Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - Is Grit Overrated?

Episode Date: June 23, 2020

In general, perseverance is a good thing. But David Epstein, author of the best-selling book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, points out that demonstrating grit is not always the best course of action.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With The Motley Fool Money Extra, I'm Chris Hill. It seems to happen more often in sports than in the business world, but every now and then you'll hear about someone's perseverance. They overcame their lack of above-average talent and intellect with hard work, with grit. But what if grit is overrated? Last year, I got the chance to interview David Epstein in front of a live audience. David is a New York Times bestselling author.

His most recent book is Range, Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. And one of the topics that book explores is a rethinking of the idea that grit is this inherently great quality that should be embraced at all times, no matter what. So grit, you've probably heard of it. It's a psychological construct. you take a survey half the points are awarded for resilience and half the points for consistency of interests and the most famous study was on actually west point cadets who were going through the six-week orientation called beast barracks and in grit turned out to be a better predictor

of who would make it through than were the more traditional measures most of them made it through anyway not very many quit but that's great but then you fast forward to you know those west point funds those people because they want them to stay 20 years and yet half of them are leaving basically the day they're allowed. And is that because they lost their grit? No, it's because the fastest time of personality change in your whole life is 18 to your late 20s, and sometimes you develop new interests, and they gain these skills, and they see they can do other stuff in the rest of the world. And that's not a problem of grit. That's a problem of match quality, which is why they started the talent-based branching. And the way that people optimize their match quality

is by trying a bunch of things, getting as much signal as possible, and quitting until they get to a better spot. So I think the sort of deification of not quitting for the sake of not quitting should not be extrapolated from a study that pre-selected people with a six-week goal that they already had. So to the extent that grit means work hard when it makes sense, I'm totally on board with that. I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.