Edison, Gretsky and the gritty side of success

"If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward." Thomas Edison.

Fundamentally different views of achievement can be seen in the well-known debates between Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. Tesla, the theoretician, conducted experiments only after careful consideration and calculation while Edison's approach was an "empirical dragnet" according to Tesla.

Similarly, hockey great Wayne Gretsky has stated "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take".

Is the key to success to multiply your rate of failure?

Of course, ability matters. But how much does perseverance matter? In other words, how much difference in success will be seen for two people of equal ability but unequal perseverance?

In success psychology, one can measure "grit", defined as "perseverance and passion for long-term goals". Duckworth and colleagues have created a self-report measure for this trait, known as the Grit Scale. In this survey, items such as "I have achieved a goal that took years of work" correlate with high grit, while items such as "New ideas and new projects sometimes distract me from previous ones" are negatively correlated with grit.

Here are some interesting things they found about grit:
* Highly educated people have more grit than people with less education.

* When controlling for age, grit increases with age.

* Grit is related to the Big Five Personality trait of Conscientiousness.

* When examining undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania, students with more grit had a higher GPA, but students with lower SAT scores had higher grit. This could suggest that getting to an elite university can be through ability (reflected in SAT scores) or grit.

* Although grit was unrelated to rankings of West Point cadets, grit was the best predictor of whether cadets would complete summer training.

* Students with higher grit were more likely to make it to the final round of the National Spelling Bee, due to putting in more time to studying.

I've been thinking a lot about grit in the last day of trying to win a scholarship (as I wrote about yesterday). The video I made is about grit, but the promotion I'm doing for it is putting me way out of my comfort zone as a shy person. I may fail, but I'll be back. :)

Carrots and sticks, sure but...

The theory of hyperbolic discounting asserts that the farther in the future a consequence (positive or negative), the less it matters to us when compared to an immediate consequence. This is why we abandon our diets in the face of a cupcake: the future hot body just pales in comparison to fatty, sugary goodness right now.

This is why putting clear economic incentives on habits can be so effective. Ian Ayers' Carrots and Sticks is an excellent book detailing how making behavioral contracts can be effective for smoking cessation, weight loss, etc.

So, I'm on board with the method. However, I don't quite understand this motivational structure for working out. Here, a gym membership costs more when you miss a workout. Maybe this is just me (I see my gym time as my favorite time of day), but missing a workout already costs you more because your monthly membership dues means that you're paying more per workout when you work out less.

Thoughts?

Why no one bats .299 in late September

This paper shows that people strive for round-number goals, showing evidence from Major League baseball players, high school students taking the SAT, and from laboratory subjects answering hypothetical surveys of behavior.

As can be seen in the figure, baseball players are 4 times more likely to end the season with a 0.300 batting average than a 0.299 average! How does this happen? Players that are at 0.298 or 0.299 are more likely to have at-bats (rather than having a pinch hitter), they are slightly more likely to have hits at those at bats, and once a batter hits the magic 0.300 point, batters often take walks and sit out for pinch hitters.

The SAT takers were 10-20 percentage points more likely to re-take the test if they had an exam ending in -90 (e.g. 1190) than one ending in -00 (e.g. 1200).

Last, the authors gathered laboratory participants and asked them how they would react given certain situations. To give an example situation, imagine running laps around a track and you are getting tired. You have run either 28, 29, 30 or 31 laps (depending on what condition you are in). Do you want to run one more lap? They found that participants in the just under a round number condition (29 laps) were more likely to run one more, and participants in the just over the round number (31) were less likely to do one more.

Are these round number goals rational? In other words, is a baseball player more likely to get a lucrative contract with a 0.300 batting average than a 0.299? Do highly selective colleges have round number cut-offs for admissions? The authors examined data from university admissions that showed no discontinuities in the probability of admission as a function of SAT score, suggesting that such round number goals are not, in fact, rational.

Pope D, & Simonsohn U (2010). Round Numbers as Goals: Evidence From Baseball, SAT Takers, and the Lab. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS PMID: 21148460