Whether it is the making-connections knowledge Lindsey Richland studied, or the broad concepts that Flynn tested, or the distant, deep structural analogical reasoning that Gentner assessed, there is often no entrenched interest fighting on the side of range, or of knowledge that must be slowly acquired. All forces align to incentivize a head start and early, narrow specialization, even if that is a poor long-term strategy. That is a problem, because another kind of knowledge, perhaps the most important of all, is necessarily slowly acquired—the kind that helps you match yourself to the right challenge in the first place.
CHAPTER 6
The Trouble with Too Much Grit
THE BOY’S MOTHER APPRECIATED music and art, but when the boy tried to freehand sketch the family cat, he proved such a deficient draftsman that he destroyed the picture and refused to try again. Instead, he spent his childhood in the Netherlands playing marbles or sledding with his little brother, but mostly just looking at things. A prominent parenting handbook advised against unsupervised wanderings that might “intoxicate” a child’s imagination, but he wandered alone for hours. He walked in storms, and at night. He walked for miles just to sit for hours watching a bird’s nest, or following water bugs on their commutes across a brook. He was especially obsessed with collecting beetles, labeling each one with its proper Latin species name.
When he was thirteen, the boy was admitted to a brand-new school housed in a hulking former royal palace. It was so far from his home that he had to board with a local family. His mind was elsewhere during class, but he was a good student, and spent his free time memorizing poetry.
The art teacher was the faculty celebrity, an education pioneer who argued for design to become a central part of the national economic engine. That crusade was so successful it led the federal government to mandate freehand drawing classes in every public school. Rather than holding forth from the front of the class, the teacher arranged students in the center and meandered through them like a sewing needle, giving personal attention. Most students adored him. But he made no impression on the boy. As an adult, the boy would complain that nobody had ever told him what perspective was in drawing, even though it was so central to the teacher’s tenets that knowledge of perspective was written into the new law expanding art education.
The boy didn’t like living with strangers, so he left the school just before he turned fifteen. For the next sixteen months, he did little other than take long nature walks. That could not go on forever, but he had no idea what else to do. Fortunately, his uncle owned a fantastically successful art dealership, and had just been knighted. He offered his nephew a job in the big city. Making art had not inspired the boy, but selling it did. He turned the observational intensity he had practiced in nature to lithographs and photographs, categorizing what he saw just as he had his beetles. By twenty, he was dealing with important clients and traveling abroad for sales trips. The young man confidently told his parents that he would never have to look for a job again. He was wrong.
He was a country boy in the city, without enough social grace to smooth over disagreements with his boss, and he disliked bargaining, which felt like trying to take advantage of customers. He was soon transferred to a London office that did not deal directly with customers, and then at twenty-two he was transferred again, this time to Paris. He arrived in France amid an artistic revolution. On walks to work, the young man passed the studios of artists who were in the process of becoming famous. And yet, as with the art teacher, as a pair of his future biographers would write, “None of it registered.” He was too busy with a new obsession: religion. Years later, when he and his little brother discussed those revolutionary artists, he would say he had “seen absolutely nothing of them.”
When he was finally dismissed from the dealership, he went to work as an assistant teacher at a boarding school in a seaside town in England. Working fourteen-hour days, he taught classes from French to math, oversaw the dorm, took the kids to church, and acted as the handyman. The school was simply a business venture for the owner, and the young man was cheap labor. He found another job as a tutor, this time at a fancier boarding school, but after a few months he decided he would become a missionary in South America. His parents talked him out of that, insisting that he needed to “stop following [his] own desires” and return to a stable life course. His mother wished he would do something in nature that would make him “happier and calmer.” He decided to follow in his father’s footsteps; he would train to become a full-fledged pastor.
In the meantime, his father arranged a job as a bookstore clerk. The young man loved books and worked from 8 a.m. until midnight. When the store flooded, he astounded his colleagues with his sheer physical endurance as he carried pile after pile of books to safety. His new goal was to get accepted to a university so that he could later train as a pastor. Again, he unleashed his tireless passion. He worked with a tutor, and copied by hand the text of entire books. “I must sit up as long as I can keep my eyes open,” he told his brother. He reminded himself that “practice makes perfect,” but Latin and Greek did not come easily to him. He moved in with an uncle, a stern war hero who urged him simply, “push on.” The young man resolved to begin work before his peers rose and finish after they slept. His uncle would find him reading in the wee morning hours.
And still, he floundered in his studies. Nearing his twenty-fifth birthday, the young man heard a sermon about how the economic revolution had made certain citizens, like his art-dealer uncle, fabulously wealthy, while others had been thrust into abject poverty. He decided to forsake university to spread the Word more quickly. He opted for a shorter educational course, but was not adept at giving the succinct, punchy sermons that the school mandated. He failed in that program as well. But nobody could stop him from preaching, so he headed for coal country, where inspiration was needed most.
When the young man arrived and saw the blackened sky, he likened it to the shading of a Rembrandt. There he would preach to workers so downtrodden that they referred to the world above the mineshaft as “up in Hell.” He dove in to spiritual service with his usual verve, giving away his clothes and money, and doting night and day on the ill and injured. They were legion.
Shortly after he arrived, a series of explosions killed 121 miners and sent gas streaming out of the ground, fueling a pillar of fire like some monstrous Bunsen burner nestled below the earth. The suffering locals marveled at the young man’s endurance as he tried to soothe families. But they also found him odd; the children he taught did not listen. Soon, his makeshift ministry was finished. He was twenty-seven, and despondent. A decade after an exuberant start as an art dealer, he had no possessions, accomplishments, or direction.
He poured his heart out in a missive to his little brother, now a respected art dealer himself. He likened himself to a caged bird in spring who feels deeply that it is time for him to do something important but cannot recall what it is, and so “bangs his head against the bars of his cage. And then the cage stays there and the bird is mad with suffering.” A man, too, he exhorted, “doesn’t always know himself what he could do, but he feels by instinct, I’m good for something, even so! . . . I know that I could be a quite different man! . . . There’s something within me, so what is it!” He had been a student, an art dealer, a teacher, a bookseller, a prospective pastor, and an itinerant catechist. After promising starts, he had failed spectacularly in every path he tried.