Grit (35 page)

Tom can’t say that running the Army Ten-Miler—and, after that, two triathlons—were decisions rooted in costs and benefits, either. “I simply wasn’t going to fail because I didn’t care or didn’t try. That’s not who I am.”

Indeed, the calculated costs and benefits of passion and perseverance don’t always add up, at least in the short run. It’s often more “sensible” to give up and move on. It can be years or more before grit’s dividends pay off.

And that’s exactly why culture and identity are so critical to understanding how gritty people live their lives. The logic of anticipated costs and benefits doesn’t explain their choices very well. The logic of identity does.

The population of Finland is just over five million. There are fewer Finns in the world than New Yorkers. This tiny, cold Nordic country—so far north that, in the depth of winter, they get barely six hours of daylight—has been invaded numerous times by larger, more powerful neighbors. Whether those meteorological and historical challenges contribute to how Finns see themselves is a good question. Regardless, it is undeniable that the Finns see themselves as among the world’s grittiest people.

The closest word to
grit
in Finnish is
sisu
(pronounced
see-sue
). The translation isn’t perfect. Grit specifies having a passion to accomplish a particular top-level goal
and
the perseverance to follow through.
Sisu
, on the other hand, is really just about perseverance. In particular,
sisu
refers to a source of inner strength—a sort of psychological capital—that Finns believe they’re born with by dint of their Finnish heritage. Quite literally,
sisu
refers to the insides of a person, their guts.

In 1939, Finland was the underdog in the Winter War, battling a Soviet army that boasted three times as many soldiers, thirty times as many aircraft, and a hundred times as many tanks. Finnish troops held
their ground for several months—dramatically longer than the Soviets or anyone else might have expected. In 1940,
Time
magazine ran a feature on
sisu
:

The Finns have something they call
sisu
. It is a compound of bravado and bravery, of ferocity and tenacity, of the ability to keep fighting after most people would have quit, and to fight with the will to win. The Finns translate
sisu
as “
the Finnish spirit” but it is a much more gutful word than that.

In the same year, the
New York Times
ran a feature called “Sisu: A Word That Explains Finland.” A Finn explained his countrymen to the journalist this way: “A typical Finn is an obstinate sort of fellow who believes in getting the better of bad fortune by proving that
he can stand worse.”

When I lecture on grit to my undergraduate classes, I like to include a brief digression on
sisu
. I ask my students the rhetorical question: Can we forge a culture—as Seahawks coach Pete Carroll clearly thinks we can—that celebrates and supports such qualities as
sisu
and grit?

A few years ago, by complete coincidence, a young Finnish woman named Emilia Lahti was in the audience when I mentioned
sisu
. After the lecture, she rushed to greet me and confirmed that my outsider view of
sisu
was correct. We agreed there was a pressing need for a systematic investigation of
sisu
, how Finns think about it, how it’s propagated.

Emilia became my graduate student the next year, completing her master’s thesis on exactly those questions. She
asked a thousand Finns how they thought about
sisu
and discovered that most have a growth mindset about its development. When asked, “Do you think
sisu
can be learned or developed through conscious effort?” 83 percent said, “Yes.” One respondent then offered: “For example, participation in Finnish scouting association jaunts, where thirteen-year-olds may be in
charge of ten-year-olds alone in the woods, seems to have some correlation with
sisu
.”

As a scientist, I don’t take seriously the notion that Finns, or members of any other nationality, have actual reserves of energy hidden in their intestines, awaiting release at the critical moment. Still, there are two powerful lessons we can take from
sisu
.

First, thinking of yourself as someone who is able to overcome tremendous adversity often leads to behavior that confirms that self-conception. If you’re a Finn with that “
sisu
spirit,” you get up again no matter what. Likewise, if you’re a Seattle Seahawk, you’re a competitor. You have what it takes to succeed. You don’t let setbacks hold you back. Grit is who you are.

Second, even if the idea of an actual inner energy source is preposterous, the metaphor couldn’t be more apt. It sometimes feels like we have nothing left to give, and yet, in those dark and desperate moments, we find that if we just keep putting one foot in front of the other, there
is
a way to accomplish what all reason seems to argue against.

The idea of
sisu
has been integral to Finnish culture for centuries. But cultures can be created in much shorter time frames. In my quest to understand what gives rise to grit, I’ve encountered a few organizations with especially gritty leaders at the helm who, in my view, have successfully forged a culture of grit.

Consider, for example, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase. Jamie isn’t the only one of the bank’s 250,000-plus employees who says, “
I wear this jersey and I bleed this blood.” Other employees much lower in the ranks say things like “What I do every day for our clients actually matters.
No one here is insignificant. And every detail, every employee, matters. . . . I am proud to be part of this great company.”

Jamie has been the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States, for more than a decade. In the 2008 financial crisis,
Jamie steered his bank to safety, and while other banks collapsed entirely, JPMorgan Chase somehow turned a $5 billion profit.

Coincidentally, the motto of Jamie’s prep school alma mater, the Browning School, is “
grytte,” an Old English version of
grit
defined in an 1897 yearbook as “firmness, courage, determination . . . which alone win the crown of genuine success in all undertakings.” In Jamie’s
senior year at Browning, his calculus teacher had a heart attack, and the substitute teacher didn’t know calculus. Half the boys quit; the other half, including Jamie, decided to stick with it and spent the entire year in a separate classroom, alone, teaching themselves.

“You have to learn to get over bumps in the road and mistakes and setbacks,” he told me when I called to talk about the culture he’s built at JPMorgan Chase. “Failures are going to happen, and how you deal with them may be the most important thing in whether you succeed. You need fierce resolve. You need to take responsibility. You call it grit.
I call it fortitude.”

Fortitude is to Jamie Dimon what
sisu
is to Finland. Jamie recalls that getting fired from Citibank at age thirty-three, and then taking a full year to ponder what lessons to take from the episode, made him a better leader. And he believes in fortitude enough to make it a core value for the entire JPMorgan Chase bank. “
The ultimate thing is that we need to grow over time.”

Is it really possible, I asked, for a leader to influence the culture of such an enormous corporation? True, the culture of JPMorgan Chase has, with some affection, been described as “the cult of Jamie.” But there are literally thousands and thousands of JPMorgan Chase employees Jamie has never met in person.

“Absolutely,” Jamie says. “It takes relentless—absolutely relentless—communication. It’s what you say and how you say it.”

It may also be how
often
you say it. By all accounts, Jamie is a tireless evangelist, crossing the country to appear at what he calls town hall meetings with his employees. At one meeting he was asked, “What
do you look for in your leadership team?” His answer? “Capability, character, and
how they treat people.” Later, he told me that he asks himself two questions about senior management. First: “Would I let them run the business without me?” Second: “Would I
let my kids work for them?”

Jamie has a favorite Teddy Roosevelt quote he likes to repeat:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is
actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

And here is how Jamie translates the poetry of Roosevelt into the prose of a JPMorgan Chase manual, titled
How We Do Business
: “Have a fierce resolve in everything you do.” “Demonstrate determination, resiliency, and tenacity.” “Do not let temporary setbacks become permanent excuses.” And, finally, “Use mistakes and problems as opportunities to get better—
not reasons to quit.”

Anson Dorrance has the challenge of instilling grit in considerably fewer people. Thirty-one women, to be exact, which is the full roster of the women’s soccer team at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Anson is the winningest coach in women’s soccer history.
His record includes twenty-two national championships in thirty-one years of competition. In 1991, he coached the U.S. Women’s National Team to its first world title.

During his younger, playing days, Anson was the captain of the UNC men’s soccer team. He wasn’t especially talented, but his full-throttle, aggressive playing in every minute of practice and competition earned the admiration of his teammates, who nicknamed him Hack and Hustle. His father once declared, “Anson, you’re the most confident person without any talent I’ve ever met.” To which Anson quickly replied, “Dad, I’m taking
that as a compliment.” Many years later, as a coach, Anson observed that “talent is common; what you invest to develop that talent is the critical
final measure of greatness.”

Many of Anson’s admirers attribute his unprecedented success to recruitment. “That’s simply incorrect,” he told me. “We’re out-recruited by five or six schools on a regular basis. Our extraordinary success is about what we do once the players get here.
It’s our culture.”

Culture building, Anson said, is a matter of continuous experimentation. “Basically, we’ll try anything, and if it works, we’ll keep doing it.”

For instance, after learning about my research on grit, Anson asked each of his players to fill out the Grit Scale and made sure each received their score. “To be honest, I was absolutely shocked. With only one or two exceptions, the grit ranking on your test is the way
I
would have evaluated their grit.” Anson now makes sure the entire team scores themselves on grit each spring so that they have “a deeper appreciation for the critical qualities of successful people.” Each player gets to see her score because, as Anson put it, “in some cases the scale captures them, and in some cases it
exposes
them.” Returning players take the scale again—and again—each year so they can compare their grit now to what it used to be.

Another experiment that stuck is
the Beep Test, which begins every Tar Heel season. All the players line up, shoulder to shoulder, and at the sound of an electronic beep, jog to a line twenty meters away, arriving
in time for the sound of another beep, which signals them to turn around and jog back to where they started. Back and forth they run, picking up the pace as the interval between the beeps gets shorter and shorter. Within minutes, the players are in a flat-out sprint—at which point, the beeps come faster still. One by one, players drop out, invariably falling to all fours in utter exhaustion when they do. How far they get, like everything else the players do in training and competition, is carefully recorded and, without delay, posted in the locker room for everyone to see.

The Beep Test was originally designed by Canadian exercise physiologists as a test of maximal aerobic capacity, but gauging fitness is only one reason Anson likes it. Like the researchers at the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory who, in 1940, designed a treadmill test to assess perseverance through physical pain, Anson sees the Beep Test as a twofold test of character. “I give a little speech beforehand about what this is going to prove to me,” he told me. “If you do well, either you have self-discipline because you’ve trained all summer, or you have the mental toughness to handle the pain that most people can’t. Ideally, of course, you have both.” Just before the first beep, Anson announces, “Ladies,
this is a test of your mentality.
Go!”

How else does Anson build a culture of grit? Like Jamie Dimon, he puts a lot of stock in communication. It’s certainly not the only thing that he does, but as a philosophy and English major he has a special appreciation for the power of words: “For me,
language is everything.”

Over the years, Anson has developed a list of twelve carefully worded core values that define what it means to be a UNC Tar Heel, as opposed to just any run-of-the-mill soccer player. “If you want to create a great culture,” he told me, “you have to have a collection of core values that everyone lives.” Half the team’s core values are about teamwork. Half are about grit. Together, they define a culture Anson and his players refer to as “the competitive cauldron.”

But a lot of organizations have core values, I pointed out, that are
flagrantly ignored on a daily basis. Anson agreed. “Of course, there’s nothing motivational about the statement that within your culture you work hard. I mean, it’s so
banal
.”