No one succeeds alone.

We all know this at a deep level, yet we are duped by the myth that successful people achieve prominence independent of their circumstances and of other people.

It’s the American Dream, that we start (should?) with absolutely nothing, with all odds stacked against us, and triumph — all hail the conquering hero.

Nice story, terrible outlook on life.

This Lone Hero myth gives short shrift to the support from family, friends & teachers/mentors, education/schooling, and chance it takes to succeed.

One example is Paul Orfalea who founded Kinko’s copy stores. My wife, Dr. Karla, gave me his biography, Copy This! : Lessons From a Hyperactive Dyslexic Who Turned a Bright Idea into One of America’s Best Companies, to read, ostensibly the story of a man with dyslexia who overcomes his learning disadvantage to become a captain of industry.

However, upon reading his story, all I could focus on were the numerous financial advantages he had that set the stage and contributed to his success.

His grandmother and father owned a clothing business, and Orfalea recounts regular dinner-table discussions about money and operating a business.

He started Kinko’s with today’s equivalent of a $32,000 loan….from his father.

Even so, being a “hyperactive dyslexic” is a much more compelling story than “son of entrepreneurial family starts his own business with dad’s money.”

Choosing the right parents is a major component of success. Mozart’s father was one of the greatest music teachers in Europe and Tiger Woods’ father was a professional golfer who devoted his later life to his son’s golf game. Skill runs in families due to genes, but also to growing up in the specific culture, so it’s no surprise that Stephen King’s son is a bestselling author.

Dr. Karla, also sent me an article from educator Mike Rose about the over-reliance on the latest character development catchword, grit, popularized by the researcher Angela Duckworth. Duckworth measures persistence with her Grit Scale to predict who will keep on keeping on and who will fold under pressure.

Grit, or persistence in the face of adversity, is trumpeted as the cure for poor kids and for failures of all sorts, as in, “if they would only work hard enough, for long enough, they would succeed like everyone else.”

I’ve experienced this attitude firsthand, in the poverty-stricken schools of Chicago’s South Side, adults given every advantage in life chastising children living a daily existence with odds so stacked against them they are bound to fail, to just buckle down and work harder.

And if these under-privileged kids don’t demonstrate grit? They are written off as lazy and deserving of everything they don’t get.

A little adversity is a challenge, adversity at every turn is soul-crushing.

Along with Duckworth’s Grit Scale, Rose posits an Impediment Scale that takes into account the obstacles in a child’s way, in addition to the child’s perseverance factor:

“Can I make a recommendation? Along with the grit survey, let us give another survey and see what the relationship is between the scores. I’m not sure what to call this new survey, but it would provide a measure of adversity, of impediments to persistence, concentration, and the like. It, too, would use a five-point response scale: “very much like me” to “not much like me.” Its items would include:

· I always have bus fare to get to school.
· I hear my parents talking about not having enough money for the rent.
· Whenever I get sick, I am able to go to a doctor.
· We always have enough food in our home.
· I worry about getting to school safely.
· There are times when I have to stay home to care for younger brothers or sisters.
· My school has honors and Advanced Placement classes.
· I have at least one teacher who cares about me.

My guess is that higher impediment scores would be linked to lower scores on the grit survey. I realize that what grit advocates want is to help young people better cope with such hardship. Anyone who has worked seriously with kids in tough circumstances spends a lot of time providing support and advice, and if grit interventions can provide an additional resource, great. But if as a society we are not also working to improve the educational and economic realities these young people face, then we are engaging in a cruel hoax, building aspiration and determination for a world that will not fulfill either.”

Rose’s viewpoint is supported by The Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan and the Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir, authors of Scarcity: Why Having So Little Means So Much. The authors found that being poor adversely affects our decision-making abilities — not that people are poor because they make bad decisions but that people who are poor make bad decisions.

The authors call our ability to reason effectively, including our willpower, “bandwidth.” The more mental bandwidth we have, the more information we can process to make the best decisions.

Under conditions of scarcity we all only have enough bandwidth to allow the most critical information in and to make moment-to-moment, survival-based decisions at the expense of long-term gain.

Here’s part of their research that will make you re-think your assumptions.

When the researchers placed “rich” people in scarcity situations, they made the exact same types of bad decisions as other poor people. Upon being removed from scarcity situations, the “rich” people once again made better, long-term decisions, demonstrating the powerful situational effects on decision-making.

Whenever we have a scarcity of money, time, positive emotions, support or friendship, we default to immediate gratification, no matter how detrimental, instead of making the wiser choices that would insure long-term well-being.

Whenever we have a scarcity of money, time, positive emotions, support or friendship, we default to immediate gratification, no matter how detrimental, instead of making the wiser choices that would insure long-term well-being.

“Wait didn’t I just read this sentence?” you ask.

If you’re thinking I made a mistake, I didn’t. I copied that sentence so you would read it again.

Why would a stressed-out-by-too-much-homework, hungry, sleep-deprived child who is feeling socially excluded not want to come to martial arts class (or go anywhere for that matter), deciding to hide out at home playing video gamers or surfing the internet instead?

Read that sentence again.

Whenever we have a scarcity of money, time, positive emotions, support or friendship, we default to immediate gratification, no matter how detrimental, instead of making the wiser choices that would insure long-term well-being.

I’m a huge proponent of grit and know that persistence is a necessary part of any success. At the same time, individuals abilities like grit and willpower require us to set the stage for these abilities to shine.
Non-pertinent impediments must be cleared away to allow grit to develop.

When a child can cultivate grit and parents remove non-pertinent impediments, this combination is a tremendous force for achievement.