Free Grit by Angela Duckworth Page B

he hit on journalism as a career path? A professor who admired Jeff’s writing suggested as much, and Jeff remembers thinking, “That is the dumbest idea I had heard . . .who wants to work for a boring newspaper?” (I remember thinking the same thing once about becoming a professor: Who wants to be a boring professor? ) Eventually, Jeff did work for the student paper, the Cornell Daily Sun —but as a photographer, not a writer.
    “When I got to Oxford,I was pretty lost academically. It was shocking to the Oxford professors that I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. They were like, ‘Why are you here? This is a serious place. You should have a firm sense of what you want to study or you shouldn’t be here.’ ”
    My guess at the time was that Jeff would pursue photojournalism.He reminded me of Robert Kincaid, the worldly, wise photographer played by Clint Eastwood in The Bridges of Madison County , which was released around the time we became friends. In fact, I can still remember the photographs Jeff showed me twenty years ago. I thought they were from National Geographic , but he’d actually taken them himself.
    By his second year at Oxford, he figured out that journalism was an even better fit: “Once I learned more about being a journalist and how that could get me back to Africa, and how that actually would be fun, and I could write more creatively than I first imagined journalism was, then I was like, ‘Screw it, this is what I’m going to do.’ I set out a very deliberate path that was possible, because the journalism industry was very hierarchical, and it was clear how to get from A to B to C to D, et cetera.”
    Step A was writing for Oxford’s student newspaper, Cherwell . Step B was a summer internship at a small paper in Wisconsin. Step C was the St. Petersburg Times in Florida on the Metro beat. Step D was the Los Angeles Times . Step E was the New York Times as a national correspondent in Atlanta. Step F was being sent overseas to cover war stories, and in 2006—just over a decade since he’d set himself the goal—he finally reached step G: becoming the New York Times ’ East Africa bureau chief.
    “It was a really winding road that took me to all kinds of places. And it was difficult, and discouraging, and demoralizing, and scary, and all the rest. But eventually, I got here. I got exactly where I wanted to be.”
    As for so many other grit paragons, the common metaphor of passion as fireworks doesn’t make sense when you think of what passion means to Jeff Gettleman. Fireworks erupt in a blaze of glory but quickly fizzle, leaving just wisps of smoke and a memory of what was once spectacular. What Jeff’s journey suggests instead is passion as a compass —that thing that takes you some time to build, tinker with, and finally get right, and that then guides you on your long and winding road to where, ultimately, you want to be.
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    Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll puts it this way: “Do youhave a life philosophy?”
    For some of us, the question makes no sense. We might say: Well, I have a lot of things I’m pursuing. A lot of goals. A lot of projects. Which do you mean?
    But others have no problem answering with conviction: This is what I want .
    Everything becomes a bit clearer when you understand the level of the goal Pete is asking about. He’s not asking about what you want to get done today, specifically, or even this year. He’s asking what you’re trying to get out of life. In grit terms, he’s asking about your passion.
    Pete’s philosophy is: Do things better than they have ever been done before. Like with Jeff, it took a while to figure out what, in the broader sense, he was aiming for. The pivotal moment came at a low point in his coaching career: just after getting fired as head coach of the New England Patriots. This was the first and only year in his life when Pete wasn’t playing or coaching football. At that juncture, one of his good friends urged him