Mark: Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. Steve Jobs had a 2.65 GPA and was fired from the very company he founded, Apple. Michelle: Wow, those are résumés you’d probably hide. Mark: Exactly. So what if the very things our culture celebrates—natural talent, effortless genius, early success—are actually myths? And what if the real secret ingredient to an extraordinary life is something much grittier, something born from failure? Michelle: That is a huge question. It feels like it pushes back against everything we see on social media, where everyone looks like an overnight success. Mark: It’s the explosive idea at the heart of Grit to Great: How Perseverance, Passion, and Pluck Take You from Ordinary to Extraordinary by Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval. Michelle: And these aren't academics sitting in an ivory tower. These are two legendary advertising executives, the minds behind the Aflac Duck, who built a powerhouse agency as women in a very male-dominated industry. They’re writing from the trenches of high-stakes business. Mark: Precisely. They argue that our entire culture, from parenting to boardrooms, has been worshipping the wrong gods. And that brings us to our first big, and frankly, uncomfortable idea: the belief in talent might be a trap.

Michelle: Okay, I have to jump in right away. The idea that talent is a trap sounds great, but come on, it has to count for something, right? You can't just 'grit' your way into the NBA if you're five-foot-two. Mark: It's a fair point, and the authors don't say talent is worthless. They say it's wildly overrated. Their argument is that passion and perseverance are far better predictors of long-term success. They bring up Colin Powell, who became a four-star general and Secretary of State. He once reflected on his childhood, saying, "I never thought I would be someone important. I was just a pretty average kid with average grades in an average home. There was nothing special about me." Michelle: That’s hard to believe, coming from him. We look at these figures in hindsight and just assume they were destined for greatness from day one. Mark: And that’s the core of the problem. We project this destiny onto them, but their stories show the opposite. Michael Jordan himself said, "I’ve missed more than nine thousand shots in my career. I’ve lost almost three hundred games... I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life, and that’s why I succeed." The book argues our obsession with innate talent makes us fear the very process that creates success: failure. Michelle: This connects to something else they critique, right? The whole self-esteem movement. Mark: Oh, they go after it hard. They tell this incredible story about a 2012 commencement speech by an English teacher named David McCullough Jr. at a very affluent high school. He gets up on stage and tells these kids, who have been told their whole lives how wonderful they are, "You're not special." Michelle: I can only imagine the parents' faces in the audience. Mark: The speech went viral. He said, "Contrary to what your U9 soccer trophy suggests, your glowing seventh-grade report card... you're nothing special." He was attacking this culture of celebrating mediocrity, of praising effort without achievement. Michelle: So it's like we've been giving out gold medals just for showing up, and then we're shocked when no one wants to run the actual race? That's... unsettling. Is there any actual research that backs this up, or is it just a feeling that we've gone soft? Mark: There is. The book cites author Kay Hymowitz, who reviewed fifteen thousand—that’s one-five-thousand—studies on the self-esteem movement. Her conclusion? High self-esteem doesn’t improve grades, reduce anti-social behavior, or deter drinking. In fact, she found that telling kids how smart they are can be counterproductive. It makes them anxious and terrified of taking on challenges where they might fail and lose that "smart" label. Michelle: Wow. So by trying to protect our kids from the pain of failure, we've actually made them more fragile. We've built a generation that expects success to be handed to them, rather than earned through struggle. Mark: Exactly. The book quotes the movie The Incredibles, where the villain says, "When everyone's super... no one will be." Thaler and Koval argue this is what the self-esteem movement did. It created a false sense of entitlement that actively works against the development of grit. Michelle: That makes so much sense. If you think you're already special, why would you put in the thousands of hours of grueling, unglamorous work it takes to actually become special? Mark: You wouldn't. You'd be waiting for the world to recognize the genius that you've been told you already possess. And that waiting is the enemy of grit.

Michelle: Okay, so if talent is a myth and self-esteem is a trap, then what is grit made of? How do you actually build it? It can't just be a matter of telling people to 'try harder.' Mark: It's not. The authors propose a framework, and a big piece of it is resilience. They use this beautiful metaphor: you have to learn to bend like bamboo. Trees like oak are strong, but in a hurricane, they snap. Bamboo is flexible; it bends to the ground and then springs back up. Michelle: I like that image. It’s not about being unbreakable, it’s about being un-broken. It’s about recovery. Mark: Precisely. And they tell one of the most powerful stories in the book to illustrate this. It's about a woman named Eleanor Longden. As a university student, she started hearing voices. They were neutral at first, just narrating her actions. But after she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and put on medication, the voices became hostile and menacing. Michelle: That sounds terrifying. Mark: It was. She reached a point of complete despair, even attempting self-harm. But then, a shift happened. With the help of a compassionate doctor and her mother's unwavering support, she started to see the voices not as a symptom of a broken brain, but as a meaningful response to her past trauma. The voices were metaphors for her deepest fears. Michelle: Wait, so instead of trying to silence them, she started to listen to them? Mark: Yes. She began a long, difficult process of deconstructing their meaning. If a voice told her to hurt herself, she learned to ask, "Why are you telling me to do this? What pain are you really expressing?" She bent towards her illness instead of trying to rigidly fight it. Over time, as she addressed the underlying fears, the voices lost their power. Eleanor Longden went on to earn her PhD in psychology and now helps others navigate similar experiences. She turned her disability into her greatest asset. Michelle: Wow. That's an incredible story of resilience. It's not about ignoring the problem, but fundamentally changing your relationship with it. But that feels like such an extreme case. What about the everyday fears that hold us back, like the fear of failure or taking a big risk? Mark: That brings us to the second part of grit's architecture, and it's probably the most controversial piece of advice in the book: Lose the Safety Net. Michelle: Uh oh. I can already feel my anxiety rising. Mark: (laughs) It’s provocative for a reason. The authors tell the story of Nik Wallenda, the high-wire artist. In 2013, he walked on a tightrope across a gorge near the Grand Canyon. It was a 1,400-foot walk, 1,500 feet in the air, on a two-inch cable. And he did it without a safety net. Michelle: My palms are sweating just hearing that. Why on earth would he do that? Mark: That’s what everyone asked. His reasoning was profound. He said the safety net provides a psychological sense that it's okay to fall. Without it, your mind has only one option: succeed. But this wasn't about being reckless. He and his team spent five years preparing. He practiced in his backyard with industrial wind machines blasting him with 90-mile-per-hour gusts to simulate the canyon's conditions. His training was so intense that he was prepared for almost any eventuality. Michelle: Hold on. That's a fantastic story for a seventh-generation high-wire artist whose job is literally to risk his life. But for the rest of us, isn't 'lose the safety net' just irresponsible advice? I have a mortgage and kids. I can't just quit my job with no plan. Mark: That's the perfect question, and it gets to the heart of a common critique of self-help books—that they offer advice that only works for a privileged few. But the authors would argue you're asking the right question. They aren't saying be reckless. They're saying the over-reliance on a safety net can prevent you from preparing properly. Wallenda didn't need a net because his preparation was his safety net. The point is to shift your focus from 'what if I fall?' to 'how do I train so intensely that falling isn't an option?' Michelle: So the safety net isn't the problem, our dependence on it is. It makes us lazy in our preparation. Mark: Exactly. The book shares the authors' own story. Robin Koval, one of the co-authors, had a very successful, very secure career in advertising. She was then approached to become the CEO of the Truth Initiative, the anti-smoking non-profit. It meant leaving her world, moving to a new city, and taking on a public-facing role where she'd be attacked by Big Tobacco. She had to give up her safety net. But she did it because the mission was more important, and she prepared relentlessly for the new role. It's about a calculated risk, not a blind leap.

Mark: So when you put these two ideas together, what we're really seeing is that grit isn't some single, magical trait. It's a dynamic process. It's about first unlearning the cultural myths of talent and specialness that make us fragile. And then, it's about actively building the architecture of resilience—that bamboo-like flexibility to bend with adversity and the courage to prepare so intensely that you become your own safety net. Michelle: It feels like the message is less about taking wild, uncalculated risks and more about taking a risk on yourself. It's about believing that your effort, your practice, your preparation is ultimately more valuable and more reliable than any external safety net or innate talent you think you have or don't have. Mark: That's it exactly. And that's why the authors call grit the 'great equalizer.' It’s not about your IQ, your family background, or where you started. It's the one thing in life you have complete control over. They quote Michael Bloomberg, another self-made billionaire, who said, "I’m not the smartest guy, but I can outwork you. It’s the one thing I can control." Michelle: That’s incredibly empowering. It removes all the excuses. It’s not about what you were given; it’s about what you do with what you have. It makes you wonder... what's the one safety net in our own lives that we're clinging to, that might be holding us back from truly preparing to succeed? Mark: A question for all of us to think about. This is Aibrary, signing off.