We tend to laud those who are successful, but ignore those who followed the same path but ended up failures. We also ignore how privilege and starting positions influence where we end up. It is easy to score a run when you were born on third base, after all.

While Pete and I think that the work of journalists like Duhigg and Pink have merit, we have to admit that we are a bit more philosophically aligned with Menand. Our society tends not to take the Oscar Wilde position on these matters, summed up as “everything in moderation including moderation.” Americans tend to think if something is good, then you can never have too much of it. If we can eliminate one bad habit then we should replace them all. If we know that the roots of intrinsic motivation are to be able to have autonomy, mastery, and work for a higher purpose, then we should all abandon our jobs (consequences be damned!). Pete and I are more or less in agreement with Menand’s overall point that maximizing our lives for productivity to the degree where personal and work life mirror each other (or are so intermixed as to be indistinguishable) might be too much. “Productivity” in our minds, is something that is achieved at work while what we’re trying to do at Grove Ave is to flesh out the idea that success is defined beyond just what happens in the workplace. Society has become (or perhaps always was) obsessed with seeing work success as directly equal to life success.

This isn’t to say that we agree with Menand on all of his points. We disagree with his blanket criticism of the entire genre of self-help business books. The fact that they largely relay common sense strategies shouldn’t be a knock against them. In fact, many people, in their day-to-day behaviors lack common sense. We’re inherently inconsistent beings influenced by emotions rather than rational utility maximizing homo economicus. What many of these books do is give us the vocabulary and conceptual frameworks to behave in a more self-aware and composed manner. That’s why classics like How to Win Friends and 7 Habits are so timeless. It’s not simply about being nice to people to get what you want, but about making your mind aware of the need for empathy, putting yourself in someone’s shoes, and striving for win-win scenarios. Not everyone does this or has the awareness to do this no matter how “common sense” it might appear to be to others.

The implication of many of these books and articles about productivity is that without taking these (sometimes rather extreme) steps, we won’t ever be successful. We are told by these theorists and popularizers of scientific findings that we should take risks and dream big, yet there is little talk of what happens when we do so and fail. There’s no Malcolm Gladwell around the corner that can pick you up off the mat and save you. You have to, largely, do that yourself. There’s also no real talk of what you do when you’ve largely “succeeded.” Once you’ve optimized your life to the point of it being frictionless and pain-free, what are you going to do with all that extra time? Don’t expect these theorists to be able to answer (or want to answer) that question for you.

Another major problem is that we tend to want to reduce important lessons and advice into capsule-sized products, to be packaged up and easily ingested. For example, the personality measure called grit has been hailed by lots of research as being even more important to success than intelligence. There’s now a movement afoot to “test” students for grit in public school and to call out schools for “failing” to improve a student’s grittiness. As the psychologist and primary grit researcher Angela Duckworth recently decried in an op-ed, when she found out what was happening based on her research:

“I felt queasy. This was not at all my intent, and this is not at all a good idea. Does character matter, and can character be developed? Science and experience unequivocally say yes. Can the practice of giving feedback to students on character be improved? Absolutely. Can scientists and educators work together to cultivate students’ character? Without question. Should we turn measures of character intended for research and self-discovery into high-stakes metrics for accountability? In my view, no.”

Yes, grit and character are important for success and yes, both can be improved. It doesn’t mean that we should test students on these measures to hold schools accountable for character growth. After all, character, like paths to success, is multidimensional and difficult to measure in real world settings. You can have not only too much of a good thing, you can turn a good thing into the opposite. The world is too complicated for these anodyne solutions to be universally helpful. One-size-fits-all recommendations for building grittiness and becoming more focused generally ignores the real problems people face that impede improvements. How can a test for grit capture the reality of your life, if just getting to school or work is obstacle-filled and difficult?

A related problem is that the advice from popularizers like Duhigg and the Business Insider type articles generally come from the most successful people. Americans almost fetishize successful people, which Menand points out is something that changes based on where we are in history. Right now, we seem to be in love with risk-taking startup virtues and believe that if we can only emulate these successful people, we ourselves will become successful, seemingly by spiritual osmosis. There is actually a conceptual term for only getting your advice from “successful people”: in science we call this “selecting on the dependent variable.” Basically, you wind up reverse engineering your findings once you know how things turn out. But, as this brilliant video from Bite Size Psych shows, success might only be an illusion, generated by luck, starting position, or genetics. We tend to laud those who are successful, but ignore those who followed the same path and ended up as failures. We also ignore how privilege and starting positions influence where we end up. It’s easy to score a run when you were born on third base.