was a fairly wide range of scores.
When ESPN aired the final rounds of
the competition, I watched all the way
through to the concluding suspenseful
moments when, at last, 13-year-old Anurag
Kashyap correctly spelled A-P-P-O-G-G-
I-A-T-U-R-A (a musical term for a kind of
grace note) to win the championship.
Then, with the final rankings in hand, I
analyzed my data.
Here’s what I found: Put simply, grit-
tier kids went further in competition, by
studying many more hours and, also, by
competing in more spelling bees.
What about talent? Verbal intelligence
also predicted getting further in competi-
tion. But there was no relationship at all
between verbal IQ and grit.
The separation of grit and talent
emerged again in a study I ran on Ivy
League undergraduates. There, SAT scores
and grit were, in fact, inversely correlated.
Students in that select sample who had
higher SAT scores were, on average, just
slightly less gritty than their peers. Putting
together this finding with the other data I’d
collected, I came to a fundamental insight
that would guide my future work: Our po-
tential is one thing. What we do with it is
quite another.
Whether we realize it or not, the culture
in which we live, and with which we iden-
tify, powerfully shapes just about every as-
pect of our being. At its core, a culture is
defined by the shared norms and values of
a group of people.
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. Identity influences every aspect
of our character, but it has special relevance
to grit. Often, the critical gritty-or-not de-
cisions we make—to get up one more time;
to stick it out through this miserable, ex-
hausting 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.
In my quest to understand what gives
rise to grit, I’ve encountered a few organi-
zations with especially gritty leaders at the
helm who, in my view, have successfully
forged a culture of grit.
Consider, for example, Jamie Dimon,
who has been the CEO of JPMorgan Chase,
the largest bank in the United States, for
more than a decade. Jamie isn’t the only one
of the bank’s 250,000-plus employees who
says, “I wear this jersey and I bleed this
blood.” In the 2008 financial crisis, Jamie
steered his bank to safety, and 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 ver-◁
Champion Anurag
Kashyap was
surrounded by
fellow spellers after
he won the 78th
Annual Scripps
National Spelling
Bee in 2005.