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By the time you set foot on the campus of the United States Military Academy at West Point, you've earned it. | mohau | |
The admissions process for West Point is at least as rigorous as for most selective universities. | mohau | |
Top scores on the SAT or ACT and outstanding high school grades are a must. | mohau | |
But when you apply to Harvard, you don't need to start your application in the 11th grade. | mohau | |
You don't need to secure a nomination from a member of Congress, a senator, or the vice president of the United States. | mohau | |
You don't, for that matter, have to get superlative marks in a fitness assessment that includes running, push-ups, sit-ups, and pull-ups. | mohau | |
Each year, in their junior year of high school, more than 14,000 applicants begin the admissions process. | mohau | |
This pool is winnowed to just 4,000 who succeed in getting the required nomination. | mohau | |
Slightly more than half of those applicants, about 2,500, meet West Point's rigorous academic and physical standards. | mohau | |
And from that select group, just 1,200 are admitted and enrolled. | mohau | |
Nearly all the men and women who come to West Point were varsity athletes. | mohau | |
Most were team captains. | mohau | |
And yet, one in five cadets will drop out before graduation. | mohau | |
What's more remarkable is that historically, a substantial fraction of dropouts leave in their first summer during an intensive seven-week training program named, even in official literature, Beast Barracks, or just for short, Beast. | mohau | |
Who spends two years trying to get into a place and then drops out after the first two months? | mohau | |
Then again, these are no ordinary months. | mohau | |
Beast is described in the West Point Handbook for new cadets as the most physically and emotionally demanding part of your four years at West Point, designed to help you make the transition from new cadet to soldier. | mohau | |
The day begins at 5 a.m. | mohau | |
By 5:30, cadets are in formation standing at attention, honoring the raising of the United States flag. | mohau | |
Then follows a hard workout, running or calisthenics, followed by a non-stop rotation of marching and formation. | mohau | |
Classroom instruction, weapons training, and athletics. | mohau | |
Lights out to a melancholy bugle song called Taps. Occurs at 10 p.m. | mohau | |
And on the next day, the routine starts over again. | mohau | |
Oh, and there are no weekends, no breaks other than meals, and virtually no contact with family and friends outside of West Point. | mohau | |
One cadet's description of Beast. | mohau | |
You are challenged in a variety of ways in every developmental area, mentally, physically, militarily, and socially. | mohau | |
The system will find your weaknesses. | mohau | |
But that's the point. West Point toughens you. | mohau | |
So, who makes it through Beast? | mohau | |
It was 2004 and my second year of graduation school in psychology when I set about answering that question. | mohau | |
But for decades, the US Army has been asking the same thing. | mohau | |
In fact, it was in 1955, almost 50 years before I began working on this puzzle, that a young psychologist named Jerry Keegan was drafted into the Army. | mohau | |
Ordered to report to West Point and assigned to test new cadets for the purpose of identifying who would stay and who would leave. | mohau | |
As fate would have it, Jerry was not the only first, was only the first psychologist to study dropping out at West Point. | mohau | |
He was also the first psychologist I met in college. | mohau | |
I ended up working part-time in his lab for two years. | mohau | |
Jerry described early efforts to separate the wheat from the chaff at West Point as dramatically unsuccessful. | mohau | |
He recalled, in particular, spending hundreds of hours showing cadets cards printed with pictures and asking the young men to make up stories to fit them. | mohau | |
This test was meant to unearth deep-seated, unconscious motives. | mohau | |
And the general idea was that cadets who visualized noble deeds and courageous accomplishments should be the ones who would graduate instead of dropping out. | mohau | |
Like a lot of ideas that sound good in principle, this one didn't work so well in practice. | mohau | |
The stories the cadets told were colorful and fun to listen to, but they had absolutely nothing to do with decisions the cadets made in their actual lives. | mohau | |
Since then, several more generations of psychologists devoted themselves to the attrition issue. | mohau | |
But not one researcher could say with much certainty why some of the most promising cadets routinely quit when their training had just begun. | mohau | |
Soon after learning about Beast, I found my way to the office of Mike Matthews, a military psychologist who's been a West Point faculty member for years. | mohau | |
Mike explained that the West Point admissions process successfully identified men and women who had the potential to thrive there. | mohau | |
In particular, admission staff calculate for each applicant something called the whole candidate score, a weighted average of SAT or ACT exam scores, | mohau | |
high school rank adjusted for the number of students in the applicant's graduating class, expert appraisals of leadership potential, and the performance on objective measures of physical fitness. | mohau | |
You can think of the whole candidate score as West Point's best guess at how much talent applicants have for the diverse rigors of its four-year program. | mohau | |
In other words, it's an estimate of how easily cadets will master the many skills required of a military leader. | mohau | |
The whole candidate score is the single most important factor in West Point's admissions, and yet it didn't reliably predict who would make it through Beast. | mohau | |
In fact, cadets with the highest whole candidate score were just as likely to drop out as those with the lowest. | mohau | |
And this is why Mike's door was open to me. | mohau | |
From his own experience, joining the Air Force as a young man, Mike had a clue to the riddle. | mohau | |
While the rigors of his induction weren't quite as harrowing as those of West Point, there were notable similarities. | mohau | |
The most important were challenges that exceeded current skills. | mohau | |
For the first time in their lives, Mike and other recruits were being asked on an hourly basis to do things they couldn't yet do. | mohau | |
Within two weeks, Mike recalls, I was tired, lonely, frustrated, and ready to quit, as were all of my classmates. | mohau | |
Some did quit, but Mike didn't. | mohau | |
What struck Mike was that rising to the occasion had almost nothing to do with talent. | mohau | |
Those who dropped out of training rarely did so from lack of ability. | mohau | |
Rather, what mattered, Mike said, was a never-give-up attitude. | mohau | |
Around that time, it wasn't just Mike Matthews who was talking to me about this kind of hang-in-there posture towards challenges. | mohau | |
As a graduate student just beginning to probe the psychology of success, I was interviewing leaders in business, art, athletics, journalism, academia, medicine, and law. | mohau | |
What are the people at the very top of a field? | mohau | |
What are they like? What do you think makes them special? | mohau | |
Some of the characteristics that emerged in these interviews were very field-specific. | mohau | |
For instance, more than one business person mentioned an appetite for taking financial risks. | mohau | |
You've got to be able to make calculated decisions about millions of dollars and still go to sleep at night. | mohau | |
But this seemed entirely beside the point for artists, who instead mentioned a drive to create. | mohau | |
I like making stuff. I don't know why, but I do. | mohau | |
In contrast, athletes mentioned a different kind of motivation, one driven by the thrill of victory. | mohau | |
Winners love to go head-to-head with other people. | mohau | |
Winners hate losing. | mohau | |
In addition to these particulars, there emerged certain commonalities, and they were what interested me the most. | mohau | |
No matter the field, the most successful people were lucky and talented. | mohau | |
I'd heard that before, and I didn't doubt it. | mohau | |
And I didn't doubt it. But the story of success didn't end there. | mohau | |
Many of the people I talked to could also recount tales of rising stars who, to everyone's surprise, dropped out or lost interest before they could realize their potential. | mohau | |
Apparently, it was critically important and not at all easy to keep going after failure. | mohau | |
Some people were great when things aren't going well, but they fell apart when things weren't, when things weren't. | mohau | |
High achievers described in these interviews really stuck it out. | mohau | |
This one guy, he wasn't actually the best writer at the beginning. | mohau | |
I mean, we used to read his stories and have a laugh because the writing was so, you know, clumsy and melodramatic. | mohau | |
But he got better and better. And last year, he won a Guggenheim. | mohau | |
And they were constantly driven to improve. She's never satisfied. | mohau | |
You'd think she would be by now, but she's her own harshest critic. | mohau | |
The highly accomplished were paragons of perseverance. | mohau | |
Why were the highly accomplished so dogged in their pursuits? | mohau | |
For most, there was no realistic expectation of ever catching up to their ambitions. | mohau |
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