Effort Matters, But It’s Not Mastery

A surgeon I knew very well once told me that there were surgeons who came by their skills naturally, and surgeons who were plodders and just worked hard to gain a mastery of their craft despite their limitations. It gave me pause to wonder which, if I had to choose, would prove to be the better surgeon. After all, when it comes to something one really wants to survive like surgery, who wouldn’t want the best he could get?

Wharton School organizational psychologist Adam Grant wrote a controversial op-ed about effort and mastery. Meritocracy has become a dirty word, both because of rationalizations that it doesn’t exist and contentions that it’s a mask for discrimination against the less able.

High marks are for excellence, not grit. In the past, students understood that hard work was not sufficient; an A required great work. Yet today, many students expect to be rewarded for the quantity of their effort rather than the quality of their knowledge. In surveys, two-thirds of college students say that “trying hard” should be a factor in their grades, and a third think they should get at least a B just for showing up at (most) classes.

Putting aside grade inflation, another problem raising the question of whether grades are meaningful indicators of anything anymore given the proclivities of some teachers to bolstering self-esteem and promoting diversity trumps competence, no less excellence, is “grit,” the amount of effort that students put into their studies, a virtue worth recognizing?

More than a generation ago, the psychologist Carol Dweck published groundbreaking experiments that changed how many parents and teachers talk to kids. Praising kids for their abilities undermined their resilience, making them more likely to get discouraged or give up when they encountered setbacks. They developed what came to be known as a fixed mind-set: They thought that success depended on innate talent and that they didn’t have the right stuff. To persist and learn in the face of challenges, kids needed to believe that skills are malleable. And the best way to nurture this growth mind-set was to shift from praising intelligence to praising effort.

To be fair, there is merit to this argument, particularly for younger students in grade school. For some kids, reading  and writing comes naturally. For others, a great deal of effort is needed, but if they put in the effort, they too will be able to master reading and writing. That’s a good thing.

Psychologists have long found that rewarding effort cultivates a strong work ethic and reinforces learning. That’s especially important in a world that often favors naturals over strivers — and for students who weren’t born into comfort or don’t have a record of achievement. (And it’s far preferable to the other corrective: participation trophy culture, which celebrates kids for just showing up.)

Unmentioned is that even innately intelligent students may reach a plateau, where their innate abilities aren’t enough to get them over the hurdle. But never having learned to work hard, they lack the grit to push through to the next level. To divide students into naturals and strivers is too simplistic. Even naturals have limits where striving atop innate intelligence is needed to achieve excellence.

The problem is that we’ve taken the practice of celebrating industriousness too far. We’ve gone from commending effort to treating it as an end in itself. We’ve taught a generation of kids that their worth is defined primarily by their work ethic. We’ve failed to remind them that working hard doesn’t guarantee doing a good job (let alone being a good person). And that does students a disservice.

There is a stunted understanding of the purpose of hard work, of effort. What is worthy of promotion to a third grader is not the same thing as what is demanded of a college sophomore, and yet the college sophomore’s grasp of the end game of education remains that of a third grader.

Of course effort matters. Of course, grit is a good thing, and something that teachers need to recognize and reward. But the point of hard work is to enable the striver to achieve excellence, not hard work ending in mediocrity, or worse. For the third grader, excellence is ahead of him in a great many ventures, from reading and writing to mathematics. And with effort, a student of modest intellect can still read, write and cipher with sufficient mastery to lay claim to a high school education.

But if that student wants to be a physicist, an architect, a surgeon, that’s where effort is needed, but only in conjunction with excellence. Indeed, the student who works hard, very hard, and still can’t achieve excellence is in the awkward position of being on the cusp of realizing that he or she just hasn’t got it. He’s never going to be good enough, no matter how hard he strives. And there’s nothing wrong with that, as not everyone can be Einstein. Nor do we need everyone to be Einstein. But we do need Einstein to be Einstein.

My friend, the surgeon, told me that he had to put in much more work than his fellow residents to become proficient, and then master, the skills needed to perform surgery. He knew that others were able to just do it, while he had to practice and practice, and practice some more, to be able to do it as well as others.

But his recognition that he lacked the innate talent and willingness to put in the effort to make it over the hurdle of excellence enabled him to become a surgeon. At the same time, this recognition would have precluded him from becoming a surgeon if, despite all his virtuous effort, he still didn’t have the goods.

14 thoughts on “Effort Matters, But It’s Not Mastery

  1. Rxc

    At one point in my career I was tasked with educating people to operate nuclear power plants. One of thise people was a very smart man whose native language was not English, and that language did not have any of the words for the concepts we were teaching. He was able to understand the concepts and passed the written tests after a lot of study.

    However, when he had to pass the test of leading a crew of people during emergency drills, the need to translate the concepts and the information that appeared in a very tight time frame, and then develop the right commands to the people who had to perform them, was too overwhelming. We could not train him to be successful in this position.

    I don’t know what happened to him – there are many positions like this in the military, and his intelligence and effort was not sufficient to overcome the language barrier.

  2. MLA

    “Equitable grading” is the hot new edu-trend now that Lucy Calkins reading-by-feels has run its course. The theory, which isn’t entirely without merit, is that students become proficient in material at different rates, so they should be given multiple opportunities to show what they can do and only the best/most recent one should count for their grade. In practice, the school year is still only 180 days and students and teachers are all still fallen humans, so it means a lot of students slacking off (they know they can always retake the test if they fail the first time, or the fourth time), and teachers inflating grades because they want students and parents to quit asking them for retakes.

    The thing that really bugs me about it as a teacher, though, is that it has deprived the truly excellent students of yet another opportunity to distinguish themselves. A student who completed six drafts of an essay and eventually produced solid work is certainly to be commended for sticking with it learning something in the process. But should I really not be drawing any distinction between him and the kid who knocked out a sophisticated argument about Paradise Lost on the first try? Among other things, it seems like it would benefit him to get the same message at your surgeon friend: sometimes you have to work long and hard to develop excellence, and it does no one any good to pretend that you were always just as amazing as the most amazing writer, chemist, or French horn player in the class.

  3. Miles

    There was a time when we expected the kids to grow up and realize that things told them in third grade were appropriate for third grade but not life rules. There was going to college, when we expected them to start acting like adults. Then it became joining the workforce where they would finally put away their childish things. And now some are teachers perpetuating their terminal adolescence because they never grew up.

    When will teachers and profs finally tell students they just aren’t good enough to cut it?

    1. j a higginbotham

      There’s also a societal reason for promoting effort’s effect. By stating that hard work leads to success, prosperous members of society can denigrate the entirety of the less fortunate as mere slackers who deserve their fate..

      1. Pedantic Grammar Police

        There are 2 kinds of “less fortunate.” There are the ones who made some mistakes, or had bad luck, and with the help of friends and family (and the taxpayers) are working their way into a better position, and there are those who have burned every bridge and nobody will help them except for the government, because helping them only enables more bad decisions. Maybe they don’t “”deserve” their fate, but they have created it.

        1. j a higginbotham

          That’s why i wrote the “entirety of the less fortunate”; because some are to blame for their condition but not all are. There is a definite throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bath-water contingent. The belief that working two minimum wage jobs will somehow get untalented people a better future is a modern Horatio Alger theme but in his stories the plucky young lad invariably had a wealthy benefactor. [And yes, i am terrible at conveying my ideas and i am sure every sentence i write takes longer than an entire post here but that is one reason i practice.]

  4. B. McLeod

    Can we even still use a potentially triggering, micro-traumatizing word like “mastery”? It’s actually almost shocking that the “m” degrees haven’t already been rechristened “grit-manifester’s degrees.”

  5. Ray

    Your friend may have more innate talent than he gives himself credit for. True humility is the mark of a great doctor.

  6. cthulhu

    Do colleges and universities still have weed-out classes? As a freshman engineering student, the gauntlet was Physics 1 and 2; they were required for just about everything else in the program, and they were made hard on purpose – at least 25% of the class suddenly decided to become a business major after being found wanting in those two classes. Sophomore year, the final weed-out class was thermodynamics; maybe 10-15% washed out there.

    After those three classes, pretty much everyone knew that his/her combination of innate capabilities and willingness to work very hard would get them through. But during the weed-out process, I had some classmates who just didn’t have the ability to grasp critical things no matter how hard they tried (and they changed majors), and also had classmates who couldn’t summon the “grit” to do stuff they clearly had the brainpower for (and also changed majors; sometimes these were kids who in retrospect weren’t ready to be on their own, spent too much time partying, and ended up on academic probation and never quite dug themselves out of that hole).

    Ultimately, I think this process was called “growing up.” Do kids just not do that anymore?

  7. Chris Van Wagner

    This lesson about “not having it” did not sink in fully for me until about, oh, 19, when I fully realized that no amount of hanging on closet doors and basement pipes was going to elongate me sufficiently to outgrow me mudder’s Irish height or habits in order for me to take the place of Dave Debusschere on the NY Knicks. OTOH, it is a damn fine thing that I picked a trade where workmanlike effort is handsomely rewarded by those unfamiliar with that fact. Tummy rubs not needed in this biz, only Dr. Green.

  8. LTMG

    Worked in manufacturing and test engineering, and then management to senior management in factories for my entire professional career. Had seven employers. Not one ever asked me about my GPA or tested my IQ.

    From observation, consistent effort and delivering what was required enabled someone to reach Engineer III or IV. That plus significant results enabled reaching Senior Engineer. Those who also had the ability to teach and develop others, and lead teams could attain Manager or Senior Manager. Those who had vision, could develop a strategy to achieve the vision, and then attain it could rise to Director or Senior Director.

    Those with corporate political skills could rise to VP.

    Anyone lacking the abilities or skills to rise to the next level would reach a plateau in their careers. I’ve seen a number of engineers in their late 40’s and into their 50’s rise to the max salaries in their job grades. At that point they become layoff targets. Due to their ages and salary expectations, finding employment after losing their jobs was difficult.

  9. Jeffrey Gamso

    One reason for grade inflation:

    Back in the day, before I went to law school, I taught English to undergraduates, A common problem was those so-called “students” who just didn’t show up or do the work. They, I referred to them as “desaparecidos,” would get a well-deserved F in the class. But then there were the students who came to class and did all the work but were just awful. They, too, would deserve an F, of course. But then the desaparecidos devalued the F for those who really earned it. And since there was no F +, well, some faculty would give them a D. Which of course, led to the D students getting a C and the C folks getting Bs and the world goes round and round.

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