For the past couple of days, I've been reading Fantastic Failures by Luke Reynolds. The title is a bit of an oversimplification because in very few of these stories did the person actually fail first; they just overcame challenges and obstacles. I guess a title like Stories of People Who Overcame Obstacles doesn't have the same zip. Sorry for the aside. To be fair, you are reading a blog called "On the Rabbit Trail," so you can't be shocked.
As I read each of these stories, I realized that we've only been viewing grit from one perspective, in educational circles anyway. We have been focused on persevering at the same thing over and over until we succeed at it or die trying. Popular examples include Michael Jordan having been cut from his high school basketball team, the oversimplified belief that Einstein was bad at math (which he was not; he was bad at school and lousy with people, especially authority figures), and J.K. Rowling being turned down by twelve publishers before getting someone to take a chance on Harry.
That is certainly one side, but there are other stories that could make us view grit in a different way.
Did you know that before she became the most well-known wedding dress designer in history, Vera Wang was a figure skater? She was good, but she came one place shy of making the Olympic team. She enjoyed fashion, so she went to work at Vogue and then Ralph Lauren. She had grit, but rather than applying it toward continuing to skate, she took it in another direction. (By the way, she is in the figure skating hall of fame for designing the costumes of many Olympic skaters.)
Play-Doh was originally developed as a wall cleaning product. It works pretty well, actually. Try it the next time you have pencil marks on a painted or wallpapered wall. In spite of it working well, it didn't sell well. Just as the company was about to dissolve, a newspaper article was published that said pre-school teachers were giving it to kids to build craft projects. Imagine if they had insisted that it remain what they originally wanted it to be rather than seeing the potential of rebranding it as Play-Doh. They didn't give up, but they didn't dig in their heels either.
Alexi Leoniv is not referenced in this book, but I read Two Sides of the Moon a few years ago, and he has an interesting grit story as well. Alexi's passion was art, and he had skill. The problem was that he couldn't afford to go to art school. Instead, he joined the military and became a pilot and a cosmonaut. He was the first person to perform a spacewalk. Art didn't stop being part of his life; in fact, he took crayons with him into space, knowing he would not be able to express what he saw in words. Because he was willing to apply his grit differently, he got one of the greatest artistic inspiration vistas in history.
As educators, we encourage our students to persevere. We want them to keep trying. If there is something that a student is truly passionate about, we want to see them achieve it. But we've all seen enough American Idol auditions to know that not everyone who is passionate about singing should pursue it as a career. We, as teachers, do not know when the right time is for a student to change directions, and we shouldn't pretend that we do. We can, however, present them with the idea that changing directions isn't the same thing as giving up. Grit can be applied in another direction.
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