Maybe being strong on the inside should have been enough for Paul, but as had been the case with some of the children from Chowchilla, he wanted to be physically strong too. “Was I going to be the kid everyone kept telling me I was, the kid who got pushed around?” Paul remembers asking himself. “Or was I going to be someone else?” Paul’s father signed his son up for judo, and soon the dojo was a place where he did get to be someone else. “I was the most aggressive person there,” Paul recalled, taking pride in the way he channeled the fighter within. He made a point of explaining that judo is not a sport of kicking or punching; it is a martial art in which one pins or neutralizes the opponent. Each afternoon after school, Paul could win without anyone getting hurt.
Such daily mastery experiences and physical activity likely protected Paul from depression and anxiety that can go along with bullying and other adversities, yet there was more to it than that. Rather than engaging in routine or maintenance exercise, Paul’s workouts both in and out of judo were increasingly designed to push his own limits. On the weekends, Paul put on his superhero T-shirts and ran two miles, then four miles, then six, the pounding of his feet keeping time with the rhythm of his breath and with the intense, thumping music he listened to. Sometimes Paul pretended he was training for the apocalypse. Sometimes he pretended he was invincible.
As an adult, Paul did look pretty invincible, and I commented on how certain and unshakable he seemed, even as he spoke about some very painful times. “I can talk about it now,” he said, suggesting that, at one time, he could not. So I wondered—and I asked him—back then, before he could talk about it and before he could draw on the strength of being a naval officer, how did he put one foot in front of another, day after day, as he walked to classes in the hallways at school and as he ran for miles on the streets of his town? How did he fight back for all those years?
At first, his answer was no surprise. His dad was in his corner, he emphasized; and to be sure, having good people who can compensate for what is bad in life can make all the difference. But then Paul said something else. He named—even owned—an emotion that is so often a part of the story, yet one that many supernormals feel ashamed of including. “I got angry,” Paul added unabashedly, as a simple matter of fact. “I realized it was wrong what those kids were doing to my family and me, and it made me angry. And that anger became my fire and motivation.”
***
Anger has a bad reputation. Both scientists and laypeople tend to think of emotions as positive or negative, and of the six universal emotions—happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, and surprise—only happiness seems clearly positive, and the negative emotions seem to be, well, all the rest. As would be expected, positive emotions are viewed as desirable and negative emotions are seen as undesirable; positive feelings lift us up, it is thought, while negative feelings drag us down. From this perspective, an emotion like happiness is to be cultivated while those like fear and sadness and anger are to be eliminated or at least managed. Historically, anger has been viewed as an especially damaging emotion, and this take on getting angry is echoed in many ancient sayings, like this one purportedly by Seneca the Younger—“Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured”—or this one widely attributed to Buddha—“You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.”
More recently, however, rather than judging feelings as good or bad, some scientists have suggested that it makes more sense that each of the universal emotions has a uniquely important role to play. It seems reasonable that while happiness is an emotion that allows us to enjoy life when all is well, other emotions can help us adjust and survive when all is not. With this in mind, researchers have begun to appreciate anger as an emotion with enormous adaptive value. There are many reasons why we become angry, although most involve feeling wronged somehow. A strong feeling of displeasure, anger emerges when we feel thwarted, provoked, or aggrieved. Maybe something or someone we treasure has been taken away, or we are prevented from attaining an object or a goal we desire. Often, but not always, to feel angry is to perceive injustice, an unfairness that results from the misdeeds of others. Anger is a signal that something has gone wrong. Something hurts. There is a violation of what “ought to be.”
One afternoon, not long after Paul and I talked about the role that anger had played in his fight against bullying, I had a session with a client in her forties who still struggled with the effects of childhood bullying. I asked her if, growing up, she ever got angry about what was happening to her. (This may be changing some but, historically, girls and women have been especially discouraged from expressing or displaying anger.) “No,” she replied. “But I think it would have been better if I had.” As Toni Morrison wrote in The Bluest Eye, “There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth.”
***
Seneca and Buddha were right that just feeling angry is not necessarily beneficial, and, to be sure, chronic anger is hard on the body and mind. What can be useful about anger, though, is not the feeling itself but the action it inspires. Anger is where the fight in fight or flight comes from. An energizer and organizer, anger moves us to close the gap between what we want and what we have, or between the way things are and the way we think they should be. It compels us to resist the current state of affairs, rather than giving up or giving in. A powerful emotion capable of generating enormous forward momentum, anger propels us toward our goals and even over obstacles along the way. Aristotle was able to hold this more generous view of anger when he wrote, “The angry man is aiming at what he can attain.” This sort of active, even tireless, striving is a hallmark of the superheroic and the supernormal, and it has long been recognized as one of the key ingredients of success.
In the 1800s, Sir Francis Galton collected biographical information on nearly a thousand celebrated statesmen, writers, scientists, poets, musicians, painters, poets, military commanders, and others, arguing that eminence was the product of the “triple event of ability combined with zeal and with capacity for hard labour.” The fact that the word ability is given pride of place, as the first of the three events mentioned, is likely no accident. A cousin of Charles Darwin, Galton makes the aforementioned argument in his blockbuster book, Hereditary Genius, in which he asserts that intelligence and talent are largely inborn, passed down in great families.
By the 1900s, however, researchers questioned the primacy of innate abilities such as intelligence and began to pay increasing attention to the other factors that Galton put forth: zeal and hard work. Lewis Terman launched the Study of the Gifted, for example, and followed academically precocious children into adulthood, and what he found was that tenacity was more predictive of whether these children became accomplished in their fields than was their IQ. More of the same was reported by Catherine Cox, a psychologist and student of Terman’s, who examined the lives of 301 geniuses and found that when intelligence was controlled for, lifetime achievement was dependent upon traits such as “persistence of motive and effort.”
In the twenty-first century, many of us know of this stick-to-itiveness as “grit”—or “passion and perseverance” as researcher Angela Duckworth defines it. Multiple studies have shown that grit contributes to success in far-ranging areas including grade point average, educational attainment, teacher effectiveness, National Spelling Bee ranking, staying married over the long run, and—as in Paul’s case—retention in the workplace and the military.
Yet, despite how common it now is to hear about the importance of grit, perseverance seems to be well understood while the passion behind it is less so. Passion—the “zeal” Galton pointed to, or the “motive” referenced by Cox—is the emotional component that propels it all. Each of us needs a reason to dig in and fight for what we want, especially when what we want will not come easily. Indeed, in a video produced by the navy about the challenges of Officer Candidate School, three graduates of the program begin the recording by pointing to the irreplaceable power of a deep-seated feeling. “If you don’t have the passion,” says one, “you’re not going to make it.” None of