YouSaid · the spoken record

Angela Duckworth

lines on the record: 67
first: 2021-04-20
most recent: 2021-04-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Or, like, what situation is this? Like, my daughter is being grumpy. Who am I? I am a mother. What does a mother do when a child is grumpy? A mother is kind, right? And so I've been kind of fascinated by like the logic of appropriateness, the importance of identity. You know, if Shakespeare said that all the world's a stage and each of us its players, you know, much of our lives were like, what role am I in? Like, oh, I'm the doctor? Okay, I'll do that, right? Like, oh, I'm the whiny child? Okay, I'll do that. And we step into that role and we play it out.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Benefits, what are the probabilities when you are operating according to the logic of appropriateness, the three questions are what situation is this? Who am I? What does someone like me do in a situation like this? This is all about identity, right? So imagine that you are like me, a tired mother, working mother who has a teenager at home and your kid is doing something that's totally annoying like, you know, asking you demandingly like whether dinner can be ready in four minutes. So there's this kind of like cost benefit.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I read this essay once by James March, who was a brilliant and iconoclastic and interdisciplinary thinker, and he said there's two kinds of logic that we can use to make choices. There's the logic of consequence, and then there's the logic of appropriateness. So the logic of consequence is like basically cost-benefit analyses, right? It's like thinking like an economist. So, you know, these are the kinds of things that economists think we do all the time. And to some extent, even if it's at a non-conscious level, we do. Like their expected value decisions. And much of our conversation has been about that, right? Like, why do people, you know, why are they ambitious? Like, why do they give up, et cetera? But Mark said there's a kind of logic that we apply in many situations that has nothing to do with calculating costs and benefits and probabilities. And it's the logic of appropriateness. And he said, when you are operating according to logic consequence, the three questions are, what are the costs?”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think that the rule on roles is probably that you should make up your own rules as opposed to like somebody exogenously handing you one.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Adaptive. There are some downsides to rules, like when you don't make your rule, like you can have the what the hell effect.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The reason I started studying rules, I just noticed when we were in conversation, he'd be like, Well, I have a rule. I don't make a decision on the phone. And he would say, like, well, I have a rule. Like, I don't blur books unless I read them in entirety and have a personal relationship with the topic or the author. And I was like, wait, Danny Kahneman does it. Dan Gilbert does it. Like, what's up with these personal rules? So I will say this too, in the small amount of research I've done, because we randomly assign people to, for example, set a rule about how many steps they were going to take. And, you know, these are Fitbit users that we had recruited because they already had a Fitbit. And then we had other conditions where you just set a goal and like anyway, various control conditions. We did not find a benefit of setting a kind of always never rule. Like I always make 10,000 steps right now. And I'm guessing that one reason is that even though for Danny Kahneman, certain rules can be certain.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Make for a lot of email checking and not a lot of thought about behavioral science, right? So the second thing is that when it's after dinner, I mean, I could watch like reruns of Downton Abbey. I could scroll through Twitter. I could do all these things. Now those things are all going to be like a little bit more fun for me than email. But if I make it a rule or a habit that like after dinner, I check my email always, then that kind of doesn't end run around the temptation. That's one of the habits I have. I also have a habit of doing exercise at 6 p.m. Eastern time. Every time I do a public talk, I have a habit of sending a thank you email because I think it's the right thing to do. And as your producers know, there's like a lot of back-end stuff that somebody had to do to make that possible. And I think it's the right thing to do to show some appreciation. And I always ask for feedback.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had to like devote all of your energy to first, I lift my wrist, then I clench my fist around the night. It's like, no, it's like there are things that can run on autopilot, like cut the grave again, how to do that. And habits are like that. There's another reason I think Colin would agree with me that habits actually are self-control device. So if you're doing something as a matter of habit like exercising or eating a salad for lunch or writing thank you notes or doing other things which are good for you and others in the long run but maybe not the funnest, easiest thing to do in the short run. Being on autopilot is a very good thing for that. So it's not just so that we can free up cognitive resources to do calculus, right? It's also because many of the things about which we have habits and roles are self-control dilemmas where the immediate alternative is just better. Like I have a habit of checking my email after dinner. That's one. I don't want to check my email all day because like that.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've been actually researching that a little bit personal rules. So personal rules are like I never or I always always never rules are really interesting to me and they are related they're kind of in the same family as like habits because they are these sort of like you're not thinking about it you're not deliberating you're just doing the reason I'm studying it is because I do think that very successful people have usually a small number of fairly inviolable rules and also habits. And by the way, why is that, right? Like the reason I think is twofold. So Colin Camerr at Caltech, who's a collaborator, would say that the biggest reason, I think you have to ask him, but I think Colin would say that the biggest reason why we have habits, they put us on autopilot and they free up cognitive resources for other things. I mean, if every time you had to like cut yourself grapefruit,”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“any of which being missing, then you're not doing deliberate practice in Andra's view. The first is that there's this kind of like hyperintentionality about a very specific weakness or a goal that you're trying to address. The second is that you are really practicing with complete concentration. And many of his research studies, including the ones that I did with him, we measured deliberate practice by whether you were doing practice alone because that was like a proxy for concentration. And then the third element was feedback, right? And ideally, in most circumstances, immediate feedback, in some circumstances, you could argue that there's some benefit to a delay.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I didn't this summer, and it was his research, of course, that became paraphrased as the 10,000 hour rule. Andres would want everyone to know. It's nothing about the like magic number 10,000, first of all. So, you know, that number comes from a single study of German musicians at a music academy where the highest performing musicians had done on average about 10,000 hours of practice. The next most expert group was 5,000. And the group below that, I believe, was like 2,500. Most importantly, Anders would want everyone to know that it's the quality of practice that is really remarkable because even in the next group down, they were still doing lots of practice. It just wasn't that they had a higher proportion of ineffective practice or less effective practice. So the high quality practice that Andres called deliberate practice had these three essential elements.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Couldn't have been that I didn't think I could make partner or director. I think I could have. It was just that like that goal lost value for me. So if you ask the question, like, when do people quit? I think it's either because the value of the goal goes down for whatever reason or their belief that they can achieve it.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I'm not going to try anymore. There is either a lack of confidence that you can prevail, right? Like, no, I'm not going to go out for soccer again because I'll never make varsity or like I'll never be very good. That's self-efficacy. That's agency. That's Al Bandura. That's what we were just talking about. But the other thing I think is that like if it's not that you can't do it, it's just that it has no value to you. Like what am I even doing? This is a stupid job. Like I, when I quit management consulting and you know some of my best friends are manager consultants, so it's not like I think it's a meaningless industry. But for me personally, who had been so interested in kids and education, I literally said out loud, if I go to my grave, you know, like increasing the ROI for a hyperdermic needle company, like I just will not feel like I fulfilled my purpose.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, anyway, twenty twenty has been a learned helplessness experiment and the suffering has been real and amplified, I think psychologically because of that. Let's start with not even gritty people, but like when we give up and like when we're most likely to give up and what's going on there, you know, I think that when people say, oh,”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We don't know when. Right. Which, you know, just to think about the psychological dimensions of 2020, the uncertainty clearly amplified, you know, all of the negative emotion, right? I think we're much better at somebody saying like, hey, you're going to have to be in quarantine for 17 days. That's going to be terrible. And then the following things are definitely going to happen to you. Brace yourself versus like you wake up and then like you don't know what's going to happen, but it's pretty bad and then like some other bad things happen. That is, by the way, what you do to an animal if you want to induce learned helplessness, which is, you know, the work of my PhD advisor, Marty Seligman, where you have an animal and then you shock them. And then the key is that if they experience these traumas at an unpredictable way with like, you know, you don't know when it's going to end. You don't know next thing's going to happen. That's when you actually get, you know, the symptoms of depression and giving up.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, this kind of like time limited crisis, right? It's not what we hope, but indefinite. We don't know. It's indefinite.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lab course is called Choose Easy. And then there's another section called Work Hard. But I think that doing something that was like, yeah, it's like butter. It's like easy, cheesy, lemon, squeezy. Plus, it's so fun. Choose those paths, walk down them long enough, and learn to work hard.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. He's like, I can't believe I get to do that. Another person that you may or may not have interviewed, but Steve Levitt tells a story of how he became an economist, right? So Steve Levitt is half of the freak economics duo of Dubner and Levitt. And Levitt tells a story of how he was a freshman and he goes to his Harvard, you know, EC 10 class. I think it was Harvard. And Ec-10 is the intro economics class. And he's walking alongside his classmate or roommate. And they both say almost at the same time, like, oh, God, that was ridiculous. But then Steve says like, yeah, I mean, everything that was said was so damn obvious. And his friend was like, I couldn't understand anything that he was saying. So the idea of doing things that are playful for you, but drudgery for others. In my class, the passion section of my grit.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, Shane, that quote, though, I like that a lot. I recently was interviewing Alex Rodriguez, Arod. Actually, he was being interviewed by students in my class Grit Lab. And he said, you know, I am a hard worker. Everyone will tell you I'm already like, I feel like I haven't worked a day in my life.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oceans deeper than when I first met him. And I was like, oh my God, he's so cute. And if I had known that when I was twenty-two, I think I would have, you know, relaxed a little bit because basically I spent like a whole decade just tortured that I didn't know what my calling was.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Life where, like, this romance was very, very fledgling, right? And it could have gone in lots of different directions, but it deepened and deepened and deepened and got more mature. And like a marriage, right? Like, you know, your relationship with your passion actually evolves over time. So to the terrified 22-year-olds, or frankly, probably there's some 20 terrified 32-year-olds or whatever on this conversation with us. I would say to you, like, if you change the verb from follow to develop, right, it gives you a little bit of a clue as to what you need to do, which is you need to like.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think the word follow, the verb follow is the right verb. Right, because you say to this like 18-year-old who's like, I don't know what I'm interested in. Okay, 22. Let's make it a 22-year-old senior who's like, oh my God, like I see adulthood on the horizon fast approaching and I don't know what I want to do, right? And then if I say to them, my advice to you is to follow your passion. Oh, like how is that helpful? They don't know where it is. So the verb I prefer is develop because I do think that if I like retroactively retrospectively think about my relationship with psychology, if I went to Google Scholar and you picked like a random article from a random year in a random journal on something about psychology, there's a very good chance that I'm going to be fascinated by it. But there was a time in my life where I didn't even know what psychology was at all. And there was a time.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One thing that I think is a continual surprise to me is that I'm a university professor, so my students are between the ages of 18 and 22. And when you just think of the word grit and you think of like what people need to learn, you think they need to learn about resilience and hard work, about how to practice on your weaknesses and get feedback, et cetera. And those things are all true. But honestly, the Ivy League students that I teach are pretty good at all of those things already. But the other half of my class, I teach this class called GritLab, is on passion. And I find that many, many young people are struggling much more with the direction in their life than the determination that they need to bring to that pursuit. Even basic questions like, what am I interested in? Like, how could you not know what you're interested in? I will tell you that I have young people in my office hours who say, like, I literally can't tell you what I'm interested in. Like, I don't know.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if you were a kid, it is like driving you nuts because they are not taking risks and they seem to be, you know, afraid of failure. And that, by the way, that sometimes looks like laziness, right? Even though it's underneath the surface, not at all laziness. Ask yourself, like, maybe they are not confident because they haven't had a string of experiences to make them confident, right? So here again, the person versus the situation, like maybe your underconfident child is that way because of series of situations. And, you know, all of the great coaches and teachers do this, that you kind of just like engineer these, you know, small wins, make things like bite-sized enough that there can be a few at bats and a few hits.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To the mother, it is because the child is attached that they will venture even five, ten feet away from where the mother is sitting and pick up a new toy and then maybe run back and make sure mom's there. But, you know, and so I think I am whatever I have that's like, okay, I can handle this criticism is probably because I've had enough mastery experiences to feel secure.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, for those, I guess, who are less familiar, this is the idea that young children really like toddler age. They are attached to their primary caregiver, often their mother, but not necessarily. And there are different styles of attachment. And the attachment style you really want is called the secure attachment style. And then there are various forms of insecure attachment. And the reason why this became so important in developmental psychology was the idea that whatever your attachment style was going to be, it was going to be like pretty influential in terms of like how you would have other future relationships in your life. And the thing to note about the security attachment style is that imagine a mother in a room and they have their toddler child. If that is a secure attachment, then the behavior of the child, say, in a new room with new toys, is not going to be to clean.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Because their intention, right? It's like either I can feel good right now and just get unalloyed praise or I can learn something that will make me a better presenter and scientist in the future. And I much, you know, the weight is higher for me on the learning. So that's the first layer answer, right? That's because of that. But then you can ask the question like, why? Why is that? Like, why is that ratio like that for you? But maybe for other people, it's more important to protect their ego. They want to sleep well on a Friday night. Like, why? And I think for me, the ability to take negative feedback, and I'm not perfect by any means, but like whatever ability I do have, I think does come from a history of mastery or success experiences, right? Like I have been encouraged enough to be a little vulnerable. And in early childhood, there's this idea of secure attachment. Have you heard of like attachment theory?”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess I have a first layer answer and a second layer answer. I think the first layer answer is because I want to learn. I want to feel good in the moment, but I mostly, I more want to learn. Like, I'm driven to improve.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Asking for feedback about how they can improve their like, they're going to be fine. And, you know, if you're the opposite of that, then I really worry about you because then I think like you're never going to be a fix your own problems. So feedback is magic.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I will say that it's not a gift that we usually want to receive. Like at the moment, it's given to us and the way it's given to us. So I think it's a skill. And by the way, Shane, I really truly believe that if somebody is eager for feedback, actively solicits feedback, tries to listen to the feedback, learn something from feedback, those are the people I never worry about, right? Like I've had students where they're like really not super socially intelligent, right? I'm like, whoa, they're not like, how do I know? Because other students come and talk to me about them, right? So it's like, but if that student”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, at the time, let me tell you, I was not appreciating the specificity of the negative feedback, right? And the dosage of it. Because like after about five minutes, I was like, hey Let's talk about something else now. Like, no, yeah, 35 more minutes of specific. Things to say about how that didn't go well. So I didn't respond well, and you're right that, you know, to answer your question directly, I think I felt especially bad because I immediately got like an avalanche of criticism that was both authoritative, detailed, and kind of, you know, unvarnished. I probably would have gone to sleep earlier or like slept more soundly if like there had been a”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, in my 20s, the self-talk that I had when I screwed up was very different. And I have all these journals, so I know what the self-talk was. I would say things like, I'm bad. I'm a bad person. And that self-talk's really toxic because, you know, you can't really do anything about being just a fundamentally bad person, you know, like whatever that even means. So I have grown up a little bit in the 30 years since my earlier young woman failures.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'll tell you the self-talk that went through my head. That was a shit show. I'm humiliated. Like, I shouldn't have managed the time that way. I shouldn't have used Pull Everywhere. I should have rehearsed, right? Now that self-talk is, it's actually productive self-talk because almost everything that I said was changeable, right? Like next time I'll rehearse, next time I won't use poll everywhere for the, you know, like.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bad. And right afterwards, I had a call talk about feedback. So right afterwards, I had a call with one of my collaborators who was in the party. And he said, you know, that was not your best hour. And then told me exactly how it was that that was such a impoverished, you know, experience for everybody, including him. I mean, I was like up all night, you know, replaying things and like writing down notes and like I literally revised my slides. I mean, I didn't have anyone to give them to, but I just wanted to like rearrange them and like make them write. And then I sent emails to not all 100 people, but like the people I had specifically invited. And I apologized. And I was like, that was not a good use of your hour. I was underprepared. I didn't manage the structure or the time well. And I'm sorry.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I don't have as many opportunities to dramatically fail as I did earlier in life, but I had this presentation that I was really excited about on like a new idea in behavior change for me. And I got so excited about it and so confident about how excited everybody else would be about it that I ended up inviting. It was like having a dinner party, inviting like more and more people until like suddenly they hardly can fit into the room. Now in this case it was Zoom. So like everybody fit in the room. But, you know, some of my idols like Danny Conneman, like, you know, like very, very important political officials. Anyway, so the party grew. I delivered this presentation, like not having ever done it before. And then also not really being good at managing the dynamics of like 100 people on a Zoom call, like some of whom you would obviously want to say what they thought as opposed to just like monologuing. I mean, it was just really.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The ego, right? The sort of like, and sometimes, you know, the people who are looking at us have a better sense of our strengths as well.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Somebody who's like, you know, you should write a book. It's like, oh no, I can't write a book. No, you should really write a book, and you know, it's that kind of challenge setting that, of course, you can try to do it on your own. But I think that we're always benefited by having like another human being whose advantages are multiple, but one of them is that they're just not usual distance from our situation.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that we are benefited in large part by having a surrogate parent. I mean, what I mean by that is, you know, whether you're 50 or 5, it's good to have somebody who is a little older and wiser than you, who is like helping you figure out the next challenge. And most of the people that I study, like they never get out of being mentored, you know, like they have a, they have a management coach, they have like a personal coach, they have a therapist. The ones I'm most jealous of have a peer for whom they coach each other, right? They have.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When they have struggled to overcome something and they have come out victorious and the engineering problem for a parent is then to figure out the right size of challenge for the kid like in the next moment in time. And I think that we often get it wrong. Like the challenge is just too big or the challenge is too small.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I asked Albendera this. I said, you know, do you think that you could learn as much from failure as you could from success, right? Because there are all these like adages and aphorisms about failure, especially in startup land. And he said, oh, this one, I 100% believe mastery experiences, success experiences are what really build this sense of agency. If your kid has like a Teflon life where, you know, everything comes easily, in part because you make it that way. And there are a lot of parents who like sort of just make their kids' lives frictionless, right? Like, oh, you know, you're struggling for 10 minutes. Like, I'll get you a $500 per hour tutor. Like, like, oh, your teacher is not so great. I'll get them fired. Like, that's not the kind of success experience that Alvan.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Responsible for how you react to it. And Victor Frankl said the same thing about his experience in the concentration camps, right? That terrible things can happen to you, over which you do not have control, but you can control your reaction. And I don't want to even say that you can control it 100%, but I do think you have some control over your reaction. And I think this egentic view is accurate and adaptive.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, we need to resurrect Howard Thurman even before Freud. So, Howard Thurman was like the mentor and the pastor for Martin Luther King Jr. And Howard Thurman, I had never heard of because I'm deeply illiterate, but I was reading Arthur Ash's memoir, so Arthur Ash for those who are younger than us maybe. He's a great tennis player and I believe the only black male to win Wimbledon. So he wrote this memoir called Days of Grace, which I recommend. And in it, he talks about how so important in his life was Howard Thurman. So that led me to Howard Thurman. And the reason I bring it up is that Howard Thurman has all these sermons about how there is the final consent. He was like, you know, you cannot change that you were born into a racist society. You cannot change that you are born into a certain family. But you can always change how you react to it, right? Like you and your”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nuance here because I don't think that we want to teach our kids that they have like control over whether the coronavirus vaccine is going to be made available in their municipality in one month or another or, you know, or whether they're going to get into a certain college because those things are a bit downstream. But where I really agree with Bandura, first of all, that we do have control, we do have agency, and that it's dramatically more productive to when you think about your own behavior that you think about, that you really pay attention to the things that you can control. And I wonder, you probably haven't, or maybe you're more well read than I. Have you ever heard of Howard Thurman?”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of control was to me like super similar. So I asked Al, like, what's the difference? Because in locus of control theory, you either have an internal locus of control or an external locus of control, right? So life kind of happens to you, or that would be the external or like, you know, you're in control. And he said, oh, there's a very important difference. I'm more interested in saying that like I can control my behavior, not necessarily that that behavior is going to magically make everything the way I want. What locus and control is about is more just like in the grand scheme is the actual outcome going to be my doing or not. He's like, all I want to say is that people have agency over their behavior, over their performance, not necessarily like that you're going to get hired just because you are the most qualified candidate, but that you could control like your own behavior and performance. So I think that's a very important.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think you're on to something very important. And I guess I have a fondness for like, you know, great psychologists in their 90s because I have been calling out Bandura a lot. He is the psychologist at Stanford. I think he's 96 now who coined the term self-efficacy to describe the belief that you can do something if you try, right? So self-efficacy about physics would be like, I can learn physics if I tried. And I had this conversation with him, you know, a couple weekends ago, actually, where I asked him, I was like, Al, you've spent your whole life studying self-efficacy, but there was this other person whose name is spelled R-O-T-E-R, but I think it's like Dutch or German. So I'm going to mispronounce it as Rodter. But Rodter studied locus of control.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My self talk, but also you can just change your actual situation. So, for example, if you constantly get into arguments at Thanksgiving with your brother-in-law,”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I hope this conversation is long enough that I'm going to talk about agency and control and the mindset that gets you to say like, wait a second, I have a little control here. I think I can do something, which I do think is the mindset of a gritty person, usually a high achieving person. Let's start with the mindset of like, hey, I can change something. I've done these research studies on this self-control technique called situation modification. And this work was done with collaborators, including James Gross at Stanford. James Gross actually originally and mostly studies emotion. And one of the things that's interesting about regulating your anger is if you have a bad temper or your sadness, if you tend toward melancholy or your happiness, if you want more of that, or I guess if you wanted less of that, is that people can use these like sort of mental strategies like what I pay attention to, how I'm going to frame things.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A child's life is not just something that they have complete control over. And I would hope that like all children, you know, not just black children or brown children, but like literally all children are helped to learn some of the things that you and I learned and were not born with. Like, you know, knowing how to set a goal, make a plan, figuring out how to take an optimistic, growth-oriented stance toward adversity, you know, understanding like how to, you know, think about stress in ways that are adaptive, modify your situation. Those have to be part of personal development. And so I try to say both Anne and in a way that, first of all, doesn't confuse people to know in and also that kind of honors this perspective, which has a lot of value to it.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that the message or the perspective that's being offered has real value, and that is this, that if you are asking questions about like, you know, underachievement and closing the achievement gap, et cetera, and the antidote that's offered is like, well, we should teach kids about growth mindset and grit and agency, then you might be overlooking, you know, the massive problem that stands in the way much more so, which is, you know, terrible classrooms, like terrible curriculum, no computers, like none of the things that your kids and my kids have. I think that's an important message. I would like to think that we can accommodate both of these perspectives. I mean, almost always the answer is both and in some version. And to me, this goes all the way back to your first question about the person in the situation, right?”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there is a number of scholars, including Bettina Love, who have asked the question, you know, is teaching grit anti-black and is the whole idea of shining light on resilience and this whole conversation on agency, like are we doing something dangerous here by ignoring structural poverty, racism, et cetera, et cetera? My first reaction being a human being was defensiveness like what? Like how am I racist? Like that's, I think natural, but hopefully temporary. And for me, I thought like, well, I am the head of character lab. Like it is not really a good thing to just like wallow in defensiveness. And maybe I should actually listen and read more. So I did, and we had some conversations in person. And then I read more, read Bettina's book. I read what other critics had said. And I think.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT