Someone sent me a video called “The Secret” – apparently a pop-culture phenomenon – which claimed that the secret to everything, riches, love, fame, power, all that, was, more or less, desire mixed with positive thinking. If you want it enough, and believe you can and should have it, you can have it. This probably does not work too well for homeless people suffering from polio on the streets of Bangladesh. But admittedly, it probably would work for me, and the other affluent Americans who buy books – if I had some material goal, if there were something I desperately wanted to possess – something dumb, of course, like a big house or a million dollars – I probably could make it mine. This is why women aren’t attracted only to success – they’re equally attracted to unslakable ambition. Because such ambition is a pretty fair indicator of success.
As I was considering these things, I came across the very interesting Times Magazine piece on schools attempting to define character – which found that “grit” was one of the top indicators of success, more than intelligence. This is obvious enough. Occasionally you meet someone at a party, who you know will walk over corpses to get what they want, who will do anything, betray anyone, ignore every distraction, and abandon every other value, for the goal – and you know, intuitively, that the world belongs to people like this. We are no match for them. I’m curious to get a little more grit – but I’m afraid it’s all too easy to get lost in the complexities. I work for someone who wants to make the world better – and he started a native-plants nursery to help regenerate local flora, which is, I think, literally operating at the most basic level of life on earth, where dirt meets vegetation – but he can’t always think his work is good, because maybe container nurseries, he reasons, can’t be made good – the containers are all plastic, certain phenotypes get propagated over others, reducing diversity and hardiness, and concentrations of plants tend to become nodal points for disease diffusion. Attempts at improvement often mean a reduction in profitability – “maybe businesses can’t be made good, if you turn a profit you must be doing some harm” – and on and on and on. The more you think about what you do, the harder it is to be utterly convinced that it is worthwhile. Anyone who doesn’t know this doesn’t think very deeply. Christopher Hitchens wrote a thoughtful book proving that Mother Teresa was a bad person, that taking care of destitute orphans was counterproductive and her life had on balance a negative effect on the world. He’s not entirely wrong.
At some point the solution is to stop thinking. “Grit” is in some sense like having natural blinders – an inability to see when seeing is inconvenient.
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