Why Trying Harder Doesn't Always Fix Things | Angela Duckworth

Key Takeaway

Stop treating every behavior problem as a willpower problem. Today, pick one recurring temptation—such as checking your phone, snacking, or skipping exercise—and redesign the environment before the urge appears: put the phone in another room, remove the snack, or schedule movement with friends. Effort still matters, but it lasts longer when your surroundings add friction to what you want less of and make your desired behavior the easy default.

Episode Overview

Angela Duckworth argues that grit and self-control are valuable but insufficient: people’s physical and social situations powerfully shape what they think, feel, and do. Drawing on research, her marriage, recovery communities, and work habits, she explains how changing people, places, and things can make better choices more sustainable.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Why Trying Harder Doesn't Always Fix Things | Angela Duckworth from 10% Happier. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Hello everybody. Welcome to the 10% Happier podcast. I'm your host Dan Harris. As many of you know, I am uh very interested in perhaps too interested in uh the topic of success. And when we think about success, we often think about things like hard work or luck or smarts or emotional regulation. But I think quite infrequently, I I'll speak for myself, do we think about um uh your situation, like the people you're surrounded by and your physical location? Turns out there's a bunch of research to show that your situation matters a ton.

So, how do you influence your situation? That's what my guest is going to talk about today. Said guest is Angela Duckworth. You may know her from her huge best-selling book, Grit. She's got a new book out called Situated. She is also a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Angela Duckworth, welcome back to the show. Dan, it's good to be with you again. You made a big name outside of academic circles. You already had a big name in academic circles when you wrote a book called Grit.

Um, you gave a TED talk on it. You published a bunch of research on it. Chapter one in this new book, which again is called Situated, uh, is called, I believe, Beyond Grit. So, what what's that all about? I studied high achievers from my very first day of graduate school and and my first preoccupation with them was everything that they have in their heads that that makes them different. You know, who wins multiple gold medals over multiple Olympics? I mean, who who takes home, you know, the Grammy, the Oscar.

And I really wanted to know psychologically what is different about their mindsets, their habits, the way they organize their goals. And I still believe in all of that, Dan. I still believe that there is an inside game to achieving your potential. And I wrote a book about it. I tried to write down responsibly everything I knew about what I had learned from these achievers, not just by interviewing them, but by doing, you know, large-scale longitudinal research. Then I became interested in as you said everything that's around a person that is equally a common denominator of achieving your potential and and that it turns out is is actually harder I think to think about to write about uh to study but there is uh a great deal of research including my own that shows that the situations we are in powerfully shape everything we do think and feel.

And I think if there's one maybe non-obvious take-home of this book, it is that you can change your situation. We're often taught not to think about our circumstances because we should look inside for what we can control. And I want people to look inside and outside for what they can control. So when you say situation, what are you referring to specifically? Well, what I'm referring to is everything, Dan. So, so you know what chair you're sitting in, the light, uh, what's within reach, what's out of reach, everything physically around you, like if you were filming a movie, you know, what are the props, what is the scenery, what are the costume, I mean, every physical detail and then also every element of your social situation like who are those people?

What are they doing? What are they saying? Uh, and even at the, you know, level of greatest abstraction, I mean, your culture, you know, like, are you in Philadelphia? Are you in Philadelphia in the summer? Are you in San Francisco? Are you in Singapore? So, I think these aspects of your situation are so all-encompassing. Everything from like, how far is your cell phone from you right now? Do you have a water bottle near you to like are you in an individualist culture right now or not?

I mean, it's all your situation. And and you know, I I know it might seem like some of those aspects are changeable, some of them not. I'm going to make the perhaps provocative argument that everything about your situation, you have some agency to change if you think it can be improved. We'll get into that for sure. Tell me a little bit about exactly what the research shows though. Let me begin with the problem of self-control. That's something that I started working on also on my first day of graduate school.

Self-control and grit sound like the same thing to a lot of people. They're not. They're close cousins, I would say, but they're not exactly the same thing. Grit is passion and perseverance for years and decades. You know, really striving to achieve some meaningful and especially challenging goal. self-control everybody needs no matter how ambitious they are because everybody needs to, you know, get to bed at a reasonable hour, you know, eat this, not that, um, get some amount of physical activity, do their taxes, floss their teeth.

I mean, self-control is doing what is better for you, not just 50 years from now, but even five minutes from now, and forgoing some temptation that is instantly rewarding. Self-control has always been a problem for humanity. I would argue in the modern era. We have fashioned temptations that that humanity has never dealt with before like you know the infinite scroll, ultrarocessed food and so forth. So self-control and grit are not the same thing but they are close cousins because they are both about you know living a life that you want to lead.

When I talk about the power of the situation, much of that goes back to my research on self-control, showing that when somebody uses willpower to force themselves to eat a banana as opposed to like opening a bag of chips or to put their phone down 30 minutes before they, you know, usually put their phone down to go to bed or to stay off their laptop during a very boring meeting. you know, knowing that like there's something on their laptop which is frankly more interesting to them at the moment than the very boring meeting.

You you can do all of the above using willpower, just forcing yourself to do it. That's when your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain, which is most recently evolved, it's, you know, right behind your forehead. It just forces other parts of the brain to do what you intend to do and to resist impulses that are more instantly gratifying. But what research shows, including my own, is that that is an incredibly fragile, infallible faculty. That yeah, you could do it, maybe you could do it once, maybe you could do it twice.

Nobody eats right, exercises right, goes to bed on time, manages their emotions, and so forth in the long run by using their prefrontal cortex to tamp down on unwanted impulses. Instead, what research shows is that people change their situation. If you have a really bad habit of snacking between lunch and dinner and you try to force yourself not to snack between lunch and dinner, you might get it right once, twice, but you won't get it right in the long term. However, if you work in an environment there are no unhealthy snacks to be found.

There's like a lot of friction between you and unhealthy sn Oh my gosh, there are all these like amazing healthy snacks like fresh fruit or you know whatever like that is going to be a much better strategy. So, so the insight is that you can wait until your impulses are very strong. You can force yourself to resist those impulses or you can put yourself in a situation where those impulses don't even develop. And that is what you know many psychologists including me and our academic work would call situational self-control.

So, a lot of the research that I'm relying on in this book draws from the self-control research and in particular the strategy of changing your circumstances before unwanted impulses have time to develop. So specifically, how could we put this to work in our you you mentioned a few strategies in there, but let this go a click deeper in terms of how we can change our physical environment so that we're not, you know, super distracted or eating food we're not actually hungry for or might make us feel like I do think that uh one of the temptations that all of us have you know some personal experience with you fighting um the battle of of not being on our phone when we ought not be and I'm not saying that we should never be on our phone or that everyone equally struggles with this but I think all of us and I'll speak personally like I used to think I didn't have any problem uh my now 91year-old mother painted this giant portrait of me.

She's an artist. Uh, and when she told me about this portrait of me, she was very excited because it's really an enormous work. I mean, it's, you know, like the size of [clears throat] a garage door. And when she unveiled it, I was disappointed we'd be putting it lightly. I mean, this picture that she painted of me is me, you know, my hair is in my face. I'm staring down. There's all this artwork around me, sculptures, paintings in the painting that she painted, but I'm ignoring all this beauty because I'm staring at my phone.

And so I said, "Mom, you know, I I I have to ask you like, why did you paint me in in, you know, like hunched over?" And she was like, "Oh, but sweetie, that's that's the way you always are." So, I'll speak personally because apparently I am on my phone more than I even realize, and I I do recognize it's a problem. You could try not to be on your phone. That's willpower. You could just say like, you know what? I got to do, you know, I I got to like get off this right now.

Or you can try some other cognitive tricks. And Dan, I know you've studied mindfulness. You've interviewed many, many scientists who study ways of reframing or reappraising the situation. You might say like, you know, I'm going to look at that phone and I'm going to think of it as, you know, a temptation or as evil. I'm not going to look at it as a portal to the universe. You can do a lot of mental gymnastics and I think they all have their place but you can also take your phone and as my best friend uh once says like throw it across the room or place it gently across the room.

Uh in my research when I've surveyed teenagers in America one study leaps to mind because I did it with the Gallup organization. So it's truly a representative sample of teenagers in America from middle school through the end of high school. Uh when we ask them where they keep their phones when they're studying, there's a range. Some keep the phone very far away, like in the next room altogether. A great deal more keep it somewhere closer. And there are five graded steps and the closest is like right next to me.

The screen is up. The sound is on. Don't want to miss any notifications. And when we match that to academic performance, what we find is the farther the phone, the higher the GPA. In other words, if you use your situation for you, not against you, right? Like that friction of having to get up and go into the next room. I mean, you can do it and maybe you will do it, but you're going to do it a lot less than like literally just looking down. You don't even have to move.

And so, physical phone placement is, I think, one of the very easy ways you can introduce yourself to the notion of situational agency that you have agency. It's your choice how you set up your personal space. As you mentioned, the power of situation goes beyond um your physical surroundings or where your phone is or whatever. It is also the people you surround yourself with. What if your boss is an and you really have no choice? Um there's no other job available. This is the situation you're stuck in.

How do you what do you do about that? this hypothetical example which you know isn't unfortunately hypothetical to a lot of people listening uh you know that is an example I think of the limits of situational agency right you know famously for example in romantic relationships like don't try to change that other person right like that you know there there limits to what you can do you can't wish that that person were different and you can't force that person to be different and I don't think you can change you know your boss's way of giving feedback or their lack of clarity when setting the agenda for the next week or their poor temper and so forth.

So I think you you've you know come up with a very good counter example if you will to situational agency. Um however I do think there are still things you could do. For example, your boss is not the only thing in your situation. Uh you might call up a a beloved mentor. You know maybe you had a former boss who was frankly a lot more patient, a lot more kind. Maybe they planned better. Uh and that person is also part of your situation. especially if you choose to go see them or have coffee and ask for advice about how to handle this, you know, terrible circumstance that you have at work.

You can also ask other people who are in that team or that company, you know, how are they managing? Your peers, I think, are a very overlooked aspect of the situation. And you usually can change your your peers in the sense of, you know, the people that you spend the most time with at work who are at the same level as you, right? So not your direct supervisors or even their supervisors, but more the people who are, you know, just like you trying to figure things out at the level or at the station that you are in.

And are any of these things miracles? I I don't think so. But in those conversations, maybe you will find a way to a different boss. like in those conversations, perhaps you will find your way to an entirely different workplace um or some other way to to improve things. So, so I I I think it's a great example to bring up, Dan, because I think you're you're right to point out that there are aspects of the situation that you don't control. At the same time, let's not let that blind us to features a situation that we can control and that we can proactively use to uh to solve our problems.

With summer winding down and all of us returning to our routines and some of us returning to school or returning our children to school, uh this feels like an appropriate moment to hit reset. And I don't mean like a full comprehensive panoramic reset of everything in your life, just like small marginal changes you can make in your life that can make a big difference. And so that's what we're focusing on right now over on my app, 10% with Dan Harris. This September, we'll be joined by Diana Winston, who's the director of UCLA's mindfulness center and the author of a book called The Little Book of Being.

The LA Times has called her one of the best known mindfulness teachers in the country. Once you hear her, you will understand why. And you can practice live with Diana right inside the 10% with Dan Harris app starting on September 8th. And then later in September, we'll be dropping a brand new meditation challenge from Diana, all in the theme of resetting. More on that in just a couple of weeks. For now though, if you could use just a little bit of a reset and you want to hang out and meditate with me and Diana and many other folks, you can sign up for my app at danharris.com.

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You can also get free shipping on select orders and every order is backed by their 365day money back guarantee so you can try it with confidence. You won't find this on Amazon in stores or anywhere else. That's biooptimizers.com/happier. Use the code happier. I guess what's coming up in my mind is that there are depending on what your circumstances are, you're going to have varying levels of agency. You know, like I'm, let's face it, a wealthy white man. Um, and I have a lot more choice about my surroundings than, um, a struggling young single mother.

Um, and I I think it's just worth saying that out loud. I'm not sure how does somebody who has less agency take advantage of what you're pointing at. I think I have to put myself I mean I'm not a wealthy white man but I am a wealthy Asian woman um who's been educated at the you know most selective schools and you know I have this memory by the way of being in college and I had my plastic cafeteria tray and I was just like you know shoving along the metal rails and like thinking about whether I wanted banana bread or not that day and the Harvard student in front of me turned around uh he was taller than me so he had to look down and he said to me, "You lead a charmed life." And they turned back around and then we proceeded and, you know, got our food and and sat down at our different tables.

And I don't think he was just saying that because of all the aforementioned characteristics, Dan. I think I have been especially blessed. I sometimes feel like for whatever reason like the universe has rolled out its red carpet for me, you know, like, oh yeah, those famous psychologists who would be amazing to talk to, right? that I actually got to talk to them and and and now they keep wanting to talk to me like this is amazing. So I am extraordinarily privileged in ways that are obvious and in ways that are not obvious, I think.

Um and I have I think therefore more agency over my situation than most people. Um, and so again, I think it's a very important point to to bring up and to and to discuss seriously like not in a glib way. Um, I think if you acknowledge that agency about our situation is maybe universal in that we all have it, but certainly not equally distributed. It does raise the question, well, what does somebody who has less agency do? Um, and I say that you have to do what anybody has to do, which is to look at your circumstances.

And, you know, they're like two columns, like the things that you can't change. And maybe that's a very long column. And you can write down all of those things and kind of acknowledge those limitations but then see whether the other column which is here are the situational factors in my life that I can change and just see if that's not an empty column. You know when I mentioned phones just now I did that partly because well in my research with Gallup and um separate research I mean there are very few human beings who don't have some ambivalence some struggle with their phone.

I started with that because you know it's something we all understand. I also started with that because where you put your phone is something that you don't have to have any kind of privilege really uh to decide right and so it was an accessible example I hope of something which is a bigger broader point when you begin to ask yourself about for example people you know the people that you spend time with well you don't have complete control over that you might have a you know horribly toxic workplace environment you might hate your boss your boss might hate you um you may not love those teammates It's uh you may not like the culture of the organization you've joined and you may not actually be able to immediately change those things, but is there any way that you could change the amount of time that you spend so that those few people that you do find in your social network who bring out your best, you feel like you're more confident around them, you feel like you're kinder around them, you feel like you're smarter around them.

Could you spend a little more time with them in some way? Could you ask to be on a project that one of those people is running? Could you have a group of people that you haven't even met yet? Like I'll give you another example. If you want to start an exercise habit, you can do what many people do, which is will themselves to do it or even resolve in a New Year's resolution kind of way to do it. I think one of the smartest things a person can do is to find another person or two or three and to do it together, right?

Like train for a marathon with another person or with a team. You know, have a gym going habit with a group of friends. I think in these ways you will find maybe not infinite power over your situation. But when you start to look for things you have control over and start to just ask yourself a simple question, you know, is there a place or are there people with whom and around whom I can do what I want to do more easily? I think we will find more than the null set.

That's the claim. No, that makes sense. We have to start where we are. Let's acknowledge that life is unfair. Um, and I just go back to what you said about you you you can make a list of things you can't change and a list of things you can and the can't list might be incredibly long and and yet there will, as you said, there will still be things you can change. I think in your book you tweak the serenity prayer along these lines. Am I right about that?

Yeah. The serenity prayer is so um beloved by so many including the more than 2 million members of Alcoholics Anonymous. And I have to say that this prayer which goes back to you know roughly World War II um written by um minister named Reinhold Neber uh it has many forms. So there are many slight variations on God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. The courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. So there are many riffs on this, you know, profound um little prayer uh that at least in one of my articles that I was reading about this about the history of the prayer he had written like on in the backseat of a taxi I think you know going to a sermon that he wasn't entirely sure what he was going to speak about that day.

The reason why that's so powerful, I think, for members of Alcoholics Anonymous is that, you know, when you talk about, you know, the serenity to accept the things you cannot change, that is a starting point, I think, for many people who consider themselves addicted uh to alcohol or to other substances um or activities. But that second line, you know, the courage to change the things I can, that really is, you know, the first column, the second column, right? Like, you know, we should have surrounding about things we can't change.

We should have courage uh to think about the things that we can and then of course the wisdom to know the difference. You you remarked Dan that in the book I I annotate it. Um I give it you know my own subtitles. Um I think when we think of the first line the serenity to accept the things we cannot change. For most people they think about all the circumstances that they cannot change. where they were born, uh maybe members of their family, the communities that they feel like they cannot exit, uh those are all outside of them.

When they get to the second line, the courage to change the things they can, then their attention goes inward. I can change my attitude. I can change my uh my mindset. I can change my assumptions. I can change my goals. So, I can't change what's outside, but I should sure change what's inside. and that's going to make the difference in my life. The annotation that I would suggest is that the things that you cannot change are sometimes outside you. Frankly, sometimes they're inside you. Like a genetic predisposition to alcoholism, which is not something you can change because you're not going to change your 23 pairs of chromosomes.

You're not just unable to change the outside. Sometimes you're unable to change the inside. And equally when it comes to courage to change the things that you can change you should look inside but you should look outside too. So I think this habit that we have gotten into I think as a culture of looking outside for the circumstances you can't change inside for the things that you have agency over is a mistake. I think there's agency inside and outside and there are limitations to agency inside and outside.

You mentioned AA. I don't know much about AA except for secondhand from folks who are in various recovery programs. I I find it and again this is all secondhand. I find what I hear to be incredibly impressive. And one thing I believe I've heard as a little mantra in in the recovery community is people, places, and things. In other words, if you want to control the people, places, and things around you in order to reduce the likelihood of relapse for whatever you're struggling with, that seems to go right at your central argument in in the book.

People, places, and things was a working title at one point for this whole book. Like what are the people, places, and things uh you know, the objective realities uh of your life that you might tweak, that you might change uh so that you can lead the life you want. I will say this about the recovery community. Um it's certainly not a community where everybody agrees on exactly the right prescription for um managing an addiction like alcoholism. Some people in the AA uh and the broader recovery community might say that, you know, be wary of relying too much on people, places, and things because you ultimately have to change your attitude uh towards alcoholism.

There's this expression like pulling a geographic and it's used usually dismissively as like you cannot run away from your problems. If you move to New Jersey or even if you move to Ocean City, New Jersey, where the laws prohibit the sale of alcohol, you know, you might think, well, great. In Ocean City, New Jersey, I won't be an alcoholic because I can't buy alcohol. And the the members of the community who would say, look, don't try to pull geographic. You can't run away from your real problems.

They will follow you wherever you go. Even if you move to Ocean City, New Jersey. And if you haven't dealt with, you know, your anger problems or your, you know, your your marriage problems or your identity problems, they will follow you. And sure enough, drink will follow you too. You will find it. I believe that the person places and things advice that you should think about the person's you know the people around you the things that are around you the places that you live you know I I would say that it may not be a magic cure but I think living in a dry town like Ocean City New Jersey certainly tips the scales in your behavior.

There is actually research that uh Wendy Wood who is I always think of her as the uh queen bee of habit research. Um so in the academic community Wendy Wood is you know the pioneer in the research on habit. It was you know her study that's widely quoted that nearly half of human behavior is habitual. So she has studied addiction and good habits also. And she points out that even living closer to uh a a a store that sells alcohol, a liquor store, like that's a risk factor for developing um alcoholism.

So So absolutely, it's not a magic wand. I do think you have to resolve your own um problems. Uh but why not make things as easy as possible? Live where things are going to be easier. put objects around you that are less tempting in ways that you're going to regret and absolutely the people around you. When I got into the research on Alcoholics Anonymous, because I think Dan that there is no more psychologically wise organization in humanity's history than Alcoholics Anonymous. Um I I got curious about what the scientific research said.

I mean, how can it be that a circle of folding chairs in a church basement is like the most effective and enduring cure um or treatment for alcoholism? I, you know, found my way to Harvard Medical School where a lot of this research has taken place. And um one of the findings is that what happens when you join Alcoholics Anonymous is that you replace your peer group. Your peer group may have been other people who are drinking the way you've been drinking. And with the introduction of this entirely new social network into your life, you have people around you who know exactly what it is like to suffer as you've been suffering, but are on a journey and they ask you to join them if you would like.

And so that is again a way of replacing the people uh who will you know uh tell you more about how they've replaced the things and how they've gone to new places. So people, places, and things I think would not have been a terrible title for for the book. Not at all. And just to pick up on the people part of it, you know, I often say that life is better in the carpool lane. And I believe, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong, that that's an evidence-based assertion.

We what we know about the quality of a human life is that based on you know the Harvard study for adult development and other studies is that it is largely determined by the quality of your relationships not only the quality of your life but the length of your life and then further just on on habit change or general um human behavior change uh large I guess the term of art and you again you'll correct me is um social support uh the people you know doing it with other people who have share your goals and values is is immensely powerful.

So AA is tapping into both of these things. You are on firm ground, Dan. And um you know whatever terms you want to pull out, social support is actually I think very often how scientists refer to uh a life where you know it's not you as some individual who is trying to like solve every problem that you as an individual have. But you you you have this um you know paradigm shift or you don't think of like Dan Harris. Dan Harris in relation to these other things, but like Dan Harris as part of something larger than Dan Harris.

So, you're part of an organism. You're part of a family. You're part of a team and you do your part. So, hopefully you do everything you can do to um advance the goals that are important, but you're no longer thinking of yourself in isolation. And you're also on firm ground, Dan, to talk about um the power of relationships to improve your life. And I think the Harvard study, which is, you know, very important, has made a lot of contributions to that finding or that conclusion. I want to mention a more recent study, which is that when you look at how people spend time in America, and much of this research has been done by scientists who didn't start this survey, but who just used the data from the American Time use survey.

One of the findings from Dunigan Folk who is a posttock in my lab but he did this research prior to joining me is that you can code what everyone is doing on any kind of dimension you know are they are they eating um are they resting um are they playing a game are they watching you know whatever it is that you want to ask the Americans uh what they're doing like whatever it is they're happier if they're with another person whatever it because all functions of life.

Um and so what that suggests is that life is better in the carpool lane. And the reason why I think that's not an obvious um observation is that we are spending less time in the carpool lane. If you ask the question like how can my situation be better, it's not just whether you're going to pick these people or that people. It's that you are also going to pick people at all. because Americans in particular, but around the world, we're spending more and more time with no people around us.

And in one analysis of the American Times survey that Dunigan cannot take credit for um this was done by a Princeton sociologist, and I apologize, I can't remember the name of the author. He looked at the data in the uh American Times survey um over the last you know decade or two and found that the number of minutes that we spend inside the home versus outside the home for any reason work play etc has skyrocketed to something like an hour and 50 minutes a day that we are spending inside versus venturing forth you know beyond um our own roof.

And so I think one of the ways that we should be observant first and then perhaps agentic if we choose is to ask, you know, how much time am I spending with any other person? Um and then of course which people am I spending it with? That's crazy. So the amount of time we're spending alone indoors has skyrocketed. And it's not just the pandemic, Dan. I was like, "Oh, the pandemic." You know, the No, no, no. That's why it's so important that the trend began before 2020.

You know, there has been a a a rising tide of time spent alone. And I don't know, I think Bob Putnham when he wrote the landmark uh book bowling alone um now more than 20 years ago. I think when he looked at trends in this country that preceded social media that preceded the co9 pandemic that preceded you know remote work as a practice that is common you know he really put his finger on it when he said we are spending more time alone. we are retreating from society if you will.

Um, if you think about what society really is, society is, you know, a community. Um, and I think that some of the things that I mentioned may have exacerbated or accelerated those things, but I don't think they they're all like in the last few years. I think that you have to look at how this country uh and many other countries have changed culturally in the, you know, the decades I've been alive. I'm 56 and I think this country is different from when I was born. In the meantime, as we've become more isolated, uh we've become, and I believe I'm right about this, uh more anxious, more depressed, uh more lonely, more addicted, uh more likely to take our own lives than we've ever been since we started keeping records.

kind of all the good things are like sex is down, reading is down, uh you know, spending time together is down, helping other people in our family, outside of our family is down. Yeah, the trends are not great. And I am an optimist by disposition like you. I think at some fundamental No, are you not an optimist? I thought Dan Harris fundamentally was like looking for the silver lining. Wait, wait. Update my Dan Harris beliefs. I mean, I No, no. I think um by nature I'm uh anxious and pessimistic um and so I'm doing this work as a way to override my um nervous system which is which is on a hair trigger for threat.

Oh, interesting. I'm reading a a biography of Lincoln right now um called Lincoln's Melancholy um which I recommend to you if you haven't read it. But uh Lincoln apparently also was uh maybe not blessed with a super sunny optimistic temperament. But then uh sort of made his life um about fighting it and using it for the betterment I guess of his community even more than himself. I am not like Lincoln. I don't think I am a melancholy person. I think I'm like uh you know like a bunny rabbit really like temperament wise.

Um, so take it from the bunny rabbit, like I look around and I think, you know, every time I go through an airport, Dan, and you know, we just talked about privilege a moment ago. If you're in an airport, you have some privilege, right? Because, you know, flying is not cheap and you're going somewhere. Um, so, so we're not talking about like abject poverty, but I'm still depressed when I walk through an airport because every human being, no matter their age, they could be like 95 or 5 months old.

I feel like every human being it seems is on a screen. Um, and when you're on a screen, you really are alone together. So, so there are some, you know, worrisome trends that whether you're an optimist or a pessimist, I think if you're a realist, I mean, you just have to, you know, look at these things. And I think looking at the default settings of society, you know, what is the default for the situation? Like what do what if you just relax and just like kind of like do what everyone else is doing?

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That's sq.com/go/happier. Run your business smarter with Square. Get started today. This is a bit of a nonsequittor, but you mentioned marriage earlier, and you do a very brave thing in your new book, which again is called Situated. Um, you talk about your own marriage. You're certainly under no obligation to do that here, but let me check in with you. Are you cool talking about what you wrote about? Yes, I I am. And not only am I comfortable, Dan, I have the permission um and maybe even the enthusiasm of my husband and my daughters who are young women now, but I never told them about the things that I ended up writing about in the book.

Uh, and only when I finished the draft of the chapter did my like push it across the table. I was like, "Read this." They're like, "Ah, I'm busy." I'm like, I get get un busy cuz you're going to want to read this before like many, many other people do. So, I'm very comfortable talking about the problems and also the solutions that my husband and I encountered together. Well, I'm glad you are. I think it's a service that you're willing to talk about this stuff. And so you hit a little bit of a rough patch in 2008 after and during the uh financial crisis.

How does what you went through and how you handled it, how is it relevant to the core thesis of this book, which again is that you have agency to change your situation as a way to change your life? One reason I think that we overlook opportunities to change our situation is that we're so busy doing something else, which is just trying harder. Uh and just trying harder. Not changing the situation but just trying harder in that situation is what got me and also my husband Jason through the first decades of our lives with great success.

You know, neither of us were uh smartest kids in our schools. Um neither of us were like reliably selected into the gifted and talented programming. Nobody said, "Oh, you know, watch out for that one. You know, they're a prodigy." But man, we worked hard. Um, and when we met and I think we were in our mid20s, um, we sort of recognized each other. We were like, "Oh, you're a ster like you also get through life by trying harder." And when we got married, I mean, it was a real fairy tale romance.

I mean, um, head over heels doesn't even begin to describe, I think, how each of us felt about each other. You know, the kind of tryh harder philosophy was still going strong. It was like great and I'm now I'm going to try hard to get tenure at an Ivy League school and you try hard to be a real estate entrepreneur and you know we'll have these like beautiful kids and then we'll try hard to be perfect parents and you know try hard to get our workouts and just try try try and take back my a vowel that trying hard is part of success because it is.

I mean there's just no way around effort in the equation of of achieving anything whether it's raising a great family or doing well professionally. But one of the reckonings that uh really you know hit us sideways was that we found ourselves in a situation and it is around 2008. I know so little Dan about the economy that when I made the very very first draft of this chapter and showed it to Jason um again not only his endorsement but his encouragement I think I got the year of the financial crisis wrong and he gently [clears throat] pointed out that you know anyway so I'm doing what I'm doing as a professor he's doing what he's doing in business I'm obviously a little bit oblivious but we really did we worked harder and longer there were times that he was working a 100 hours a week I felt like I was doing the same if I counted the hours that I was working plus, you know, shouldering, you know, many of the parenting responsibilities.

And frankly, it just stopped working. I mean, the wheels were falling off the bus. You know, the harder he worked, it's not like his company started to do better. Like, it was not doing better, even though he was, you know, putting in um ungodly hours. My own research, it's like I woke up earlier, tried harder to do each study, and they just kept failing. Um, and we had a breaking point in our marriage really because of me. I mean, I had this husband who was never home.

Um, I mean, when he was home, he was exhausted, always kind, but he was miserable. And I had this, you know, workaholic, miserable husband who was never home. And I felt like, you know, trying harder wasn't working. And I, at that point in our marriage, girls were, you know, very young, um, you know, [clears throat] beginning of elementary school, I think. Um, I thought the solution was to uh just give up um and to get divorced. Um, and um, I thought maybe I'd be happy that way.

And you know, every child, you know, deserves a happy mother. What we discovered uh and it took a while in a lot of therapy um uh was that if you try hard in a no-win situation, you know, like 100 hours isn't going to do it, but neither is 110 hours, you know, like we had to fundamentally shift. Let me be very specific about what that meant because in the abstract it's like okay, you change your situation, but what does that even mean? Jason stopped working 100 hours a week.

Uh he also um uh not only subtracted hours from his work week, he added in mentors. You know, something he hadn't done until that point in his career is to reach out to more seasoned veterans of real estate development and in this crazy economic crisis, ask for their advice. He created an advisory board. Um I know young people talk about having a brand and so forth and it can make our eyes roll into the back of our heads. Um, but one thing I think young people ought to do is what Jason did during that crisis.

He had this advisory board of mentors who would convene about every six months and give advice on the problems that Jason was encountering at work. It was this gamecher uh because it wasn't just Jason Duckworth trying to figure things out. was Jason Duckworth in the company of these, you know, more experienced, seasoned, uh, business people who only wanted the best for Jason Duckworth. I'll give you a tactical change on my end. You know, when I was failing in these studies, you know, one of the things that made it even harder was that they were just my ideas.

I was executing. And what I do now, Dan, and began to do at that point was to not think of myself as Angela Duckworth, psychologist, like Angela Duckworth, individual inventor and genius, but Angela Duckworth, part of a chorus or a team who in collaboration with a bunch of other people who are trying hard, like we're going to get something done. And what I have found in my research is that I am dramatically better as a contributor to a team than I am as a solo uh performer.

Uh so all I do now is team science. I mean when I work with economists like they're better at the things that they do and I'm you know making my contribution as a psychologist etc etc. And the final thing I'll mention Dan is that we went to therapy and I know that that is a whole long conversation. I'm happy to have as much of it as you want. I am not trained as a clinical psychologist, but I also was not raised in a family where you go to therapy.

So, it was with great apprehension and reluctance that I began seeing somebody to talk about my problems that Jason began seeing another person to talk about his problems and the two of us went to go see a third therapist to talk about our problems. And when we, you know, applied effort, less effort than we had for, but in this new situation with an advisory board and collaborators and therapists and, you know, finally opening up to our family so that they could be the calvaryary that came in um at critical times.

Um it changed everything. And so I still believe in effort. I will never not believe in effort. But one of the great Achilles heels of people who have spent their whole life getting where they are because they are strivvers is to ignore the power of the situation and to forego the opportunity to put yourself in a situation where all your effort is paying off. Let me pick up on what you just said that you still believe in effort. you know this um the the your emphasis on grit has garnered some push back especially from people who say it's kind of unfair to focus on uh perseverance and hard work when you've got a lot of low-income people in a very inequality inequal society who you know can try as hard as they want but this the deck is stacked against them.

Um, and so I was just wondering like is is part of this new work you've just produced motivated by responding to those critics in some way? I mean, I'll be honest. I don't know if it's motivated by responding to those critics, but I hope it does respond to those critics. I won't say that I got a lot of criticism, then it made me think harder, then I decided to address it. It's more that the critics had a point. Uh and I do think I uh was right to try to write a book about one thing.

You know, a book about everything is a book about nothing. So in grit, I focused on quality of effort, quantity of effort, the difference between effort and talent, the mindsets that incline you to put in effort, the kind of practice that experts do. I don't think that was a mistake because I didn't want to write a book about everything or nothing. I wanted to write a book about something. And I think the psychology of effort is a is a worthy subject, especially if you, you know, write yourself out of, you know, the game, you know, early on because you're not talented.

But where the critics are right, I'll give you a story. Um, I just a vignette. I remember sitting down at a conference. It was somewhere in California, maybe it was in Stanford or something like that. And there was this sociologist there. Now, I'm a psychologist. I study the individual. Sociologists do not take the individual as the unit of analysis. They're they're studying societies, groups, culture. I sit down and I say to the sociologist that I had never met before, but you know how it is. The norm in these little meetings is like, "You're friendly and you ask people what the best salad is on the buffet bar." And wow, this woman uh was so angry at me.

She was practically shaking. Um, and I had to ask, I was like, "I'm sorry. Have we met?" "No, but I know your work on grit." Um, and I said, uh, well, I'd love to hear what you think. Um, and she said in so many words, I think it is racist. I think it is classist. Um, I think you're ignoring from your state of privilege. uh the realities that the majority of people in this country and elsewhere have to uh reckon with and pull yourself up by your bootstraps mantra is uh inaccurate and irresponsible.

Um and I I want to say that that perspective has legitimacy. And here's what I would say to you today. Um Dan, I think that uh she was right that there are there are situations in which effort doesn't pay off. um Bridget Terry Long who was for a time the dean of the graduate school of education at Harvard um and a very distinguished economist um by training you know she said to me um when I was you know talking to her about her own story um she has um a bit of an American you know like ragster rich's story and her her parents are very hardworking um and they had a great amount of social mobility uh and economic mobility in her lifetime her parents had uh moved her to a suburb suburb of Chicago.

And when her father took a new job, I think it was at Xerox, he like put the pin of a compass to where his work was. And then he drew a circle, the radius that he thought was a reasonable commute. And then systematically the family visited every school in in that circle to find the very best school uh for Bridget um and the family. And so she really understands, I think, at many different levels, you know, what opportunity and lack of opportunity are. And from her own experience, I think she would say that hard work does pay off more in certain zip codes and in certain classrooms uh and in certain um stations of life or you know role you're born into.

Um that is why I think it is important to talk about the situation where I may differ from some is that when I talk about the situation and I I'm sure a lot of people will criticize me for this too but I will say boldly that we shouldn't only think about aspects of the situation that are beyond control. It is equally important, I think, for any person, whoever they are, their privilege or their lack thereof, to just ask what they can change. Because assuming that somebody born into a low socioeconomic status, community or family that is not privileged uh in any way that the word means, it's almost always that there's something they can change.

Um, not everything, not as much as the, you know, people like you and me maybe, Dan. Uh, but something um and and maybe that is the optimist in me, but I I I do think there's agency um if if we look for it. I'm holding in my hand, and if you're uh listening instead of watching, you can't see this, but just trust me, I'm holding in my hand a really cool gadget that just came in the mail. This is called the Fit Nexa Somnipods 3. Essentially, they are earbuds that you can wear to sleep.

And unlike other earbuds that are a little clunky if you're lying on your side, these are designed for side sleepers like me. And I have fit them into my ear and they slide in quite nicely and are comfortable when you uh slide onto your side, which is a requirement for me if I'm going to be wearing anything in my ears at night. Finexa actually provides a couple of cool benefits. First, these earbuds block noise. That can be distracting when you're trying to fall asleep. That's a huge problem for many of us, especially if uh you sleep next to somebody who snores, as is the plight of my wife.

Also though, uh you can use these earbuds to pipe into your noggin, soothing sleep sounds, calming audio, or other nighttime content through the Fit Nexa app, which I have downloaded and is very clean and smooth and easy to use. They've got guided meditations and nature sounds and all the stuff that many of you like to use when you're trying to fall asleep. You can learn more about the Fit Nexa Somnipods 3 at fitnexa.com and use the code happier10 for $10 off your order. Is there something about your openness to these critiques that jibes nicely with the thesis of your new book?

like it. One way we can boost our um mental strength and odds of success is to be open to and indeed even surround ourselves with our critics. Not in a in a self- flagagillating way or a masochistic way, but really as a way to, you know, make our ideas and workflows and processes bulletproof. You know, Dan, I first of all don't want to paint myself as a uh saintlike, you know, always open to criticism. Like, what a good point. Let me go write this down and then reflect.

Like, I'm as defensive as the next person. Um, I could be as small-minded as as anyone. I think it's been helpful for me to understand the research. I mean, human beings do not learn without feedback. Um, and the most valuable feedback very often is not what you're doing right, but what you're doing wrong. Actually both kinds of feedback matter. One thing I have observed because in the position of somebody who studies greatness, I get to study people who have a lot of power, fame, um, and money.

And one thing I've noticed is that when you just spend time with those people, they are typically surrounded with with people who tell them that everything's great, you know, like there's just not a lot of um tension, friction, or criticism. Uh and and the very wise ones recognize that and they do what you're I think suggesting which is they intentionally place themselves shoulder-to-shoulder, you know, nose tonose sometimes with critics because who's going to give you the feedback on what you have missed or gotten slightly wrong or very wrong other than somebody who identifies themselves as your opponent as opposed to your advocate.

So I think the more privileged you are, the more difficult it is to do um exactly that maybe the more urgently um we need that. For me, I will say that um I probably should get more criticism than I do. I get like 10 emails in my inbox uh that say I I loved grit and you know, here's why and thank you uh for every one that says like uh I don't like this message and I think you're wrong. Maybe it's 100 to one. um but the value of that one is priceless and I guess the question is like do I have the courage to read it um or respond to it.

So this book I do think was a way for me to widen the aperture to point out what I think a lot of critics have usefully and correctly pointed out. Um they may not like that I have pointed out that there's an agency element to this. So maybe I'll get another, you know, sociologist who sits down next to me at a meeting and is still shaking with anger. maybe a different kind of anger but uh but it is it is important and this topic Dan I think is overlooked.

I mean if you want to talk about ratios I think there are 100 books on like how you can change the inside game um of your thinking for every one that talks about how you as an individual can start to change your situation. Let me pick up on uh something you mentioned earlier about your husband in the wake of the uh financial crisis reaching out and and surrounding himself with mentors because that this seems simultaneously really important but also touches on a subject we've been um uh weaving in and out of throughout this conversation which is privilege.

Mentors are incredibly important. I'd love to hear you say more about about that. Uh but not all of us know the right people to create an advisory board. Uh so yeah, how would we go about doing that if we're not super well connected? You know, Jason, I have to say, um was privileged to have a father who was also a real estate developer, um who was still alive at the time of the financial crisis and was, you know, rather beloved um in that community. And so that did open, I think, doors that wouldn't have been opened uh to somebody else.

We're on theme here. If we're talking about privilege, many of my mentors I met through my very uh first psychology mentor, Marty Celigman. You know, when your PhD adviser is the father of positive psychology um and the author of learned optimism um and you know the ideator behind many many important discoveries in psychological science, you find that the doors are open when you introduce them yourself as as their student. Um, so how do you do it if you don't have uh, you know, that kind of network already?

Well, let me tell you about some emails that I've gotten, Dan. Um, they come sometimes, uh, completely uh, out of the blue uh, from strangers that I've never met. Um, so it's not like my aunt says that you could talk to me or, you know, your old college roommate while I happen to be their nephew. You know, these are emails um, that reach me. I mean, sometimes I I'll be completely honest. I try to make my email address relatively obscure on the internet because I am an inbox zero girl and like the more widely my email is circulated, the longer it takes me to get to inbox zero.

But these individuals sometimes introduce themselves to me uh with no personal connection um and nothing more [clears throat] impressive other than to just share with me what they're thinking. I'm thinking of one I just got the other day, a young man named Miguel. He wants to be a real estate lawyer. I don't even know what that is, Dan, but I think I could figure it out from real estate and lawyer. Um, he's of Cuban descent. He has, you know, a very strong connection to his Cuban Cuban heritage.

He has these sort of business ambitions that are related but separate from real estate law. He writes me this very um um beautiful note and at the end, you know, he says like, "Thank you so much. Just wanted you to get this." Um, I wrote back. I will also say that if Miguel asks um for a conversation, the answer is yes. There is this way that you can meet complete strangers uh which is to ask them for what the Hollywood producer Brian Graaser calls curiosity conversations.

Um will every Dan Harris write back to your email and say absolutely I will spend 15 minutes talking to you about whatever you want and however I can be helpful for those 15 minutes. Not every Dan Harris is going to write back to you. Not every Oprah Winfrey is going to write back to you, but I think you send out 10 of these emails that introduce yourself and make a very humble request for five minutes if 15 seems too much. Um, with your cell phone number and you know just why it is that you think that would be so helpful.

I will be shocked if you get no positive replies, particularly if you shoot slightly more to the level of like people who probably don't get a hundred emails a day like that. Um, but I think the the power of that is um illustrated nicely, but by an email that my husband got um I don't know, five or more years ago. Young man uh played football at a local college. Um was interested in getting into real estate, didn't know anything about it, asked very politely for a quick conversation where if Jason would be so generous, he would love to learn about Jason's own path.

Jason took the call. He liked this guy whose name is Colin so much that by the end Jason heard himself saying, "Do you want to come work for me?" I mean, oh my gosh, let's see. I don't have a job. How about for the summer? That summer internship became a longer internship. And now Colin is working with Jason full-time. So, I'm not saying that every fairy tale ends this way, but you don't have to be famous. You don't have to be wealthy or super educated to send a polite note to someone that you want to make a connection with.

I guarantee that somebody if you send out enough of those notes will reach back back and say yes. We have this new closing segment that I want to get to in a minute. But before I get to that, uh, let me ask you this. Is there something you were hoping we would get to in this interview that we have not yet? You know, I we could talk about like Victor Frankle if you want or Maslo, but no. Well, I mean, I think every conversation, Dan, is like it's best to be whatever it is.

So, I I personally don't feel like the goal of this conversation is to like give the readers or listeners like a complete outline. Um, so, you know, I think this has been great. Really, really fun for me. That's not the right word, but I Yeah, I think it's been great. Let's do this little segment that we we're calling what's good where we talk about like something, you know, could be a book, could be a you did mention a book about Abraham Lincoln earlier, it could be um a TV show, could be a song, could be um I don't know, some new little habit you've integrated into your life that you uh think is worth recommending.

Tony Morrison. Tony Morrison is good. I just finished Song of Solomon. Tony Morrison is the kind of writer I would not consider myself literary enough as a reader to read Tony Morrison. Uh when I was a freshman at Harvard, the book that we were all supposed to read was Beloved by Tony Morrison. I read that and I was like what? Like what is this baby alive or is this not what? Like I just it was too hard for me. But a few months ago, maybe weeks actually, I was riding down the elevator from my publishers's office at Simon and Schustster to the lobby uh of Rockefeller Center uh in New York City.

And the young editor who happened to be also riding the elevator with me was introduced in about two seconds as, "Oh, by the way, this is the promising new editor. We have elevator door shut." So, I'm turning to this young woman who's decades younger than me, and I said, "Okay, well, if you're the most promising young editor here, uh, what should I read?" And she said, "Tony Morrison." I told her as we were descending down, it was like wrote, you know, floor 22, floor 21. I was like, "I am not good enough as a reader to read Tony Morrison." She thought for a moment and she said, "Start with Song of Solomon." Got down to the lobby and um, I just finished it um, two days ago.

Uh, and it is a beautiful book. I won't say that I completely understand it but I decided to start at the beginning and read it again. It is a beautiful book. It is a beautiful beautiful book which we don't have a lot of time to talk about. This is I think we've done this segment now like three or four times and every time uh the per the guest has recommended something high-minded and I've replied with something uh not at all high-minded. So I'm going to keep that tradition going.

Oh, also Trader Joe's spanicopa. How's that for low lowbrow? Trader Joe spanicopa. Amazing. I love sneaking in a supplemental reco. Um, and so yes, that's awesome. Trader Joe's spanicopa duly noted. Make sure you cook it enough. You know, put it in the oven, make sure it's really brown, let it cool, don't burn yourself. Going to be great. That would be a good accompaniment for what I'm about to recommend, which is a new, well, I don't know if it'll be new by the time this uh airs, but a new, as of this recording, uh, docu series on HBO called Monsters of God.

Wait, what's that about? It's a crazy docu. I love I loved I loved doing this as a journalist when I was a journalist and I love watching uh what I'm about to describe. When somebody when you dive into a subculture and this is by the guy who made Tiger King, which was on Netflix and got huge during the pandemic about a guy who was doing what I found to be some pretty aborant things with animals and became known as the Tiger King and then went off to prison.

Anyway, he now dives into uh in Monsters of God into uh the illegal reptile trade. Um and uh if you're sensitive to the plight of animals as I am, um there will be some things in there that bum you out, but mostly it's just an incredibly well-made dive into a world populated by beautiful animals, but really quirky, unusual, um kind of broken human beings. And uh like I said, the film making is incredible. Um and I highly recommend it. Monsters of God. Okay, noted. And documentaries are my favorite genre, Dan.

I hope that's not too high brow to say, but you know, documentaries are like pizza. I mean, how c bad can they be? There's like a base level, which is pretty good. Uh my son was watching it. My son's 11 was watching it with me and my cousin Andy was staying with us. Um and he's was complaining about how he hates documentaries and um What? Yeah, I know. But I I agree with you and may maybe because I kind of was in the documentary business for so long essentially I love watching them especially music documentaries but um I'll take I'll take reptiles.

He'll grow into it. He's 11. Let's give him a little time. Yeah. Yes. For now it's Marvel. Angela, such a pleasure to talk to you. Just please remind everybody of the name of your book and your prior book or anything else you want people to know about before I let you go. Dan, the new book is called Situated. Find the people and places that bring out your best. I have really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much. Total pleasure. Great job. It's always great to talk to you.

I want to thank everybody who works so hard to make this show. 10% Happier is produced by Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasil. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme. Also, one quick ask before I let you go. Head on over, please, to danharris.com to sign up for my weekly newsletter. Every Monday, I drop a little bit of goodness into your inbox.

Mondays, especially Monday mornings, can be super stressful. So, that is when I drop in one useful nugget that you can operationalize in your life immediately, either from ancient wisdom like Buddhism or from modern science. It's short. It's easy to read. It's worth it. It's free. Sign up at danharris.com.