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Chapter 11: The Playing Fields of Grit
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Grit, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Passion, Perseverance, and Success
Developing Grit
Psychology and Human Development
Grit and Society
Summary
Analysis
After the Seattle Seahawks won the Super Bowl in 2014, coach Pete Carroll explained that his coaching philosophy is to look for players with grit. In fact, he had called Duckworth a few months before, just after she released her TED talk, to ask about how to build a culture of grit at the Seahawks. Duckworth explains that people’s lives are strongly shaped by culture—or the shared values and norms of the in-group to which they belong. This in-group can be a nation, a school, a company, or anything else that people commit themselves to. Duckworth’s advice about culture is straightforward: “to be grittier, find a gritty culture and join it.” And to make people gritter, make the group culture grittier.
So far, Duckworth has primarily focused on grit as an individual personality trait—she has discussed how to build it and how to help others do the same. But now, she views it from another perspective: as a shared cultural value. As Duckworth pointed out in the chapter on “Parenting for Grit,” people often develop their personalities by emulating the traits of the individuals around them, which is why gritty people can help spread grit to others. Carroll’s coaching style demonstrates how this phenomenon can take hold of an entire organization and help systematically make people grittier.
Themes
The sociologist Dan Chambliss, who famously studied champion swimmers, told Duckworth that he still stands by all of his conclusions. But he wishes he could add one more: “the real way to become a great swimmer is to join a great team.” Newcomers quickly meet the standards of their team, so when a team is slightly above a newcomer’s level, they tend to adapt and improve. At base, people feel a need to fit in with the people around them, so people are likely to develop grit if they join a gritty group.
Like Duckworth, Chambliss views grit’s cultural power as particularly underrated. Indeed, his comments echo the common advice that people should surround themselves with the kind of people they want to become. In short, Chambliss and Duckworth suggest that conformity is a powerful force, and people ought to use it to their advantage in order to achieve their other goals.
Themes
Beyond conformity, Duckworth argues, culture is also extraordinary because it shapes people’s identities, and identity is key to grit because it determines how people make “critical gritty-or-not decisions.” As scholar James March explained it, people sometimes make decisions by weighing the costs and benefits, and they sometimes decide by asking a version of the question “What does someone like me do in a situation like this?”
Just as people can use the power of conformity to make themselves grittier, they can do the same through the power of identity. Specifically, since people’s sense of identity controls so much of how they live and act, tying one’s identity to grit is a surefire way to develop it. Identities can be individual, but most often, they’re collective—which means that, by joining a gritty group, people can start to think of themselves as gritty people.
Themes
For instance, after the soldier Tom Deierlein got shot in the pelvis in Iraq, he insisted on going above and beyond in his physical training because he wanted to recover and run a 10-mile race. He succeeded. He explained that his decision was driven by his sense of identity: giving up, he said, is “not who I am.” This exemplifies the connection between grit and identity: gritty behavior often doesn’t make sense in terms of short-term costs and benefits, but it does in terms of the ways in which it can confirm or shape a person’s identity.
Deierlein recovered quickly because grit was central to his identity as a soldier. Giving up (or failing to be gritty) would have meant betraying his own sense of self. As Duckworth points out, one of the central challenges for developing grit is how to get people to choose gritty behaviors that benefit them in the long run, but not the short term. Identity is a useful solution to this problem because it’s one of the only long-term considerations that consistently affects people’s decisions.
Themes
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Finland is small, cold, and full of people who view themselves as particularly high-grit. Finns use the word sisu, which really means perseverance, to explain their national character. In one classic example of sisu, Finland’s tiny army fended off the much larger Soviet army for many months in the 1939 Winter War. One of Duckworth’s students, who is Finnish, studied sisu for her master’s thesis and found that most Finns believe sisu is learnable. Thus, sisu shows how grit can become part of a people’s cultural identity.
Sisu shows how grit can spread very widely—to the point that it even defines a whole nation’s sense of identity. Duckworth’s student’s research implies that it’s possible to actively create this kind of collective grit by teaching people to value it. Needless to say, this is one of Duckworth’s goals as a psychologist: by changing the cultural conversation about grit and achievement in the US, she hopes to make grit more prestigious and, eventually, more popular.
Themes
Organizations can also create cultures of grit. For instance, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has tried to build a gritty culture at his bank, and this helped it weather the 2008 financial crisis. Learning from failure—which he calls fortitude—is his core value, and he tries to spread it throughout the bank through “relentless communication.” He frequently visits employees around the country and even incorporated a Teddy Roosevelt quote about tenacity into a company manual.
Dimon’s leadership demonstrates one way that traits like grit can become cultural values in the first place. Just like parents who want to raise gritty children, leaders who want to create gritty organizations have to model grit. Dimon succeeded by clearly communicating his values and setting high expectations while supporting his employees and tolerating their failures.
Themes
Anson Dorrance is the coach of UNC-Chapel Hill’s nationally dominant women’s soccer team. He attributes the team’s success not to the players’ talent, but to the culture that he has built. Every year, Dorrance makes his team complete the Grit Scale and take the Beep Test, a running assessment that he treats as a measure of self-discipline and toughness. He constantly communicates his team’s 12 core values, which are based around teamwork and grit. But to make sure these values are actually implemented, he makes his players memorize a literary quote that corresponds to each of them.
Just like Dimon, Dorrance illustrates how leaders can build a culture of grit by effectively communicating their values and expectations. He also shows how they can make deliberate practice a collective routine: he helps his players identify their current abilities, work on their weaknesses, and measure their improvement over time. Dimon and Dorrance provide tangible examples for anyone who has power in a group or organization and wants to make its culture grittier.
Themes
Like Dorrance’s soccer players, West Point students also have to memorize all sorts of “songs, poems, codes, creeds, and miscellany” that represent the institution’s values. But they’re also expected to embody those values through their actions. While cadets have to memorize a passage about the importance of leaders respecting their subordinates, for many years, violent hazing was the norm. This helped explain why so many cadets dropped out of Beast Barracks—only the toughest made it through. By 1990, West Point brought its actions in line with its values by banning hazing. The proportion of Beast Barracks dropouts started falling dramatically.
West Point clearly understands how to pass down values through institutional culture and tradition. But Duckworth also uses it to illustrate the crucial difference between professing values like grit and actually living them out. Clearly, institutions need to do the latter if they actually want their members to internalize those values. In other words, institutions have to model the values they wish to spread by making leadership, organization, and policy decisions based on them. Violent hazing doesn’t model particularly respectable behavior, so it detracted from the overall culture at West Point. Therefore, the academy banned hazing, thus bringing its practices in line with its actual values.
Themes
But the Beast Barracks dropout rate has continued to fall, even since the hazing ban. This isn’t because West Point is admitting students with more grit, but rather because it has started to focus on making its students grittier. Its educators now lead by example, rather than through fear. But West Point’s standards remain just as high, and it maintains many of the other traditions that hold together its culture—like decorum, the dress code, and slang.
West Point appears to have shifted from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset: it now tries to fix certain cadets’ lack of grit, instead of just punishing them for it. Clearly, it has benefited from this shift as an institution. This shows how powerful psychology research can be when it’s faithfully applied in policies that affect large numbers of people.
Themes
A couple years after their first conversation, Duckworth visited Pete Carroll in Seattle. Carroll had praised grit in his autobiography and media appearances. He said that he tries to make his players grittier by having them compete against and teach one another. To that end, star player Earl Thomas noted that he and his teammates help one another improve over time. By the time Duckworth visited, the Seahawks had reached two consecutive Super Bowls but lost the second because of a serious coaching error in the last 30 seconds. She wanted to know how the team was responding to this failure.
Duckworth returns to the Seahawks, who—like the UNC soccer team and JPMorgan—have built an organizational culture around the concept of grit. Pete Carroll reinforces this culture by applying Dan Chambliss’s observation from the beginning of this chapter: people who are surrounded by grittier teammates will generally become grittier over time. But the Seahawks’ response to their Super Bowl blunder would also be a measure of their grit—as Duckworth has repeatedly noted, bouncing back from failure is one of the key aspects of grittiness.
Themes
During her visit, Duckworth noticed important elements of the Seahawks’ culture. Most notably, the team uses Pete Carroll’s specific language. Seahawks define competition not as defeating their opponents, but as working together for excellence. They care about “finishing strong”—which really means always maintaining the same level of effort and excellence. During a meeting, they even chanted, “No whining. No complaining. No excuses.” Around lunchtime, Duckworth lectured the team about grit and helped one player decide how to help his younger brother succeed in school. On her way out, she realized she didn’t ask Pete Carroll about his “worst call ever.” But in a magazine article, he later explained that he would face his mistake and use it to improve.
Carroll’s specific language is designed to shape the way his team evaluates and thinks about its performance. Specifically, it encourages the team to try and meet independent standards for excellence—the players always focus on improvement, regardless of whether or not they win their games. In other words, they compete with themselves rather than their opponents, which gives them an intrinsic motivation to succeed. Similarly, the players’ chants show that they value effortful practice, and Carroll’s attitude towards failure demonstrates the hope that is key to grit. Finally, the players’ shared language gives them something to bond over, which helps them build a communal sense of purpose. Thus, under Carroll’s leadership, the Seahawks have managed to build and spread all the key components of grit.
Themes
