Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

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
.”
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,