THE SUCCESSFUL ATTITUDE
sion of grit defined in an 1897 yearbook
as “firmness, courage, determination.. .”
“You have to learn to get over bumps in
the road and mistakes and setbacks,” Jamie
told me when I called to talk about the cul-
ture he’s built at JPMorgan Chase. “Failures
are going to happen, and how you deal with
them may be the most important thing in
whether you succeed. You need fierce re-
solve. You need to take responsibility. You
call it grit. I call it fortitude.”
The first football game I ever watched
from beginning to end was Super Bowl
XLVIII. The game took place on Feb. 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, who asked him: What is that philos-
ophy, what does it mean to be a Seahawk?”
Pete chuckled softly. “I’m not going
to give it all to you, but... 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 hur-
dles and things.... It’s that attitude—we
really refer to it as grit.”
I can’t say I was surprised. Nine months
earlier, I’d received a call from Pete. Ap-
parently, he’d just watched a TED Talk I’d
given on grit. He was eager to learn more
about grit than I’d been able to convey in
the six minutes TED had allotted me. And
he was annoyed. 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.
“Come and watch us,” he said.” All we
do is help people be great competitors. We
teach them how to persevere. We unleashHead coach Pete
Carroll of the
Seattle Seahawks
celebrated his
team’s second
touchdown against
the Detroit Lions on
Oct. 28, 2018.
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