Intelligence Follows Interest
The psychologist Angela Duckworth talks about how intelligence follows interest. “This is why I say,” she said, “I can be very dumb about things that I’m not interested in, and I can be extremely smart about the things that I am interested in…If you talk to me about something that I am not interested in, I can genuinely be extremely stupid. And when I try to learn about things I’m not really interested in, I struggle. But when I read about something like human behavior, which I’m very interested in, everything sticks.”
Some other things that follow interest—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
When We Struggle With Attention…
When he was a boy, Charlie Mackesy—the artist, illustrator, and author of The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse—was diagnosed with ADHD. He struggled in school. He couldn’t focus. He was thought to be lazy and spacey. In class, teachers would call him out, is Charlie here today? “People would always say to me, ‘Your attention span is terrible.’” And then he discovered drawing. And that he could sit with a sketchbook for hours and hours, his attention—usually so quick to scatter—completely absorbed in the act of drawing. “And I think I realized,” Mackesy said, “that my attention issues were really an issue of not having found the things that truly interest me…When we struggle with attention, there are things we can do that hold us, that absorb us.” The key is finding those things.
Proving To Millions That Reading Is Not A Disagreeable Task
In 1954, Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Hersey investigated a problem parents around the country were increasingly worried about. “Parents,” Hersey writes, “[are] in dismay that their children can not read.” For 2 years, Hersey read children’s books, met with experts, and attended schools to observe how reading was taught. “It became obvious,” Hersey writes, what the problem was: Children’s books were terribly boring. “Reading troubles,” Hersey writes, “come from a failure to help children to want to read.” Remember, Hersey points out, “reading has to compete for the interest of children with television, radio, movies, comic books, magazines, and sports.” So to be able to compete and to help children to want to read, Hersey says, children’s books need to be more interesting and entertaining. Hersey’s article was a call to redirect the focus from a lag measure to a lead measure. The call was answered by an editor at the publishing house Houghton Mifflin, who, after reading the article, called the illustrator Dr. Seuss and challenged him: “write me a story that first graders can’t put down.” In this book for first graders, Dr. Seuss had to use a vocabulary list of 300 “accepted” words. Dr. Seuss played around with the list of 300 words, and said, “If I find two words that rhyme and make sense to me, that’s the title.” As Dr. Seuss scanned the list, two words caught his attention: Cat and Hat. A little over a year later, on April 19, 1957, Houghton Mifflin released Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat. Using just 236 unique words, Dr. Seuss wrote a blockbuster. The book was called “the biggest event in children’s reading for centuries.” John Hersey said the book was a “masterpiece…a gift to the art of reading.” “It’s the book I’m proudest of,” Dr. Seuss said, “because [it] proved to a number of million kids that reading is not a disagreeable task.”
C.S. Lewis’s Advice To Thomasine
In 1959, a seventh-grader named Thomasine was wrestling with how to pursue her dream of becoming a writer. At her teacher’s suggestion, she wrote a letter to her favorite writer, C.S. Lewis, asking for his advice. “Dear Thomasine,” Lewis wrote back, “It is very hard to give any general advice about writing. Here’s my attempt…Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else. (Notice this means that if you are interested only in writing you will never be a writer, because you will have nothing to write about).”
A Byproduct Of Doing What You’re Really Interested In
Michael Lewis was an art history major at Princeton. While working on his senior thesis—a 166-page paper on how the Italian sculptor Donatello took inspiration from the ancient Greeks and Romans—he discovered he loved the process of researching and writing. “I remember thinking,” he said, “‘I now know what I’d like to do for a living: write books.’” But when he graduated in 1982, “because I hadn’t the first clue what I should write about,” he did what the majority of his peers were doing and took a job at an investment bank in New York City. When Lewis got there, Wall Street was booming with chaos, excess, and “recent Princeton graduates who knew nothing about money making small fortunes.” After a year and a half amidst the madness, Lewis decided to quit his job and write his first book about it. When he told coworkers, they laughed, genuinely thinking he was kidding. His boss—worried about the sanity of someone walking away from hundreds of thousands of dollars—advised him to see a psychiatrist. And when he told his father, his father’s advice was to wait: “Stay for 10 years,” he said. “Make your fortune, and then write your books.” As he considered his father’s advice, Lewis first thought back to the feeling he had while working on his thesis, “and I wanted to feel that interest in something again.” He then looked around at the people 10 years older than him on Wall Street making their fortunes: “they seemed completely stuck. Their lives had completely adapted and depended on the money, the position, the status. Had I stayed 10 years, I knew I’d get trapped too. I’d lose the desire to do the other thing. I would have forgotten the feeling.” Lewis ignored his father’s advice and followed his interests. It took a year and a half to write his first book, and during that time, Lewis said, “I was aware of my unknown future, but I never felt like, ‘if this thing doesn’t succeed, I’m screwed.’ It was, ‘I’m doing exactly what I want to do.’” This is something he now tells his kids and anyone who asks him for advice, he said: “Success should just be thought of as a byproduct of doing something you’re really interested in doing. And the goal is to move through life in a way that you don’t miss the thing, that you don’t walk away from it by mistake, that you’re alive to it when it walks in the front door.” That first book was Liar’s Poker. It sold millions of copies and launched Lewis’ prolific writing career (Moneyball, The Blind Side, The Big Short, and many others)—all following from following his interests.
The Troops Behind The General
Shortly after watching The Last Dance—the documentary series about Michael Jordan—the radio personality Howard Stern said he loved the way Jordan “willed” himself to be a great basketball player. It caused him to reflect on his own trajectory—how he’d started out “terrible, just terrible,” Stern told Jerry Seinfeld, and “willed” himself to a successful career. “I’m going to adjust your perspective a little bit here,” Seinfeld replied. “That was not ‘will.’ What you were using, what Michael Jordan used, and what I use is not will—it’s love. When you love something, it’s a bottomless pool of energy. That’s where the energy comes from. But you have to love it. Sincerely. Not because you’re gonna make money from it or be famous or get whatever you wanna get. When you do it because you love it, then you naturally will find yourself moving up and getting really good at something you wanted to be good at. ‘Will’ is like not eating desert or something—it’s just forcing yourself to do or not do something. You can’t force yourself to be what you have made yourself into. You have to love it. Love is endless. Will is finite…Real love—real love—is what enables anyone to accomplish anything. Not will, not discipline, not work ethic. You gotta love it. If you love it, all those other things come in behind it. They’re the troops following behind. Love is the general.”
Intelligence, success, the ability to focus, finding reading to be an agreeable task—they’re the troops following behind. Interest—real, genuine, sincere interest—is the general.