Not your grandpa’s self-help book, but Duckworth’s text is oddly encouraging, exhorting us to do better by trying harder,...
Gumption: it’s not just for readers of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, as this debut book, blending anecdote and science, statistic and yarn, capably illustrates.
If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? It could be, to trust MacArthur fellow Duckworth, that you’re just not working hard enough—which is to say, you just don’t have enough grit. That old-fashioned term, appropriated by a newfangled scholar, is meant to combine the notions of passion, persistence, and hard work in more or less equal measure. That passion, Duckworth argues, “begins with intrinsically enjoying what you do.” Self-confidence figures into the equation, the assuredness that you have the ability to do what you do with at least some measure of success; but then, the ability to cope with failure, dust yourself off, and try again comes into play as well. Duckworth makes great effort to downplay any idea of innate talent in favor of improvement and mastery that come from digging in and doing it. “If we overemphasize talent,” she urges, “we underemphasize everything else.” In the nature vs. nurture controversy, the author sides with nurture, and there’s more than a little of the tiger mom in the prescriptions she dispenses for education. But on that note, she writes, teachers who are demanding may “produce measurable year-to-year gains in the academic skills of their students.” But throw a little love, supportiveness, and respect into the mix, and you build better people. For Duckworth, there should be no trophies for just showing up. When she writes of hard work in building the “gritty person,” she means hard work, as evidenced by her close study of West Pointers during their first and worst year, when 20 percent of the students drop out in a cohort carefully selected for their ability to stay on task until the task is done.
Not your grandpa’s self-help book, but Duckworth’s text is oddly encouraging, exhorting us to do better by trying harder, and a pleasure to read.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1110-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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