Grit(76)
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.”