#109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior
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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 that 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 proceed from there. Welcome to The Knowledge Project. I'm your host, Shane Parrish.

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Today I'm speaking with Angela Duckworth, the founder and CEO of Character Lab, a nonprofit with a mission to advance scientific insights that help children thrive. Angela's book, 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.

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I'm curious about human behavior.

Can we explore a bit to what extent our behavior is predictable versus what extent it's situational? So the person versus situation debate 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 enough?

because I'm a generous person, or am I generous because of the exigencies of the situation? And the contrary too, right? So 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

I mean, have you ever heard this expression, you know, the person versus situation war in psychology? No, never. It was about 1968. So I could be off by a year or so. But Walter Mischel, one of the greatest psychologists to ever live, who lived into his 90s, passed away a couple of years ago. He wrote a book and it was called Personality and Assessment. It was really like a monograph, like a really, really long essay. But it was like 300 pages. So it's called a book.

And young Walter at that point is like two years before I was born. Ask the question, 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 1968, 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 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 0.3. And sometimes people call this like the 0.3 ceiling, right? So if I observe somebody at home versus at work, you know, the correlation is

in a data set of lots of people who are observed in both situations might only approach 0.3. 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 you had people who said that's ridiculous. Of course, there's such a thing as a generous person. You know, you're not going to marry a random person. You marry them because of their character, because of their personality. So it can't be that we are so chameleon like that there's no consistency there.

within us. There's no such thing as our character. Around that decade or so, there was also this research on the big five. Now I want to ask you, this is like a psychology quiz. Like Shane, have you ever heard of the big five?

No, 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, it's a taxonomy of personality traits. So extroversion, conscientiousness, occultism,

agreeableness, openness to experience and emotional stability. You can think of them 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, 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 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 attributes that could be classified into the big five. You can say of a child, like, oh, that child is like pretty high on extroversion, 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 debate or this war, which is that it is both the personality of the 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 80-20, 70-30, 40-60, 50-60.

Because what really 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 shapes the person. So after you've been in a job that requires like lots of detail orientation and, you know, diligent methodical work, like you yourself after years 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 metaphor that we want to use is that there's a conversation going on between ourselves and the circumstances in which we are.

And is that a conscious conversation or is that a conversation between our unconscious brain and our circumstance or physical environment or? Well, now that you got me thinking historically, right? So I'm, I'm, I'm 50, I've been alive a half century. And, you know, in that time, this debate between the person, the situation, you know,

happened and, you know, kind of was resolved, I think. And at the same time, another, I think, important discovery or advance was made 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 behavior and even our emotion and our motivation happens below the surface of consciousness.

The idea that we do things and not always knowing that we do them is important, but it's not just that, you

you know, insight because you could say like, Oh really? It took, it took Freud and 50 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's where Freud was wrong, by the way. Freud was like, you'll never know. It's under the floorboards and you can't pry open the floorboards in the basement of your mind.

And I think that this dialogue that happens below the surface of consciousness can be raised, most of it, to conscious awareness. And you could just like literally have a conversation 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 proceed from there.

I'm going to 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.

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 will say that I've worked with some great coaches, right? So, you know, professional coaches of professional athletes and

And 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 a professional athlete, they're like technically still in adolescence. Psychologically, anyway, brain still developing prefrontal cortex, not quite mature. Anyway, it sometimes gets in a lot of trouble.

And I thought the whole conversation would be like, tell me what to do 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. When things are like really going well, you know, you get picked like

one and two in the draft, like, you know, you're going to be MVP, et cetera. You can just see how that could lead to all kinds of problems from the trivial, like, oh, you get like lavished 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 a hanger on in your entourage. But also I think it creates a lot of fear for people because, because now, you know, you have everything to lose and,

Some of the most successful people, right, like the, you know, people like Kobe Bryant, like were able to maintain an underdog mindset or even Tom Brady, right? Long past the time where you could actually legitimately say that you're an underdog.

They are at some level manipulating themselves. Like you, I'm sure, watched the Michael Jordan documentary, Last Dance. And, you know, if you think about Michael Jordan, basically he must have, 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, um,

He was 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 99% of people, you're just trying to get to a certain, you know, like threshold of excellence. You know, like how many people when they're already getting a 99 in a course, they're

Right. Or frankly, a 93, whatever the watermark is for getting an A. Right. How many people would keep trying and really try, like just try it? Like the marginal gain of knowledge is like no smart. There's no diminishing marginal return. I'd say 99 percent 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 the famous study who like on a rainy day, even though they can earn more money. So they should stay out for like an 18 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, right?

We're learning. And so they're the Abby Wambach's like they're the Tom Brady's like they're the Kevin Durant's, you know, they're the Jeff Bezos's. And I think that satisficing is a description of most people and maximizing without end is a description of the people that I study. The thing I would amend to that or add.

I guess, append to that is that, you know, one of the things that I really admire about outstanding performers is that they really are never done. They're like, 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 there. So, so they learn as much in bad years as they do in good years. And I think that's maybe, um,

you know, they're perennial learners. Are those people born or they made through life experiences? Like 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, I would like to like know what you think of yourself, like whether, you know, like how you are in those dimensions and whether that was kind of nature or nurture for you.

I'm very much of the Will Smith mindset, which is, you know, I'll race you on a treadmill and, you know, I'm just going to 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 doesn't that lead you to a nature 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 30 seconds of work and get a 70 or I can do five hours of work and get a 90. Like, why would I do five hours of work? I'm content with this 70. Tell them my satisficing hypothesis. So, I mean, that's my take. But your kids have different genes, by the way. But hold on. Can we just broaden this nature nurture thing to begin with? So,

Nature would sort of be, in my understanding, just to make sure we're on the same page, is 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...

what my, you know, what my situation is, what my environment is like. Your circumstances that just happened. My zip code, right? Like I had no say in any of that. That's all luck. 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 that 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 going to 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 want to 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 that DNA. I mean, there is no characteristic

at all, psychological or otherwise, you know, your risk of heart disease, your preference for broccoli, 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, like documenting that if you are twin, you know, you are more likely to be like your sibling than if you are not a twin, right? Because, you know, at least 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's also evidence from the same twin studies, by the way, that nurture matters. And in these studies, very often nurture is just like they take the nature part, which they can back into statistically, and then just like nurture is 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 didn't. Although, okay, step two is like, okay, there's probably a conversation going on between nature and nurture because a very conscientious person says, I'm going to 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 16 probably is being influenced by their genes.

I don't know that most people 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, there is a number of scholars, including Bettina Love, who have asked the question, you know, is teaching grit anti-Black? And is the whole like,

idea of shining light on resilience and this whole conversation on agency. Are we doing something dangerous here by ignoring structural poverty, racism, et cetera, et cetera? My first reaction being a human being was defensiveness. Like what? How am I racist? That's, I think, 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 we had some conversations in person. And then I read more, read Bettina's book. I read what other critics had said. And I think that 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, 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. Right.

which is terrible classrooms, terrible curriculum, no computers, none of the things that your kids and my kids have. I think that's an important message. 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 not just something that they have complete control over.

And I would hope that like all children, you know, not just black children or brown children, but like literally all children are helped to learn some of the things that you and I learned and were not born with. Like, you know, knowing how to set a goal, make a plan, figuring out how to take an optimistic growth oriented stance toward adversity, you know, understanding like

how to, you know, think about stress in ways that are adaptive, modify your situation. Those have to be part of personal development. And so I try to say both and in a way that, first of all, doesn't confuse people to know and also that kind of honors this perspective, which, you know, has a lot of value to it. I want to actually explore it a little more, especially on the fulcrum of

There are 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 hope this conversation is long enough that I'm going to talk about agency and control and the mindset that gets you to say like, wait a second, I have a little like,

control here. I think I can do something, which I do think is the mindset of a gritty person, 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 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 that people can use these sort of mental strategies, like what I pay attention to, how I'm going to 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 middle school. Well, 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. It was about five minutes long. And then we told them 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 learned about willpower and how important it is to like, you know, use willpower to accomplish your goals. And then there was a neutral control group. And what we found is that the condition that increased academic goal attainment best was the one where you just explain 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 but something you can agentically intentionally modify is one of the most important lessons that you could learn in life I love that I think that there a lot of people are passive about life it's like life just happens to them and

And things just happen to them. And it's sort of like 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 you. And I believe in a very active life.

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, in a conversation we had in New York. And he just sort of recounted this story to me about...

And one of his friends actually was driving with this portfolio manager. And I think he actually wrote about this on his blog too. 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 going to 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 90s. Because I have been calling Al Bandura a lot. He is the psychologist at Stanford, he's 96 now, who coined 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

I can learn physics if I tried. And I had this conversation with him, you know, 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, whose name is spelled R O T T E R. But I think it's like Dutch or German. Anyway, so I'm going to mispronounce it as Rotter, but Rotter studied locus of control and,

And locus of control was 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 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 manifest.

magically make everything the way I want. What Locust Control is about is more just like in the grand scheme, is the actual outcome going to be my doing or not? Because all I want to say is that people have agency over their behavior, over their performance, not necessarily that you're going to get hired just because you are the most qualified candidate, but that you could control your own behavior and performance.

So I think that's a very important nuance here, because I don't think that we want to teach our kids that they have control over whether the coronavirus vaccine is going to be made available in their municipality in Washington.

one month or another, or whether they're going to get into a certain college, 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 dramatically more productive to when you think about your own

No.

Okay, we need to resurrect Howard Thurman even before Freud. Okay. Right? So Howard Thurman was like the mentor and the pastor for Martin Luther King Jr. And Howard Thurman, I had never heard of because I'm deeply illiterate, but I was reading Arthur Ashe's

memoir. So Arthur Ashe, for those who are younger than us, maybe, you know, he's a great 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 Thurman. 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 the final consent. He was like, you cannot change that you were born into a racist society. You cannot change that you were 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 Viktor Frankl 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 I don't want to even say that you can control it 100%, but I do think you have some control over your reaction. And I think this agentic view is accurate and adaptive. How do we as parents instill that mindset in our kids?

I asked Al Bandura this. I said, you know, do you think that you could learn as much from failure 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 100 percent believe mastery experiences, success, success experiences are what really build this experience.

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 $500 per hour tutor. Like, oh, your teacher is not so great. I'll get them fired. Like, that's not the kind of success experience that Al Bandura is talking about because he's talking about success after challenge, success after struggle. So I think Al Bandura's advice is the best advice, which is the number one thing, and there is more than one thing,

But the number one thing is that people develop confidence when they have struggled to overcome something and they have come out victorious. And 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 in large part by having a surrogate parent. I mean, what I mean by that is, you know, whether you're 50 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. And most of the people that I study, like they never get out of being mentored, you know, like they have a management coach, they have like a personal coach, they have a therapist, you know,

the ones I'm most jealous of have a peer for whom they coach each other. Right. 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 challenge setting that of course you can try to do it on your own. But I think we're always benefited by having like another human being whose advantages are multiple. But one of them is that they're just not us.

Right. So they have a psychological distance 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. Two weeks ago, you gave a presentation that didn't really go as planned. I want to know what happened and how you talk to yourself in the moment. Like 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 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 would be about it, but I ended up inviting, it was like having a dinner party, inviting like more and more people until like suddenly 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 as opposed to just like monologuing.

Oh, 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 he said, you know,

That was not your best hour. And then told me exactly how it was that that was such an impoverished, you know, experience 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,

And then I sent emails to not all hundred people, but like the people I had specifically invited. And I apologized and I was like, that was not a good use of your hour. I was underprepared. I didn't manage the structure of the time well. And I'm sorry. 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? Yeah.

Well, I'll tell you the self-talk that went through my head. 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. I should have rehearsed, right? Now that self-talk is, it's actually productive self-talk because like almost everything that I said was like,

It's like next time I'll rehearse. Next time I won't use pull everywhere for the, you know, like now in my twenties, the self-talk that I had when I screwed up was very different. 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. And that self-talk is 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 30 years since my

earlier, you know, young woman failures. How much of that was planted by that immediate feedback by one of your collaborators who called you and then would probably give you very specific feedback too, right? Versus when we're kids, we often don't often get specific feedback. Like 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 it?

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 the dosage of it. Cause like after about five minutes, I was like, Hey, let's talk about something else. Yeah. 35 more minutes of specific feedback.

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 bad 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

or like slept more soundly if like there had been a little less of it, if it were a little less detailed. But I do think it was better to have gotten that than a kind of like, hey, it could have gone better. All right, so let's talk about other things, right? Yeah, that wasn't your best effort, but dinner was great. What did you think? Yeah, but you know, forever.

I kind of like this idea. Let's talk about it. So feedback, as they say, is a gift, but most of us don't know how to unwrap it. Like 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 think it's a skill. And by the way, Shane, I really truly believe that if somebody is eager for feedback, actively solicits feedback, tries to listen to the feedback, learn something from feedback, that

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? Because 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 going to 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 going to be a fix your own problems. 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 what you're doing is not, which is a lot more vague than when other people are giving you feedback. Yeah.

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 want to feel good in the moment, but I mostly, I more want to learn. Like I'm driven to improve. Your desire to learn over rules, feeling good in the moment. Exactly. Cause their intention, right? It's like, I think 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 something.

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. And in early childhood, there's this idea of secure attachment. Have you heard of like attachment theory? So 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 not necessarily. And there are different styles of attachment. And the attachment style you really want is called the secure attachment style. And then there are various forms of insecure attachment. And the reason why this became so important in developmental psychology, it was the idea that like whatever your attachment style was going to be, it was going to be like

pretty influential in terms of like how you would like have other future relationships in your life. And 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 the behavior of the child is say in a new room with new toys,

is not going to be to cling to the mother. It is because the child is attached that they will venture, you know, even five, 10 feet away from 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, and so I think I am, as whatever I have, that's like, okay, I can handle this criticism is probably because I've had enough

mastery experiences to feel secure. 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, doesn't change relationships in your life, it's just making you better. And if your 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, that you kind of just like engineer these, you know, small wins, make things like bite size enough that there can be a few at bats and a few hits.

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 I think is a congeniality

continual surprise to me is that, you know, I'm a university professor. So my students are between the ages of 18 and 22. And 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 on your weaknesses and get feedback, et cetera. And those things are all true. But honestly, the Ivy League students that I teach are

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 determinations.

that they need to bring to that 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. 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 18 year old who's like, I don't know what I'm interested in. Okay. 22, let's make it a 22 year old senior. Who's like, Oh my God. Like I see adulthood on the horizon, fast approaching. And 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 because I do think that 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, it's,

There's a very good chance that I'm going to be fascinated by it. But there was a time in my life where I didn't even know what psychology was at all. 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 so to the terrified 22 year olds or frankly, probably there's some 22 year

terrified 32-year-olds or whatever 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, kind of 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 22, 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 Ravikant has a, I'm going to 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, where are 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, A-Rod. Actually, he was being interviewed by students in my class, Grit Lab. And he said, you know, I am a hard worker. Everyone would tell you I'm a hard worker. 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 Steve Levitt tells a story of how he became an economist, right? So Steve Levitt is half of the

Freakonomics duo of Dubner and Levitt. And Levitt tells a story of how he was a freshman and he goes to his Harvard EC10 class. I think it was Harvard. And EC10 is the intro economics class. And he's walking alongside his classmate or roommate. And they both say almost at the same time, like, oh God, that was ridiculous. And

But then Steve says, like, yeah, I mean, everything that was said was so damn obvious. And his friend was like, I couldn't understand anything that he was saying. So the idea of doing things that are playful for you, but drudgery for others. In my class, the passion section of my Grit Lab course is called Choose Easy.

And then there's another section called work hard. 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, walk 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? Do we intervene in those times? Is there a mental intervention we can have with ourself 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 know you said grit was about long-term work.

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's it's it's not what we hope. But indefinite. We don't know. It's indefinite. We know it's going to end. We just don't know. We don't know when. Right. Which, you know, just to think about like the psychological dimensions of 2020 and

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 going to have to be in quarantine for 17 days. That's going to be terrible. And then the following things are definitely going to happen to you.

brace yourself versus like you wake up and then like, you don't know what's going to happen, but it's pretty bad. And then like some other bad things happen. That is by the way, what you do to an animal, if you want to induce learned helplessness, which is, you know, the work of my PhD advisor, Marty Seligman, where, you know, you have an animal and then you like shock them. And then the key is that if they experience these traumas,

in an unpredictable way with like, you know, you don't know when it's going to end. You don't know what's going to happen. That's when you actually get, you know, the symptoms of depression and giving up. So anyway, 2020 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 what's going on there. You know, I think that when people say, oh,

no, I'm not going to try anymore. There is either a lack of confidence that you can prevail, right? Like, no, I'm not going to go out for soccer again because I'll never make varsity or like I'll never be very good. Right.

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 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 management 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 hypodermic needle company, like I just will not feel like I fulfilled my purpose. So it couldn't have been that I didn't think I could make partner or director. I think I could have. 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 the value of the goal is,

goes down for whatever reason, or their belief that they can achieve it. Talk to me about the 10,000 hour rule. When it comes to working hard, we seem to have this view that, hey, if we just do something for 10,000 hours, we can't help but be successful in it. To what extent is it the hours versus the reps involved and the immediacy of the feedback too, I would imagine. You may know that Anders Ericsson passed away this year. Do you know that?

I had heard that. Yeah, I didn't. This summer. And it was his research, of course, that became paraphrased as the 10,000 hour rule. Anders would want everyone to know. It's nothing about the like magic number 10,000, first of all. So, you know, that.

comes from a single study of German musicians at a music academy where the highest performing musicians had done on average about 10,000 hours of practice. The next most expert group was 5,000 and the group below that I believe was like 2,500.

Most importantly, Anders would want everyone to know that it's the quality of practice that is really remarkable because even in the next group down, they were still doing lots of practice. It just wasn't that they had a higher proportion of ineffective practice or less effective practice.

So the high quality practice that Andra's called deliberate practice had 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 or a goal that you're trying to address.

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 were doing practice alone, because that was like a proxy for concentration. And then the third element was feedback. Right. And ideally, in most circumstances, immediate feedback.

in some circumstances, you could argue that like there's some benefit to a delay and then the repetition of that cycle. 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 practicing full concentration. My phone's off, nobody's around. And then I'm getting like immediate feedback. And then I'm going to do it all again. Like

I don't know, there could be days that go by without any deliberate practice. And so that's, I think, the magic of what 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 without getting into what we want out of life, I'm curious as to exploring what those habits, routines, or rules that you have are.

I've been actually researching that a little bit, right? Personal rules. So personal rules are like, I never, or I always, always never rules are really interesting to me. And they are related. They're kind of in the same family as like habits, because they are these sort of like, you're not thinking about it. You're not deliberating. You're just doing.

The reason I'm studying it is because I do think that very successful people have usually a small number of fairly inviolable rules and also habits. And by the way, why is that, right? Like the reason I think is twofold. So Colin Kammerer at Caltech, who's a collaborator, would say that the biggest reason, I think 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 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 things that can like run on autopilot, like cut the grapefruit. 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, if you're 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 is 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-controlled 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 going to be like a little bit more fun for me than email. But if I make it a rule or a habit that,

that like after dinner, I check my email always, then that kind of does an end run around the temptation. So that's one of the habits I have. I also have a habit of doing exercise at 6 p.m. Eastern time. Every time I do a public talk,

I have a habit of sending a thank you email because I think it's the right thing to do. And as your producers know, there's like a lot of backend 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 those are all habits that I have found to be very useful.

Just coming back to the rules versus 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 Kahneman 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 that we were in conversation. You'd be like, well, I have a rule. I don't make it. 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 Kahneman does it. Dan Gilbert does it. Like what's up with these personal rules? So I will say this too, in the, in the small amount of research I've done, because we randomly assign people to, for example, set a rule about books.

how many steps they were going to 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 right now. And I I'm guessing that one reason is that even though for Danny Kahneman, certain rules can be set,

certainly adaptive. There are some downsides to rules, like when you don't make your rule, like you can have the what the hell effect. So I think that the rule on rules is probably that you should make up your own rules as opposed to somebody exogenously handing you

You have to think for yourself, what are the rules that are likely to put me on the path to success? But 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. 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 930 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 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 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 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 their expected value decisions. 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? Right.

But Marx 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 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? What are the probabilities that like that outcome is good? Oh,

Or like, what situation is this? Like my daughter is 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've been kind of fascinated by like the logic of appropriateness, the importance of identity. You know, if Shakespeare said that all the world's a stage and each of us, it's 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 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 loved this conversation. Thank you for having me. Hey, one more thing before we say goodbye. The Knowledge Project is produced by the team at Furnham Street. I want to make this the best podcast you listen to, and I'd love to get your feedback. If you have comments, ideas for future shows or topics, or just feedback in general, you can email me at shane at fs.blog or follow me on Twitter at shaneaperish.

You can learn more about the show and find past episodes at fs.blog slash podcast. If you want a transcript of this episode, go to fs.blog slash tribe and join our learning community. If you found this episode valuable, share it online with the hashtag the knowledge project or leave a review. Until the next episode.