Predictors of future success: passion, curiosity, and perseverance (grit)

Curiosity leads you to wonder, passion leads you to act, and grit keeps you curious and passionate long after the initial burst of interest or excitement.

What qualities are the greatest predictors of future success? According to Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google: “The combination of persistence and curiosity is a very good predictor of employee success in a knowledge economy.”

His thoughts pair nicely with now nearly 10-year-old talk. from Angela Lee Duckworth titled: Grit: The power of passion and perseverance. She studied kids and adults in a variety of challenging settings, and in every study, her question was, who is successful here and why? She described her findings this way: “In all those very different contexts, one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success. And it wasn't social intelligence. It wasn't good looks, physical health, and it wasn't IQ. It was grit.”

Interesting that one of the most successful commercial enterprises and an academic researcher came to a similar conclusion on what leads people to future success. Passion, curiosity, and perseverance (grit).

Libraries

Have a goal of reading more? Consider joining your local library. I’ve found that having a due date for a book and knowing that someone else may be waiting to read it encourages me to finish the book more so than if I had bought it myself. Plus walking through the library with the smell of books has a special quality that can't be replicated when ordering a book online.

Switching cost and switch cost

Interesting essay from Gloria Mark on ‘our dwindling attention spans’. Two insights that stood out to me:

1. While push notifications and alerts play a role in our shortened attention spans she says “it turns out that people are nearly as likely to switch their attention of their own volition. We are determined to be interrupted, if not by others, then by ourselves.”

2. “The inability to pay sustained attention has repercussions. Studies consistently show that our blood pressure rises and our heart rate increases with fast attention shifts.”

The ill effects of constantly shifting our attention are known as a “switch cost”. Switch cost is characterized by the errors and delays that result from frequently shifting our attention.

There’s a great metaphor here. Companies go to great lengths to first create and draw attention to the high cost of switching from their product or service to another. This is known as the switching cost. It's cheaper for a company to maintain an existing customer rather than lose one and have to acquire a new customer or reacquire the lost customer. In the case of our personal attention, we’re the company, and maintaining our focus on a task rather than switching back and forth costs us less.

If we can only draw our personal attention to the high cost of switching.