The relentless pursuit of success is valorised in our culture, but taking the long way around is often the best
On 11 October 1726, Benjamin Franklin stepped off the Berkshire
and breathed in ‘the fine weather’ of Philadelphia. After spending two
years in London learning the printing trade, he had crossed back over
the Atlantic on a 12-week voyage that left him nauseated but craving the
comforts of America.
Within three years he would be publishing The Pennsylvania Gazette, a popular daily newspaper, followed by the indispensable Poor Richard’s Almanack.
But on that fine October day, the 20-year-old had another idea – an
idea that had him scurrying to his room to find his quill pen and a
bottle of red ink.
With
these, he sketched a chart – the days of the week on top and 13
‘virtues’ on the side – which he would use to test his personal growth.
‘I conceiv’d the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral
perfection’, Franklin wrote in his Autobiography. ‘I wish’d to
live without committing any fault at any time; and to conquer all that
either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into.’ The
virtues he listed were temperance, silence, order, resolution,
frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness,
tranquility, chastity and humility.
Franklin
quickly found that he was less than perfect. Black dots began poxing
his chart. On the first Sunday of his exercise he twice betrayed his
virtue of silence (with ‘a habit I was getting into: prattling, punning,
and joking, which only made me acceptable to trifling company’); and
once his virtue of order. The following day he violated silence and
order yet again, but this time he also failed to be frugal (‘to waste
nothing’). Tuesday saw the same breaches of virtue as well as a failing
of resolution.
Throughout
that week and the next, Franklin would betray all of his virtues,
perhaps most dubiously that of chastity. This was not a new problem:
while working as a printer in London, he thought his marriage prospects
dim, thanks to his getting frequently caught up in ‘intrigues with low
women that fell in my way’. Fell in his way, indeed.
What
Franklin began to learn was that attempting total perfection was
futile. He gave up his chart, thinking it better to allow himself a few
faults so as to be near perfect, rather than trying so hard for
unattainable heights that any slight failure derailed his entire week.
‘A speckled axe is best’, he concluded. ‘A benevolent man should allow a
few faults in himself.’
It
is a common belief that to achieve a goal one must work at it
constantly – not taking a circuitous path towards it when a straight one
is available. Thus the Overeaters Anonymous organisation, the Atkins
diet, the South Beach diet, and so on, ban a variety of ‘bad foods’;
financial planners would probably advise clients against going to fancy
restaurants while saving up to buy a house or car; a pastor would seek
to dissuade his congregation from sin, no matter how minor. In order to
achieve a goal, the thinking goes, one must not deviate from the straightest course; to allow for mistakes or failures is to torpedo your chances of attaining your goal.
And
yet a new school of thinking is challenging these received ways and
arguing that straying from the path, even engaging in hedonistic
behaviour, might be the surest way to success.
Rita
Coelho do Vale is an assistant professor at the Católica Lisbon School
of Business and Economics, where she researches the human
decision-making process with respect to self-regulation. She says that
we not only can but should engage in behaviour antithetical to our ultimate goals.
In experiments conducted with Rik Pieters and Marcel Zeelenberg, and published in January 2016 in the Journal of Consumer Psychology,
do Vale surveyed the way people go about achieving their goals. She
concluded that it is better to make plans to fail intermittently – to
splurge on occasional luxuries when saving for a house; to have a slice
of chocolate cake when trying to shed a few pounds – than to end up
failing anyway and getting so demoralised you give up your goal
altogether.
‘It’s
something that’s so obvious, but no one has ever studied these
phenomena,’ do Vale told me. ‘We all plan for breaks during the day –
coffee, a nap – and we know that we will feel better after these rests.
But with goals we simply don’t think like this.’
Do
Vale conducted a pair of diet-related experiments. A ‘straight striving
group’ was asked to adhere to a strict regimen of 1,500 calories per
day with limited food choices, while an ‘intermittent striving’ group
was given an even stricter diet of 1,300 calories with limited choices;
however, after six days of strict dieting the second group was allowed
one day of 2,700 calories with unlimited food choices.
Do Vale found
that the ‘intermittent’ strivers had higher self-regulatory abilities,
while generating a greater variety of strategies to overcome food
temptations: they were more motivated to see the diet through.
Participants in the ‘straight striving’ group, meanwhile, were more
likely to quit the diet and report emotional setbacks when they
accidentally overate. It follows that, so long as it is planned, it is
often good to be bad. ‘The only way to get rid of temptation,’ Oscar
Wilde wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray, ‘is to yield to it.’
In
June 2007, Angela Duckworth published a revolutionary study, where she
found that the personal quality of ‘grit’ was the single most important
factor in success – more important even than socioeconomic background.
The world of pop psychology was set ablaze.
Duckworth,
a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with a MacArthur
Fellowship under her belt (largely due to her grit-related findings),
has become an in-demand public speaker and a preacher of meritocratic
ascension: she espouses the idea that success is about effort and
anyone, no matter where they’re from, can get to the top. It’s a theory
tailor-made for the middle and upper classes:
‘We’re here because we
tried; you’re there because you didn’t.’ In Grit: the Power and Passion of Perseverance,
to be published this May, Duckworth supports her findings with rousing
anecdotes. At the West Point military academy, a cadet’s ‘grit’ score
was a better predictor of his success in the Beast Barracks (a gruelling
summer training course) than his fitness, leadership ability, or
intelligence; at the Scripps National Spelling Bee, contestants with the
highest grit score were the most likely to get to the final round,
regardless of intelligence or initial spelling ability.
Most people aren’t extremely gritty; they won’t be able to study 15 hours a day for a spelling bee, or complete punishing military training in the summer heat
This
‘grit score’, determined via a test created by Duckworth, is based on
answers to questions concerning diligence, seeing tasks through, hard
work, and not being discouraged by setbacks. ‘Cheat days’ are
unacceptable for the high-grit person; but if she does somehow stumble,
she’s able to get back up and continue forward.
Duckworth’s
findings are relentless. To a certain extent she’s right: people who
are able to persevere despite repeated failure do tend eventually to
find success. Yet this approach to goal-completion and this negative
view of setbacks (they are to be overcome, not planned or revelled in)
puts this version of success out of most people’s reach.
The
truth is, most people aren’t extremely gritty; they won’t be able to
study for 15 hours a day for a spelling bee, or complete punishing
military training courses in the summer heat. And not even the grittiest
are guaranteed success. In fact, the mindset needed to maintain
persistent forward motion can be its own setback. People who are
obsessive and who want the very best for themselves tend to be the
grittiest; they also tend, as University of Texas psychiatrist Monica
Ramirez Basco writes in her book Never Good Enough (2000), to be ‘more vulnerable to depression when stressful events occur’.
Plus, much as we may want to achieve our goals – and be willing to work
for them – there are limits to our capacity for work and will. That’s
because willpower is a finite resource, according to Roy Baumeister, a
professor of psychology at Florida State University, who coined the term
‘ego depletion’. Ego depletion (or a dwindling reserve of willpower) is
the reason that you may feel less keen to exercise after a hard day at
the office; it’s the reason poorer people, after expending energy on
finding the best price on basic goods at the grocery store, may then buy
bags of Skittles and lowbrow magazines at the checkout counter. You
only have so much willpower to use before you need to take a break from
decision-making and let it replenish. In Baumeister’s principal study on
willpower, people who were told to give a speech advocating beliefs
contrary to their own were less able to complete a difficult puzzle
afterwards, implying that psychological stress had depleted their
reserve of willpower.
But
why do some people have significantly more willpower – and thus the
potential for higher grit – than others? It might boil down to the types
and number of decisions they must make each day, factors that are
primarily influenced by one’s socioeconomic class.
‘Slack’,
which allows a person to use more of their cognitive and emotional
resources, comes from having a cushier social and financial safety net,
according to Sendhil Mullainathan, a professor of economics at Harvard University, and Eldar Shafir,
a behavioural scientist at Princeton University.
Slack is often a
better indicator of potential success than grit. It’s the reason the
impoverished single mother, gritty and hardworking though she might be,
is likely to have a tougher time succeeding than a young man from an
affluent family. Her relative lack of slack means she has less room for
error; even if she is equally good at recovering from setbacks (the
quintessence of grit), she will simply face both more arduous and more
numerous setbacks, leading to a faster depletion of willpower.
You
soon see how privilege can exert influence in goal-driven behaviours.
In this light, the notion that hard work and passion are all that is
necessary for success begins to seem woefully naïve. In almost every
case, but particularly where slack is in short supply, it’s advisable to
plan for a setback. ‘It’s important to plan in advance to fail,’ do
Vale told me. ‘Perhaps we should call failure something different – a
moment of indulgence, a moment of rest, a saving of willpower.’
Epicurus
understood that the expectation of future pleasure is a pleasure in
itself. Taking up his ideas, the Enlightenment philosopher Jeremy
Bentham noted: ‘Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two
sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.’ Yet pleasure, for Epicurus and
Bentham, was defined not by sensation or excitement but by both the
absence of pain and the expectation of its absence. For Freud, the
‘pleasure principle’ described the active pursuit of pleasure; but in
both cases, pain and pleasure are binary feelings: while a person might
still have to physically endure pain, by looking forward to a lack of
pain in the future – that is, pleasure – she can be sufficiently
distracted from her current bodily discomfort.
The
history of exaggerated pleasure is generally a response to a perceived
deprivation. That is, pleasure is relative. For the late 19th-century
French Decadents, for instance, whose works might seem salacious,
pornographic, unnecessary (reminiscent of the Marquis de Sade), their
exaggerated pleasure came to embody a bolder meaning when juxtaposed
with the bourgeois values that brought levels of financial inequality
and deprivation that had been unheard of since the Revolution.
To
take a more prosaic example, consuming 2,300 calories might not be
pleasurable to someone who consumes that on a daily basis; however it
quickly becomes pleasurable when one is accustomed to eating just 1,300
calories per day. A fancy restaurant means very little if every night is
spent at august tables, and a good deal more when one has been
consuming dinners comprised chiefly of ramen.
Therefore to plan
hedonistic setbacks on your way to achieving a goal is to convert an
otherwise painful process into a more pleasurable one. ‘The simple act
of knowing they would have a moment of pleasure in the future made
participants more persistent towards their goals’, said do Vale.
Pleasure,
however, is a particularly slippery concept. Surely the pursuit of
pleasure – and avoidance of pain – does not exclusively inform our every
move? Is that what all of our goals come down to – maximising pleasure,
minimising pain? In De Anima, Aristotle claimed animals desire
things and with this desire they are given movement – a lion desires
food so he runs for a gazelle. But for human beings, Aristotle says,
reason also plays into our pursuit of a goal.
Humans
use reason to shape how they imagine a useful object of desire. With
reason and desire working in tandem we choose and pursue our goals. In Phaedrus, Plato said the soul is guided by a
dark horse of passion and a white horse of reason. Socrates agreed, but
said the white horse is of greater importance – we must use reason to
pursue the right things; to let desire reign over reason is to chase the eventually meaningless and temporal.
Franklin eventually gave up on his virtue chart. The single fault behind all his other faults was pride
There
are un-pleasurable, even painful aspects to pursuing most goals, and so
we must be clever about what we choose to go after. To go wherever
desire and pleasure whisk us is to fall into the trap of chasing things
we want in the immediate moment but may care nothing about in the longer
term. Zooming out on our lives, it is fascinating to see that both our
goals, and the ways in which we set out to achieve them, so often go
unexamined. Why do we want what we want? Why do we think a relentless
pursuit forward is the surest way to succeed? We so seldom interrogate
our desires and the best ways to achieve them – especially when those
methods cut against the grain of what we’ve grown accustomed to.
After
years of striving for perfection, Franklin eventually gave up on his
virtue chart. He noted that the single fault behind all his other faults
was pride. ‘In reality, there is, perhaps, no one of our natural
passions so hard to subdue as pride’, he wrote. ‘Disguise
it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one
pleases, it is still alive…even if I could conceive that I had
completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility.’
That
he ever thought he could achieve perfection, without setbacks, without
respites, Franklin admitted, was his gravest error. He had been naïve.
And prideful. Only decades later, while writing his autobiography, did
he realise that his goals could not be attained just by trying hard, by
going at them again and again, without rest or leaving a place for
pleasure: ‘the mere speculative conviction that it was our interest to
be completely virtuous was not sufficient to prevent our slipping.’ He
saw that pursuing his truest goals would take more than pure desire. It
would also take reason. It would take a plan.
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