#109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/72b7dc014c2b6404

you know, Freud was wrong about a lot of things, but one thing he was very right about is that so much of our behavior and even our emotion happens below the surface of consciousness. How much of our behavior and our emotion and motivation could be going on without our conscious awareness. So
I think
that this dialogue that happens below the surface of consciousness can be raised most of it.
to conscious awareness and then you could just like literally have a conversation like hey, you know, what is it about my job that's sort of bringing out the worst in me? Like let me think about that. I'll talk to my spouse about it and then um proceed from that.
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Today I'm speaking with Angela Duckworth, the founder and CEO of Character Lab, a nonprofit with the mission to advance scientific insights that help children thrive.
Angela's book, Grit, The Power of Passion and Perseverance, was a New York Times bestseller.
This conversation dives into whether human behavior is constant or circumstantial.
grit and other mindsets that help us succeed.
Lessons for parents Developing Our Passion
Reps versus hours, negative self-talk, personal rules for success, and so much more.
It's time to listen and learn.
I'm curious about human behavior.
Can we explore a bit to what extent our behaviors predictable versus what extent it's situational?
So the person versus situation debate uh is the question that you're asking about. And you know
you could say that this has been the central question in all psychology for as long as we've had psychology, right? And then if you want to predate it even more, you could say philosophy.
You could argue that there are other questions as well, but this is central. You know, am I generous?
Because I'm a generous person.
Or am I generous because of the exigencies of the situation? And the and the contrary too, right? So you know, when you witness a selfish behavior, is that because the person is selfish?
Or because of context factors. And as a psychologist, one of the first things I learned about was this.
war. I mean, have you ever heard this expression, you know, the person versus situation war in in psychology?
No, never. It was about nineteen sixty eight, so I could be off by a year or so. Um, but Walter Michelle, uh, one of the greatest psychologists to ever live, who lived into his nineties, passed away a couple of years ago, um, he wrote a book.
Um, and it was called Personality and Assessment. It was really like a monograph, like a really, really long essay, but it was like three hundred pages, so it's called a book. And young Walter at that point, it was like two years before I was born, um, asked the question, um
You know, how consistent
is our behavior across situations because that of course would be an argument for the person.
Right, you know, Shane is generous when he goes to buy coffee in the morning, Shane is generous to his family, Shane is generous to his friends, Shane is generous to, you know, a random person at the bus stop.
And when he looked at the available data, of which there was dramatically less, at least circa nineteen sixty eight, uh, Walter was able to squint and say, look, if you look at all the available data
Not so much is the answer to how much consistency there is across the
situations, which is an argument in favor of
situations over
The person.
The correlation that he observed across situations had like a maximum of about point three. And sometimes people call this like the point three ceiling, right? So um if I
observe somebody it at home versus at work, you know, the correlation
in a data set of lots of people who are observed in both situations might might only approach point three.
So the reason why it's a war, you need an enemy to have a war, right?
On the other side
of this debate, actually even in the 1960s, and um you had people who said that's ridiculous. Of course there's such a thing as a generous person. You know, you're not gonna marry a random person. You marry them because of their character, because of their personality. So it can't be that we are so um chameleon like that there's no consistency
within us, um, there's no such thing as our character. Around that decade or so, there was also this research on the big five. Now I'm gonna ask you, this is like a psychology quiz. Like Shane, have you ever heard of the big five?
No, are the are these the Caldini sort of liking loving principles or are these something completely different? No, the big five refer to the five personality factors that are kind of like the north, south, and east and west of personality, except for their five, not four, inconveniently.
But the big five are a it's a taxonomy of personality traits. So extraversion.
uh conscientiousness
agreebless
Openness to experience.
and emotional stability. You can think of them uh just to mix metaphors here, like as continents and then like specific
character or personality traits would just be, you know, on these continents. So like grit, which is something I study, would be like on the conscientiousness continent, but sitting next to
self control and and
you know, punctuality and politeness, et cetera. But I think it's really interesting that around the time that people began to ask seriously and interrogate the data on whether it was the person or the situation that determined behavior, this
kind of contrary to Walter.
uh tradition was emerging, which is to say, yes, there is such a thing as personality. And furthermore, we can actually give you a map of of human personality that is consistent across culture and across time. So children seem to, you know, have you know characters or personality
uh attributes that could be classified into the big five. You can say of a child like oh that child is like
Pretty high on extra version.
relatively low on conscientiousness
kind of in the middle on emotional stability, et cetera, et cetera.
So I guess where I would say that you know we've advanced to in 2020 is the following resolution of this um debate or this war, which is that it is both the personality of a person and
their situation that determines what they will do.
And what's more, I can say that the wrong way to think about it is like
eighty twenty, seventy thirty, forty sixty,
Uh because what really um your personality and your situation are like, it's like a conversation where the personality of the person actually changes the situation. You know, conscientious people like select into jobs that require conscientiousness.
But then the situation kind of talks back.
to the personality and shap the personal so after you've been in a job that requires like lots of detail orientation and you know diligent um methodical work like you yourself after years um will be shaped by it and so forth. So
I believe that the situation matters. I believe that we do have.
character strengths or personality traits.
you know, there's a lot more complexity to get into, but I think the the metaphor that we want to use is that there's a conversation going on uh between our ourselves and the circumstances in which we are.
And is that a conscious conversation or is that a a conversation between our unconscious brain and our circumstance or our physical environment or
Well, now that you got me thinking historically, right? So I'm I'm I'm fifty, I've been alive a half century, and you know, in that time this debate between the person, the situation happened and, you know, kind of was resolved, um, I think. And at the same time, another I think important discovery.
or advance was made um in the same time period in psychology. Basically the affirmation that Freud was right. I mean, you know, Freud was wrong about a lot of things, but one thing he was very right about is that so much of our
our behavior and even our emotion um and our motivation happens below the surface of consciousness. The idea that we do things um
and not always knowing that we do them is important. But it's not just that
You know
insight because you could say like, oh really it took it took Freud and fifty years of science after Freud to figure that it's like how much of our behavior and our emotion and motivation could be
going on without our conscious awareness. So I do think a lot of the conversation between you know who we are and our circumstances
is happening um without our um being aware. Although you can bring our awareness to our behavior. That that's where Freud was wrong, by the way. Freud was like, You'll never know. It's under the floorboards and you can't
Try
Open the floorboards in the basement of your mind.
I think
that this dialogue that happens below the surface of consciousness can be raised most of it to conscious awareness and that you could just like literally have a conversation like like we're having and then you can think like, hey, you know, what is it about my job that's sort of bringing out the worst in me? Like let me think about that. I'll talk to my spouse about it and then um proceed from there.
I'm gonna switch gears a little bit here. History shows us that the best opportunities come from sort of seizing and spotting opportunities. And they don't come in the good times, they come in the bad times. And it seems like an art.
I if you follow that, then there's a staggering advantage to be gained by positioning yourself to capitalize on bad times. And one of the ways that we can do that.
Is our mindset. If you think about the mindsets required for this, what comes to mind?
I I I will say that um I've I've um worked with some great coaches, right? So
you know, professional
coach of professional athletes and
And uh more than one of them has said something that surprised me.
Which is when when we start talking about like, you know, how to develop their players and like especially their younger players. So usually when you recruit um a professional athlete, they're like technically still in adolescence, um, psychologically anyway, brain's still developing, prefrontal cortex, not quite mature. Anyway, it sometimes gets them a lot of trouble.
And I thought the whole conversation would be like, tell me what to do with when my players are having a bad day. And actually one of the things that surprised me most was that so often it's the players who are having a really good year.
that actually end up for a variety of reasons. That's its own
kind of crisis in a way. It when when things are
Like really going well.
You know, you get picked
one and two in the draft, like you know, you're gonna be MVP, et cetera.
you can just see how that could lead to all kinds of problems. S the from the trivial, like oh, you get like lavish with attention on social media and people like throwing themselves at you and you know not telling you what they really think anymore because they want to be hang around in your entourage. But also I think it creates a lot of fear.
for uh people because um because now you know y you have everything to lose.
Some of the most successful people, right? Like the um
you know, people like Kobe Bryant, like were able to maintain an underdog mindset.
um or even Tom Brady, right? Long past the time where they you could actually legitimately say that you're an underdog.
They are at some level manipulating themselves. Like you you, I'm sure, watch the Michael Jordan documentary Last Dance and
You know, if you think about Michael Jordan, basically he must have at he was not a stupid guy, right? An extremely intelligent person and very psychologically intuitive.
I'm guessing that he used certain like tricks to get himself riled up and he kind of knew he was using them, right? Like he would pick on a certain argument that like he had with the
you know, opponent team or opponent like, you know, player.
he's like manipulating himself. I think this underdog mindset where you you like keep the chip on your shoulder is is partly if you ask why, it's like because they know it improves their performance, right? So then you could ask the question
Why doesn't everybody do that?
I think that the reason why that is, is that for the vast majority of people, let's say for ninety nine percent of people, you're just trying to get to a certain, you know.
um uh like threshold of excellence. You know, like how many people when they're already getting a 99 in a course,
Right, or frankly a ninety-three, whatever the mark watermark is for getting an A, right? How many people would keep trying and really try, like just try it, like the the marginal gain of knowledge is like no smart there's no diminishing marginal return.
Um, I'd say 99% of people are like, oh, you only try up to the point where you get the A or you make a certain, you know, whatever amount of money or you get a certain amount of accomplishment. And then you withdraw effort, you know, accordingly. And therefore the really, really smart people who have like a really high ROI are like those taxi drivers in in the um
famous study who like on a rainy day, even though they can earn more money, so if they should stay out for like an eighteen hour shift, like they actually go home early because they make their till.
But the rare individual
is never sated and there's no diminishing marginal return for achievement or understanding.
or learning. And so they're the Abbey Wombacks, like they're the Tom Brady's, like they're the Kevin Durant's, you know, they're the Jeff Bezos's. And I I think that satisfacing is a is a is a description of most people, and um maximizing without end is is a description of the people that I study.
The the thing I would amend to that or
uh I guess append to that is that um you know one of the things that I really admire about outstanding performers is that um they really are never
Done.
They're the they uh they're the opposite of complacent. And I think one of the hidden dangers of success is that you stop you stop kind of like working as hard as you
really need to. I mean, that's kind of related to the first thing that we're saying, but just like there are people that I know who really want to win their second Nobel Prize. The the people who are like just tireless are the so they learn as much in bad years as they do in good years. And I think that's maybe
you know, they're perennial learners.
Are are those people born or are they made through life experiences? Like how how do we
I think you know, a lot of it is driven
By life experience. I mean, this is my personal take, right? Like Yeah, I mean I would love to um
I would love to hear what you think and I wonder yeah, we'd like to and like know what you think of yourself. Like whether you know, like how you are in those dimensions and or whether that was kind of nature or nurture for you.
I'm very much of the Will Smith mindset, which is, you know, I'm I'll I'll race you on a treadmill and you know, I'm gonna knock at all I'm just gonna pass out before I give up. I have no idea where that comes from, but it's really good for grinding. It's been great. Were you always like that? Yeah, I think so. And I don't know why.
And um Doesn't that lead you to a nature um narrative? Well sort of, but then I have two kids and one of them is very much not like that. He's very much like, Oh, you know, I can do thirty seconds of work and get a
A seventy or I can do five hours of work and get a ninety. Like why would I do five hours of work? I'm I'm content with this seventy. How am I satisfying a hypothesis? Yeah. So that I mean that's my take. But your kids have different genes, by the way. But hold on, can can we just broaden this nature nurture thing to to begin with? So
Uh, nature would sort of be, in my understanding, just to make sure we're on the same page as you like your genes. This is what you're born with genetically. It's the mutations and your parents and the combination of your history.
Nurture.
There's two types of nurture. There's chance and there's chosen, right? Chance is like what country I'm born into, what my parents do for a living, what my
Uh you know.
What my situation is, what my environment is like, what circumstances that just my zip code, right? Like I had no say in any of that. That's all a lot.
But then at some point
there's like a chosen nurture that kicks in, which is like you're an adult, and there's probably no light switch that like flips, right? There's some people that will probably flip at 16, some people it might never flip.
But you have this ability to take control
You have agency to change your situation.
Right? You're like, hey, these friends are really not good for me.
I'm not gonna hang out with them anymore. Yeah, so you can see how immediately this gets very complicated.
My desire always when somebody asks me about this
is to shove as much information into their heads as possible. Usually that's not that much, right? Usually people are like, well I just wanna know, like is it nature versus nurture? So I was like, how about this? First complication, it's nature and nurture.
Right. So step one is
It is not either or, it is definitely both and. You know, you have two kids, I have two kids. Our kids inherited
DNA.
From their biological parents, right? They um are absolutely influenced by the that DNA. I mean, there is no
No characteristic.
at all, psychological or otherwise, you know, your risk of heart disease, your preference for broccoli, um, you know, whether you like to talk a lot at parties, whether you pray or not.
There are literally published studies on all those things, uh like documenting that if you are a twin, you know, um, you are more likely to be like your sibling than if you are not a twin, right? Because you know, at least probably identical twins, et cetera, et cetera. So
That's
the nature part but
For the very same characteristics, which is like all characteristics, right? There there's also evidence from the same twin studies, by the way, um, that that nurture matters and in these
studies very often nurture is just like
Uh, they take the nature part, which they can back in into statistically, and then just like nurture kind of everything else. So it kind of puts into one group.
The things that you had some
control over and then the things that you
You didn't.
Although okay, step
Step two is is like, Okay, there's probably a conversation going on between nature and nurture because a very conscientious person says, I'm gonna go to summer school this summer and get away from my
Good for nothing.
Friends.
But also the kind of kid who chooses to go to summer school when they're sixteen probably is being influenced by their genes.
I don't know that um
that most people like want to shove this much information into their minds. So sometimes I just stop at kind of like it's complicated and it's both.
What's the most credible sort of research or
arguments against your research.
Well, um, there is a a number of scholars, including Bettina Love, um, who have asked the question, you know, is teaching grit
anti black, um, and is the whole like
idea of shining light on resilience and this whole conversation on agency, like are are we are we doing something dangerous here um by ignoring
uh structural poverty, racism, et cetera, et cetera. My first reaction being a human being was
defensiveness. Like what? Like how am I racist? Like that's I think n natural, but hopefully temporary. And for me, I thought like, well, I am the head of character lab. Like it is
not really a good thing to just like wallow in defensiveness. And maybe I should actually listen and read more. So I did, and that we had some conversations in person, and then I read more, read Betina's book, I read what other critics had said. And I think that um
I think that the the message or the perspective that's being offered has real value, and that is this.
that if you are asking questions about like
you know, underachievement and you know, closing the achievement gap, et cetera.
And um, you know, the antidote that's offered is like well, we should teach kids about growth mindset and grit and agency, then you might be overlooking, you know, the massive problem that stands in the way, much more
So, which is, you know, terrible classrooms, like terrible curriculum, no computers, like
No
No none of the things that your kids and my kids have. I think that's a an important message. I I would like to
think that we can accommodate both of these perspectives. I mean almost always the answer is both and in some version. And to me this goes all the way back to your first question about the person and the situation, right? So
You know
A child's life is um not just something that they have complete control over.
And
Um I would
hope that like all children, you know, not just black children or brown children, but like literally all children are are helped to learn some of the things that you and I learned and and were not born with. Like, you know, knowing how to set a goal, make a plan, figuring out how to take out an optimistic, growth oriented
a stance toward adversity, you know, understanding like how to um you know think about stress in ways that are adaptive, modify your situation.
those have to be part of personal development. And so I
I I try to say both and and in a way that
First of all doesn't confuse
people to know in and also that kind of honors this perspective which
you know, has has a lot of value to it. I I wanna actually explore it a little more, especially on the the fulcrum of
There are th things that we can't control, but there are things that we can control. And what are those things that we can control
And what are the like you don't choose who your parents are, but as an adult, you can choose who your exemplars are. You can choose who the people you model yourself after are. I I hope this conversation is long enough that I'm gonna talk about agency and control and the mindset that gets you to say, like, wait a second.
I I had a little like
Control here. I think I can do something, which I do think is the mindset of of a gritty person, um, usually a high achieving person.
Let's start with the mindset of like, hey, I can change something.
I've done these research studies on this self-control technique called situation modification. And this work was done with um collaborators, including James Gross at Stanford. James Gross actually originally and mostly studies emotion. And one of the things that's interesting about regulating your anger is if you have a bad temper.
or your sadness, if you tend toward melancholy, or your happiness, if you want more of that, or I guess if you wanted less of that, is um that people can, you know, use these like sort of mental strategies like what I pay attention to, how I'm gonna frame things, my self talk.
But also you can just change your actual situation. So for example
If you
constantly get into arguments at Thanksgiving with your brother in law.
then maybe you should sit at the other end of the table or like not go to Thanksgiving with your brother in law, or like make sure that like you're watching football while your brother in law is like cutting up the pie, right? So we extended that in a study of um uh middle school actually we've done it in all different age groups. I'll tell you about a study we did with high school students where we randomly assigned
high school students to watch this little video was about five minutes long. Um and then we told some similar things, but the intervention wasn't very long. And we were like, you know
You can change your situation.
You know, like people think when they have to exercise self-control to like study or do all in school, they think it's all willpower. But like actually, like you could, for example, put your phone in another room. Like you could make sure that you study in a place that like people aren't walking into and out of all the time. So in that study, there was a control group.
that um learned about willpower and how important it is to like, you know, use willpower to accomplish your goals. And then there was a
a neutral control group. And what we found is that the condition that increased academic
Goal attainment best was the one where you just explained to kids like, hey, you can modify your situation. And I think that.
idea that like your situation isn't just like
Fixed or set.
Um but something you can agentially
intentionally modify is one of the most important lessons that you could learn in life.
I love that. I think that the there a lot of people are passive about life. It's like life just happens to them.
And things just happen to them. And it it it it's sort of like you can you can put that in the victim mentality sort of mindset, but it's really it's deeper than that, no way, right? It's like I have no agency over anything. It's not necessarily about the story, it's just sort of like this general passiveness to and I I
I believe in a very active life. Where did you where did you learn that? Like why do you think you have come out on that end of the continuum?
I don't know. I mean, I first got that phrasing, I think it was from Graham Duncan.
uh in a conversation we had in New York, and he just sort of recounted this story to me about
um one of his friends actually was driving with this portfolio manager and they
I think he actually wrote about this on his blog too. Um, but they were driving and then this car swerved out and almost hit him. And the guy driving the car was like, Why does this stuff always happen to me? And it was just a very revealing sort of mindset, right? And it comes back to sort of that question, which is like
what are the mindsets that are gonna enable us to
capitalize on life in part in bad situations, capitalize on bad, capitalize on good, intelligently prepare
To put us on the path to success.
I think you're on to something very important and
I guess I have a fondness for like, you know, great psychologists in their nineties. Um
Because I have been calling Al Bandura a lot. Um, he is the psychologist at Stanford, I think he's 96 now, who um
Coin the term self efficacy.
to describe
the belief that you can do something if you try.
Right. So self efficacy about physics would be like
I can learn physics if I tried. And I had this conversation with him, you know
Well, a couple of weekends ago, actually, where I asked him, I was like, Um, Al, you've spent your whole life studying self efficacy, but there was this other person um who's
like name is spelled R-O-T-T-E-R, but I think it's like Dutch or German. Anyway, so I'm gonna mispronounce it as Roder, but Roder studied locus of control. And locus of control was uh to me like super similar. So I asked Al like what's the difference?
Because in locus of control theory, you either have an internal locus of control or an external locus of control, right? So life kind of happens to you or um that would be the external, or like, you know, you're in control. And he said, Oh, there's a very important difference.
I'm more interested in saying that like I can control, you know, my behavior. Not necessarily that that behavior is going to like.
magically make everything the way I want.
What what locus and control is about is more just like
In the grand scheme, is the actual outcome gonna be, you know, my doing or not? He's like I all I wanna say is that people have agency.
Over there.
behavior.
uh over their um performance, not necessarily like that you're gonna get hired just because you are the most qualified candidate, but that you could control like your own behavior and performance. So I think that's a very important
um nuance here um because I don't
think that we want to teach our kids that they have like control over like
whether the coronavirus vaccine is going to be made available in their municipality, you know, in
one month or another, or you know, or whether they're gonna get into a certain college, um, because those things are a bit downstream. But where I really agree with Bandura
First of all, that we do have
control we do have agency and that it's m dramatically more productive to when you think about your own
behavior that you think about, you that you you you really pay attention um to the things that you can control.
And I I wonder you probably haven't, or maybe you're more well read than I have you ever heard of Howard Thurman? No.
Okay, we need to resurrect Howard Thurmond even before Freud. Okay. Right. So Howard Thurman was um uh like the mentor and the
Pastor um for Martin Luther King Junior and Howard Thurman I had never heard of because I'm
deeply illiterate, but I was reading Arthur Ash's
memoir. So Arthur Ashe, for those who are younger than us, maybe the you know he's a great uh tennis player and I believe the only
black male to win Wimbledon. So he wrote this memoir called Days of Grace, which I recommend, and in it he talks about how
so important in his life was Howard Thurmond. So that led me to Howard Thurman, and the reason I bring it up is that
Howard Thurman has all these sermons about how there is um the final consent. He was like, you know, you cannot
like change that you were born into a racist society. You cannot change that you are born into a certain family, but you can always
change how you react to it.
Right, like you and you're responsible for how you react to it. And in Victor Frankel said the same thing about his experience in the concentration camps, right? That that terrible things can happen to you over which you do not have control.
But you can control your reaction. And and I don't want to even say that you can control it a hundred percent, but I do think you have some control over your reaction. And I I I think this agentic view is um accurate and adaptive.
How do we as parents instill that mindset in our kids?
I asked Al Bandura this, um
А сед, іно, дорчум фільм.
as you could from success, right? Because there are all these like
adages and aphorisms about failure, especially in startup land. And he said, Oh
This one I hundred percent believe is
mastery experiences, success success experiences um are what really build
Mm.
you know, sense of agency.
If your kid has like a Teflon life where, you know, everything comes easily in part because you make it that way, and there are a lot of parents who like sort of just
make their kids' lives frictionless, right? Like, oh, you know, you're struggling for 10 minutes, like I'll get you a five hundred dollars per hour tutor. Like like, oh your your teacher's not so great. I'll get them fired. Like that's not the kind of success experience that Albander is talking about because he's talking about um success after challenge.
success after struggle. So um I think Al Bander's advice is the best advice, which is the the number one thing, and there's more than one thing, but the number one thing is that people develop confidence when they have
Um struggle to overcome something and
They have come out victorious. Um and the the
engineering problem for a parent is then to figure out the right size of challenge for the kid.
Like in the next moment in time. And I think that we often get it wrong. Like the challenge is just too big or the challenge is too small.
it's sort of monitoring and adjusting based on your particular child and the circumstances involved. How do we do it as adults? Do we seek out these opportunities to be challenged? Do we
I think that we are benefited um
in large part by having a um surrogate parent. I mean
I I I what I mean by that is, you know, whether you're fifty or five, right, it's good to have somebody who is a little older and wiser than you who is like helping you figure out the next challenge. Um and and most of the people that I study, like they never get out of being mentored, you know, like they they have a they have a management coach, they have like a personal coach, they have
Therapist, the ones I'm most jealous of have a peer for whom they coach each other, right? But they have somebody who's like,
You know, you should write a book. It's like oh no, I can't write a book. No, you should really write a book. Like and you know, it's that it's that kind of um
challenge setting that of course you can try to do it on your own, but I I think that we're always benefited by having like another human being um who's
advantages are multiple, but one of them is that they're just not us.
Right. So they have a psychological distance, um, from our situation. They have a better a different aperture into our situation, one that removes a lot of the nuance, and the nuance in our case might be holding us back, right? And the ego, right? Sort of like
And sometimes, you know, the people who are looking at us have a better sense of our strengths as well. Yeah, two weeks ago you gave a presentation that didn't really go as planned. I wanna know.
What happened and how you talked to yourself in the moment. Like w what was that internal monologue?
So I don't have as many opportunities to like dramatically fail as I did earlier in life.
But I had this presentation that I was really excited about on um like a new idea and behavior change for me. And I got so excited about it and I was so confident about how
excited everybody else to be about it, that I ended up inviting it was like having a dinner party, inviting like more and more people until like suddenly they they hardly can fit into the room. Now in this case it was Zoom. So like everybody fit in the room.
But you know, some of my idols, like Danny Kahneman, like you know, like very, very important political officials. So like anyway, so the party grew.
I delivered this presentation like not
having ever done it before, and then also not really being good at managing the dynamics of like a hundred people on a Zoom call, like some of whom like you would obviously want to say what they thought, um, as opposed to just like monologuing.
Ugh I mean it was just really
Bad. And right afterwards, I had a call talk about feedback. So right afterwards, I had a call with one of my collaborators who was in the party.
And um he said, you know
That
Was not your best hour.
And then told me exactly how it was that that was such a
impoverished, you know, experience um for everybody, including him. I mean, I was like
Up all night.
you know, replaying things and like writing down notes and like I literally revised my slides. I mean I didn't have anyone to give them to, but I just
wanted to like rearrange them and like make them right.
And then I sent emails to um not all hundred people, but like the people I had specifically invited.
And I apologized and was like, that was not a good use of your hour. I was underprepared. I didn't manage the structure or the time well. And I'm sorry. Um
I I I do like the idea that I presented, but
Yeah, that was not good. Dive into that a little more. Like how did you speak to yourself in that moment? And then how did you change
That conversation.
Well, I'll tell you the self talk that went through my head. Um, that was a shit show. I'm humiliated, like I shouldn't have managed the time that way, I shouldn't have used pull everywhere, um, I should have rehearsed, right? Now that self talk is it's actually productive self talk because like um almost everything that I said was like
changeable, right? It's like next time I'll rehearse, next time I won't use pull everywhere for the f you know, like now in my twenties, the self talk that I had when I screwed up was very different. Um and I have all these journals, so I I know what the self talk was. I would say things like
I'm bad.
I'm a bad person. Um, and that's self talks really toxic because
you know, you can't really do anything about being just a fundamentally bad person, you know, like whatever that even means. So I have grown up a little bit in the thirty years since my earlier
Yeah, young woman failures. How much of that was planted by that immediate feedback by one of the your collaborators who called you and then was probably gave you very specific feedback too, right? Versus
Versus when we're kids, we often don't often get specific feedback. Like we we I remember when I first started working in my early twenties in an organization.
My boss would just be like, That doesn't work. Like, that's no good. But it's like, Well, what's no good? Like what is you know, you have this vague sense that you're not living up to expectations, but you're unclear sometimes on what those expectations are. So you you reinforce this vague self talk in a way.
And then
Yeah, I mean at the time, let me tell you, I was not appreciating the specificity of the negative feedback, right? And and the dosage of it,'cause like after about five minutes, I was like, Hey
Let's talk about something else now.
Yeah. Thirty five more minutes of specific
things to say about like how that didn't go well. Um, so I didn't respond well, and you're right that, you know,
To answer your question directly, I think I felt especially because I immediately got like an avalanche of.
Criticism.
That was
Um both authoritative.
Detailed.
um and kind of, you know, um unvarnished. I
Probably would have gone to sleep.
earlier or like slept more soundly if like there had been a little less of it, if it were a little less detailed.
But but I do think it was better to have gotten that.
than a kind of like
Hey, could have gone better.
Alright, so let's talk about other things, right? Like Yeah, that wasn't your best effort, but dinner was great. Like I kinda like this idea. Let's talk about so
Feedback.
as they say is a gift, but most of us don't know how to unwrap it. Like I I I will say that it's not a gift that we usually want to receive. Like at the moment
It's given
to us and the way it's given to us.
So I I think it's a skill.
And by the way, Shane, I really truly believe that if somebody
uh is eager for feedback.
Actively solicits feedback.
Tries to listen to the feedback.
Learn something from feedback.
Those are the people I never worry about, right? Like
I've had students where they're like really not super socially intelligent, right? I'm like whoa
They're not how do I know?'Cause other students come and talk to me about them, right? So it's like but if that student
is
asking for feedback about how they can improve their like they're gonna be fine. And you know
If you're the opposite of that, then I really worry about you because then I think like you're never gonna be a fix your own your own problems. Um, so feedback is magic.
But I wonder what drives that behavior in terms of I want the feedback because if you want it from other people.
You're probably really open to it from the world too, when it starts giving you feedback that you're what you're doing is not which is a lot more vague than when other people are giving you feedback.
I guess I have a first layer
answer and a second layer answer. I think the first layer answer is like it's like because I want to learn. I don't I wanna feel good in the moment, but I mostly I more want to learn. Like
I
driven to improve. Your desire to learn over rules, feeling good in the moment. Exactly. Cause they're intention, right? It's like I thought I can feel good right now and just get unalloyed praise.
Or I can learn something that will make me a better presenter and scientist in the future. And I'm much, you know, the weight is higher for me on the learning.
So that's the first layer answer, right? It's because of that. But then you can ask the question like why? Why is that? Like why is that ratio like that for you? But maybe for other people it's more important to protect their ego or
They want to sleep well on a Friday night. Like why?
And I think for me, the ability to take negative feedback, and I'm not perfect by any means, but like whatever ability I do have, I think does come from a history of mastery or success experiences, right? Like
I have been encouraged enough to be a little vulnerable. Um and in early childhood there's this idea of secure attachment. Have you heard of like attachment theory? Mm-hmm. So um for those I guess who are less
you know, familiar this is the idea that young children really like toddler age. They are attached to their primary caregiver, often their mother, but um not necessarily. And there are different styles of attachment. And the the the st the attachment style you you really want is called the secure
attachment style. And then there are various forms of insecure attachment. Um, and the reason why this became so important in developmental psychology was the idea that like whatever your attachment style was gonna be, it was gonna be like
pretty influential in terms of like how you would like have other future relationships in your life.
And um the the thing to note about the secure attachment style is that imagine a mother in a room and they have their, you know, toddler child. If that is a secure attachment, then um the behavior of the child, say in a new room with new toys, is not gonna be to cling to the mother.
It is because the child is attached that they will venture
you know, even five, ten feet away from the where the mother is sitting and
pick up a new toy and then maybe run back and make sure mom's there. But you know it
And so I think I am
And whatever I have that's like okay, I can handle this criticism, it is probably because I've had enough
mastery experiences to feel secure. That's I I I think that's a really important place, right? You feel the safety so that you can take these risks, including learning and knowing that it doesn't change who you are, it doesn't change relationships in your life, is just making you better. And if you were a kid is like driving you nuts because they are not taking risks and they seem to be
you know, afraid of failure. And that, by the way, that sometimes looks like laziness, right? Even though it's underneath the surface not at all laziness.
Ask yourself like
Maybe.
They are not
confident because they haven't had
A string of experiences
To make them.
Confident.
Right. So here again, the person versus the situation, like maybe your underconfident child.
is that way because of series of situations. And you know, all the great coaches and teachers do this. They you kind of just like engineer these, you know, small wins. Make things like
bite size enough that there there can be a few at bats and a few hits.
Is is there anything that you've learned significantly
post writing your book on grit that you think should be added to the conversation.
One thing that um I think is uh
continual surprise to me is that um, you know, I'm a university professor, so my students are between the ages of eighteen and twenty two.
And um when you just think of the word grit and you think of like what people need to learn, you think they need to learn about resilience and hard work, about how to practice.
uh on your weaknesses and get feedback, et cetera. And those things are all true. But honestly, the Ivy League students that I teach,
are pretty good at all those things already. But the other half of my class, I teach this class called Grit Lab, is on passion. And I find that many, many young people are struggling much more with the direction in their life than the determination.
that they need to bring to that um pursuit. Even basic questions like what am I interested in?
Like, how could you not know what you're interested in? I will tell you that I have young people in my office hours who say, like, I literally can't tell you what I'm interested in. Like, I don't know. Help me help me figure that out. Well, let's let's talk about that for a second. I mean, how would you answer the question about should we follow our passion? Should we not?
I don't think the word
Follow the verb follow is the right verb.
Right,'cause'cause you say to this like eighteen year old is like, I don't know what I'm interested in. Okay, twenty two, let's make it a twenty two year old senior.
Who's like
Oh my God, like I see adulthood.
on the horizon fast approaching and
I I don't know what I want to do. Right. And then if I say to them
My advice to you is to follow your passion. Oh, like how's that helpful? They don't, they don't know where it is. So the verb I prefer is develop.
Um, because I do think that um if I like retroactively, retrospectively think about my relationship with psychology.
If I went to Google Scholar and you picked like a random article from a random year in a random journal on something about psychology.
There's a very good chance that I'm gonna be fascinated by it. But there was a time in my life where I didn't even know what psychology was at all. Um, and there was a time in my life where like,
This romance was very, very fledgling, right? And it could have gone in lots of different directions, but it deepened and deepened and deepened and got more mature. And like a marriage, right? Like, you know, your relationship with your passion actually evolves over time. So to the terrified 22 year olds, or frankly, probably there's some 22
terrified 32 year olds or whatever in on on this conversation with us, I would say to you, like, if you change the verb from follow to develop, right? It gives you a little
bit of a clue as to what you need to do, which is you need to like
start dating some things, right? And then like, you know, go on a second date with the ones where you're like, I don't know, kinda like you. And then allow this relationship to evolve over what might take years.
Like if I think about my own husband, Jason, right, my relationship to my husband today is just
Oceans deeper than when I first met him. And I was like, Oh my God, he's so cute. And if I had known that when I was
Twenty, um, I think I would have um, you know, relaxed a little bit because basically I spent like a whole decade just tortured that I didn't know what my calling was.
Back to the passion thing, my friend uh Naval Ravakant has a I'm gonna butcher this
quote or phrase, but it's sort of like do what is play for you, but work for others.
And then that's how you can sort of like wear those things because now you're leveraging also the need to make a career out of it and all of that stuff. I think that's really interesting. You know, Shane, that quote though, I like that a lot.
Uh I recently was interviewing um Alex Rodriguez, Arod. Actually he was being interviewed by students in my my class, Grit Lab. And he said, you know, I am a hard worker. Everyone will tell y'all he's like, I feel like I haven't worked a day in my life. Right. He's like, I can't believe I get to do that. Another person that you may or may not have interviewed, but um
Steve Levit um tells a story of how he became an economist, right? So Steve Levit is half of the
for economics um duo of of yeah Dubner and Levit. And Levit tells a story of how he was a freshman and he goes to his like Harvard, you know, Ect Ten class. I think it was Harvard, and Ect Ten is the intro um economics class.
And um he's walking alongside his, you know, classmate or roommate, and they both say almost at the same time, like, Oh God, that was ridiculous.
But then
Stів says like yeah, I m everything that was said was so damn obvious.
And his friend was like, I couldn't understand anything that he was saying. So so the idea of doing things that are playful for you, but drudgery for others. In my class, the passion um section of my grit lab course is called Choose Easy.
Um, and then there's another section called work hard. But but I think that, you know, doing something that was like, yeah, it's like butter, it's like easy, cheesy, lemon, squeezy, plus it's so fun. Choose those paths.
Wal down them long enough.
And
Learn to work hard.
When are we most likely to give up? Like when it comes back to grit for a second, like what are the times when we're most likely to give up?
And do we intervene in those times? Is there a mental intervention we can have with ourselves, or is there a recognition?
Oh, this is that point. Like I know it's coming. I just need to get over this hump.
And in part, like I see and I I knew you said grit was about long term.
But I feel like there's a lot of grit necessary in the times that we're in right now, too.
Right. This kind of like
time limited crisis. Right. It it's it's not it's not we hope not going to be a we don't know. It's indefinite. We know it's going to end. We just don't know when we don't know when. Right. Which um you know just to think about like the psychological dimensions of twenty twenty
The uncertainty
clearly amplified, you know, all of the negative emotion, right? I think we're much better at somebody saying, like, hey, you're gonna have to be in quarantine for 17 days. That's gonna be terrible. And then then the following things are definitely gonna happen to you.
Brace yourself.
Versus like you wake up
And then like you don't know what's gonna happen, but it's pretty bad. And then like some other bad things happen. That is, by the way, um what you do to an animal if you wanna induce learned helplessness, which is um you know, the work of my PhD advisor, Marty Seligman.
um where you know you have an animal and then you like shock them and then
The key is that if they experience these
Traumas.
it in unpredictable way with like, you know, you don't know when it's gonna end, you don't know next thing's gonna happen. That's when you actually get, you know, the symptoms of depression, um and giving up. So anyway, twenty twenty has been like
A learned helplessness experiment and the suffering has been
real and amplified, I think, psychologically, because of that. Well let's start with like not even gritty people, but like when we give up and like when we're most likely to give up and um
what's going on there.
You know, I think that when people say, Oh
No, I'm not gonna try anymore. There is either a lack of confidence that you can prevail, right? Like, no, I'm not gonna go out for soccer again because I'll never make varsity or like I'll never be very good. That's self efficacy, that's agency, that's al Bandura, that's
what we were just talking about. But the other thing I think is that like if it's not that you can't do it, it's just that it has it has no value to you. Like what am I even doing? This is a stupid job. Like I when I quit
Management consulting.
And you know, some of my best friends are manager consultants, so it's not like
I think it's a meaningless industry, but for me personally, who had been so interested in kids and education, I literally said out loud.
If I go to my grave
you know, like increasing the ROI for a hyperdermic needle company, like I just will not feel like I fulfilled
my purpose. So um it couldn't
have been that I didn't think I could make partner or director. I think I could have. Um it was just that like that goal lost value for me. So if you ask the question like when do people quit, I think it's either because they the value of the goal
goes down for whatever reason or their belief that they can achieve it.
Talk me about the ten thousand hour rule. Uh when it comes to working hard, we seem to have this view that hey, if we just do something for ten thousand hours, we can't help but be successful in it. To what extent is it the hours versus the reps involved?
And the the immediacy of the feedback too, I would imagine.
You may know that Andres Ericsson passed away this year. Do you know that?
Uh I had heard that. Yeah. I didn't
This summer and it was his research of course that became
paraphrased as the ten thousand hour rule, Anders would want everyone to know
It's nothing about the um like magic number 10,000, first of all. So you know, um that number comes from a single study of German musicians at a a music academy where the highest performing musicians had done on average about 10,000 hours of practice.
the next most expert group was five thousand, and the group below that, I believe, was like two thousand five hundred. Most importantly, Andres would want everyone to know that it's the quality of practice that is um really remarkable because even in the, you know, next group down, they were still doing lots of practice. It just was um
That they had a higher proportion of ineffective practice or less effective practice. So the high quality practice that Andres called deliberate practice.
have these three essential elements, any of which being missing.
then you're not doing deliberate practice, in Andra's view. The first is that there's this kind of like hyper intentionality about a very specific weakness or um or a goal that you're trying to address.
Um, the second is that you are really practicing with complete concentration. And many of his research studies, including the ones that I did with him, we measured deliberate practice by whether you're doing practice alone.
Um, because um that was like a proxy concentration. And then the third element was feedback, right? And um ideally, in most circumstances, immediate feedback. In some circumstances, you could argue that like there's some benefit to a delay. And then the repet repetition of that cycle. Um, and I think if you ask yourself,
How much of my day am I
hyper conscious about exactly what I'm trying to do. Like I have a like a movie in my head of what it looks like before I can do it. And then I'm like
Practically the full concentration, my phone's off, nobody's around. And then I'm getting like immediate feedback and then I'm gonna just do it all again. Like
I don't know, there could be days that go by without any deliberate practice. And and so that's I think the magic of what um experts do.
Do you have personal rules, routines, or habits for success? And what I mean by that is I like to think that there's these
automatic rules that we can adapt for ourselves that put us on the path to success to help us get what we want out of life. And whether getting into what we want out of life,
I I'm curious as to exploring what those habits, routines, or rules that you have are.
I've been actually researching that um a little bit, right? Personal rules. So personal rules are like I never or I always uh always never rules are really interesting to me and they are related, they're kind of in the same family as like habits, um, because they are these sort of like you're not thinking about it, you're not deliberating, you're just doing.
the the reason I'm studying it is because I do think that um very successful people have usually a small number of fairly inviolable roles.
And
also habits. And by the way, why is that, right? Like the reason I think is twofold.
So column camera at um
Caltech, who's a collaborator, would say that
the biggest reason, I think Cal you have to ask him, but I think Colin would say that the biggest reason why we have habits, they put us on autopilot and they free up
cognitive resources for other things.
I mean if every time you had to like
cut yourself a a a like grapefruit. You had to like devote all of your energy to like
first I lift my wrist, then I clench my fist around the night. It's like no, it's like there are there are things that can like run on autopilot, like
Cut the grave again, how to do that. And habits are like that. There's another reason I think Colin would agree with me that habits actually are a self-control device.
So um if you are doing something as a matter of habit, like exercising or eating a salad for lunch or writing thank you notes or doing other things which are good for you and others in the long run, but maybe not.
the funnest, easiest thing to do in the short run.
Being on autopilot's a very good thing for that.
So it's not just so that we can free up cognitive resources to do calculus, right? It's also because many of the things about which we have habits and rules are self-control dilemmas where the immediate alternative is just better. Like I have a habit of checking my email.
After dinner, that's one. I don't want to check my email all day because like
that would make for a lot of email checking and not a lot of thought about behavioral science, right? So the second thing is that when when it's after dinner, I mean I could watch
like reruns of Downton Abbey I could like scroll through Twitter, I could do all these things. Now those things are all gonna be like a little bit more fun for me than email, but if I make it a rule or a habit that like after dinner I check my email always, then that
that kind of does an end run around the temptation. So that's one of the habits I have. Um I also have a habit of doing um exercise at six PM Eastern time.
Every time I
Do a public talk.
I have a habit of um sending a thank you email um because I think it's the right thing to do. And as your producers know, there's like a lot of back end stuff that somebody had to do to make that possible. And I think it's
the right thing to do to show some appreciation.
And I always ask for feedback.
But um those are all habits that I have, you know, found to be very useful.
Just coming back to the rules versus uh habits or choices, there's a huge difference between somebody who's on a diet.
And somebody who doesn't eat dessert.
Yes. Right. Because if you're on a diet, you're consciously you're you're making these choices all the time. But if you don't eat dessert, A, it's a rule. You just don't eat you don't have to make a choice.
And Daniel Conman told me this in our conversation actually for the podcast where
He said nobody argues with rules.
He's the reason I started studying rules.
I just noticed and we were in conversation, he'd be like, Well, I have a rule. I don't make a you know, I don't make a decision on the phone.
And then he would say, like, Well I have a rule, like I don't blur books unless I read them in entirety and have a personal relationship with the topic or the author. And I was like
Wait, Danny Codman does it, Dan Gilbert does it, like
What's up with these personal rules? So I will say this too, in the th in the small amount of research I've done, because we randomly assign people to, for example, set a rule about
um, how many steps they were gonna take. And you know, these are Fitbit users that we had recruited because they already had a Fitbit. And then we had other conditions where you just set a goal and like anyway, various control conditions. We did not find a benefit of setting a kind of always never rule, like I always make 10,000 steps, or I and I I'm guessing that one reason
is that um even though for Danny Conneman certain rules can be
Certainly adaptive. Um there are
you know, some downsides to rules, like when you don't make your rule, like you can have the what the hell effect. Yeah. So I think that the the rule on rules is probably that you should make up your own rules as opposed to like somebody exogenously handing you one.
You have to think for yourself. What are the rules that are likely to put me on the path to success? But I I think about that in multiple ways, right? There's lifestyle rules, which is you want to get enough sleep, you want to eat healthy, you w what are the situations what are the rules that you can create around that that help you just
Go on autopilot. It could be your alarm going off at nine thirty on your
iPhone going like now it's time to wind down and go to bed. Why am I doing that? I'm doing that because that puts me in the best position to succeed tomorrow at work. And then you have these rules about the type of person you want to become.
What would that person behave like in in these given situations, right? So you have an identity based rule system where
It's like I want to be a better person. I want to be a better spouse. I want to be a better a better version of me. Or what is the best version of me?
look like in these moments. So you have these business rules, you sort of have these life rules, and then you have these personal
Well, I'm curious as to your take on that.
I read this essay once by James March, who was a
brilliant and uh iconoclastic and interdisciplinary thinker. And he said there's
two kinds of logic that we can use to make choices. There's the logic of consequence.
And then there's the logic of appropriateness. So the logic of consequence is like basically cost benefit analyses, right? It's like thinking like an economist, like,
So, you know, these are the kinds of things that economists think we do all the time. And to some extent, even if it's at a non-conscious level, we do. Like they're expected value decisions. Um, and much of our conversation has been about that, right? Like why do people, you know, why are they ambitious? Like, why do they give up, et cetera.
But Mark said there's a
kind of logic that we apply in many situations that has nothing to do with calculating costs and benefits and probabilities. And it's the logic of appropriateness. And he said
When you are operating according to logic consequence, the three questions are, what are the costs, what are the benefits, what are the probabilities?
When you are operating according to the logic of appropriateness, the three questions are
What situation is this?
Who am I?
What does someone like me do?
In a situation like this. This is all about identity, right? So imagine that um you are like me, a tired mother, working mother who has a teenager at home, and your kid is doing something totally annoying, like you know, asking you demandingly like whether dinner could be ready in four minutes.
So there's this kind of like cost benefit probability thing. It's like, what are the benefits of, you know, responding in a kind way? What are the costs to me of responding? What are the probabilities that like that outcome is getting.
Or
Like what situation is this? Like my daughter's being
Grumpy.
Who am I? I am a mother.
What does a mother do?
When a child is grumpy.
A mother is kind.
Right. And so I I've been kind of fascinated by like the logic of appropriateness, the importance of identity. You know, if if Shakespeare said that all the world is stage and each of us its players, you know, much of our lives we're like, what role am I in?
Like, oh, I'm the doctor? Okay, I'll do that. Right. Like, oh, I'm the whiny child. Okay, I'll do that. And we we step into that role and we play it out.
I think that's a great place to end this, Angela. I want to thank you so much for a fascinating conversation. Shane, I love this conversation. Thank you for having me.
Hey, one more thing before we say goodbye.
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