We urge ourselves and others to grit it out, bear down, “just do it”—to think harder. But, as we often find to our frustration, the brain is made of stubborn and unyielding stuff, its vaunted plasticity notwithstanding. Confronted by its limits, we may conclude that we ourselves (or our children or our students or our employees) are simply not smart enough, or not “gritty” enough. In fact, it’s the way we handle our mental shortcomings—which are, remember, endemic to our species—that is the problem. Our approach constitutes an instance of (as the poet William Butler Yeats put it in another
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