me to spend many hours repaying
favors or debts. I’ve moved more couches and spent more time
making gifts for friends than I thought possible, all to make sure
that others whose friendships I valued knew I appreciated what
they had done for me and, in so doing, kept those bonds from fraying
down the line. Compassion is similar. It moves many people to
give money, time, or emotional support to others in need. It encourages
an altruism that ensures efforts will be returned for our kind
acts when we need them. Pride, too, can encourage people to sacrifice
for future gain. I’ll always remember one of my students telling
me that the only thing that allowed her to get up at 5:00 a.m. every
day to practice rowing on the frigid Columbia River was the pride
she felt in being part of her team. These emotions grease the wheels
of social life by making us act in ways that, though costly to our
pleasure or resources in the short term, bring the promise of greater
rewards in the future. They give us self-control.
These same emotions — the ones that push us to value the future
in order to grow our social success — can be co-opted to help
us achieve success in any area of life: academic, professional, financial,
health. Just as they nudge us to sacrifice in the short run to
better our relationships with others, we can use them to manage
our relationships with someone else who’s central to our hopes and
dreams: our own future selves. As we’ll see, cultivating these three
emotions can help us meet our own needs and goals in a way that
is more powerful and less fraught than relying on reason and willpower
alone.
Collateral Damage
Depending on fragile cognitive strategies to reach our goals doesn’t
only reduce our chances of success, it can also harm us in more subtle
ways. Broadly speaking, these harms — what I call collateral damage
— tend to be of two types. The first centers on stress. Because
most of the cognitive techniques are corrective in nature — they’re
meant to override or tamp down a more basic desire for pleasure
rather than prevent that desire from emerging in the first place —
they usually require a good deal of effort. It can frequently feel like
you’re wrestling with yourself as you pursue a goal. And since few
experiences cause more stress than those that combine great effort
with a sizable risk of failure, feelings of tension and temporary
burnout can arise. This kind of stress isn’t only unpleasant, it also
has been shown to interfere with our ability to learn. So in some
ways, using cognitive techniques is like taking two steps forward
and one step back. Over time, however, the negative effects from
using these tools can be even more pernicious; they can lead to declines
in health.
This brings us to the second form of collateral damage. Although
a bit more diffuse, the impairments are no less troubling.
In modern life, success for many requires gaining more and more
competence in highly specific realms. If you want to be a top violinist,
you’ve got to practice for hours and hours to hone your craft and
stay one step ahead of the competition. If you want to get into Harvard
Medical School, Yale Law, or a famed Silicon Valley corporation,
it’s much the same. Competition is fierce, meaning dedication
to building knowledge and skills is essential. How we choose to motivate
ourselves to do this, however, can make a world of difference.
The currently recommended ways — the ones that rely on executive
function, reason, and the like — all share a theme: rational
antisocialism. That is, they treat the mind as if it were a machine
existing in a social vacuum, with engineers tweaking its mech-anisms
to make it ever more efficient. If you want to succeed, the
thinking goes, work harder, faster, longer, and more efficiently.
That’s what a computer or robot would do. So, if you’re a human,
who unlike those entities is saddled with temptations to seek multiple
types of enjoyment, do everything you can to suppress those.
Bring willpower online to thwart irrational emotional responses
that might lead you astray. When willpower fails, use techniques of
distraction, habit formation, goal reappraisal, and the like. But the
human mind isn’t a computer. It has an owner who is a social being,
meaning that it evolved to take care of a body that has social needs
— needs that these cognitive mechanisms often ignore or even inhibit
— that are also inherently linked to achievement. As we’ll see
later in this book, links to other people not only drive perseverance
and success but also make us more fulfilled and resilient.
The personality trait of grit — the ability to use self-control to
keep focused on future goals over long periods — has been linked
to achievement. This makes great sense, as those who are habitually
more willing to accept sacrifices in the short run to enhance their
skills in the long run are more likely to reach their goals. But, and
it’s a big but, it’s a risky approach.
One of the most celebrated early findings in grit research came
from a study of the prestigious pressure cooker that is the Scripps
National Spelling Bee. Although on its own, grit was clearly predictive
of success — kids who had higher levels of grit were more
likely to advance through initial stages — there were some cautionary
findings as well. For example, in the final rounds, once differences
in verbal IQ and age were considered, differences in grit were
virtually meaningless. In other words, a child’s level of intelligence
combined with experience based on age trumped any influence grit
had in determining who won the bee or came close among this select
group of finalists. What it did predict among these high achievers
was longer hours spent studying and drilling vocabulary words
— longer hours that didn’t correspond to better performance but
did likely increase social isolation. And few factors are more closely
associated with unhappiness or poor health than loneliness and social
isolation. So while grit is undoubtedly important, the tools and
strategies a person uses to become gritty can matter greatly.
More evidence of the threats posed by using a strictly cogni-
tive tool set to keep your nose to the grindstone comes from research
done by the psychologist Christopher Boyce and colleagues.
Boyce’s team followed more than nine thousand people for four
years as they faced possible failures such as losing a job. They found
that people who were highly self-disciplined in their pursuits and
who tended to rely on logical analysis and willpower-related selfcontrol
to achieve their goals were also the ones who suffered the
most when facing failure. While losing a job is difficult for anyone,
the drop in well-being among these people was 120 percent greater
than among others. These hardworking people do fail less often, but
when they do, it takes a greater toll on them, as they have a weaker
safety net to catch them when they fall.
The way out of this trap — the way to improve our chances of
achieving while also building resilience — is simply to use the emotional
tools available to us. As we’ll see, using gratitude, compassion,
and pride to pursue our goals will enable us to persevere and
resist temptation — to increase our self-control and grit — while almost
effortlessly helping us create the social bonds that will buttress
us against stumbles, stress, and the afflictions of loneliness along
the way.
The Journey Ahead
This book will examine the origins and workings of these three
emotions, their ties to self-control and resilience, and their potential
for increasing success over the long haul for each of us and for
society at large. To do this, I’ve divided the book into three parts.
In the first — Setting the Stage — I describe the problem and then
dispel our fundamental misconceptions about how to solve it. In
chapter 1, I’ll briefly review why the human mind prefers short-term
rewards over long-term ones, the problems this preference causes,
and why almost everyone will succumb to temptation under certain
circumstances. Then, in chapter 2, I’ll dispel the fallacy that cognition
is the only route to self-control by demonstrating the many
foibles inherent in relying on reason, willpower, and executive function
to get the job done.
In the second part of the book, The Emotional Toolbox, I’ll
show how gratitude, compassion, and pride, when cultivated and
used appropriately, provide the strongest bulwark against the indulgence
and impulsivity that often underlie failure. Gratitude and
compassion are not passive; they are states of quiet power. Pride,
when used properly, is not destructive but rather beneficial as it focuses
the mind on the future. As we explore each of these emotions
in turn (chapters 3–5), we’ll examine not only how and why they
shape our behaviors but also ways to use them effectively.
In the book’s third and final part — Value Added — I’ll explain
how adopting emotion-based strategies might offer the most robust
way forward both for individuals and for society as a whole.
In chapter 6 I’ll show how gratitude, compassion, and pride build
social relationships — their original purpose — that offer a double
benefit. In addition to reinforcing grit and self-control on their
own, relationships function to keep loneliness, and all its harms to
mind and body, at bay.
In chapter 7 I’ll expand the social view by showing how these
emotions can flow through a social network, thereby increasing not
only your own success but also that of those around you. The bonus
here is that you, too, will benefit when others invite these emotions
into play. And in chapter 8 I’ll extend the field of view once again,
this time to the societal level. Here we’ll take a look at how using
and cultivating these emotions among larger groups of people can
help ensure a society’s resilience by increasing its willingness to invest
in its future.
Finally, in the Coda, I’ll reflect on both how this new perspective
should change our thinking about the pursuit of success and
how strategies using these three emotions should be better implemented.
With respect to altering our thinking, it’s important to
recognize two things. First, from a scientific perspective, gratitude,
compassion, and pride aren’t just three independent human virtues;
they’re actually the source of many others. Second, emotions aren’t
just foisted upon us; we can exert great control over what we feel
and when we feel it. In combination, these truths give rise to an entirely
new way of understanding how certain emotions can be used
to help us thrive. Yet at present too few professionals — whether
they be educators, corporate trainers, managers, or counselors —
have embraced this view, and thus too few people are equipped with
the techniques necessary to pursue their goals most effectively. It’s
time we change that, because if we’re going to meet the challenges
our lives and careers throw at us, many of which require patience,
dedication, and fortitude to overcome, we’re going to need every
weapon in our arsenal.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Self-Control, Success, and the Road Not Taken 1
Part 1 Setting the Stage
Chapter 1 The Problem: Why and How We All Devalue the Future 17
Of Ants and Grasshoppers
Backward Depreciation
The Easy Way Out
Chapter 2 The Problem with the Solution: Why Willpower, Executive Function, and Reason Set You Up for Failure 32
Chasing Spinoza
Two Minds Are Better Than One
Beguiled by Reason
Diminishing Returns
A Candle in the Wind
Success from the Bottom Up
Part 2 The Emotional Toolbox
Chapter 3 Gratitude Is About the Future, Not the Past 57
Paying It Forward
Marshmallow Redux
Consumption, Commitment, and Competence
Gratitude Does a Body Good
Spiraling Up
Chapter 4 Compassion Builds Inner Strength and Inner Peace 81
The Morality of Meditation
Buddha Brain
Peace Be with You
Forgive, Forget, and Flourish
Gaming the System
Chapter 5 Pride and Perseverance 115
Prom the Outside Looking In
Forward Ho!
I'll Take You
In Praise of Pride
Avoiding the Slippery Slope
Part 3 Value Added
Chapter 6 Being Social Means Being Successful 143
Morality Pays Dividends
Social Grit
Resilient Success for Body and Mind
Combating the Ravages of Loneliness
Chapter 7 Scaling Out; Reaching High Means Reaching Out 161
Pyramid Power
Longing to Give
Viral Success
Chapter 8 Scaling Up: Stimulating Societal Success 177
When More Minds Are Worse Than One
Emotional Mores
Coda 193
The Changing World of Work
Constructing Character
Acknowledgments 201
Notes 204
Index 221