Tuomas Immonen and his team suggest that some people,
including researchers, are too “risk-centric” when they are describ-
ing the kind of sports Will does. Most people, they suggest, describe
the kinds of experiences that extreme sports produce as “positive,
deeply meaningful, and life-enhancing” and these have little to do
with risk or adrenaline.^29Katherine Beatlie: Perseverance and Grit
It seems to me that every few years they come up with a brand new
way to get hit by a car. In the 2000s it was the Segway and Razor
Scooter, and in the 1980s it was rollerblades. I remember the very
first time I put on rollerblades. I certainly never expected to match
the skill of Roller Girl who you read about earlier, but I thought
maybe it would be fun to skate around the park. How hard could it
be? Turns out I somehow injured myself while simply putting on
the skates and decided to abandon the activity forever even before
standing up. High sensation-seekers aren’t like that. We know from
the research we discussed earlier that high sensation-seekers are
more likely to press on even when they do get injured.
This is certainly the case for Katherine Beatlie. By day
Katherine is a television scriptwriter in Los Angeles but she’s always
been a high sensation-seeker.
“When I was a kid I was always trying to ride bikes and
skateboard and I always wanted to surf and bodyboard. If it had
wheels I wanted to do it. And I was terrible at it.” She laughed. “I
could hardly make it move and I was so bad but I loved it and I kept
at it.” Yes, unlike me, Katherine kept at it. Psychologist Angela
Duckworth calls this grit.^30
As a teacher, Duckworth was puzzled about how some of
her students performed on their assignments and exams. Some of
the strongest students didn’t necessarily have high achievement
scores, and some of the brightest kids weren’t doing all that well. It
seemed that there was no connection between how “smart” the
students were and how well they were doing in her class.
Angela left the classroom and went to graduate school in
psychology. Her big question? Who is successful and why. She
looked at elite military training graduates, rookie teachers, even
national spelling bee champions to see if there was something
common about who succeeds. One thing stood out as a predictor
of success – grit.80 / Buzz!Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:19:03, subject to the Cambridge