“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.”
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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. The way we do things around here and why eventually becomes The way I do things and why.
Identity influences every aspect of our character, but it has special relevance to grit. Often, the critical gritty-or-not decisions we make—to get up one more time; to stick it out through this miserable, exhausting summer; to run five miles with our teammates when on our own we might only run three—are a matter of identity more than anything else. Often, our passion and perseverance do not spring from a cold, calculating analysis of the costs and benefits of alternatives. Rather, the source of our strength is the person we know ourselves to be.
James March, an expert on decision making at Stanford University, explains the difference this way: Sometimes, we revert to cost-benefit analyses to make choices. Of course, March doesn’t mean that, in deciding what to order for lunch or when to go to bed, we take out a pad of paper and a calculator. What he means is that, sometimes when making choices, we take into consideration how we might benefit, and what we’ll have to pay, and how likely it is that these benefits and costs will be what we think they’ll be. We can do all of this in our heads, and indeed, when I’m deciding what to order for lunch or when to go to bed, I often think through the pros and the cons before making a decision. It’s very logical.
But other times, March says, we don’t think through the consequences of our actions at all. We don’t ask ourselves: What are the benefits? What are the costs? What are the risks? Instead, we ask ourselves: Who am I? What is this situation? What does someone like me do in a situation like this?
Here’s an example:
Tom Deierlein introduced himself to me this way: “I am a West Pointer, Airborne Ranger, and two-time CEO. I founded and run a nonprofit. I am not special or extraordinary in any way. Except one: grit.”
On active duty in Baghdad during the summer of 2006, Tom was shot by a sniper. The bullet shattered his pelvis and sacrum. There was no way to know how the bones would knit back together and what sort of functionality Tom might have when they did. Doctors told him he might never walk again.
“You don’t know me,” Tom replied simply. And then, to himself, he made a promise to run the Army Ten-Miler, a race he’d been training to run before he was shot.
When, seven months later, he was finally well enough to get out of bed and begin physical therapy, Tom worked fiercely, unrelentingly, doing all the assigned exercises and then more. Sometimes, he’d grunt in pain or shout out encouragements to himself. “The other patients were a little startled at first,” Tom says, “but they got used to it, and then—all in good fun—they’d mock me with fake grunts of their own.”
After a particularly tough workout, Tom got “zingers,” sharp bolts of pain that shot down his legs. “They’d only last a second or two,” Tom says, “but they’d come back at random times throughout the day, literally making me jump from the shock.” Without fail, each day, Tom set a goal, and for a few months, the pain and perspiration were paying off. Finally, he could just barely walk with a walker, then with just a cane, then on his own. He walked faster and farther, then was able to run on the treadmill for a few seconds while holding onto the railings, and then for a full minute, and on and on until, after four months of improving, he hit a plateau.
“My physical therapist said, ‘You’re done. Good job.’ And I said, ‘I’m still coming.’ And she said, ‘You did what you needed to do. You’re good.’ And I said, ‘No, no, I’m still coming.’?”
And then Tom kept going for a full eight months beyond the point where there were any noticeable improvements. Technically, his physical therapist wasn’t allowed to treat him anymore, but Tom came back on his own to use the equipment anyway.
Was there any benefit to those extra months? Maybe. Maybe not. Tom can’t say for sure that the extra exercises did any good. He does know that he was able to start training for the Army Ten-Miler the next summer. Before getting shot, he’d aimed to run seven-minute miles, completing the race in seventy minutes or less. After getting shot, he revised his goal: he hoped to run twelve-minute miles and to finish in two hours. His finish time? One hour and fifty-six minutes.
Tom can’t say that running the Army Ten-Miler—and, after that, two triathlons—were decisions rooted in costs and benefits, either. “I simply wasn’t going to fail because I didn’t care or didn’t try. That’s not who I am.”
Indeed, the calculated costs and benefits of passion and perseverance don’t always add up, at least in the short run. It’s often more “sensible” to give up and move on. It can be years or more before grit’s dividends pay off.
And that’s exactly why culture and identity are so critical to understanding how gritty people live their lives. The logic of anticipated costs and benefits doesn’t explain their choices very well. The logic of identity does.
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