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
.”
His solution to rescuing core values from banality was in some ways entirely unpredictable and in
other ways exactly what you might expect from someone with Anson’s humanities background.
Inspiration struck while Anson was reading an article about Joseph Brodsky, the Russian exile and
Nobel laureate poet. Brodsky, Anson learned, required his graduate students at Columbia University
to memorize scores of Russian poems each semester. Naturally, most students considered this demand
unreasonable and antiquated, and they marched into his office to tell him so. Brodsky said they could
do what they liked, but if they didn’t memorize the required verses, they wouldn’t get their PhDs. “So
they walked out of his office,” Anson recalled, “with their tails tucked firmly between their legs, and
they got to work.” What happened next was, as Anson put it, “simply transformational.” Quite
suddenly, upon committing a verse to memory, Brodsky’s students “felt and lived and breathed
Russia.” What was dead on the page had come to life.
Rather than read this anecdote and quickly forget it, Anson immediately appreciated its relevance
to the top-level goal he was trying to accomplish. Like just about everything else he reads, sees, or
does, he asked himself,
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