Grit (34 page)

Tyrannical? I don’t believe it is. And if Lucy’s and Amanda’s recent comments on the topic aren’t disguised apple-polishing, neither do my daughters. They’d like to grow grittier as they get older, and, like any skill, they know grit takes practice. They know they’re fortunate to have the opportunity to do so.

For parents who would like to encourage grit without obliterating their children’s capacity to choose their own path, I recommend the Hard Thing Rule.

Chapter 12

A CULTURE OF GRIT

The first football game I ever watched from beginning to end was Super Bowl XLVIII. The game took place on February 2, 2014, and pitted the Seattle Seahawks against the Denver Broncos. The Seahawks won, 43–8.

The day after their victory, Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll was interviewed by a former member of the San Francisco 49ers.

“I know when I was with the (Forty-) Niners,” the interviewer began, “you were there. . . . It meant something to be a Niner, not a football player. When you and John Schneider are looking for a player, tell me: What is that philosophy, what does it mean to be a Seahawk?”

Pete chuckled softly. “I’m not going to give it all to you, but . . .”

“Come on, man. Give it to me, Pete.”

“I will tell you that we’re looking for great competitors. That’s really where it starts. And that’s the guys that
really have
grit
. The mindset that they’re always going to succeed, that they’ve got something to prove. They’re resilient, they’re not going to let setbacks hold them back. They’re not going to be deterred, you know, by challenges and hurdles and things. . . . It’s that attitude—we really refer to it as
grit
.”

I can’t say I was surprised, either by Pete’s comments or by his team’s triumphant performance the day before.

Why not? Because nine months earlier, I’d received a call from Pete. Apparently, he’d just watched my TED talk on grit. What prompted his call were two urgent emotions.

First, he was curious—eager to learn more about grit than I’d been able to convey in the six minutes TED had allotted me.

Second, he was annoyed. Not by most of what I had to say. It was just the part at the end that irked him. Science, I’d confessed in that talk, had at that point disappointingly little to say about building grit. Pete later told me that he just about jumped out of his chair, practically yelling at my on-screen image that building grit is
exactly
what the Seahawks culture is all about.

We ended up talking for roughly an hour: me on one end of the line, sitting at my desk in Philadelphia, and Pete and his staff on the other, huddled around a speakerphone in Seattle. I told him what I was learning in my research, and Pete reciprocated by telling me about what he was trying to accomplish with the Seahawks.

“Come and watch us. All we do is help people
be great competitors. We teach them how to persevere. We unleash their passion. That’s
all
we do.”

Whether we realize it or not, the culture in which we live, and with which we identify, powerfully shapes just about every aspect of our being.

By culture, I don’t mean the geographic or political boundaries that divide one people from another as much as the invisible psychological boundaries separating
us
from
them
. At its core, a culture is defined by the shared norms and values of a group of people. In other words, a distinct culture exists anytime a group of people are in consensus about how we do things around here and why. As for how the rest of
the world operates, the sharper the contrast, the stronger the bonds among those in what psychologists call the “in-group.”

So it is that the Seattle Seahawks and the KIPP charter schools—as much as any nation—are bona fide cultures. If you’re a Seahawk, you’re not just a football player. If you’re a KIPPster, you’re not just a student. Seahawks and KIPPsters do things in a certain way, and they do so for certain reasons. Likewise, West Point has a distinct culture—one that is more than two centuries old, and yet, as we’ll soon discover, continues to evolve.

For many of us, the companies we work for are an important cultural force in our lives. For instance, growing up, my dad liked to refer to himself as a DuPonter. All the pencils in our house were company-issued, embossed with phrases like
Safety First
, and my dad would light up every time a DuPont commercial came on television, sometimes even chiming in with the voice-over: “Better things for better living.” I think my dad only met the CEO of DuPont a handful of times, but he’d tell stories of his good judgment the way you might speak of a family war hero.

How do you know you’re part of a culture that, in a very real sense, has become part of you? When you adopt a culture, you make a
categorical
allegiance to that in-group. You’re not “sort of” a Seahawk, or “sort of” a West Pointer. You either are or you aren’t. You’re
in
the group, or
out
of it. You can use a noun, not just an adjective or a verb, to describe your commitment. So much depends, as it turns out, on which in-group you commit to.

The bottom line on culture and grit is:
If you want to be grittier, find a gritty culture and join it. If you’re a leader, and you want the people in your organization to be grittier, create a gritty culture.

I recently called Dan Chambliss, the sociologist we met in chapter 3 who spent the first six years of his professional life studying swimmers.

My question for Dan was whether, in the three decades since his landmark study of expertise, he’d changed his mind about any of its provocative conclusions.

Did he, for example, still believe talent was largely a red herring when it came to understanding the origins of world-class excellence? Did he stand by the observation that going from your local club team to being competitive at the state and national levels and, finally, to world-class, Olympic-level expertise necessitated qualitative improvements in skill, not just “more hours” in the pool? And was mystifying excellence, at the end of the day, really the confluence of countless, perfectly executed yet mundane, doable acts?

Yes, yes, and yes.

“But I left out the most important thing,” Dan said. “The real way to become a great swimmer is to
join a great team.”

That logic might strike you as strange. You might assume that
first
a person becomes a great swimmer and
then
he or she joins a great team. And it’s true, of course, that great teams don’t take just anyone. There are tryouts. There are a limited number of spots. There are standards. And the more elite the team, the fiercer the desire of those already on the team to keep those standards high.

What Dan was getting at is the reciprocal effect of a team’s particular culture on the person who joins it. In his many years in and out of the pool, he’d seen the arrow of causality between a great team and a great individual performer go both ways. In effect, he’d witnessed the corresponsive principle of personality development: he’d seen that the very characteristics that are selected for certain situations are, in turn, enhanced by them.

“Look, when I started studying Olympians, I thought, ‘What kind of oddball gets up every day at four in the morning to go to swimming practice?’ I thought, ‘These must be extraordinary people to do that sort of thing.’ But the thing is, when you go to a place where basically
everybody
you know is getting up at four in the morning to go to practice, that’s just what you do. It’s no big deal. It becomes a habit.”

Over and over, Dan had observed new swimmers join a team that did things a notch or two better than what they’d been used to. Very quickly, the newcomer conformed to the team’s norms and standards.

“Speaking for myself,” Dan added, “I don’t have that much self-discipline. But if I’m surrounded by people who are writing articles and giving lectures and working hard, I tend to fall in line. If I’m in a crowd of people doing things a certain way, I follow along.”

The drive to fit in—to conform to the group—is powerful indeed. Some of the most important psychology experiments in history have demonstrated how quickly, and usually without conscious awareness, the individual falls in line with a group that is acting or
thinking a different way.

“So it seems to me,” Dan concluded, “that there’s a hard way to get grit and an easy way. The hard way is to do it by yourself. The easy way is to use conformity—the basic human drive to fit in—because if you’re around a lot of people who are gritty, you’re going to act grittier.”

Short-term conformity effects are not what excite me about the power of culture to influence grit. Not exactly.

What excites me most is the idea that, in the long run, culture has the power to shape our identity. Over time and under the right circumstances, the norms and values of the group to which we belong become our own. We internalize them. We carry them with us.
The way we do things around here and why
eventually becomes
The way I do things and why
.

Identity influences every aspect of our character, but it has special relevance to grit. Often, the critical gritty-or-not decisions we make—to get up one more time; to stick it out through this miserable, exhausting
summer; to run five miles with our teammates when on our own we might only run three—are a matter of identity more than anything else. Often, our passion and perseverance do not spring from a cold, calculating analysis of the costs and benefits of alternatives. Rather, the source of our strength is the person we know ourselves to be.

James March, an expert on decision making at Stanford University, explains the difference this way: Sometimes, we revert to cost-benefit analyses to make choices. Of course, March doesn’t mean that, in deciding what to order for lunch or when to go to bed, we take out a pad of paper and a calculator. What he means is that, sometimes when making choices, we take into consideration how we might benefit, and what we’ll have to pay, and how likely it is that these benefits and costs will be what we think they’ll be. We can do all of this in our heads, and indeed, when I’m deciding what to order for lunch or when to go to bed, I often think through the pros and the cons before making a decision. It’s very logical.

But other times, March says, we don’t think through the consequences of our actions at all. We don’t ask ourselves:
What are the benefits? What are the costs? What are the risks?
Instead, we ask ourselves:
Who am I? What is this situation? What does someone like me do in a situation like this?

Here’s an example:

Tom Deierlein introduced himself to me this way: “
I am a West Pointer, Airborne Ranger, and two-time CEO. I founded and run a nonprofit. I am not special or extraordinary in any way. Except one: grit.”

On active duty in Baghdad during the summer of 2006, Tom was shot by a sniper. The bullet shattered his pelvis and sacrum. There was no way to know how the bones would knit back together and what sort of functionality Tom might have when they did. Doctors told him he might never walk again.

“You don’t know me,” Tom replied simply. And then, to himself, he
made a promise to run the Army Ten-Miler, a race he’d been training to run before he was shot.

When, seven months later, he was finally well enough to get out of bed and begin physical therapy, Tom worked fiercely, unrelentingly, doing all the assigned exercises and then more. Sometimes, he’d grunt in pain or shout out encouragements to himself. “The other patients were a little startled at first,” Tom says, “but
they got used to it, and then—all in good fun—they’d mock me with fake grunts of their own.”

After a particularly tough workout, Tom got “zingers,” sharp bolts of pain that shot down his legs. “They’d only last a second or two,” Tom says, “but they’d come back at random times throughout the day, literally making me jump from the shock.” Without fail, each day, Tom set a goal, and for a few months, the pain and perspiration were paying off. Finally, he could just barely walk with a walker, then with just a cane, then on his own. He walked faster and farther, then was able to run on the treadmill for a few seconds while holding onto the railings, and then for a full minute, and on and on until, after four months of improving, he hit a plateau.

“My physical therapist said, ‘You’re done. Good job.’ And I said, ‘I’m still coming.’ And she said, ‘You did what you needed to do. You’re good.’ And I said, ‘No, no, I’m still coming.’ ”

And then Tom kept going for a full eight months beyond the point where there were any noticeable improvements. Technically, his physical therapist wasn’t allowed to treat him anymore, but Tom came back on his own to use the equipment anyway.

Was there any benefit to those extra months? Maybe. Maybe not. Tom can’t say for sure that the extra exercises did any good. He
does
know that he was able to start training for the Army Ten-Miler the next summer. Before getting shot, he’d aimed to run seven-minute miles, completing the race in seventy minutes or less. After getting shot, he revised his goal: he hoped to run twelve-minute miles and to finish in two hours. His finish time? One hour and fifty-six minutes.