Free Grit by Angela Duckworth Page B

He’s a bit of a celebrity in the world of international journalism, widely admired for his courage to pursue stories that put his life at risk and, also, for his willingness to unflinchingly report events that are unthinkably horrific.
    I met Jeff when we were in our early twenties. At the time, both of us were pursuing master’s degrees at Oxford University. For me, this was before McKinsey, before teaching, and before becoming a psychologist. For Jeff, this was before he’d written his first news story. I think it’s fair to say that, back then, neither of us knew quite what we wanted to be when we grew up—and we were both trying desperately to figure it out.
    I caught up with Jeff on the phone recently. He was in Nairobi, his home base between trips to other parts of Africa. Every few minutes, we had to ask each other if we could still be heard. After reminiscing about our classmates and trading news about our children, I asked Jeff to reflect on the idea of passion and how it had played out in his life.
    â€œFor a very long time, I’ve had a very clear sense of where I wanted to be,” Jeff told me. “And that passion is to live andwork in East Africa.”
    â€œOh, I didn’t know—I assumed your passion was journalism, not a certain area of the world. If you could only be a journalist or only live in East Africa, which would you choose?”
    I expected Jeff to pick journalism. He didn’t.
    â€œLook, journalism is a great fit for me. I’ve always gravitated towards writing. I’ve always been okay being in new situations. Even theconfrontational side of journalism—that speaks to my personality. I like to challenge authority. But I think journalism has been, in a sense, a means to an end.”
    Jeff’s passion emerged over a period of years. And it wasn’t just a process of passive discovery—of unearthing a little gem hidden inside his psyche—but rather of active construction. Jeff didn’t just go looking for his passion—he helped create it.
    Moving to Ithaca, New York, from Evanston, Illinois, Jeff, at eighteen years old, could not have predicted his future career. At Cornell, he ended up majoring in philosophy, in part because“it was the easiest to fulfill the requirements.” Then, the summer after freshman year, he visited East Africa. And that was the beginning of the beginning: “I don’t know how to explain it. This place just blew my mind. There was a spirit here that I wanted to connect with, andI wanted to make it a part of my life.”
    As soon as he got back to Cornell, Jeff started taking courses in Swahili, and after sophomore year, he took a year off to backpack around the world. During that trip, he returned to East Africa, experiencing the same wonder he’d felt the first time he visited.
    Still, it wasn’t clear how he’d make a life there. How did 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.
    â€œWhen 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