Grit (36 page)

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,
How can this help me develop the culture I want?

Each year that you play soccer for Anson Dorrance, you must memorize three different literary quotes, each handpicked to communicate a different core value. “You will be tested in front of the team in preseason,” his memo to the team reads, “and then tested again in every player conference. Not only do you have to memorize them, but you have to understand them. So reflect on them as well. . . .”

By senior year, Anson’s athletes know all twelve by heart, beginning with the first core value—
We don’t whine
—and its corresponding quote, courtesy of playwright George Bernard Shaw: “The true joy in
life is to be a force of fortune instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to
making you happy.”

Verbatim memorization is a proud, centuries-old tradition at West Point. You can find the very, very long list of songs, poems, codes, creeds, and miscellany that all first-year cadets—“plebes” in West Point parlance—are required to memorize in a document West Point calls
the Bugle Notes.

But West Point’s current superintendent, Lieutenant General Robert Caslen, is the first to point out that words, even those committed to memory, don’t sustain a culture when they diverge from actions.

Take, for example, Schofield’s Definition of Discipline. These words, first spoken in an 1879 address to the cadets by then superintendent John Schofield, are the sort you’d expect a West Pointer to know by heart. The passage that cadets must memorize begins: “The discipline which makes the soldiers of a free country reliable in battle is
not
to be gained by harsh or tyrannical treatment. On the contrary, such treatment is far more likely to destroy
than to make an army.”

Schofield goes on to say—and the cadets must memorize this, too—that the very same commands can be issued in a way that inspires allegiance or seeds resentment. And the difference comes down to one essential thing: respect. Respect of subordinates for their commander? No, Schofield says. The origin of great leadership begins with the respect of the commander for his subordinates.

The irony of reciting Schofield’s uplifting words, even as you’re being yelled and screamed at by upperclassmen, was not lost on Caslen when he committed them to memory as an eighteen-year-old plebe in 1971. In that era, hazing was not only tolerated but encouraged. “It was the survivalists who succeeded,” Caslen recalled. “It wasn’t
so much the physical challenges as the mental toughness required to cope with all
the yelling and screaming.”

Indeed, forty years ago, 170 of the cadets who started Beast Barracks quit before it was over. That’s 12 percent, double the proportion who dropped out of Beast by the time I came to West Point to study grit a decade ago. Last year, attrition was down to
less than 2 percent.

One explanation for this downward trend is hazing, or, rather, the lack thereof. The practice of inflicting physical and psychological stress on first-year cadets was long considered a necessary part of toughening up future officers. A second benefit, so the logic went, was to cull the weak, effectively eliminating weakness in the corps by pushing out those who couldn’t handle it. Over the decades, the list of approved hazing rituals was progressively curtailed, and in 1990, hazing was officially banned altogether.

So, eliminating hazing might explain declining Beast attrition in the late twentieth century, but what explains the last decade’s precipitous drop? Is West Point admissions doing a better job of selecting for grit? From the year-to-year data on grit I’ve seen, absolutely not. The average grit scores of incoming cadets haven’t changed since West Point began collecting them.

According to General Caslen, what’s happened at the academy is a deliberate change in culture. “When only the survivalists succeed, that’s an
attrition model
,” he explained. “There’s another kind of leadership. I call it a
developmental model
. The standards are exactly the same—high—but in one case, you use fear to get your subordinates to achieve those standards. And in the other case, you lead from the front.”

On the battlefield, leading from the front means, quite literally, getting out in front with your soldiers, doing the same hard work, and facing the same mortal risks. At West Point, it means treating cadets with unconditional respect and, when they fall short of meeting the
academy’s extraordinarily high standards, figuring out the support they need to develop.

“For example,” Caslen explained, “on the physical fitness test, if there are cadets that struggle with the two-mile run and I’m their leader, what I’m going to do is sit down with them and put together a training program. I’m going to make sure the plan is sensible. Some afternoons, I’m going to say, ‘Okay, let’s go run,’ or ‘Let’s go workout,’ or ‘Let’s go do intervals.’ I will lead from the front to get the cadet to the standard. Very often, the cadet who was unable to do it on their own all of a sudden is now motivated, and once they start to improve, their motivation increases, and when they meet those objectives they gain even more confidence. At some point, they figure out how to do things on their own.”

Caslen’s example brought to mind a story West Pointer Tom Deierlein told me of the even-tougher-than-Beast training he endured to become an Airborne Ranger. At one point in the training, he was hanging off a rock face—a climb he’d already failed once—with every muscle in his body shaking in rebellion. “I can’t!” Tom shouted to the Ranger instructor on the plateau above. “I expected him to shout back, ‘That’s right. Quit! You’re a loser!’ This guy, for whatever reason, instead says, ‘Yes you can! Get up here!’ And I did. I climbed up, and I swore to myself I’d never say ‘I can’t’ again.”

As for critics of West Point’s new developmental culture, Caslen points out that the academic, physical, and military standards for graduating from West Point have, if anything, grown more stringent over time. He’s convinced that the academy is producing finer, stronger, and more capable leaders than ever before. “If you want to measure West Point by how much yelling and screaming goes on around here, then I’m just going to let you complain. Young men and women today just don’t respond to yelling and screaming.”

Other than objective standards of performance, what else
hasn’t
changed at West Point in the last ten years? Norms of politeness and
decorum remain so strong that, during my visit, I found myself checking my watch to make sure I was a few minutes early for each appointment and, without thinking, addressed every man and woman I met by “sir” and “ma’am.” Also, the gray full-dress uniforms worn by cadets on formal occasions remain the same, making today’s cadets part of the “long gray line” of West Pointers stretching back two centuries before them. Finally, cadet slang is still spoken fluently by West Pointers and includes such improbably defined terms as
firsties
for “fourth-year cadets,”
spoony
for “neat in physical appearance,” and
huah
for everything from “I understand you” to “gung ho” to “agreed” to “great job.”

Caslen isn’t so naive as to think that four years of developmental culture at West Point will reliably turn 2s and 3s on the Grit Scale into 5s. But then again, the varsity athletes, class presidents, and valedictorians who make it through West Point’s two-year admissions process aren’t exactly the bottom of the barrel in grit. Importantly, he’s seen people change. He’s watched cadets develop. He has a growth mindset. “You never really know who is going to become a Schwarzkopf or a MacArthur.”

Two years after Pete Carroll called to talk about grit, I got on a plane to Seattle. I wanted to see firsthand what Pete meant when he said the Seahawks were building the grittiest culture in the NFL.

By then I’d read his autobiography,
Win Forever
, in which he talks about discovering the power of passion and perseverance in his own life:

Personally, I have learned that if you create a
vision
for yourself and stick with it, you can make amazing things happen in your life. My experience is that once you have done the work to create the clear vision, it is the
discipline
and
effort
to maintain that vision that can make it all come true. The two go hand in hand.
The moment you’ve created that vision, you’re on your way, but it’s the diligence with which you stick to that vision that
allows you to get there.

Getting that across to players is a constant occupation.

I’d also watched Pete talk about grit and culture in his many interviews. In one, Pete is onstage in an auditorium at the University of Southern California, returning as an honored guest to the school where he’d coached the USC Trojans to a record six wins in seven championship games over nine years. “What’s new? What are you learning?” Pete’s interviewer asked. Pete recounted discovering my research on grit and its resonance with his own decades-in-the-making approach to coaching. “In our program,” Pete said, his coaching staff reinforces a culture of grit through innumerable “competitive opportunities and moments and illustrations. . . . Really what we’re doing is we’re just trying to make them more gritty. We’re trying to teach them how to persevere. We’re trying to illustrate to them how
they can demonstrate more passion.”

Then he gave an example. In practice, Seahawks play to win—offensive and defensive players compete against each other with the full-throated aggression and destroy-the-enemy intensity of a real game. The ritual of weekly competition-level practice, dubbed Competition Wednesdays, can be traced back to Anson Dorrance, whose book on coaching Pete devoured when he was crafting his own approach. “If you thought of it as who was winning and who was losing, you’d miss the whole point. . . . It’s really the guy across from us that makes us who we are.” Our opponent, Pete explained, creates challenges that help us become our best selves.

Outsiders to Seahawks culture easily miss that point. “Guys don’t understand it right away,” Pete said. “They don’t get it, but in time we work our way through it.” For Pete, this means sharing—in the most transparent way—everything that goes on in his own head, his
objectives, the reasoning behind his approach. “If I didn’t talk about it, they wouldn’t know that. They’d be thinking, ‘Am I going to win or am I going to lose?’ But when we talk about it enough, they come to an appreciation of
why
they compete.”

Pete admitted that some players may have more to teach than they have to learn. Seahawk free safety Earl Thomas, for example, came to him as “the most competitive, gritty guy you could ever imagine. . . . He pushes and practices with marvelous intensity. He focuses, studies, does everything.” But the magic of culture is that one person’s grit can provide a model for others. On a daily basis, Earl “demonstrates in so many different ways what he’s all about.” If each person’s grit enhances grit in others, then, over time, you might expect what social scientist Jim Flynn calls a “social multiplier” effect. In a sense, it’s the motivational analogue of the infinity cube of self-reflecting mirrors Jeff Bezos built as a boy—one person’s grit enhances the grit of the others, which in turn inspires more grit in that person, and so on, without end.

What does Earl Thomas have to say about being a Seahawk? “My teammates have been pushing me since day one.
They’re helping me to get better, and vice versa. You have to have a genuine appreciation for teammates who are willing to put in hard work, buy into the system, and never be satisfied with anything but continuing to evolve. It’s incredible to see the heights we’re reaching from that humble attitude.”

By the time I got around to visiting the Seahawks’ training facility, my curiosity had doubled. Making it to the championship game in successive years is notoriously hard, but the Seahawks had defied the odds and made it to the Super Bowl again that year. In sharp contrast to the prior year’s win, which Seattle fans celebrated with a blue and green ticker-tape parade that was the largest public gathering in Seattle’s history, this year’s loss resulted in howling, weeping, and the gnashing of
teeth—over what sports commentators deemed “
the worst call in NFL history.”

Here’s a recap: With twenty-six seconds on the clock, the Seahawks have possession of the ball and are one yard away from a game-winning touchdown. Everyone expects Pete to call a running play. It’s not just that the end zone is so close. It’s also because the Seahawks have Marshawn Lynch, whose nickname is Beast Mode and who’s widely agreed to be the single best running back in the entire NFL.

Instead, Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson throws a pass, the ball is intercepted, and the New England Patriots take home the trophy.

Since Super Bowl XLIX was only the third football game I’d watched without interruption in my entire life—the second being the NFC championship game the Seahawks had won the week before—I can’t offer an expert opinion on whether, indeed, passing instead of running was the epitome of coaching misjudgment. What interested me more when I arrived in Seattle was Pete’s reaction and that of the whole team.