Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

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.”
Over and over, Dan had observed new swimmers join a team that did things a notch or two better
than what they’d been used to. Very quickly, the newcomer conformed to the team’s norms and
standards.
“Speaking for myself,” Dan added, “I don’t have that much self-discipline. But if I’m surrounded
by people who are writing articles and giving lectures and working hard, I tend to fall in line. If I’m
in a crowd of people doing things a certain way, I follow along.”
The drive to fit in—to conform to the group—is powerful indeed. Some of the most important
psychology experiments in history have demonstrated how quickly, and usually without conscious
awareness, the individual falls in line with a group that is acting or thinking a different way.
“So it seems to me,” Dan concluded, “that there’s a hard way to get grit and an easy way. The hard
way is to do it by yourself. The easy way is to use conformity—the basic human drive to fit in—
because if you’re around a lot of people who are gritty, you’re going to act grittier.”
Short-term conformity effects are not what excite me about the power of culture to influence grit. Not
exactly.
What excites me most is the idea that, in the long run, culture has the power to shape our identity.
Over time and under the right circumstances, the norms and values of the group to which we belong
become our own. We internalize them. We carry them with us.