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Chapter 11: The Playing Fields of Grit
Themes
and Colors
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.
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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.
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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?”
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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