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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“There's probably a conversation going on between nature and nurture because a very conscientious person says, I'm going to go to summer school this summer and get away from my good for nothing friends, but also the kind of kid who chooses to go to summer school when they're 16 probably is being influenced by their genes. I don't know that most people want to shove this much information into their minds, so sometimes I just stop at kind of like, it's complicated and it's both.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You like to talk a lot at parties, whether you pray or not, there are literally published studies on all those things, like documenting that if you are a twin, you know, you are more likely to be like your sibling than if you are not a twin, right? Because, you know, at least I'm talking about identical twins, et cetera, et cetera. So that's the nature part. But for the very same characteristics, which is like all characteristics, right? There's also evidence from the same twin studies, by the way, that nurture matters. And in these studies, very often nurture is just like they take the nature part, which they can back in into statistically and then just like nurtures kind of everything else. So it kind of puts into one group the things that you had some control over and then the things that you didn't. Although, okay, step two is like, okay.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have agency to change your situation, right? You're like, hey, these friends are really not good for me. I'm not going to hang out with them anymore. Yeah. So you can see how immediately this gets very complicated. My desire always when somebody asks me about this is to shove as much information into their heads as possible. Usually that's not that much, right? Usually people are like, well, I just want to know like, is it introverse nurture? So I was like, how about this? First complication. It's nature and nurture, right? So step one is it is not either or. It is definitely both and, you know, you have two kids. I have two kids. Our kids inherited DNA from their biological parents, right? They are absolutely influenced by that DNA. I mean, there is no characteristic at all, psychological or otherwise. You know, your risk of heart disease, your preference for broccoli.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I would love to hear what you think. And I wonder, yeah, I would like to know what you think of yourself, like whether, you know, like. You are in those dimensions, and whether that was kind of nature or nurture for you.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that satisfying is a description of most people and maximizing without end is a description of the people that I study. The thing I would amend to that or I guess append to that is that, you know, one of the things that I really admire about outstanding performers is that they really are never done. They're the opposite of complacent. And I think one of the hidden dangers of success is that you stop kind of like working as hard as you really need to. I mean, that's kind of related to the first thing that we're saying, but just like there are people that I know who really want to win their second Nobel Prize. The people who are like just tireless. So they learn as much in bad years as they do in good years. And I think that's maybe their perennial learners.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would keep trying and really try. Like, just try, like, the marginal gain of knowledge is like no small, there's no diminishing marginal return. I'd say 99% of people are like, oh, you only try up to the point where you get the A or you make a certain, you know, whatever amount of money or you get a certain amount of accomplishment. And then you withdraw effort, you know, accordingly. And therefore, the really, really smart people who have like a really high ROI are like those taxi drivers in the famous study who like on a rainy day, even though they can earn more money. So they should stay out for like an 18-hour shift. They actually go home early because they make their till. But the rare individual is never sated and there's no diminishing marginal return for achievement or understanding or learning. And so there the Abbey Wombax, like they're the Tom Brady's, like they're the Kevin Durant's, you know, they're the Jeff Bezos.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Extremely intelligent person and very psychologically intuitive. I'm guessing that he used certain like tricks to get himself riled up and he kind of knew he was using them, right? Like he would pick on a certain argument that like he had with the opponent team or opponent like, you know, player, he was like manipulating himself. I think this underdog mindset where you like keep the chip on your shoulder is partly if you ask why, it's like because they know it improves their performance, right? So then you could ask the question, why doesn't everybody do that? I think that the reason why that is, is that for the vast majority of people, let's say for 99% of people, you're just trying to get to a certain, you know, like threshold of excellence, like how many people, when they're already getting a 99 in a course, right? Or frankly, a 93, whatever the watermark is for getting an A, right? How many people?”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get picked one and two in the draft, like you know, you're going to be MVP, et cetera. You can just see how that could lead to all kinds of problems from the trivial, like, oh, you get like lavished with attention on social media and people like throwing themselves at you and, you know, not telling you what they really think anymore because they want to be a hangar on in your entourage. But also, I think it creates a lot of fear for people because now, you know, you have everything to lose. Some of the most successful people, right? Like the people like Kobe Bryant, like were able to maintain an underdog mindset or even Tom Brady, right? Long past the time where you could actually legitimately say that you're an underdog. They are at some level manipulating themselves. Like you, I'm sure watch the Michael Jordan documentary Last Dance. And if you think about Michael Jordan, basically, he must have not a stupid guy, right?”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I will say that I've worked with some great coaches, right? So, you know, professional coaches of professional athletes. And more than one of them, I said something that surprised me, which is when we start talking about like, you know, how to develop their players and especially their younger players. So usually when you recruit a professional athlete, they're like technically still in adolescence, psychologically anyway. Brain's still developing, prefrontal cortex, not quite mature. Anyway, it sometimes gets them a lot of trouble. And I thought the whole conversation would be like, tell me what to do when my players are having a bad day. And actually one of the things that surprised me most was that so often it's the players who are having a really good year that actually end up for a variety of reasons. That's its own kind of crisis in a way. When things are like really going well, you know.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really, your personality and your situation are like it's like a conversation where the personality of the person actually changes the situation. You know, conscientious people like select into jobs that require conscientiousness. But then the situation kind of talks back to the personality and shapes the person. So after you've been in a job that requires like lots of detail orientation and diligent methodical work, like you yourself after years will be shaped by it and so forth. So I believe that the situation matters. I believe that we do have character, strengths, or personality traits. You know, there's a lot more complexity to get into, but I think the metaphor that we want to use is that there's a conversation going on between ourselves and the circumstances in which we are.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Walter tradition was emerging, which is to say, yes, there is such a thing as personality. And furthermore, we can actually give you a map of human personality that is consistent across culture and across time. So children seem to have characters or personality attributes that could be classified into the big five. You can say of a child like, oh, that child is pretty high on extroversion, relatively low on conscientiousness, kind of in the middle on emotional stability, et cetera, et cetera. So I guess where I would say that, you know, we've advanced to in 2020 is the following resolution of this debate or this war, which is that it is both the personality of a person and their situation that determines what they will do. And what's more, I can say that the wrong way to think about it is like eighty twenty, seventy, thirty, forty, sixty.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The big five refer to the five personality factors that are kind of like the north, south, and east, and west of personality except for their five, not four, inconveniently. But the big five are, it's a taxonomy of personality traits. So extroversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness to experience, and emotional stability. You can think of them just to mix metaphors here like as continents and then like specific character or personality traits would just be on these continents. So like grit, which is something I study would be like on the conscientiousness continent, but sitting next to self-control and, you know, punctuality and politeness, et cetera. But I think it's really interesting that around the time that people began to ask seriously and interrogate the data on whether it was the person or the situation that determined behavior, this kind of contrary to”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Consistency within us. There's no such thing as our character. Around that decade or so, there was also this research on the big five. Now I want to ask you, this is like a psychology quiz. Like, Shane, have you ever heard of the Big Five?”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Much is the answer to how much consistency there is across situations which is an argument in favor of situations over the person, the correlation that he observed across situations had like a maximum of about three, and sometimes people call this like the 0.3 ceiling, right? So if I observe somebody at home versus at work, you know, the correlation in a data set of lots of people who are observed in both situations might only approach 0.3. So the reason why it's a war, you need an enemy to have a war, right? On the other side of this debate, actually even in the 1960s, and you had people who said that's ridiculous. Of course, there's such a thing as a generous person. You know, you're not going to marry a random person. You marry them because of their character, because of their personality. So it can't be that we are so chameleon-like that there's no...”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was about nineteen sixty eight, so I could be off by a year or so, but Walter Michelle, one of the greatest psychologists to ever live, who lived into his nineties, passed away a couple years ago, he wrote a book and was called Personality and Assessment. It was really like a monograph, like a really, really long essay. But it was like 300 pages, so let's call it a book. And young Walter at that point, it was like two years before I was born, asked the question, you know, how consistent is our behavior across situations? Because that, of course, would be an argument for the person, right? You know, Shane is generous when he goes to buy coffee in the morning. Shane is generous to his family. Shane is generous to his friends. Shane is generous to, you know, a random person at the bus stop. And when he looked at the available data of which there was dramatically less, at least circa in 1968, Walter was able to squint and say, look, if you look at all the available data.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the person versus situation debate is the question that you're asking about. And, you know, you could say that this has been the central question in all psychology for as long as we've had psychology, right? And then if you want to predate it even more, you could say philosophy. You could argue that there are other questions as well. But this is central. You know, am I generous because I'm a generous person? Or am I generous because of the exigencies of the situation and the contrary too, right? So when you witness a selfish behavior, is that because the person is selfish or because of context factors? And as a psychologist, one of the first things I learned about was this war. I mean, have you ever heard this expression, you know, the person versus situation war in psychology?”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, Freud was wrong about a lot of things, but one thing he was very right about is that so much of our behavior and even our emotion happens below the surface of consciousness. How much of our behavior and our emotion and motivation could be going on without our consciousness? So I think that this dialogue that happens below the surface of consciousness can be raised most of it to conscious awareness and that you could just like literally have a conversation like, hey, you know, what is it about my job that's sort of bringing out the worst in me? Like, let me think about that. I'll talk to my spouse about it and then proceed from there.”
2021-04-20 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #109 Angela Duckworth: Grit and Human Behavior · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT