Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

two
years
.
Tyrannical? I don’t believe it is. And if Lucy’s and Amanda’s recent comments on the topic aren’t
disguised apple-polishing, neither do my daughters. They’d like to grow grittier as they get older, and,
like any skill, they know grit takes practice. They know they’re fortunate to have the opportunity to do
so.
For parents who would like to encourage grit without obliterating their children’s capacity to
choose their own path, I recommend the Hard Thing Rule.

---

Chapter 12
A CULTURE OF GRIT
The first football game I ever watched from beginning to end was Super Bowl XLVIII. The game took
place on February 2, 2014, and pitted the Seattle Seahawks against the Denver Broncos. The
Seahawks won, 43–8.
The day after their victory, Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll was interviewed by a former
member of the San Francisco 49ers.
“I know when I was with the (Forty-) Niners,” the interviewer began, “you were there. . . . It
meant something to be a Niner, not a football player. When you and John Schneider are looking for a
player, tell me: What is that philosophy, what does it mean to be a Seahawk?”
Pete chuckled softly. “I’m not going to give it all to you, but . . .”
“Come on, man. Give it to me, Pete.”
“I will tell you that we’re looking for great competitors. That’s really where it starts. And that’s
the guys that really have 
grit
. The mindset that they’re always going to succeed, that they’ve got
something to prove. They’re resilient, they’re not going to let setbacks hold them back. They’re not
going to be deterred, you know, by challenges and hurdles and things. . . . It’s that attitude—we really
refer to it as 
grit
.”
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