The Many Worlds of Madison Sowell

“On the Value of a Growth Mindset and Grit” was first published in Voices of Tusculum, ed. Michael Bodary, 4^th ed. (Tusculum University, 2019).

About the author

Dr. Madison U. Sowell penned this essay in response to a question he is often asked:  How does someone born and reared in Piggott, Arkansas, with a population at the time of fewer than 3,000 persons, grow up to earn a master’s and Ph.D. from Harvard University in romance languages and literatures, engage in post-doctoral studies or fellowships at three other Ivy League schools (Columbia, Dartmouth, and Cornell), become an internationally respected specialist in Dante studies and dance iconography, publish eight books and over 130 scholarly articles and book reviews, and become the honors program director at one of America’s largest private universities and then provost (chief academic officer) at two liberal arts colleges?

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I was born and reared in the farming community of Piggott, Arkansas (population 2,776 in 1960). My father, a farmer who never attended college, was killed in an accident when I was eight years old; after his death my widowed mother struggled to run the non-irrigated hill farm and to make ends meet. My first home was a former dance hall that had been converted into a one-bathroom lodging around the time of my birth. It was located two miles out of town in a grove of oak trees. We didn’t have a telephone until I was six years old, and it was on a party line with our rural neighbors. Our well water was ferrous (full or iron), and we collected rain water for washing our clothes. Bantam chickens provided us with eggs, a couple of cows gave us milk in the summer, and we’d  slaughter one for meat during the winter months.

While chores were never lacking, paid employment for a youngster living in the country was hard to come by. One summer I tried to supplement income by chopping cotton for a local farmer for 75 cents an hour, ten hours a day. When I lamented the long hours and low pay, my mother drove me to nearby Mississippi County where I could live with my aunt. The pay there for chopping cotton turned out to be only 40 cents an hour. Another time I bought some piglets, thinking that I could raise them on acorns that fell from our trees and on leftover meal scraps. I planned to sell the mature hogs for a profit, but somehow the pigs got parasites. That blew any financial gain I had hoped to make. I fell back on collecting Coca-Cola and other pop bottles from ditches where drivers had discarded them; I made two cents for every unbroken bottle that I surrendered to a grocery store.

As hard as country life was, life without a father proved even more challenging. I turned inward and became pensive—reading books, practicing our little spinet piano, and climbing trees to escape the life I seemed destined to live. Poetic lines penned by Emily Dickinson, “There is no Frigate like a Book / To take us Lands away,” gradually began to describe my life of the mind. As a ten-year-old, I read about faraway lands that I ached to visit; I devoured dozens of biographies of great men and women. As a young teenager I read an illustrated article about the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer in the Reader’s Digest, which was one of the few magazines we could afford.  I couldn’t have been more than fifteen when I vowed that someday I would be able to say that I had seen all of Vermeer’s thirty-six extant paintings. (I fulfilled that vow before my fortieth birthday, and accomplishing that feat took me to New York, London, Paris, Dresden, Glasgow, Dublin, and Washington, DC.) The irony is that, when I made that promise to myself, I had no clear idea how I would ever see beyond the borders of Clay County, Arkansas.  My two, much-older half-brothers had joined the military to see the world; however, with the Vietnam War starting to rage, I didn’t find that option at all attractive.

Challenging as those early experiences were, they taught me life-changing lessons. For one thing, I realized that the only way to get ahead would be through setting specific goals for myself and then persevering to realize those goals. Studying harder than anyone else became my passion. I wanted to learn how to learn so that I could absorb more knowledge, not only about the world but also about myself. When my report cards showed straight A’s or my test scores placed me in the 99^th percentile of test takers, my mother wisely refused to compliment me on being smarter than anyone else; she would always say that I worked harder. The result was that I was blessed to reach young adulthood with what is now recognized as a “growth mindset,” the belief that one’s abilities are not fixed at birth but can be developed over time through consistent and persistent hard work and diligent and focused effort.

Simply stated, your IQ does not determine who you will become; your innate talent does not determine what you will accomplish. Whatever your natural ability or talent, it is the effort that you put into following your passion that leads to success. In other words, “effort is what ignites [one’s] ability and turns it into accomplishment.”¹ As one of my teachers used to say, “I can’t grade potential, only performance.” What counted was not whether I had potential or not; it was how I performed that mattered.

After I completed the tenth grade, my mother accepted the reality that our farm was costing more money than it produced.  We sold it for about $50 an acre and moved to Memphis, where she could find work as a dental hygienist and I could attend my final two years of high school. So it was that at the start of my junior year we moved into a one-bedroom apartment, and I slept on the couch in the small living room. We still had the spinet piano, but we had to wrap it in blankets to keep my practicing from disturbing the neighbors.

In Arkansas I was used to being the top student in a class of only fifty or sixty kids. In Tennessee I was competing for the first time with students who had enjoyed every advantage that big city life could afford. I was no longer the big fish in a little pond.  I was a little fish in a sea of four hundred fellow classmates, many of whom were planning to attend an Ivy League college or a so-called “Harvard of the South” (e.g., Vanderbilt in Tennessee, Duke in North Carolina, Emory in Georgia, or Tulane in Louisiana). While I could now study Latin and Advanced Placement or accelerated classes in math, history, and English, the competition for the top grade was much keener. Likewise my new piano and organ teacher demanded even more practice time than I was used to. It was time for me to show what I was capable of; it was time for me to draw on my reserve of grit.²

Grit has been defined in many ways. It is associated with words such as courageousness, bravery, pluck, mettle, backbone, spirit, strength of will, steel, nerve, valor, fortitude, toughness, hardiness, resolve, determination, resolution, stamina, doggedness, tenacity, perseverance, and endurance. Grit is informally known as gumption, guts, or spunk. It refers to the inner strength that one displays in getting up after being knocked down, in not allowing a failure or even a series of failures to halt one’s progress toward a goal. While I was not entirely certain of the reason, I knew by the time we moved to Memphis that my objective was to become a highly educated professional. I also knew that grit was going to be the means that helped me realize that dream. Initially I think my motivation to achieve a high degree of education was pecuniary; that is, it was based largely on the desire for financial independence. In time my rationale grew into something much more profound; it evolved into a spiritual quest for greater light, knowledge, and truth.

Given that Tusculum is a faith-based institution, I believe it is appropriate that I share part of the theological underpinning of my drive. My ambition for more education was bolstered theologically after I encountered missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I was sixteen, and the missionaries could tell that I was a very serious student. They shared with me their religious belief that “The glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth” and that “if a person gains more knowledge and intelligence in this life through his diligence and obedience than another, he will have so much the advantage in the world to come.”³ Although I had grown up in a solidly Protestant home where the Bible was read and we attended church services every Sunday, I had not until that point in my life viewed education as part of a theological construct. I soon embraced the idea that my Creator wanted me to gain more knowledge and intelligence and to realize my potential, however great or small, so as to bless my life and that of others.

When I graduated from high school, sharing the first-place ranking with other 4.0 students, I was accepted into Brigham Young University’s highly selective Honors Program. Of 6,500 first-year students, only 250 (the top 4%) were admitted to the program. It was like a small liberal arts college in the context of a major research university of 30,000 students. I had the best of two worlds: a liberal arts education taught by outstanding teachers in small sections and access to a major library and other key resources, such as a language laboratory.  I could continue to study Latin but add German and Italian. Once again, I had a steep learning curve because the competition was intense. For example, when as a senior I represented BYU as a Rhodes Scholar candidate, the fellow Honors student who actually won the scholarship was Clayton Christensen. He went on to become the Harvard Business School guru of disruptive innovation. Another fellow BYU Honors student, Tom Kelly, graduated from Harvard Law School and eventually co-founded Jet Blue Airlines.

As an undergraduate I learned that more important than the subjects I studied were the professors who taught the classes, dedicated teachers who could be role models and mentors. I made a list of the university’s most highly respected professors in disciplines that were of interest and made sure I took at least one course from each of them.  It was a mentor, Dr. Karen Lynn, who told me that I was potentially “Harvard material.” Instead of relying on past accolades or achievements, however, I worked all the harder to make sure I didn’t disappoint her.  I sought out opportunities to publish a couple of short pieces; those publications, though minor, strengthened my application for prestigious graduate programs. I saved and found the means to live and work abroad for two years as a missionary myself.  In short, I took advantage of the opportunities that an undergraduate education could afford and worked my hardest to prove that I had the grit to succeed at whatever educational goal I set for myself.

Space does not permit a lengthy commentary on my graduate experience at Harvard.  I will note that, once again, I often felt like a small fish swimming in a large ocean. Initial attempts to write acceptable papers for my professors were disappointing. Renowned teacher-scholars expected more than I had ever before produced. They didn’t want their own thoughts regurgitated; they wanted to see original thought spelled out in detail and defended by solid arguments. They wanted to learn something from me that they didn’t already know. At first I was intimidated not only by the professors but also by fellow graduate students who had gone to prestigious prep schools and then to elite undergraduate colleges. I remember having to swallow my pride and ask a student who received an A on an assignment (for which I had received a lower grade) if I could read his response so as to determine what the professor was looking for when demanding “original thought.” Learning to raise my hand in class when I was the only one who seemed not to understand something and learning to ask for help from others who seemed to understand did not come easily, but such actions were necessary to my success and paid off in the end.  Near the completion of my four years at Harvard, I was the first graduate student in the department’s history to win both of the annual prizes, one for teaching and the other for scholarship.

The trajectory my life has taken, from Piggott farm boy to Tusculum provost, could not have been predicted by my place of birth or family circumstances. It could not have been foreseen by my ACT score. (Fresh off the farm, I was so naïve when I took the ACT that I didn’t realize at first that it was a timed exam.) The predictors for any success that I have enjoyed were three-fold:  a growth mindset (the confidence that I could develop my abilities through focused effort), grit (perseverance in the face of challenges), and a religious conviction that—whether I had one, two, or five talents (see Matthew 25:14-30 for the Parable of the Talents)—God expected me to develop what I had in order to bless as many lives as possible.

¹ See Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (New York: Ballantine Books, 2016), p. 41.

² See Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (New York: Scribner, 2016): “Grit has two components: passion and perseverance” (p. 56); “Grit is about holding the same top-level [ultimate] goal for a very long time” (p. 64); “[Grit] rests on the expectation that our own efforts can improve our future” (p. 169).

³ See The Doctrine and Covenants of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City, UT: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1995), p.183 (D&C 93:36) and p. 265 (D&C 130:19).