Willpower Expert: The Secret To Effortless Discipline - Angela Duckworth

Key Takeaway

Stop treating every stalled goal as a willpower problem. Today, remove one point of friction from a habit you want to repeat: lay out gym clothes, put your phone in another room, place a book on your desk, or schedule a weekly check-in with peers. Willpower can handle a one-off challenge, but consistency comes from a situation that makes the desired action visible, easy, and socially supported.

Episode Overview

Angela Duckworth revisits the limits of grit, arguing that persistence matters but is incomplete without designing circumstances that make effort pay off. She and Chris Williamson explore environmental cues, peer groups, mentors, burnout, cultural influences, and why high achievers deliberately create situations that support consistent action.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Willpower Expert: The Secret To Effortless Discipline - Angela Duckworth from Modern Wisdom. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

People of the uk and ireland if you want to come and see me live tickets are very limited for my life to this october but they are still available dublin is already sold out however if you're a fan of modern wisdom if you love psychology philosophy human nature personal development and you want to hear stories i definitely can't tell on the internet and come and see me live this october chris williamson dot live is got all of the tickets dublin is completely gone but there are limited tickets everywhere else i'll see you soon chris williamson.

You wrote one of the defining personal development books of the decade. What's changed in your world view since then. What is a psychologist i really did spend the first half of my career trying to understand the importance of individual effort to achieving excellence and i wrote a book about it and i recently read that book and i wanted to know whether i change my mind i mean you know i continue to do science, other scientists getting people to keep the and you know what i don't disagree with the word and great i really don't other people can but i i don't i feel like there is a final common path to becoming great that requires consistency over time and that's the message of grit.

And you know the reason i i embarked on this in the first place is that. I knew that i had achieved what i had achieved to through effort and not through natural talent so there was a personal dimension and it was my vocation my calling as a scientist but as a scientist i continue to ask the question you know like what else what else is there and also where does this come from right so, your dna will incline you to be grittier or less gritty but we also know that it's not just your dna so i also wanted to know like why would somebody be passionate and persevering and this curiosity.

Inevitably leads you outside of the mind of a high achiever and into their situation it leads you naturally to like who's around them what's around them where are they and so the second book is about. Everything that inclines a person to devote individual effort and also everything that makes individual effort pay off when does great stop being useful what are the limits of great. You know i think the personal reason why i wrote this second book is is that as somebody who has gotten very far in life through her own effort.

She has asked the question you know when is it not paying off and i will tell you when you are trying hard and you're not making the progress you want well if you're me at a certain age you just try harder and wake up earlier. Grind harder and then stay later right assumption. If i'm trying hard if i think i'm trying hard and i'm not getting results yeah it must be that i think i'm trying hard but i'm not trying hard and then i can try harder right it's kind of like natural you're like oh then you know do twenty percent more right you know you're not getting where you are like.

Turn up the volume rates like a inverse parkinson's law not the work expands to fill the time given for it but if it expands to make something happen right and sometimes that works right cuz sometimes you are in a hundred percent and sometimes like yeah like you know you're lifting weights and you just like exert a little more effort. So i feel like this trick that we learn you know try harder is not wrong but it's incomplete and i think the limits i mean you ask me like what are the limits when you are trying hard.

And then harder and you're not making progress you have to do something that was not natural for me which is to ask whether the situation itself. Was not the right situation you know to me it felt like. First of all i don't know that it would occur to me like you know i was looking word right it's like you know what can i do i don't want to look out word that was reflexive to me i'm an awesome kind of yeah like well i'll use the word cowardly you can use the word like.

It is not embarrassing and shameful just felt like being a loser to you know ask what are you saying that you can't do on your own oh you need a helping hand you need this crutch in order to be able to get across the line exactly it would be more noble if you suffered more. Yeah yeah right and it's you know the hard way is the best way right and so that that like that rule of thumb right like effort is everything if it's not working try harder i think it's dangerous i think it's incomplete and i think by being incomplete you can end up in the wrong place.

Do you know why i think one of the reasons why i think that asymmetry maybe that people have has been so prevalent in the modern world because of the fact that you wrote a. Massive book about it i think a big part of it is that on average more people probably do needs to be told to put their emotions to one side and just work harder i think that if you were to take an aggregate if you take a hundred people yes how many people like actually just need to turn up the volume.

I'm on their effort and how many people actually need to get situated you would say like more people need just like not even that that i think far more people are leaving a lot on the table when it comes to how hard they're pressing the gas tank full stop and you are always going to have more agency over just. Effort applied like it's immediate it's there right now right i can just do that i can just do one more rap now i can just stick about for another thirty minutes now and.

The problem is this a selection effect which is the kind of people that listen to podcasts like this and read books like yours. Already in the group who are probably turning themselves inside out thinking that they're not doing enough already so this is what i call advice hyper responders so advice hyper responders yes yes they basically exaggerate that which they are predisposed to already as opposed to correcting the imbalance. Which i think actually so you might say that about vice hyper responders i mean. You could argue that that's just human nature that are our strengths get raced that are starting to get stronger right well yeah cuz you like the problem with every physical therapy problem that anybody ever had rights like oh you're using your like glutes and like because you have strong glutes you like you're not using.

The other muscles right like the hamstring so so i think that it could be a general truth right that if you have gotten far in life through effort and maybe you're right that numerically like okay that's not everyone like maybe that's the minority like then it's those people maybe not a hundred out of a hundred. Who knows what the ratio is like those people are the ones who like. Make the mistake of just like pushing harder instead of finding a situation where their effort has higher return bingo yeah they gravitate toward a message that reinforces the world view already yes and it also confirms what the reason that most people are doing that which is the fear of being the inverse.

But the person who's already adamant why i'm just so lazy inside dude you haven't missed a gym session like three weeks but like you notice when you have a cupcake as opposed to the guy that hasn't left the couch on an evening time for like two months right heat for him advice just goes through him like he's a poltergeist yeah whereas like that you did the imbalances and corrected the predisposition gets exaggerated that's basically how this and it's so how do you feel about these advice hyper responders do you feel like they are.

It's good is it bad like what do you think about it just it just it just is i think you know the men who hear the message don't be pushy with women unfortunately in a post me to world what's happened there is the guys that were just blowing through boundaries and being assholes they posted past that advice completely unchanged while the guys who probably could have done with a little bit more confidence to go to the woman i know i knew i was too much i knew that i was too much i see it everywhere i see this absolutely everywhere.

That's why i'm saying it's like a general truth it's not just about like effort and go it's across it's across the board strength is it is in a way weakness yes strengthen your fear will be reinforced by whatever and this is to to sort of bring it into land in a meritocracy. Where you are your outcomes which means that the winners is deserving of their successes and the losers is deserving of their losses what do you want to own my outcomes right i want to know that if i put my fucking foot on the pedal yeah it's on me.

Not gonna rely on anyone at my society individual responsibility man i'm gonna sigma lone ranger wolf my way to the top like it's alluring what do you think about my thesis that individual effort matters. But what do you think about the thesis like and your situation matters enormously and much more than people think i mean do you feel like it's a weak message do you feel like it's you know what do you think. No i don't think it's a weak message at all i think it's a important counterbalance to kind of the prevailing personal development message of the last ten to fifteen years or so like even when i think about if you had to like give a one liner for the personal advice that is given for last night like what's your perspective like what is what is that message fuck your feelings just work harder.

Just do it fuck your feelings just work harder yeah that's that's been trying to curse less so you're like a terrible influence i'm sorry i'm gonna be dropping i'm afflicted i'm afflicted with british it sounds much better with your accent so thank you anything you want yeah the cussing thing i do need to dial it back there is research actually that shows that like it is actually just a sign of being sincere because like you're not editing so you know meanwhile your. Prefrontal cortex is stepping into a boy with children and parents and so that's a totally different speed run the development.

Speed during their education they're gonna start using you're a precocious developer here i see the languages come on since you're a prodigy gonna be like so the last ten or fifteen years i agree there's i think there are two messages honestly i think there's one which is like just do it right. I do think there's another one which is a little more nuanced right so so for me as a scientist i'm not a journalist i'm a scientist i study human behavior and i study human behavior change and i think i speak for pretty much every behavioral scientist when we say that.

Your response you can change directly but you can also change your thoughts and if you change your thoughts then you don't have to use willpower because your thoughts like. If you say to yourself like i want to go to the gym then you don't need to use willpower to go to the gym so you can either change. Your will like at the last is like i'm gonna force myself to just go to the gym right or earlier than that you can change your thoughts you can reframe it you can we think it you can have a paradigm shift like i want to go to the gym is my temple like i'm the sort of person i think to me the last fifteen years.

Personal development advice is either been like just do it or just change your thoughts so that you want to do it and i think the the the message of this book is. I think blindingly obvious to people who study human behavior for a living which is that. Our thoughts are much more influence by our circumstances by like who you're talking to what they just said i'm like you know is the can of soda to your right next to your elbow or not where's your phone these.

Elements of your situation are much more in charge of your thoughts than you think people think they're in charge of their own thoughts and very often the situation is in charge of your thoughts you think. People with discipline or high willpower actually more disciplined or do they have they just designed lives that required less of it so i think one of the like signal discoveries the last twenty years is that. We assume that people go to the gym like and they go for the run and they get their work done and they're not procrastinating and they control their temper and they have five year goals but they actually break down the five year goals into like one year goals and any progress on them.

They return emails like we think of those people is having enormous willpower and twenty or thirty years ago that's what scientists would also say. I think the fact that people have willpower i mean what is a thing i mean there's a part of your brain at the front that is able to suppress or elevate impulses for the rest of your brain like you can will yourself to do things but the discovery is that highly successful people are not using willpower. Highly successful people are doing exactly what you said which is their arranging their lives so they don't need to use willpower i mean it's it's kind of the opposite of like brute force and being like a general right you know sun tzu said you don't win a war through brute force you do it strategically and you do it the law is really the law of least effort right so like how can you set up a situation where you.

Think i want to go to the gym it's like well for me i'll tell you it's like this trivial. If i have my gym clothes out right the night before i mean i keep my gym clothes in the fourth drawer of my bureau it's not that hard to reach into the fourth like it's not like i have to climb a ladder right so in the morning i could reach into the fourth drawer of my bureau and pull out a top and a pair of shorts and i'd be ready to go to the gym.

It would take me i think three seconds and almost no calories right so how can that make a difference to whether i go to the gym or not. If the night before i reach into the fourth drawer and i take out the shorts and the top and i laid on top of the bureau i will tell you it makes a huge difference it makes enormous especially when i'm traveling by the way because when i'm home i have a routine but like. The difference is that first of all it's a visual cue right like our attention is just whatever we see right there's an expression what you see is all there is.

If i see it i think oh right i could go to the gym and that micro friction the micro friction of like i could open the drawer i could like i could hunt around i could like find it is enough to make the difference and so to me the. The insight is yeah don't wait for willpower like that's the worst way to change human behavior again i think i speak on behalf of angela duckworth and i speak on on behalf of scientists who study this like everyone i know.

And also if you're going to take the message of the last ten to fifteen years it's like it's all in your mind at your mindset so forth what books do you need to have visible what. What quotes you have you who do you need to be around to give you the thoughts that you want to give you the behavior on like that's the three boxes model the situation is box one your thoughts are box two and your response to your thoughts is box three that's interesting is that so that's a big change you think of the last couple of decades for me i think my you know i sound like a politician when i say like well i don't it's not a contradiction academic diplomacy is showing.

It's it's it's really like i'm i'm i'm trying to be honest in a way that doesn't sound like i. you know, and making it up because it is truth. You know, when I was in graduate school, like the very first thing you learn is about the power of the situation. There is a book that I don't think a lot of people have read, but some people have read. I know Malcolm Gladwell read it and it changed his life. The book is called The Person and the Situation, and it is not a bestseller.

It is written by two academics who never went on podcasts, right? They are Dickness Bitt and Lee Ross, and every graduate student in psychology has to learn what's in that book. And what's in that book is that people have the experience of being intentional, goal-directed, right? Why did you do that? Like, why did you drink that? Why did you say that? You know, what was in your mind, right? And that's only partly true. The book about The Person and the Situation is really about the power of the situation over the person.

The book mostly talks about how, whether you're altruistic or, you're gonna make me curse, or not altruistic, like a total fill-in-the-blank, do it. Asshole. Okay, whether you are one or the other. You could have said that in front of a kid. I could have said that, but like, I'm trying to. You just can't call the kid an asshole. It's slightly different. Yes, I don't do that either. That one I don't have a problem with. But it's very much, okay, so here's a study that is highlighted in The Person and the Situation that, again, like every graduate student in psychology learned.

It's called The Good Samaritan Study, right? And it actually literally takes place at a seminary. So these are people who are going to go into the ministry. It's their job to be altruistic. They're nothing like the- Predisposed to be lovely. Yeah, and that's like, they're predisposed, and it's like all they think about, right? So in The Good Samaritan Study, they basically have, in one condition, somebody who's obviously homeless and suffering, right? And they're there. In the other condition, that's also true. But in one condition, these good Samaritans, right?

These seminarians are like rushing to get to a next appointment, right? Like you give them a phone call, and they're supposed to. And another one, they don't. It's a trivial situational feature. It shouldn't affect their character, right? You didn't make them more altruistic by like calling them and saying like, oh, you have to be in this place at two o'clock. But it has a massive effect on whether they stop and help the person who needs help. So this is the kind of thing that all graduate students in psychology learn about, the hidden power of situations.

We feel like we're intentional, but we're much more reactive. Okay, you learn about that in graduate school. So I can't lie and say that I never knew about the power of the situation. But I do think that connecting this to excellence, like connecting this to agency, there are philosophers who have pointed out that the agency of the individual is located within. There are not many philosophers who say that you have agency over your circumstances, that whether you choose to have water next to you or whatever you're not trying to drink, soda, like is up to you.

I think that to me was an insight that I hadn't fully appreciated when I started out. It's a feedback mechanism as well, presumably, that you can engineer more agency, which means that you can engineer further, which means more able to, to, to, to. I think there are many examples of positive feedback cycles and in a way, when we're talking about like a strength becomes more of a strength, right? And a weakness becomes more, that's also a positive feedback cycle. Right, the Matthew effect, right? Like, you know, the rich get richer or whatever it is that you're doing.

So I do think situational agency begets situational agency. And it's not just that, but when you start to change your situation and you realize that you do have a responsibility to put things around you and to be around people who bring out your best, I think that encourages you to do more of the same. What are the environmental similarities that you discovered when studying world-class performers? Well, since we are in Austin, I will tell you that the signature example of grit would be Michael Phelps, right?

365 day a year swimmer for a 20 year career, right? And I had dinner with Michael Phelps' coach, Bob Bowman, who is a coach here now at UT Austin. And to me, the story of Michael Phelps is a perfect illustration of how grit is essential and how grit is not enough. And here's why. You can be as gritty as Michael Phelps. I really don't think there's anybody who's worked harder than Michael Phelps. And he's actually said that himself. He's like, I'm not gonna brag about a lot of things, but I will say that I don't think anybody swam harder than I did.

Like nobody practiced and trained. And it's not just the physical, by the way, but mental, something that Bob mentioned kind of like parenthetically last night. It's like, it's not just the mileage that he put into the pool and how, he would mentally visualize every competition, but not just what Bob asked him to do, which is to like imagine how you want the race to go, but he imagined all the ways the race could go and then like what he would do so that he was completely able to be like in the moment.

But then when you ask the question like, well, would Michael Phelps become, arguably the greatest athlete ever, because he's certainly the most decorated Olympic athlete by a stretch, right? Nobody's gonna approach this record that he has of 28 medals, 23 of them gold across a 20 year career. But you could also ask the question, was he situated, right? And absolutely. Okay, so let's consider that Michael Phelps was born 10 minutes, well, he's actually born an hour away from where Bob Bowman, who I think the greatest swimming coach in history happened to be, and he was then moved to be only 10 minutes away because Michael's sisters wanted to swim and they wanted to swim where all the best swimmers were.

So they started going to the North Baltimore Aquatic Center and that is where the best swimmers were. So the best team and also the best coaches, like the kind of youth aquatic center that like actually recruits nationally for coaches, which is why Bob Bowman moved from California to Baltimore. So it was a situation, he also had his mom. So he had ADHD as a diagnosis as a nine-year-old, I think. And he had this mom who was so situationally wise, she understood that in certain situations, Michael was a pain in the ass.

Look, by the end of this podcast, I'm just gonna be dropping F-bombs. But he was a pain in the ass, letters home, teachers saying like, this kid doesn't have potential, like he's also a disruption. But she knew that in the right situation, he would have complete focus and total effort. So that's the pool. I think these features of a situation, Baltimore Aquatic Center, a team of athletes who even at ages like nine, 10, 11, were used to the kind of practice that elite swimmers do. A coach who ends up being in the storybooks as like one of the greatest coaches ever.

You cannot explain Michael Phelps's achievements without talking about his situation. And then if you just look at subsequent things, I think Michael actually did have a lot of situational agency. When Bob Bowman moved from Baltimore, Michael Phelps had the good sense to follow him. He knew that he couldn't be the swimmer that he could be with Bob, unless he was with Bob. So I think there is a story that is not often told. You show me the paragon of grit, and if you keep looking, you will also find a situation that was their ally.

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Isn't that interesting? First off, an inversion of the athlete going with the coach as opposed to the coach going with the athlete because usually people think about the athlete as being the once-in-a-generation talent, but what Michael Phelps identified was that he would only be what he could be if he was around this particular guy. This particular, arguably once-in-a-generation coach. Also, what's kind of interesting, the word is situation. When people think about situation, it's kind of amorphous, it's big, it's ephemeral, but he'd found this singular, this one linchpin because he would have left his teammates, he would have left his home, he would have left his routine, his car.

Maybe the new pool's a little bit longer or colder or wider or something. Maybe the chlorine's slightly different or maybe he can't get the same kind of food or the raw milk that he was drinking on a weekend isn't available or he's not got his friends or his girl or whatever. It's like his situation was a guy. So how have you come to think about this? Because look, I really appreciate you saying, asking me for critique at the top. It seems like your career in academia has made you sort of wanting to hear things.

I was a little bit worried when I was like, Angela Duckworth's next book's gonna be about situation and environment design. I was a little worried when I first thought about that because I'm like, with a productivity background and spending a lot of time with David Allens getting things done and environment design, like you don't want to be distracted by your phone. Don't have it next to you on the table. I'm like, don't, it can't be, it can't be. And what I'm keen to do is to, everyone now understands that your environment sort of can influence you.

I want to move past like, don't have the chips in the house if you don't want to eat the fucking chips. Yeah, you're like, this I know. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that's great. But I want to go to, I want to get really deep on the environment design stuff. What is the cutting edge shit that makes the biggest difference that people don't already know? People know that they shouldn't live that far from their fucking gym, right? People know that they shouldn't. By the way, they don't necessarily do anything about it.

Right? So like, before we just skip over like, oh, everybody knows that like, you know, what's within your reach is what you're going to eat. Like, everybody knows that. How many people put that into practice? When I wrote the chapter on like, set up your space, I was like, blindingly obvious, but nobody's doing it. But I agree with you. There are also chapters on everybody knows it's important, but they don't think it's possible. I mean, there's other things, but before we skip past like, what's within reach, and I'll just say, I think in my research, by the way, when I ask Americans like, what's the best way to control your behavior?

They say it's to control the situation. Ask the same Americans, what do you do? They say they use willpower. Why? Well, then I asked follow up questions. I said, why? And one of the most common responses was, I want to be the sort of person who can do what they want because of their will, not because they need the situation. They don't want the situation to be a crutch. I think it needs a kind of a mark of character. Like, you don't want to be the kind of person who needs to take GLP-1s or to like, you know, you want to be the sort of person who doesn't need that, right?

So I think that that to me is at least part of the answer. But you asked the question like, what's not obvious, right? So let's get to that. Here's something that I think is not obvious. I think it is not obvious that by and large, you'll be more successful achieving your individual goals if you do it as part of a group. And I'm not talking about just sort of like, oh, being specifically on a swimming team. I'm literally talking about like, so somebody's trying to run a marathon, someone's trying to be a better public speaker, entrepreneur, start a company, become a better marketer, right?

If you ask the question, could I find other people who don't necessarily work with me on my project but are just striving for the same goals, also trying to run a marathon, also trying to go to the gym more, also trying to found a company, but maybe a different company, right? Research shows, and I think this is counter-cultural, research shows that you will be more successful on average if you do that in a flock, like as part of a tribe. And the reason I say it's counter-cultural is that DIY is the prevailing, like DIY is an expression, do-it-yourself was introduced more than 50 years ago, but it's now 50 times more common.

And when I see young people in particular, the things that they try to do, they try to do with their own individual effort. It doesn't necessarily occur to them to find other aspiring writers, like other aspiring whatever it is. And that to me is an insight that if I could go back in time, I think of young people that I've advised, and I'm trying to help them with their time management and their confidence and so forth. How often did I say, who else do you know that is trying to be a graduate student?

And how often did I say, let's help you find a group? Because it's easier in some ways if you're a swimmer because you join a team. I think it's less obvious, but just as transformative to do that for like quite literally any individual personal goal you have. What like? What are some of the non-obvious goals that people have used groups to help them with? So one of the examples that I found in my research on this was there was a group of surgeons, right? And it wasn't necessarily they were trying to be better surgeons, but surgery is like an all-consuming thing.

What they really wanted to do, they were all young men. They were just finishing, I think like the part of their specialized training. So they're all going into orthopedic surgery. They met at a conference because that's what they did for their life. But they had a dinner and they said that they had a different goal other than being world-class surgeons, which they all, by the way, ended up being. Like they're all chaired professors at like the best hospital systems in the country. They had another goal.

They wanted to be good fathers and they wanted to be good husbands. And they wondered how they would do that, right? And they were living in different cities. They had their own lives. And at this point, they're strangers, right? But they decided to have dinner at the next conference and the next one. And then they decided to have a group text thread. And you ask these men who are now at retirement age, how different would your lives be if you had tried to become world-class orthopedic surgeons and achieve this other goal of being men?

You know, being men who showed up for their family. And so what's the road not taken? And each of these men will say that the road not taken is not the best road, that they are, that their lives were transformed. And then they gave examples, you know, they've seen each other through true tragedy. and every possible you know personal struggle and it was because they had this group and it really was nothing more or less than a group text thread and then getting together a few times you know with some increasing frequency right so now not just at conferences and so forth when I think about my own career like when I interviewed them I was like oh what about me like I don't have that and I will tell you that I have room to grow too because I have collaborators I have a team that works in my lab I don't have what these men have like I don't have this like group of people who are struggling with the same professional and personal challenges you know it is essentially creating Alcoholics Anonymous for yourself like it's creating a mutual aid society which is how Alcoholics Anonymous sometimes calls them so it's like I don't have that and I think I think it would even for me at 56 and a lot to be grateful for I think it would transform my life and I'm actually trying to start one I like actually reached out to these women who were like what like all in their 50s actually one in their high 40s or maybe she's 50 and I said like I interviewed these surgeons I want to try to do what I'm what I'm trying to do but I would like to try to do it like somehow in some kind of fellowship or community with you.

Do you want to make the Avengers assemble of high-powered lady academics? They are really high-powered I have to say they I think I think it's very important if you're gonna decide to like start a group right you can join a group if you can find a group I think you just join a group right like you're trying to marathon and you just find the local running club they're apparently over 60 in Philadelphia so like there's got to be a running club wherever you are and there's probably a group of people who like want to write a book or whatever but if you're trying to find a group like these orthopedic surgeons could not find a group but they could just join of like other elite orthopedic surgeons who cared about family and so forth well then they start one right if you're gonna do that I think you should probably look for two things I do think stage of life like the difference between a mentor and a peer is that a mentor is above you they are farther than you they're above you and honestly they're usually older than you so I think finding somebody who's at the same stage of life and then who are really like like-minded and so yes you won't be surprised that the women that I reach out to are all like very accomplished women and they're all around my age you know what it makes me think about the difference between reading fiction and nonfiction with the mentor versus peer relationship so in a mentor relationship it's largely what unidirectional right the advice is going to come it's going to come from them to you but in the same way as reading fiction can often teach you more stuff than reading nonfiction does because you understand the protagonist motivations and okay well what does that mean and it causes you to reflect it's more indirect in the same way when you've got a peer group indirectly the advice that you need to give somebody reveals something about yourself to yourself which is by the way part of the magic of a a right alcoholics anonymous as they say like you only keep it when you give it away I mean there is something in the advice giving that is self-awareness well I mean how you mentioned before about the identity element of personality right I am the sort of person that goes to the gym I am the sort of person that does the thing like it is hard to proselytize about this thing that somebody else should be doing without it at least somehow throwing into sharp contrast the fact that you're not doing it yourself I actually did do a random assignment study where we asked people to give advice as kids right like you know how do you not procrastinate like and so that was the whole advice giving is an intervention exactly and you know yeah there was it went up so like basically in the treatment group which was like you know in a few minutes like just write down the things that you would advise other students to do like that was the whole thing like we didn't tell them anything they weren't even giving it to a student it was they were told to like give it to soon and actually we don't lie in our studies so we actually did give it to other students because it was actually good advice it turns out and then the students who are randomly assigned to give advice and then the the control group was just a control group it wasn't that they received it was just a control group that like didn't do this they they actually did better themselves I do think there's something about like RT I think it's partly by the way self-awareness like you you basically do some reflection and then also there's a kind of like well I just said it so like I should probably do it yeah like a kind of consistency like you want to be a hypocrite yeah right but I do think your point about what is the difference between a peer and a mentor is profound and I guess if I if I if I wanted to sum up what I just said about like what's something non-obvious about your situation like are you doing things alone and more and more Americans are doing that over the last 15 or 20 years we're spending more time alone in every category of age and particularly with young people but it's not just young people we're also spending less time out of the house it turns out like by over an hour so over the last 20 years we're spending like you know less time just not under our own roofs which means that we're very likely alone but we're it's sort of isolated right from the rest of society and a new finding that was just published not by me but by you know scientists who specialize in this we're speaking about 300 fewer words a day so we're sort of becoming a isolated silent oh okay you didn't you don't mean vocabulary breath you mean volume of words of words over the last say 15 years the same thing is not true for me the podcaster in the room maybe you are like you bucking the trend but without your data you know what it's like when Bill Gates walks into a stadium and everybody on average becomes a billionaire I walk I walk into the room and everyone on average becomes a podcaster I uh Andrew Yang in the American time you survey came up with four stats that I thought were fascinating between 2003 and 2024 the amount of time that Americans spent attending or hosting a social event declined by 50% among young people aged 15 to 24 they spent 70% less time attending or hosting parties in 2024 than in 2023 men who watch television now spend seven hours doing so for every hour they spend hanging out with another person outside of the house and number four this was the most insane the average female pet owner spends more time with her pet than all humans put together right I didn't know about it's just I think I knew about the first three of those stats I didn't know about the fourth one but like this is the painting of the you know this is the picture right of like modern American life and one reason I wrote a book on the situation is that I don't think the default settings of the modern world are good I really don't I think this trend toward isolation towards being on your phone all the time you know being in some little segregated part of the world where like you only interact with people who are basically agreeing with you like I I don't think it's good and so if you're going to change your life and if you believe the science that says to change yourself you change your situation the imperative is even more urgent is what I'm saying isn't it interesting that you've had to sneak this pro-social thing that has happened for the entirety of human history and is the single best intervention according to the Harvard longevity study people in making you live longer relationships it'll improve your performance so maybe you should do it you know what I mean we have to sneak it into the meritocracy somehow you know I am NOT a great commentator on like how you know my work fits into the rest of the partly because and if you knew me well you would really believe me I know what I know and I really don't know most things oh my god like current events like basic world history so I can't necessarily fit my but I am a study or I am a student of human excellence and so you know you could say like oh the only way that somebody's gonna listen to you talk about relationships is because like they think it'll help them achieve more in this meritocracy and you may be right but I only know what I know and I am a psychologist who studies high achievers and I can say it's a student of high achievers that their relationships their mentors which we haven't talked about too much but their peers like they are arguably more important than their physical environment but I don't want to discount environment either somewhere along the way low energy just gets accepted as a part of getting older turns out there's a reason for that as we age on mitochondria the parts of ourselves that power us become weaker and make less energy which is why I'm such a huge fan of timeline they've developed this that helps to clear out your damaged mitochondria so your cells can actually renew themselves timeline is backed by over a decade of research and has more than 50 patents and is the number one recommended mitochondrial supplement on the planet this isn't just theory in clinical trials people saw mitochondrial renewal increased by more than 40% in just 16 weeks along with improvements in their overall energy I've been using it for over two years since my doctor recommended it to me way before I partnered with timeline and eat your heart out Martin Shkreli because they've just dropped the price and it now starts at $99 best of all there is a 30-day money-back guarantee plus free shipping in the US plus they ship internationally and right now you can get that $99 price with an additional 20% off by going to the link in the description below heading to timeline dot-com slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom at checkout that's timeline dot-com slash modern wisdom a modern wisdom at checkout okay hit me up about mentors what did you learn about mentors so you can you know dig up stats on like you know your likelihood of becoming and for example an award-winning scientist is like two times to four times larger if you're mentored by an award-winning scientist you know the the the kind of oh a mentor makes a difference I don't really know that there are a lot of people who need convincing like how many people would say you know it doesn't matter if like Oprah Winfrey is going to mentor you as you try to make your way like in media or like it doesn't matter whether you have an editor if you're a writer like I think the intuition that mentors matter is common what is rare I think is the idea that you can proactively be a mentor magnet you can you can attract mentors and I will tell you that not every high achiever but most that I have studied is a mentor magnet and what am I talking about the sort of person who other high achieving people who are farther down the path want to mentor and you know not everyone is equally mentorable so what are these people like like let me give you a very specific example I think I think the situation is so abstract honestly that like you know you don't know what to do with it because it's like everything so let me be concrete I got a email in my inbox on May 13th 2013 from Cody Coleman I wrote about him in grit I also wrote about him in situated and he's the only person I put in both books I wrote about him in grit why because in that early email in 2013 he introduced himself as somebody whose life could only be explained through passion and perseverance he was born to a mother who was serving time in jail so he was literally born in a prison outside of Trenton New Jersey and from those inauspicious beginnings you know a childhood just sheer chaos right like the police police are being called like you know every other week because of you know domestic disturbances there was a menagerie of cats and dogs he has severe asthma you could hardly breathe his grandmother was taking care of him but she was basically losing her mind so you know he these are not the circumstances that you would think and the one day he'll graduate from MIT prototypical excellence I mean this is the thing he had this this remarkable escape from from poverty so when he emailed me he said I watched her TED talk and I think I think you have explained a lot about my life and I would like to talk to you right so you basically was asking me for a curiosity conversation I think that's that's the term that is used for like I'd like to learn something from you right and again not a term well not again it's a term I want to just hasten to say like I didn't come up with it but I think it's a perfect description so in that email he expresses curiosity he also expresses preparation because he wasn't writing me something that like it took two seconds like he had watched what I had he had read a little bit of what I had written and then he signed off with something that I think is signature to mentor magnets he said if there's anything that I can do that might be helpful in any way like I would love to do that right and by the way he was something like 20 or 21 years old when he wrote this it's not Shakespeare it was just sincere he signed his name and you know what of all the emails in my inbox I replied to that one so who is this person who's prepared who has something to say who wants a few minutes of my time who is offering to be helpful so to be a mentor magnet is to be the sort of person where you know the universe does reach out to you because you're mentorable what happens next so I meet Cody I find out about a story I write about it and grit by the way he continues to live so I can tell you what happened to him so after he reached MIT and he graduated with a four nine out of five he went to Google from there he went to Stanford he got his PhD at Stanford in computer science he was the third black recipient of a PhD in computer science in the university's history and now he's the CEO of an AI startup that according to Forbes magazine you know maybe valued at a billion dollars like at some point in the future so why does he play a role in the second book he gave a TED talk himself it turns out years after I gave mine and he gave it in Palo Alto to a Stanford audience and because it was a Stanford audience he had no problem like putting graphs up on the PowerPoint slide behind him so he has a graph up and there's a gray line that's gently sloping up or over upward and he says that's what most people think you know you meet me here and you think like you know he did better and better he went to MIT and so forth like that's not my life this is my life and there's a red exponential curve right talk about the Matthew effect when there is a flywheel when good begets better and better be gets best you actually get exponential growth this is what he said I think of my life in five-year chapters in each chapter my situation was better than the last and you can only explain my exponential improvement not linear but exponential if you really understand my situations and how each one right so from his high school to MIT from MIT to Google from Google to Stanford now to like San Jose Silicon Valley that the opportunities multiplied and the support multiplied so so I think I think you can be a mentor magnet what did Cody not do he didn't email me and asked me to be his mentor mentor magnets do not email people and say hi Chris could you be my mentor hello you know like they don't do that they ask for a short conversation They offer to be helpful, they express gratitude, and very often that will lead to another conversation.

What they also do, by the way, is work with you on something. So mentor magnets have a habit of asking whether they can contribute to a project that the mentor is already working on. When Cody reiterated his offer to help, I initially thought no, and then I realized I had a project that was ongoing where I was trying to teach little kids to be gritty, and I thought, oh, this is perfect, I'll have Cody Coleman record a video about how from very humble beginnings he got to where he got through passion and perseverance.

So we worked on that project for about three months, which is about, that's what I call the mentors for a season. You go from a mentor for a reason, can I have a short conversation, to a mentor for a season. He did that, and then he continued to just be a grateful, curious, wonderful person. When I read his PhD dissertation, which was on AI, and I didn't understand the math, so I pretty much skipped the acknowledgments, I was like, oh, no, I'm not going to understand this.

His acknowledgments are three single-spaced pages. He thanks by full name over 200 people, like dozens of teammates or fellow students. There were 17 administrators of the computer science department at Stanford that he thanks by full name. Cody Coleman is a paragon of grit. Cody Coleman is a mentor magnet, and Cody Coleman is a perfect example of like, yes, you need grit, but you also need to have the agency to navigate into better and better situations. What's the relationship between grit and your new insight around situations and burnout?

Having experienced burnout, and I'll be honest, when I used to teach burnout, because burnout is a word that a psychologist named Christina Maslach coined. She was studying burnout. It has a very specific definition. Depression is you're depressed, it's pervasive. Burnout is specifically about work. When you experience this trifecta of exhaustion and also like a weird sort of dissociation or like I'm not really present, and finally, kind of a helplessness, this is the trifecta of burnout. That's what burnout is. It's an emotional state characterized by I'm exhausted, I feel strangely not connected to my work anymore, and also nothing I do is working and I have no agency.

That's what burnout is. I would stand up in front of PowerPoint slides and I would tell my MBA students, for example, and my undergraduates about burnout and the psychology of burnout and Christina Maslach's research and what we know about burnout. It was completely abstract to me. I could have been talking about Mars. I'm like, you know, Mars is a planet. Then I experienced burnout in my own life. If I'm completely honest, I experienced burnout while I was writing this book. And why? Well, first, what? I was experiencing exhaustion, this weird sort of like I'm sort of doing this and I'm doing it seven days a week and I'm doing it from before dawn to after midnight, but also I'm kind of like the opposite of the flow state.

I'm just like, I'm like weirdly not in the moment, right? And a real feeling of sort of like helplessness, like I work harder and harder, nothing's happening. So I was experiencing this emotional state of burnout. What I think was happening is what we were talking about at the very beginning of this conversation. It wasn't going well. I just tried harder and it's still like I just kept digging the hole deeper. And I think the danger of only thinking that grit is your superpower and also being ashamed or negligent of, you know, the change in the situation that would make things better.

Like I think I think what happened was I should have asked for help. And I'll tell you, I asked for it too late. I also did. You said like, let's not talk about the physical situation is kind of obvious. Here's something that wasn't obvious. I was working at home seven days a week in my pajamas. Like I literally think voluntarily gone back into Covid. It was exactly. It was actually an extension of the pandemic lifestyle. Everybody else went to back to like civilization. I decided to stay, you know, I thought it would be better for concentration, self-imposed misery.

It was it was awful because I was like socially, you know, I was putting in solitary confinement by by choice. But I didn't ask for help early enough. I didn't ask for help often enough. I didn't put myself in the company of other people. What would the help have looked like? Well, I had a person that I met three years into writing this. By the way, this book took five years to write. Right. Congratulations. Yeah. It's on being sane. I, you know, I may live a shorter life because of it, but it took five years to write.

But of course, you know, the research took longer. But the hard part for me was the writing three years into it when things are going terribly right. I'm not sleeping. The stress levels were like I had cortisol just like coursing through my body. So I would go to sleep. It came to the point where I'd go to sleep at ten thirty and my body's fight or flight response would wake me up at eleven thirty. And then I would just be awake all night and then start the next day exhausted, but also trying to work harder.

Right. So I've been there. Have you been there? Have you experienced burnout, by the way? OK, well, if I finish the story, you tell me yours. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. You get your rock bottom out and I'll get mine. All right. I'm going to get. OK, so I'm telling my husband I'm retiring. I, I, I, I literally was fantasizing about being a pastry chef. I don't even eat. I don't even eat pastry. I'm like, why would I be a pastry chef? I mean, there are all these like escapist fantasies.

You know, I had a friend named Julie who was like, you know, you seem a little bit stressed. I barked. She was like, do you want to go skiing? I was like, I can't go skiing. She's like, you know, do you want to go for a walk? Like it came down to she was just sort of negotiating and like she's like, can I take you for a walk for an hour? No, I can't take a walk for. This is a sign of burnout. Like, no, I can't take a walk for an hour because I need that hour to work because this is going so poorly.

I met somebody who I asked for help. I got sort of set up his his name is Rick Cott and he had just retired from being an editor and he had time and he had patience and he had for some reason, like from the moment we met, he had some affection for me like he was just sort of. So I would have these calls with him because he lived in New York. I lived in Philadelphia and he would ask me how I was doing. And with increasing honesty, I told him.

And then at each subsequent meeting, like, let's talk the next hour. You know, when you have an editor, you're supposed to produce for them. Right. And what you're supposed to talk about is the writing and then what you need to do next. And each Saturday I would show up with no pages and I would say to him, like, I'm wasting your time. Like I am. I'm a mess. I'm a dumpster fire. And and you don't even know me. I did tell him I was like, I'm I'm I'm actually usually a competent, smart person, but not right now.

And he kept meeting with me and there came a point where he said, you know, I think the problem with this book is not what you're saying, but the structure of it. And then he went off and he reworked the structure. He sent it to me and I immediately saw that it was wrong. I said, that's not the structure. He said, how? And then I basically wrote him an email that was long enough and detailed enough where I got it right. And then that changed everything.

And then I and then I did just have to rearrange things because I already had the science and I already knew. So that was my rock bottom. And that was my belated cry for help. If I had asked earlier, if I had his support earlier or other support, I really think I would have suffered less. Maybe burnout wouldn't have happened at all. But that's why burnout to me is a personal thing now. Like I don't just teach it in the abstract. And I think people who are really gritty and already try hard and you're right, maybe they're in the minority.

I don't know. But I think it's us. It's us who like digs a hole deeper and doesn't ask for somebody to throw you a rope. While you're on a roll, let's say that there is someone who is burnout or burnout adjacent. What does the science say and or your personal experience about recovering from burnout? So Christina Maslach is exactly the person to follow. And by the way, over the arc of her long career, I read one for the last, you know, academic. She's emeritus now, right now, retired from Berkeley.

And just on this note here, and then we'll talk about like, what's the prognosis, right? Like what's the prescription and what's the prognosis? And then I do want your personal story of burnout, but she said in one of the last academic articles of her career while she was still active at Berkeley, like people always think that the problem with burnout is the person and they try to fix the person. Maybe the manager tries to fix the person who's burned out. Like what can I do? You know, this person's burned out.

I need to fix them. She said, it's almost always that you have to fix the situation. And I am quoting like nearly verbatim. I'm not saying that because I wrote a book called Situated. So what's the prescription and what's the prognosis? The first thing that I think that Christina Maslach would say is that when there is a mismatch between the person and their work situation, that can create burnout. One of the ways that's mismatched is workload. You're doing too much, right? You're working 60 hours. You can only really handle 55 or she was like, that's only one.

And then she names five others, by the way, like lack of autonomy, like misalignment of values, a system that for you doesn't feel like it's a fair system. There are many ways that your work situation can be a mismatch and overload of work hours is only one and maybe not even the most common. So the first thing about the diagnosis before you get to the prognosis and the prescription is you should try to figure out what the mismatch is. And I will direct you to her work, not mine.

Then what is the prescription and what's the prognosis? The prescription is actually to make situational changes. And if you're a leader, you can try to change the situation for others. And if you're an employee, if you're not in charge, I do think you have to look at what's wrong and in one way or another. And sometimes it does include leaving the position, but not always like, okay, lack of autonomy. Like how do I find autonomy? I mean, I don't have like a one liner sort of like, oh, do this because it depends, but you have to fix the mismatch.

I mean, that's the key insight. The situation has to change. You cannot will yourself to not be burned out. You cannot think yourself out of burnout. You have to change the situation. And the prognosis is good. Burnout to me is not like a characteristic of a person, like their height, you know, like there are burned out people, like the sort of, like it's an emotional state, like joy or pride or fear or depression. Like it, it has, it has a reality and it can feel like forever, but I was burned out and I'm not burned out now.

I may be burned out in the future, but it's not permanent. One scoop I've learned from over a thousand podcast episodes. The easier that you make your health routine, the more consistent you'll be. It's like golf, right? You want to keep it simple and not makes a bunch of pills. You want the eye of the tiger, not the DUI of the tiger. That's why I'm such a huge fan of AG1. One scoop contains 75 vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and whole food source ingredients in a single daily drink.

And that's why I've been taking it every single morning for nearly five years now. And they've taken it a step further with AG1 NextGen backed by four clinical trials. Those trials that was shown to fill common nutrient gaps, improve key nutrient levels in just three months and increase healthy gut bacteria by 10 times, even in people who already eat well. Plus, if you're still unsure, they've got a 90 day money back guarantee, so you can buy it and try it every single day for three months.

If you don't like it, they will give you all of your money back. Right now you can get 20% off a welcome kit and that 90 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. The fascinating thing I've sort of come to learn about burnout, at least my particular variant of it, was mine was brought on by getting ill. So I lived in a house that had toxic mold and for someone that has three, two years ago, three years, started living in the house four years ago and then moved out about two and a half years ago when I found out.

So I had a good bit of time and my time under tension, as bodybuilders say, was significant. And if you have the wrong polymorphisms, you can't, your detox pathways don't work in the right way. And I lived in the house with another guy. He was fine. I was whatever the opposite of fine was. And it was like a fungus or something that was growing. It's the same stuff that, I mean, this country's wonderful in many ways, but your building materials are wood and that's not, a house is, a building is not supposed to be made out of wood.

It's supposed to be made out of brick, like a civilized society. I will ask my real estate developer husband, like, yeah, because it absorbs the water. It's organic material and it gets wet and hot and wet and hot, and then it gets encased in insulation and then it gets a bit of plasterboard clad over it. Well, even if it does, there's like little microbes that are in there and you just need one water leak and everything's now ruined. Okay, so then what happened? So anyway, I go through that and my capacity gets limited.

No, no, but wait, can you be more vivid? Like what happened? Were you like short of breath? Were you like, what happened? Oh, okay. You, if you want the, allow me to bring you down the rabbit hole. The first thing that I noticed was a significant decrease in energy. I was getting very tired on a night time. I used to be a club promoter, so being up until very late was kind of par for the course for me. And by six or seven or 8 p.m.

it would feel like gravity was four times as heavy as it should be. Wow, okay. I would go to sleep for between 10 and 12 hours and no matter how long I'd slept, I woke up feeling more tired than when I went to bed. So every morning was starting slow and then you begin this sort of recursive, I am not the sort of person that has energy, the morning is going to be hard. So it becomes kind of self-referential. Self-fulfilling prophecy, right? You're like, this is going to be an awful morning and then you have an awful morning.

Yes, and then it becomes an awful morning. Yeah, I've been there. And that kind of intervention becomes quite difficult. I mean, I couldn't bear the sound of porcelain. Like if anyone was putting cups out, so loud sounds, especially punctuating sounds or percussive sounds. Those were very uncomfortable to me. I didn't want to spend time around people that were talking, but I didn't want to spend time in silence. I couldn't put up with music. I didn't want to see my friends as much. I wasn't being as extroverted.

It was a lassitude, like the emotion of lassitude, of being ill, but without knowing that I was ill, which is the fascinating thing. Yeah, so what did you think was going on? I don't fucking know. It was like being moody. I just press the, you are being a bitch button. You're being a bitch button. Every single issue that I've ever encountered throughout my entire life has always been fixed by working harder. Right. And was that your response to this? Of course it was. You're like, suck it up.

Yeah, just go harder. Go harder. So I did, which obviously made it all worse. And this is what was kind of fascinating, and maybe, again, my particular variant has got this sort of... medical, pharmacological, biological, like, environmental thing, but if there is something that comes in and suppresses your capacity, what becomes very interesting is the, you working harder actively makes the problem worse. And there's very few situations in life where working harder won't improve things. Very few. When it comes down to it, it might not make it better, but it's rare that it makes it worse.

And this is one of them. And this is a case where it is. This is one of them. And what's also fascinating is that a lot of kind of ironies, I suppose, very unfortunate ironies, one of them being that you get ruthless brain fog. So I forgot the names of people that I'd known for ages. I forgot the names of streets. I forgot the names of cities. I looked down at my shoes one day and couldn't remember how to tie my shoes. The brain fog was insane.

The smell of standing water was awful. The smell of cut grass was awful. Things that I used to usually like. And all of this stuff had changed. And it's your body just, it has no idea what's going on. It's trying to fire all of this stuff. And it's, I got COVID at the same time. And there was maybe some long COVID-y stuff. And then you go on this weird Sherlock Holmes, like, you know, you've got the pipe and you've got the monocle. You literally have the pipe.

I do indeed. I need to put on British again. I'm pontificate. Yes, it's all gone. You're trying to work out what it is. Is it this? Is it that? And it's just, they're all red herrings. They're all dead ends. I'll fix this thing. Oh, you've got some BPAs. Everybody's got BPAs. What might be the BPAs? We'll fix that. Oh, it's not that. Oh, you've got some EBV. Everybody's got EBV. Okay, well, you might fix that. You've got allergies or whatever, you know, whatever it is. And there's all of these things that are problems on a piece of paper, but aren't the reason that you feel like shit.

They're not the reason, yeah. And then you go through all of this stuff. But the thing that sort of made me think about it was you saying about the sleep. And what's really, really ruthless for anyone that's going through complex illness, environmental stuff, is that they can feel absolutely wiped during the day and wiped when they get to bed at night. And then after a brief amount of time asleep, they're like completely awake. If I could invert my night to my day, I would have been fine.

Yeah, because you could have like alerted like, This is awesome. Like kind of apart from the fact that it's I'm highly aroused. Yeah, exactly. It's like 1230. And sure, I did a saliva cortisol test where you spit in a tube, maybe you did one of these too. Every two hours or every hour you do this throughout the day or in the night as well. I didn't do that. I didn't need to. I knew what was going on. I've inverted, you literally inverted my cortisol melatonin response.

I was like, wow, that's kind of impressive. Like I'm an owl. I've become an owl. I've burned myself out so much that I've become an owl. Right, right. Well, I'm not a sleep researcher, but I'm in a department with one. And he says, you know, the ideal sleep is like a box wave, right? So you're asleep, then you're awake. Yeah. You're asleep, then you're awake. And pathology is when you're asleep, but you're too aroused and you're like awake, but you're too like, so, so I have been there.

So then what happened? Then what's the ending? So you're not in this situation anymore? Not to the same degree. Still, it is a very, very slow recovery. And that was two and a half years ago, but better adjacent. So it's good. Brain function appears to be at least somewhat back better days and worse days. But that combined and the reason that I think at least is associated tangential to burnout is that when you have a couple of things, limited work capacity, but specifically limited mental capacity, which is different because it's attacking your ability to think.

And I have a friend whose dad was really struggling and was taken into a psychiatric ward. And he turned to her one day and he said, this illness has taken everything from me. It's even taken myself. And that sentence really stuck in the back of my mind because he's a very smart man that for a long time had relied on his mental horsepower to get him out. It's kind of like it's kind of like having the ability to fly or something. And you go, if I get into backed into a corner with the world, I can just press the I can fly button and that'll lift me out of the situation and I can live to fight another day.

And it's the same thing as what most people think of when it comes to their mind. They're like, I can use this very carefully curated thing between my ears to fix the problems. And in the past, I've used my mind to fix the problems. But the very thing that I would use to fix this problem is the very thing that the problem is attacking. And it felt so ironic and like very hopeless, hopeless, like lack of agency, inability to change, low motivation, all of that stuff.

And yeah, it was like an induced burnout. And then when you try to apply the foot on the gas, like I'll just try harder. Like that's the thing that's sapping what you've got the least of and it saps more from what you need it for for recovery. So and then here's the really, really ruthless thing. And this is like, pretty much sort of bringing it into where I'm land where I'm at now. What I realized was that I kind of de-trained my grit muscle. How so?

Well, because when I learned the lesson of when you try harder, things get worse. I need to learn to be gentle with myself. I need to learn to give myself a lot more grace. I have to, you know, just pick a small number of battles each day that you're going to have some discipline in. But obviously, that kind of becomes lax and it sort of begins to fluff somewhat. And that explains why I've gained like 12 pounds this year. And that for the first time in ages.

Because you're not working out? Because I'm not working out as much and I'm eating more. Okay. And then I wasn't getting up on time as much and I wasn't meditating as much and I wasn't reading as much. And I was taking my foot off the gas with this and that and the other. And I'm like, oh, I have, I now need to relearn how to do hard things. Because for a long time, doing hard things made me worse. Right. So I'm having to consciously relearn something for the second time that I already learned like 15 years ago.

Like you're coming back to it. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's been a really fascinating, like full circle thing. I mean, I'm not going to disagree with your story. It's not your, it's not, you know, it's not my place to disagree with your story. And I don't disagree. But I do want to say that the grit muscle, like one of the things that I have known, not just since writing this book, but I do elaborate on it in this book is that I don't think the grit muscle is a voice that says just do it.

It's really not. Michael Phelps didn't just do it. Like he didn't just like force himself. Nobody loves swimming more than Michael Phelps. He still does, by the way, right? So the self-talk is not just do it. It's very rarely just do it, right? Occasionally you do have to just say like, okay, right now I'm going to tell myself to just do it. But talk about exceptions to the rule. I mean, the complaint I have about like the grit muscle and I can be blamed for this, like one word, you know, it does sound like, you know, white knuckle it, but it's really, this is interesting.

This is important. I can do it. And I know what to try next, right? If you have those two alignment, it's all about alignment. Actually, what I did this summer, instead of like ruthlessly promoting myself for book tour, which would have been maybe something I should have done was I went to, so in the book, I talk about this professor James Gross at Stanford, who is the intellectual progenitor of this idea of like the situation leads to the thoughts and the response, or he's, you know, we all think this in social science, but he kind of laid it out in this really nice framework.

And this summer I spent a sabbatical working on alignment. So to me, what alignment is, is that internally you're aligned. Like I want to do this. Why? Because it's interesting and it's important and I can do this and I know what to try next. You know what misalignment looks like? Well, it's important, but it's not interesting, or it's interesting, but I can't do it, or I think I could do it, but I don't know what to try next. Right? So if you want a picture of the mental life of a paragon of grit, it's a bunch of arrows that are all pointing the same way.

Right? And that's not just Stuart. Just Stuart is like, I, you know, I'm going to like force this arrow another way. Right? The reason why we met and spent a sabbatical together is that this second book is about aligning all the arrows outside of you. Like, I don't know if you took physics, but in physics, you know, there are a bunch of diagrams with arrows, right? And the arrows are forces, right? And you learn to draw the arrows and you subtract them. You're like, what's the net force?

You're like, how about friction? Right? But you know what makes something go fast? It's when all the arrows are pushing the same direction. And that's true internally and externally. All I'm saying in this book is line up the arrows. Don't ignore the arrows. Do you have peers? Do you have mentors? Like, what is your physical space? Where do you live? Right? So that's lining up the outside arrows. And the reason why we're meeting to talk about alignment is that we think that a life well lived, we think if you go all the way back to Aristotle, like, what is the good life?

It really is about alignment. Because now, like, if I'm aligned with you, right? Like, my internal arrows are aligned. Like, my external arrows, like, are getting, but also, like, my goals are aligned with your goals. They don't have to be the same goals, but they're in alignment. Like, to me, that is like, that is what the good life is. Like, that's what Aristotle meant for us. So alignment is, to me, what this book is about externally. But it's sort of, you know, a bigger concept, even than that.

Let's do some environment stuff. What did you, after doing all of this research, it's going to be one of the most applicable ways, places that you've gone to, what have you changed environmentally beyond Jim Kitt is out? So I've had a fascination with quotes, and there are certain poems that I'm, you know, trying to commit to memory, including, you know, If by Rudyard Kipling, and my current one that I'm trying to memorize is called Pity the Beautiful. Pity the Beautiful, the Dolls and the Dishes. Anyway, so I could tell you my favorite quotes, like Nelson Mandela, I never lose, I win or I learn, right?

So I have long wanted to memorize certain quotes. But I have changed, which is I write them down on I print out poems, and I paste them on the wall. And I write down quotes. And I like usually on two by two post-it notes, like I was going to try to get them like needle pointed or whatever. And I was just like, I'm just gonna write it down on a post-it note. And I put them at eye level. And I swear to God, when I leave my office, the last thing I see is Nelson Mandela, right?

And you know why that's important? Because I want to say to myself, I never lose, I win or I learn. I believe that. And yet, I feel like a loser when I lose. And so I need to see the two by two post-it note. So like some of the people I study, including Cody Coleman, Cody Coleman has post-it notes everywhere, literally, like, you know, the post-it note on his mirror. So I become like the people I study, I'm decorating my personal space, not just when I'm taking out and you said like, what's obvious, like people know they shouldn't have Halloween candy around, they should, you know, you don't want to drink Diet Coke, don't have Diet Coke, right?

Like, that's kind of obvious. I'm not saying people do it. But I think what you put into your physical environment is what you put into your head. And what you put into your head is what you do. So that's been the most recent change. Yeah, your body is made up of everything that you put into your mouth and your mind is made up of everything that you put into your eyes and ears. Yeah. And yeah, curating that's interesting. Jared, have you ever considered you might have a drinking problem?

I don't consider a lot, Chris. Well, you drank an entire case of Athletic Brewing Co. last night. But they're non-alcoholic. And that's not a problem? Sorry, man. I kept chugging, waiting for the regret to creep in. Never happened. Didn't you end up going home with that chick with the lazy eye? I didn't seem lazy to me. See, most people like Jared don't actually want to change what they drink. They just don't want the next day to be a complete write-off, which is why I'm such a huge fan of Athletic Brewing Co.

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Near-beer terms and conditions apply. Athletic Brewing Co. fit for all times. So I've been thinking about the aversion some people have to relying on environment. In your opinion, if you remove too much friction from someone's life, does it make them weaker? I think if you remove all friction, then yes. Because like a muscle, we adapt. So the reason a muscle grows is that the challenge exceeds its capacity and then it rips a little bit and then we like repair it and that's how we work. So I think a life of no friction would be a life of weak character.

So I agree with that. But what I want people to do is make hard things easier. I talked to Alistair Bromley in my research for this. He's a very gritty person. I don't think you can become one of the world's greatest triathletes without a lot of grit. His dedication to his training is famous. So nobody is going to talk about winning triathlons without doing the hard work. But Alistair Bromley tried to make hard work as easy as possible. He literally bought a house that was close to where he could swim and where he could run.

I mean, he could be gritty and just be like, well, I'm just going to drive to the triathlon. No, but he wanted to make it easier. He does my gym trick of putting out the clean clothes. He's like, oh, by the way, it has to be dry. I mean, maybe somebody who works out that much, he has to run the laundry a lot. It has to be clean and dry and the kind of thing you want to get into. So I think imagine having a world-class coach and a bunch of peers who are also trying to train for a triathlon, maybe not on a team, but just like you trade tips, you're friends.

You've got all of these physical things around you, the training clothes. All of that makes doing the hard thing easier, and it still leaves the hard thing, right? It's just like being on Bob Bowman's swim team, right? If you sign up for this swim team, you will train harder than maybe any other swim team, but you just go and it's all there. So I think that's the lesson. I will never back down because I think it's the law of psychology that you don't improve in human skill without resistance, right?

So you can't take the hard work out of excellence, but you can make hard work easier, and you do Do that by setting up your situation. Yeah, so three things come to mind. The first one is, life requires quite a lot of effort and I think it should be reserved for the places where you don't get to choose how much effort you need to apply, if that makes sense. Second one is, one reason why it's less sexy or less well promoted to try and make life easier or to have the peer group thing is that it makes for a really shit movie.

It makes for a horrendous movie. What you want is the protagonist to be brushing up against friction all the time. And then that makes them the hero, right? Of course. Because if it's a situation that makes them less a hero. If Rocky was him, with a bunch of peers and a lovely mentor, and he'd laid his clothes out and everything was done, so okay, well we've removed a lot of the dramatic tension, which is exactly what makes for a good movie. And I think we've kind of imbibed the story of the hero and we're now trying to live it that way.

Yeah, yeah. That's so actually insightful. In the last chapter- You didn't need to be surprised about it. Well, I hadn't thought about it before. I am surprised. I cannot be surprised. I'm just teasing you, I'm just teasing. In the last chapter of the book, I wrote the story of my daughter and how she was in seventh grade. She fails her, she's in this super advanced math class. The kind of math class where you get to college math in your junior year or something of high school.

Look, I used to teach math, literally full time as a high school and middle school math teacher. And also I'm a quantitative social scientist. I am not an author by profession. I'm actually a psychologist. So I'm looking at her seventh grade math and she fails these tests and I'm looking at these questions and I'm like, wow, has seventh grade math changed? I literally couldn't do them. And I said to her, look, this little track you're on, which a very small number of kids are on, I was like, it does seem too hard.

Why don't you just go into the normal advanced math class and you'll still get to calculus. My husband, the real estate developer, objects and he says, I don't want my daughter to learn that she's a failure. I actually don't care about math, but I don't want her to learn the lesson of being a failure. So he brings home scrap paper, they learn the math together. It's basically a very supportive situation, right? So here's what happens in this little narrative, right? Let's make it into a movie.

So Amanda wakes up early, she has coffee for the first time. I mean, it was mostly milk, but yeah, she drank coffee the first time. She furiously works on the problems of the math tests that she had already failed. Her teacher says, you know what? I'm not gonna replace your grade, but I'm gonna let you take the test again so you can show me what you can do, right? And you can also prove yourself wrong that you're like not a math person. She's working mornings, she's working evenings.

They cut church to like, you know, practice math. And then the moment of truth comes and she takes the math test and she triumphs and she does 100% on these math tests. So don't count for a grade, but that sets her trajectory. So she finishes, she stays in the math class. She gets an A, yeah. She graduates from college years later as a math major and not any college, but Harvard. So it's like not easy math. And I showed this story to an early reader and they look at the story, they read the story and they say, this is a story of grit.

And I'm like, what about the father who learned all this really hard math and like sat with her and like gave her the next problem, like just like explain things. What about this graph? What about the fact that like everybody in our house like tiptoed around her and gave her all this space? Like, what about the personal space that she set up where she like put her phone, she actually had the foresight to like zip her phone into a pocket of a coat and then put it into a coat.

Like, what about the math teacher who said, you know, I'm gonna give you a second chance, So I think you're exactly right, but it's not only because like if you have Rocky and he has like a lot of things going for him, it doesn't mean, I think you're exactly right about that. Maybe that's the more profound point. But even when we have true stories of people who were gritty and had a great situation, we somehow edit out the situation. We just like only want the hero like a silhouette on a white piece of paper.

And the danger of that is that when we go to try to do great things, we think that's the way to do it. And you just can't do it. You cannot be Michael Phelps without Bob Bowman, full stop. Yeah, the third thing that it made me think about, so my chosen instrument of choice is talking. And I worked with a speech coach for a good while and addiction coach and a comedy coach and a bunch of other people did improv and a lot of other things.

When I said to my friends that I was gonna start to work with a speech coach, they sort of had this alarmed look or they were a little bit uncertain and they said something to the effect of, what if you lose your sort of natural speaking voice, your natural speaking cadence? And I said, well, that's interesting that you would say that about me working to improve something which objectively can be improved with someone that's a professional because you wouldn't have said the same if I was playing the saxophone.

If I was playing the saxophone as a beginner saxophonist, you would not say, well, what about your beautiful, natural way of playing the saxophone? You go, well, it's wrong or it could be better, right? What about your beautiful way of running? And you go, well, they're- Because they want it to be natural, right? They want it to be- So this is the distinction, at least this is my total, this is total bros, this is the hat for bro science. So this is like, I should have had this on the whole time talking to you.

Wait, what does this hat mean? For bro science, if I'm a bro scientist today. Oh, okay, yes. It's basically- Because you're the captain here now. Correct, that's it. That's good on you. Here's my, thank you, here's my working theory, which is, there are certain things about us that we feel as being close to our sense of self. Yeah, like our essence. Yes, yes. Who we really are. The way you speak is so fundamental to the person that you are. The language you use, the cadence that you speak in, how you enunciate words, that's you.

The way that you play the saxophone, that's not you. Interesting. And I think- Yeah, what do you think? Part of the reason that people have this little aversion to talking about environment and situation as opposed to grit and self-determination is that it feels like it's less me. It's not- It's like there's a hundred points, and if it's gonna be like 20 to the situation- Yes, yeah, well, it's less you. Then it's less me. It's less you. Not only does it mean that if the environment was to go away, that you're less self-sufficient.

Right. That I put you on a desert island. Correct, yeah, yeah. So not only you contribute less to it, and you get to own it less, which means that there's less pride associated with it, and I just want it to be me. It's this almost like transcendent thing. Does that make sense? It's just not true. I mean, yeah, I think that's right, right? I'm objection handling on your behalf. It's like a hundred points. How many go to Rocky, right? Like, let's give all hundred points to Rocky.

And how many go to Adrian? Yeah, exactly. And I can't remember, was it Coach Mickey? Yeah. Was it Coach Mickey? I think so, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know what? Maybe there is some kind of like, yeah, I mean, I guess if you were gonna take away some of the Rocky points and give them to Adrian and give them to Mickey, like then Rocky has fewer than a hundred. It's just the reality though, right? And the question is like, do you wanna be Michael Phelps winning 28 gold medals?

Or do you wanna get all hundred points for being Michael Phelps without Bob Bowman, without Debbie Phelps, without his teammates? By the way, I just listened to Roger Federer's induction speech. This is like actually what I do. Oh my God, I will never get bored of studying excellence. So I don't even play tennis. I don't even watch tennis, but I'm watching Roger Federer's 29 minute acceptance speech to the Tennis Hall of Fame. And if I could do a word cloud of that speech, the single biggest word, the most common thing he said was ecosystem, right?

As he is being inducted into the Hall of Fame, he's talking about, by name, the two guys who string his rackets, right? The, like his physiotherapist, like he named his coaches by name. I didn't realize he had so many, past and present. Like the thing is, is that if you want to get all the points, like you can give Roger Federer all the points if he doesn't have all those people that he relies on, his agent, right? Like, okay, that's fine. But he won't be the Roger Federer that we know.

And the question is, how far do you wanna go? Are you willing to give up some of the points to other people, to the situation, and go farther? Or do you wanna keep all the points to yourself, a completely DIY, self-made man? I did everything myself, and nobody helped me. You can keep all the points, but you won't go as far. Yeah, that's so great. I've got the pie chart in my mind, and it's not just the portion. You can have 100%, but the size of the pie is going to be smaller.

Yeah, yeah, you can have all the little pie. You can have 100% of a little pie, or you can have a wedge of a bigger pie. And that, to me, is the story of success. And I knew it when I studied Paragons of Grit, I think. But I wasn't thinking about it very hard. I was like, oh, right, and let's talk about you. But now when I interview people, I ask them about their mentors. I ask them about the people that they're training with. I literally ask them about their physical circumstances.

I ask them what's on their desk. I ask them what's in their refrigerator. I ask them about their routines. And so I do think that there is this complete story if you look for it, but we're not looking for it. How do you know when to work harder on yourself and when to change your circumstances? I'll say this. I think if you wanna work harder, you gave me an A and B choice, right? A, work harder. B, change your circumstances, right? I'm gonna say that they both end up with change your circumstances, and here's why, right?

I think to answer your change, if you feel burned out, then you probably are trying really hard. If you recognize this feeling of exhaustion and whatever, like, oh, it's like helplessness, then you probably are, just like you were and just like I was, digging yourself a deeper hole. And absolutely, that is the canary in the coal mine. Change your circumstances. You need more support and probably, you know, an adjustment of challenge for the time being. All right, that's choice B, so that's when you, but what about working harder?

And you made the argument that like maybe that's the modal thing, like maybe that's most of the time what people need to do. They need to like push harder on their ass. I think you still end up with change the circumstances, and here's why. So say you realize, like, you know, I've been giving 70% at work, and if I'm honest, like, that's what's holding me back, so now you decide you're gonna give 100% or even like 75%, right? As a behavioral scientist, I will say, if you're giving 70, try for 75, not for 100, but anyway, leaving that aside.

So then, if you accept this three-box framework of all of human behavior, they're like, I want more effort in box three. That's my response. I wanna come into work and be 75, if not higher. Then you have to ask the question, what thought will make me do that, right? I've told you that I don't think the thought is just do it. I think you have to think that your work is more interesting, important, that you can do it, and you know what to try next. I think that's the only way to sustain a higher level of effort, but the reason I say that you eventually get back to circumstances is like, what books do I need to read?

What podcasts do I listen to? What people do I need to be with? Like, what mentors do I need? What conversations do I need? What's my physical space need to be so that I can have those thoughts that will get me to work harder? So eventually, I think, whether it's getting a coach, a therapist, a mentor, a peer group, a change of your situation in any way, like eventually, that's where you end up anyway, even, I mean, if you're smart about it, even if the answer is like, work harder, because this is not just to do once.

If you only have to work harder, like today at four o'clock in the afternoon once, then maybe you could just use willpower. Go for it. It'll be tiring, but you can do it. But if you have to do it every day at four o'clock and every week, and then every year, there's no way you can do it by just forcing yourself. Right, so in your opinion, it's less situation-specific, and it's more like iteration-specific. If this is a one-off, then maybe you can just put foot on the gas pedal.

All I'm saying is that willpower is this thing that you can use when you really need to, and you can do it once. I think anybody can do it. By the way, we're better at it than animals. Like, we're better at it than dogs and chimpanzees. Like, you can put animals through, like, the same kind of tasks that you put young children, and human beings are better at delaying gratification, better at forcing ourselves to do things that we don't wanna do in the moment. But all I'm saying is that you're right.

Like, if it's iterative, if you have to do this again and again and again, and the path to excellence is consistency, right? Like, that is the seminal insight of grit. The path to excellence is consistency, and the path to consistency is a situation that sets up consistency. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So you spent some time at Oxford, right? I did, two years, and I actually started speaking with a faux-British accent because of the power of the situation. I was like, cheers, to just, like, oh, you know, trousers around the ankles, and I, you know, the power of the situation is very strong.

Look at how far you've fallen. So unfortunate. So I have got this new live show, which I'm about to go on tour with, and one of the things that I talk about, because I'm going back to the homeland, the UK and Ireland. Oh, you're gonna start in UK? I am, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm talking about tall poppy syndrome, and- This is a British, unpack this for me, but this is the British- It is, it is an affliction, and it actually came from New Zealand and Australia, originally.

Oh, really? Okay, that's like the origin story? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it comes across. It's a situation in which a person who becomes conspicuously successful, or wealthy, or high status, or whatever, is derogated by people around them, and interestingly- This is a British thing. Very, very, very. It's kind of like if- As the poppies, right? If football didn't exist, it would be our national sport. That's kind of how central it is. A deviation, it's typically sort of preceded with a deviation from the norm, that somebody decides to do something that's a little bit different.

Yeah, very much so. There's a lot of conformance. But excellence, then, is derogated, is what your point is. Oh, 100%, yeah. I mean, you're allowed to be successful, but only if you treat it as a horrible accident that you got there. Interesting. It's like, it very much is, you're sort of ashamed. It's like, oh my God, I appear to have- This explains all the Hugh Grant humor, right? I appear to have created a successful business, I'm so sorry, I must not do this again, I promise, I swear it won't happen.

Not very American, by the way. But I, no, no, no, no, no. It's the opposite. My best friend George has got this line, he says, British affliction is cynicism, and the American affliction is bullshit. And it's so true. It's the same, two sides of the same, yeah. It's so true, right? That one is feet of two. I'm better than I truly am. One is feet of two hot on the ground. And one his head is too high in the clouds Yeah, I think it's beautiful, but I just what it made me think about yeah Cuz I've been yeah, I did my first work in progress show last night here in Austin I do these secret shows and there's 50 people.

So I'm not working out the material. I'm talking to people live So I'm getting feedback almost. Yeah doing DVD extra commentary of like, okay, so this is where I'm at I'm basically talking to myself But there's a room of people that are listening to me pontificate to me about whatever anyway The the tall poppy thing is is kind of that and I was Everybody had to because it's all Americans obviously in Austin I had to get them to pretend to be British and I said imagine that you're British for a second I've actually for the next hour And the interesting thing about the tall poppy syndrome culture, I can't think of a sociocultural influence That is more high friction for excellence Than something like that We haven't talked about culture, right?

Because you know when you say like if you start out the obvious and everyone can do it But maybe everyone isn't doing it It really is like what's within three feet of you push it away if you don't want to do it like move it in like Decorate your space. Okay, fine Culture is the exact opposite culture is like all-encompassing. It's abstract But it's also the most powerful thing you can do right and when you're in a culture of excellence, you know One of the reasons why Michael Phelps ended up being excellent is because he's Michael Phelps But another is that Bob Bowman created a culture of excellence, right?

Like it's the expectation What's a culture of excellence look like and how can somebody engineer it themselves, you know, what is excellence, right? Right excellence is like aspiring toward like a greater level achievement than one definition, right? which was like aspiring to a greater level of achievement than you have now, right and one of the things that I think is a problem in society is that there are People in places where that is the norm right that we are striving right like and and whatever it is today because I think excellence And it's cliche like is it a journey what like that's the key to it though?

It's not that there's a certain watermark. It's just that you're constantly trying to improve like anything you do I am sure you came home from your first Ryan was like I hope a list of things that you wanted to do differently. You're like, oh I didn't so these adjustments I think a culture of excellence where that is the norm and that that's what everybody is trying to do and When you describe tall poppy syndrome, right where it's like quite literally the opposite, right that like if you do it It's embarrassing and shameful and like it's punished, right?

That's the opposite So I will say that if you really want to change and I know most people won't move right the one thing people are very Reluctant the I'll say this some people can't move right? It's too expensive But it's the one life change that people most don't want to do Why do I know that there's an economist named Steven Levitt who is very interested in what's called? Status quo bias. It's your tendency to cling to what you have Like I live in Philadelphia and I have to live in Philadelphia and you start making lists of all the reasons why you can't move Out of Philadelphia for me.

It's like my mother-in-law lives there. My mom lives there You know, my work is there like my friends are there so you can make a very long list but what Steven Levitt wanted to say in his research was there may be actually times where you actually make both lists like the list of reasons to stay and listen and Actually, the lists are equally long and maybe you intellectually realize that the list of reasons to go is longer, right? And status quo bias is the irrational Like steadfast clinging to the way things are so he has a flip the coin Experiment, you know you flip the coin its heads you change and it's tails you stay right?

But for anything that you're trying to decide so he has people do this experiment But they get to decide what they're flipping the coin for and some people are like should I get a tattoo? Like should I break up with my boyfriend? I mean, these are literally things that people wrote down One of the items was should I move? So there are a great number of people in this experiment who when asked the question like what is a life decision? You're struggling with and you don't really don't know whether you should change or stay.

I Don't know if I should move right? So in this experiment, he flips the coin for you There's like literally this electronic coin and he was like heads Change you're moving tails or and you didn't you know film like should you get the tattoo? Yes, you know So so in his data The one thing that people are most reluctant to follow the advice heads Change is where they live. So when you talk about like, okay living, you know It's different when you grow up in the United Kingdom than here.

It's different when you go up in Philadelphia then Austin I think the biggest change you can make in your life is to change your zip code The biggest change has changed the culture of where you spend 24 hours a day Because when you change that you change your mentors and your peers and your physical environment but it's the one thing that people are most reluctant to do and I think people should do it more the Economist magazine Which is it is British. Is it not? I believe it is.

It seems like this is how little I know about the world But we subscribe and my husband reads it When the Economist magazine put out their guide to big life decisions They said based on economic research and it's true the single highest effective thing that you could do to change your life is to move to a Zip code with greater opportunity to a neighborhood and yet research from Steve Levin others would suggest like it's the one thing We don't want to do so you moved here.

I did and like it was terrifying and was it an accident or was it? No, it's completely terrifying and why did you do it then because I was sick of the UK, you know I'd met a million people running nightclubs and I had a handful of friends which was great But my friendship exposure to conversion ratio was not it's not fantastic, right? My funnel wasn't funneling in internet marketing speak I was seeing so many people and I fell out of place right and I was like you didn't have your tribe then No, I was really I my exposure to people was high No one can say that I've met more people.

I've shook more hands in person than most people except for like international diplomats right, yeah, so I'd really done the thing and I felt like I'd kind of completed a lot and I UK there's many things I have to do the fucking throat clearing of like It's wet and cold a lot I wasn't I didn't feel like I fitted in from a cultural perspective that was it because you had Tall poppy like ambitious That feels the self self aggrandizing which it this in itself is a British.

I've got British It's happening right before my eyes and go and what I will say is that ambition is not Curated you're ambitious. And so you when you fit in here I very much. I feel more Apart from in terms of the accent. I feel more at home in the US than I have for Austin Because it is currently the center of the universe for podcasting. It is by the way, what the hell I think apart from LA it's got more people in the top ten, but in fact it might have the most number of people in the top ten of Anywhere, LA will be close because Jay and Steven are there and maybe Alex and Dax I don't know though Dax is in the top ten last year.

He might have been But Anyway, it's it's it's got a great community of people here. Everyone's a cultural refugee from somewhere else, which meant that Social groups hadn't had a chance to ossify interesting. There's a lady called Tracy vine core. You might not be interested in this way So it's kind of cool the reason that bullying is exists in schools more than exists anywhere else is because the Amount of time that social networks have had to be in stasis and to ossify Yeah, like you get to stratify out where the pecking order is too much Fucking company that people work at for life people come people go so on and so forth to people that stay right then you have Like the same kids for 12 years.

Yeah. Yeah, that's why bullying exists. Yeah, I know I didn't day Austin is basically Passing point for a lot of people that you know They've been here for one year or three years or six years or something But no one's been here for no one's was born here Like there's basically nobody in Austin that lives here was born here. I have not met anybody except for the mayor Okay, so if you want to be a great podcaster go to Austin if you want to be a great artist like don't try to Do it in the middle of well, probably for the best.

I was gonna say like a few like what is this? Right, like so so this is the thing. That's why the power of moving right and you're the rare person who moved yeah, and the escape velocity to do it is is Quite high. It's it's really gravity's heavy when you're doing that thing. It's it's operationally difficult. There's lots and lots of friction. It's scary You're gonna go to this country on your own suck at the beginning It's well, I mean, I certainly it's got at the very beginning the excitement for me was so great.

Oh my god I'm actually doing the thing Okay, which was was enough to get me over that. I'm Interested in obviously you've been through the burnout thing new book Congratulations, it's very very wonderful and you've taken a topic that's important and made it interesting and I hope so accessible What are you going to curse yourself with after this? Not another book I'll tell you what I think is on the horizon for me as a research scientist and And I did put my heart and soul into this book, but I am a scientist So, I think the seismic changes in technology phones social media AI Everyone's talking about it.

But as a behavioral scientist, I can't say that I have seen anything That's changing the way we spend time the way we do or don't socialize the way we exercise the way we do everything religions That's greater than the things that are happening right now with AI with screens or Human life doesn't look like it did 50 years ago or even 20 years ago. So I'm gonna study that I Won't write a book about it, but I feel like I've done my work I've done the inside game of success and now I've done the outside game of success and now I just want to understand You know how in this new, you know world People can be successful unreal Angela Duckworth.

Ladies and gentlemen, where should people go to check out everything you do? I have no idea You are I don't know where to send people. What have you got a website? What's the website? I have a website I'm website. It's angela duckworth.com. Wonderful. And the book is called situated fantastic and it is available It is available everywhere. Fantastic. That's it. All right. Appreciate it. Goodbye. That was so fun Awesome awesome This episode is brought to you by born in roma fragrances by valentino beauty the iconic fragrance duo Donna born in roma eau de parfum is a feminine fragrance featuring juicy black currant central jasmine woody cashmere and warm vanilla Its masculine counterpart womo born in roma eau de toilette has notes of fresh violet leaf aromatic sage Green vetiver spicy ginger and mineral salt shop at macy's.com

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