Good Life Project - Angela Duckworth | Grit and Beyond

Episode Date: October 1, 2020

In many circles, Angela Duckworth’s name has become synonymous with the word grit, this elusive trait that fuels the sustained action-taking in the face of relentless adversity that leads to big achievements. Her book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller, and Duckworth is founder and C.E.O. of Character Lab, a nonprofit that uses psychological science to help children thrive. She is also the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, faculty co-director of the Penn-Wharton Behavior Change for Good Initiative, and faculty co-director of Wharton People Analytics. A 2013 MacArthur Fellow, Angela has advised the White House, the World Bank, NBA and NFL teams, and Fortune 500 C.E.O.’s, and her TED talk is among the most-viewed of all time. And, she now also co-hosts the new podcast 'No Stupid Questions' with Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics.You can find Angela Duckworth at:Website : https://angeladuckworth.com/No Stupid Questions Podcast : https://freakonomics.com/nsq/-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://www.goodlifeproject.com/sparketypes/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In many circles, Angela Duckworth's name has become synonymous with the word grit, that elusive state or trait or, as you will hear her describe it, tendency that fuels the sustained action-taking in the face of relentless adversity over an extended period of time that leads to extraordinary achievement and outcomes. Her book, Grit, The Power of Passion and Perseverance, was a long-running number one New York Times bestseller. And expanding her fascination with human flourishing beyond the topic of grit and also deepening into her love of children, Duckworth founded and is the CEO of Character Lab, a nonprofit that uses psychological sciences to help children thrive. She's also the Christopher H. Brown Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, Faculty Co-Director of the Penn Wharton Behavioral Change for Good Initiative, and Faculty Co-Director of Wharton People Analytics, a 2013 MacArthur Fellow.

Angela has advised the White House, the World Bank, NBA, NFL teams, and Fortune 500 CEOs, and her TED Talk is among the most viewed of all times. And she is now the co-host of the podcast No Stupid Questions with Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics. Fueling all of this is a relentless curiosity about people, why they do what they do and how to help them do it better, bundled with a deep desire to make a real difference in people's lives. We explore all of this in today's conversation. So excited to share it with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.

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Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th.

Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot? Flight risk. We want to dive in with you because you are in the context of all of this.

There's so much incredible work that you have done, so much work that you're doing. And eventually I want to get to the podcast that you've been rocking out this year as well. You've built this stunning career as a researcher and an educator, a lot of it focused around grit and then expanding out into broader character traits. But it sounds like sort of education has been a part of your ethos from the earliest days. It was sort of like something that was drummed into and part of the culture of your family as well. Yeah, I think education, you know, it's like a fish in water. You're not even consciously aware of how important education is because like everyone you know thinks education is so important. And then you, and then you realize

like, oh, you know, there is, there's something like unusual about this emphasis when you, you know, leave your family and you, you know, you go experience other, other influences. But I would say that my, my devotion to education now is maybe less from my family saying like, it's important, you know, education is, is the, is the way to do anything in life. I think, I think I really like kids. So when I was in high school, I, you know, I tutored a little bit when I was in college, I really like I spent, I think I maybe spent more time with kids in the neighborhood as a tutor, as a big sister, as organizing program than I, than I did in the classroom. So I think I'm just, you know,

kids are great. I'm a smarter than us and they're nicer than us and they're more energetic. Yeah. I mean, have you ever thought to yourself, like, what is it about the quality of being a child that so draws you to them? You know, they really are kinetic, right? If you're around kids, like it's just, it's palpable, right? Like they just, Maybe their mitochondria are better, but they're just kind of bouncing off the walls with energy. And I don't just mean three-year-olds, right? I mean, like 15-year-olds, like 18-year-olds, they've got a lot of chi. It's like a life force. And I find that to be literally revitalizing, right? Vita meaning life, right? Like it, it, you feel energized. And, and I do think there is like a, like a purity, like they're just,

I mean, I really do think they're like smarter and nicer than, than we are in so many ways, right? Like there's a real kind of authenticity, especially young kids, of course, right? Who they're just like, look at you. And there's not a lot of like layering of strategy, et cetera. So I don't know. I've really enjoyed them from that perspective. Also, when I was a freshman in college, you know, like most 18 year olds are figuring out what to do. So you're doing a lot of experimenting.

And I remember I volunteered both as a tutor and also as a, like a, somebody who would go visit people in the locals, a nursing home. It was like a publicly funded nursing home. And I got assigned two patients and I would go every week and just like sit with them because they were people who didn't have a living family or at least living family who would visit them. And I remember having these like two experiences, like tutoring, like nine year olds, and then visiting, you know, 85 year olds, and in the same neighborhood. And I think these are both like, valuable things to do. But I guess the other reason I'm drawn to education, you know, in addition to maybe my family culture, in addition to like liking kids, because they're awesome, is that if you really want to

make the world a better place, there just seems to be a kind of logic of like, well, this kid needs more than what they're getting. Maybe since they are at the beginning of their lives, this is a good time to invest. And so just in some sense, I had an intuition that this would be a very... If you want to make the world a better place, how could you not start with kids? No, I love that. I mean, it's curious. I love the idea of bouncing between sort of like the nine-year-old and then dramatically fast forward to the person who's close to 90. And there are probably some really fascinating similarities between those two age groups, a level of openness and curiosity, a level of...

I feel like it's sort of like there's this window where we start to center our lives and our thoughts and our expression. And it's almost like when you catch people before that, it's a different insight into the human condition. And then when you step into people's lives in their late 80s, they're probably at a point where, I don't want to make assumptions, but I'm guessing a lot of people will be at the point where you're kind of like, you know, I got nothing to hide. It just is what it is. I'm going to be here with you, you know? Yeah, there are parallels and there are differences. I mean, you know, I see that the two women that I was visiting were not especially open to experience. I was trying to convince them

of things. I didn't do a very good job, but later in my life, I think it was in my thirties or maybe my, maybe it was my thirties. I was talking to my friend, Adam Grant, who's also a psychologist. I'm sure, you know, Adam, many, I dare say most people I interact with like know him or know of him. So I called him and I said, we're both tenured now as professors and we're very blessed. I'm trying to make a rank order list of like the problems in the world that I should work on, you know, in order of importance. Like, have you done that? Like, what do you think? And he said, you know, I thought about that. But at the end of the day, I realized that it's very difficult to rank what are like climate change compared to funding reform in education or elections, or it's, it's very difficult to make that list. And I'm not sure

that's the right list anyway, because these problems are all so above threshold. Maybe you should make the list based on what you get energy from and what you're good at. And I think there are some social problems which you could argue are more urgent than others, but there are so many that really are above threshold. I thought that was great advice. And I don't think that what I work on is necessarily more important than what other people work on. But I think it's above threshold to say like, hey, maybe psychological science can do something to helping all kids thrive. And for me, as an individual, for whatever reason, even more than food, I find human nature to be endlessly fascinating.

I mean, it's funny because I have noticed, so I do a lot of research whenever I sit down before I have a conversation. And I have a quick note I wrote down, relentless curiosity. And the way that shows up when you're being interviewed is you take over the interview very often. I know. Well, it's like asking questions. Right. But it was amazing to see. And then what happened? Why did you do that? Right. And I'm like, I'll be listening. And all of a sudden I'm like, wait a minute, she's asking all the questions. You're so, so, yeah. I usually like apologize to the interviewer afterwards. I'm like, sorry,

I just had to like, I just had to know. I wanted to know what you were thinking. Yeah. But I think it's actually beautiful, right? Because it shows that somehow you have found a way to channel so much of your energy into something that other people are curious about. But also, even when the context is supposed to be them asking of you, you are so curious just about the current interaction that you're in, about the human being that you're in conversation with, that it's almost like you can't help yourself. You have this childlike curiosity about what's going on in the mind and the life experience of the person that you are momentarily in conversation with.

I do feel like one of the great joys in life is to feel like the way you were when you were a kid and you were curious about something. You just wanted to know. And it was in a way like a need or a yearning, which sounds negative, but it's great. it's, it's great. Right. Like you're just quote unquote, dying to know. Right. I do often feel like that. I've never met somebody that didn't interest me. And when I think about what I read about, like, like you said, you're like, Oh, you notice I'm interested in food. True. Right. And I do read a lot about food, but I'm not reading actually like the books about like molecular gastronomy and like what really happens when you braise something. I'm actually reading like memoirs about food, you know, like I'm reading MFK Fisher and I'm, I'm like reading, you know, stories of like the people, you know, why do people do that? Like,

like, so, so the, the human dimension of anything that is happening is, is invariably what interests me when my husband and I bought a house recently, we moved five blocks in Philadelphia, and the realtor would just find it hysterical that when he would take me to a new home, instead of thinking about the molding or the electrical system, I was always asking these questions like, oh, and then why did they want to move out of this? And then, so they have three children. So how old are they? And like, what, you know, why do you think that they decided to go into that profession? And the realtor's like, I don't know, but I don't know that it's relevant to buying a house, but it is exactly

where my mind goes. Yeah. I mean, it's almost like this childlike state of wonder, where it's just a fierce curiosity about everything and everyone. Do you think everyone's like that though? Like just to, you know, do my thing of asking questions, like, but do you really like, like, are there people, do you, do you, you know, in your experience and like, do you think there are people who are less curious, who aren't asking? In some ways I feel like, isn't everybody doing this all the time? Yeah, I actually don't think so. And here's why I say that. So I've actually been doing sort of my own research for a couple of years. We developed a set of archetypes and an assessment that looks at sort of the primary drivers of work, of effort across the spectrum of people. And so one of those archetypes, we call them sparketypes, categorize as the maven,

which is basically either a broad-based or a deep dive fascination, a love of learning, probably line up with that and like the via strengths. And we've got about half a million people who've been through the assessment at this point. So we have some serious data and mavens or people who are driven by curiosity or fascination are absolutely the most prevalent of the archetypes. They're most willing to invest effort in pursuing that curiosity or fascination. They show up anywhere between 25% and 30% of the population or the people who are taking the assessment.

But there are also other people and other drivers that seem to be much less interested in learning and much more interested in doing particular things. And it's almost like having to stop that to learn something or to go deep into a curiosity or fascination is more of an annoyance. It takes them away from this other thing. And my lens is that we are, if we're a hammer, the world is a nail. Yeah. And that those who are the mavens cannot conceive of anyone else approaching the world similarly to them, just like any other orientation or wiring or impulse. Yeah, you take it for granted.

You're like, isn't everybody this kind of hammer? Like, aren't all the things't everybody this kind of hammer? Like, aren't all the things I see this kind of nail? You know, my dad used to say there are thinkers, doers, and charmers. And he wanted to make the distinction, first of all, between thinking and doing, which you just emphasized. And then he said, you know, the people who really get things done are thinkers and doers. And the people who really get things done are thinkers, doers, and charmers. Anyway, that was my dad's taxonomy of the universe. And I do think that I am sometimes like a very curious person. I'm also very doing oriented.

I took the Myers-Briggs personality indicator, like MBTI, I guess, Myers-Briggs type indicator, which is a whole other conversation because most research psychologists don't put a lot of stock in it. But I do remember taking it and getting like a zero for thinking and the maximum score for feeling and the test proctor coming over and saying like, oh, I think you self-scored this wrong. And then it was retabulated. They're like, no, you got a zero for thinking. I was actually a McKinsey consultant at the time, which was a little worrisome to my colleagues. But yeah, I think there's a part of me which is very curious, especially about human nature. I'm not curious about everything. I actually don't know that

anybody is curious about everything except for young children. I'm not curious about politics. I'm not curious about lots of important issues. I'm deeply curious about human nature. And I am a doer. Like there is a, like if I'm on vacation by like day three, I'm just like dying to do guess, is what is the impulse underneath the doing? You know, doing to achieve what? Which kind of like loops us to a certain extent to one of the topics that you have studied for a lot of time now, which is this thing, you know, capital G, grit. Where we're really talking about when you zoom the lens out and you look at people who have achieved stunning things across a number of different domains and very often in the face of great adversity over an extended period of time, and you embrace this question, like, what is it? What is the thing that distinguishes them from other people? And you identify this thing, which you call grit. Can you deconstruct that for me a little bit? Yeah, I define grit as this combination of long-term passion and long-term perseverance

with the emphasis on long-term, by the way. So I'm just going to say what I think about these things. I think, by the way, these are words and nobody owns any of the words in the English or any other language. So I'm not saying that other people who use these words are wrong or, you know, they and I'm not saying that this is the best way. But to clarify, when I say long term, I mean in adulthood, really over years or decades to really have a abiding sense of doing something that's really important to you, that you love, that you are not bored of, you know, after like a year or two or three or four or five or six. And then perseverance is, you know, the more obvious part of grit. I think like working incredibly hard, even when nothing's wrong and then being resilient when things are

wrong. So it's really about time on task, like high quality, high quantity engagement, to me is probably the final common path to any human achievement. And grit is this tendency, by the way, I think you can change your grit. So it's not necessarily a fixed tendency, but a tendency to stick with things and to keep pursuing them, you know, not a different thing every few years and just work really hard at it. So when I watched The Last Dance, which I feel like I was the last person to watch The Last Dance and they just finished that series. And I'm just, you know, like everybody else, I was glued to the screen. How could you not be? But when you look at like a Michael Jordan or Lindsay Vaughn, you know, like it's, it's incredible how much high quality, consistent, high quantity energy

they devoted to their craft, you know, not over a year, not over two, it's really over decades. And I think that is why these people are so great. We could have a discussion about talent too, but I think that's what grit is and that's why I study it. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are.

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Flight Risk. Flight risk. Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating. You used the word tendency, which I'm curious about. As I've learned about grit over the years, looked at your work, looked at some of the other commentary around it, and just looked at the broader field of positive psych and social science. I have been curious how grit really gets described. In my mind, I keep flipping between, is this a state? Is it a trait? You use the word tendency. And I guess part of the curiosity for me is that if you view it as a trait, which I've heard it spoken about numerous times, then underlying that is the assumption that it's

not changeable. If you use it as a state or a tendency, well, then maybe it opens the door to this being a trainable thing, something which is malleable over time. So I'm curious where you fall on there. So if I could try to communicate something that is both true and very nuanced, then I will do a victory dance after this conversation because I think it's very hard to understand, but I'm going to try. And it's the idea that any trait is a distribution of states. So it's not that grit is a trait or a state. It's that when I say a tendency, I mean that if you take a really gritty person, what it means is that very often if you dropped into the middle of their life and say, gee, I wonder what they're doing. Very often they would be in the state of passionate pursuit of something that they're working very hard. If you take a very low grit person, more often that you drop into their life and you're like, what are they doing right now? Are they doing something with passion and

perseverance that they've been working on for years? It's like that would happen less often. But any human being has a distribution. So if you say like, oh, Michael Jordan was really gritty, he's at the extreme. You'd be like, you could drop in on almost any moment in his life, right? And you could make a good bet that he was like thinking about basketball and working to improve and, you know, exhibiting. It could be, however, though, that like, you know, you drop in and there's a day, an hour, a moment where he's doing like something totally random. But I think the idea that traits, character strengths are tendencies and people have distributions. By the way, this is hard to explain to a general audience without

knowing a little bit about statistics. Because what I mean by distribution is like, if you could imagine in your mind's eye, like a little graph, right? Like you would see the distribution means like, where are you on average? Where are you sometimes? Where are you, you know, rarely, like, anyway, the idea is that I think grit is a trait in the sense that people differ on their distributions, but anybody differs within themselves, right? So people have the capacity, even if they're a really high grit person, to occasionally be low grit. And I think that is why just to, you know, since I'm already in this, like quagmire of complexity, which is, I think, actually, what human nature really is, like very complex, like, human nature cannot be communicated in a TED talk. I think I think that

is why why like your context matters so much, right? So you could be a really gritty person and your coach is just toxic or your company is toxic and you're really a passionate person, but you have no opportunities to, to like learn or to develop like that, that will also influence, you know, whether you are in the state of grit. So, so that is, you know, the fuller picture of grit, which I have struggled to communicate because it's hard, right? Like, I think it's just hard to understand that things like traits and states aren't opposites or like it's either a trait or, but that all human care, and I actually will say this, any serious personality psychologist will just say like, oh, of course, all tendencies,

all the strengths in the via, you know, what it would mean to be a quote unquote grateful person, or like, you know, curiosity is a signature strength. What it really means is that if somebody sampled your life, that your distribution would be all kind of like bunched up, you know, toward the high curiosity end of the spectrum, and that the states of low curiosity be rare, but not non-existent. Yeah, I mean, that's fascinating to me. If you think of it as a sampling of many moments over a long window of time

and then looking at the distribution, then it also makes me curious about, well, who's doing the sampling and how are they actually viewing the context of what allows somebody to express these things an unencumbered way with a lot of resources versus somebody else who comes out of a very different place and maybe remains in those circumstances for decades or for life and would love to express these identical things, but because of constraints and circumstances, just doesn't have the opportunity. I'm curious how you take that into account when you're sampling those moments and figuring out how these two people are different in their expression. So let's make a distinction between what theoretically is probably true and like how you would ever actually do it.

I think it's really important to do that because when I say like, oh, people are these distributions and imagine this like thought experiment that you could like parachute into their life and then see what they're doing. And then you could like that's not actually what happens, right? Because it's very hard to do. So in theory though, I just will stand by and I, you could like literally ask any trained PhD psychologists, what about, and by the way, the psychologist who's really pioneer here, who like put a name to it and all this Will Fleece and he calls it the density distribution model of personality. Anyway, all very hard to communicate, but, but it's not controversial. It's like every, I think every serious psychologist would be like, oh yeah, of course. So it's complex, but it's not like new, or it's certainly not my new idea. Okay. So then you're

like, well, who would do the sampling? Like, I think that, you know, these are all good questions, but I think more relevant is like the part of what you were saying about when you observe somebody doing something or not doing something, you know, you could say like, oh, they're high in this character strength. They're low in this character strength. There's a distribution of states in part because your circumstances matter enormously, right? I spent this terrible summer. My parents owned this tiny little like needlepoint canvas company that, you know, my mom would get these like canvases shipped in from Taiwan and they all had the Made in Taiwan sticker on them, which was some, you know, requirement for customs. And then my job for the whole summer was to take the stickers, these little gold oval stickers that said made in Taiwan, take them off, right? Which I hope was

legal. But anyway, that's what I was asked to do. And, you know, I'm a pretty hardworking person. I feel like I'm actually a pretty energetic person. It was like torture. I mean, the first hour of the day, I was going crazy already and so exhausted. And I think that's an example of how your situation is going to change your behavior, not because you're a low curiosity person or you're a low energy person or you're an irritable person. You're now at that end of the spectrum in your distribution. You're on the low end of curiosity for you because you're in a situation that doesn't give you the affordance to like be at your best. And I think the recent conversations in this country about equity and about racism and more

are in a very important way, like shining a light on like how uneven and how disparate people's opportunities really are. I think that's intersecting with positive psychology and, and the kinds of things that I work on, because you don't want to make what the psychologists that I, you know, know, would call the fundamental attribution error, which is to observe a behavior and attribute it entirely to the person's tendencies and not take into account context, situation, opportunity, obstacles that are outside of the individual. Yeah. I mean, that makes a lot of sense to me.

And I do feel like the conversation that's happening in this country now touches into that in a lot of different ways. Beyond the sort of general attribution error, I'm also curious about how sort of the notion of survivor bias affects when you're looking at who is gritty. If you take somebody who achieves this incredible thing through perseverance and passion and incredible resilience over a long period of time through adversity, and they reach this capital S success. We might be inclined to then call them a gritty person, but you take somebody who did the

exact same thing and then they either fail or become destroyed along the way. In hindsight, popular culture will then often look at that person and not call them gritty or successful, but rather arrogant or delusional. So I wonder how this idea of sort of survivor bias plays into the conversation, if at all. Yeah, the idea of survivor bias or something that's called sampling on the dependent variable, it's basically the idea if like if you look at the winner's circle and you're like, hey, these people have all these, you know, things in common, but you're not looking at everyone. And it could be that those same characteristics that are true of the people who are, you know, at the top of their careers could be the same of people who are at the bottom or in the middle or

whatever else. You have a fallacy there if you do that. So in my research, I both interview people who are like Olympic gold medalists, but most of my published research, actually, all of my published research is based on longitudinal samples where you're not just looking at the people who finished, right? So at West Point, for example, if you only interview the people who finished and you're like, hey, they're really gritty, then you could be sampling on the dependent variable. You could be committing this error. But if you start out with all the cadets and they all take the grit scale and, you know, of course, it's a select sample, but you're still starting with everyone. Then of the people who, you know, you're studying, you can look at variation on their outcomes. So that's the solution to this error.

And that is why I think it's important to do studies that are not just like, hey, I just interviewed these three Olympic athletes and I'm going to just draw all these inferences. So that's the sort of methodological solution. That makes sense to me. You know, it's interesting, the example of the cadets at West Point, I think it's really interesting also sort of like when you're taking a group of people who all start together and they're all tasked with essentially working towards the same outcome. And there's a predefined endpoint and a predefined metric for success. And part of my broader curiosity around

grit also is how it shows up and how it applies when you are out in the world doing things where there is no predefined endpoint, where it's more of an agile process, where you need to sort of define success along the way and even decide whether you can succeed and if it's worth the cost sort of in real time as you're doing it, you know, like does grid apply when learning along the way is a part of the metric for success? I think you're right. Just to, first of all, contrast, you know, a really structured environment, you know, sports are like that too, right? Like, I mean, what if you are on the very long path to becoming, you hope, an Olympic gold medalist, right? Like it's very hard, but it's, it's structured in a, in a way that most of us don't have that. You know, most of us are like,

more like fill in the blank than multiple choice, right? In terms of the choices that we're making. And that's harder in, in some ways, I feel like. So why would somebody pursue something for years is that the goal must be at a level of abstraction that it's not like something you accomplish like in a day or a week or a year. Like, you know, when you ask people and not everyone has an explicit top level goal that they could say like, oh, this is my mission statement for my life. And I think, I don't know, maybe one out of 10 people that I've talked to like has it in a very conscious way. Even people who are really gritty, because sometimes it can be like non-conscious or like, you know, an outsider might say like, I would think your goal is this.

But they might not be, you know, having it in their head like that. I think whether it's conscious and available to you or less so, it is having something which you are basically working toward. And I think that the idea that it's this higher level goal in a hierarchy of goals explains to me why there has to be a lot of flexibility and experimentation. It's cliche almost when you, when you really get what people's top level goals are, because they're so abstract, you know, like, you know, be my best, you know, like make the world a better place. Like, you know, bring out the best in others. I have a graduate student, Danny Southwick. He's a former NFL quarterback. Who's now getting his PhD. He did the master's

in positive psychology program, which is how I met him. And his top level goal professionally is show what's possible, right? Okay. That is incredibly inspiring and poetic, but it's so abstract, right? It's in the particulars, right? Where there's so much experimentation and like, is that going to be through being a coach? Is that going to be through becoming a research psychologist? How can I do that? figure out like which path. I still think having some articulation, however, of that North Star top level abstract goal is helpful, right? Even if like the path toward that is, you know, something you're constantly experimenting with. And it's been helpful to me, you know, I think my top level goal, use psychological science to help kids thrive,'t even as abstract as, as it, you know, is for other people. But, but just knowing that, like, you know, should I go on this podcast?

Like, is it, you know, what should I do on Friday afternoon? To me, it helps me decide, and it helps me realize like, no, not that, that, not that podcast, like, but maybe this one, or like, no, shouldn't, shouldn't do that on Friday afternoon. I should do this on Friday afternoon because, because ultimately it's more aligned with what I care about most deeply. Yeah. I guess that helps orient around, you know, like, and that last thing that you said, I think is really what it comes down to what I care about most deeply. You know, even if you, if you, if you don't have some predefined sense of this is exactly where I'm headed, this is exactly what

it looks like, or this is exactly what I'm looking to create or learn or discover or achieve, to have a strong sense of this is the thing that fuels me, that wakes me up in the morning, and am I making progress towards that? That's why I think I use the word agile in the world of entrepreneurship and startups for a long time. Lean was a hot word. And I think I used the word agile in the world of entrepreneurship and startups for a long time. Lean was a sort of like a hot word. And I thought it was fascinating because they essentially reframed the idea of a startup as a startup is effectively a group of people in search of a business model.

And the goal was not to quote quote, succeed. The goal was to learn. It was to iterate as rapidly as you can to prototype to get feedback. And the fundamental goal was just to learn and learn and learn and learn. And as long as you were learning, then you could say, I'm succeeding. Even if at the end of the day, the learning taught you, this was a terrible idea and we absolutely shouldn't do it. I think it's interesting because when you orient around that, then I feel like grit becomes almost more accessible, no matter what the outcome is or no matter whether, you know, burn through the seed money that was given you and realize it was a terrible idea to start with. There's a great paper out of

Stanford Business School. I just love it. It's about success being metaphorically a journey and not a destination. And of course, you know, that's a metaphor that's been around for a while, but they actually did these random assignment experiments where they showed people photographs of, you know, a road and like a farmhouse or something in the distance. And, you know, in one condition, you're encouraged to think of success as the road, right? As the journey, as the path. And then in another condition, like success is there. It's like getting there. It's like that house in the distance. That's your goal. They found was, you know, that relatively, you know, simple, brief induction and metaphorical framing actually encouraged people in actual real life, uh, goal-directed things like exercises to, to, to stick with things longer and to, you know, put more energy into it. And in general, I think it's a healthier thing. Actually, I was just talking to Lindsay Vaughn yesterday. She's great. And I, I think she has many character

strengths, including obviously grit. And she, you know, talked about how as early as she can remember, really, like she would want to one up herself. Right. And really that is the idea that like, you're never there. Right. And she would say that too. Like even when she retired, you know, she could name the number of things that she wanted to do that she hadn't done. So I think it is like a good way to think like, you know, what am I learning? Right? Like, did I learn something? And by the way, I have tried to use this during the pandemic, because this is just the most stressful year of my life of most people's lives that I know. And I'm especially blessed. So I'm, I'm can only imagine what other people are going through. But I am trying to wake up in the morning, in addition to doing my three good things,

exercise and thinking of three blessings in my life, I am trying to think of at least one thing I learned. And when all these imperfections, right, like, oh, this happened and that was not what I wanted. And like, then I tried to do that and that did not work out the way I want. Like, and then I made this mistake and, you know, I made that poor judgment. I think if I keep coming back to a question of like, what did I learn? Then it frames it, as you said, in the

right way. Does it matter that you burned through your startup? Yeah, it matters. But what you really want to think about is like, what did I learn? And I mean, in that context of day-to-day life, in the context of startups, whatever it may be, I feel like that just taking that frame, you live a better life because no matter what happens, you know, as long as you pause to kind of see it, like reflect on it, it's kind of like you can't, you can't lose. Right. It may suck in the moment. It may be a brutal experience. It may be hard, but you know, if you frame it as, as you know, like, do I now know something that will inform how I move forward in a, in a different

way? There's so much uncertainty right now. Isn't it great that you could basically guarantee that you win if you say like, did I learn something today? And yeah, you're right. And by the way, truly world-class performers learn from their successes too, right? So it's very hard to learn from failure. Actually, new research from terrific psychologists shows that it's especially hard to learn from failure. So we should praise the Lindsey Vons and the Michael Jordans from learning from failure, but also they learn from success and that's hard too, right? Because so often it's like, oh, that worked out. So anyway, having a learning mindset at all times is, I think, a wonderful thing in so many

ways. Yeah. And I think it also speaks to a certain extent to the role of a coach or a mentor or a guide or somebody who steps in. We had Anders Ericsson in the studio a little while back. I think a lot of people know his original research, which has been misinterpreted around the 10,000-hour rule, which is not a 10,000-hour rule. But the idea of this deliberate practice, this grueling practice, but what's fascinating to me is his current focus seems a lot more to be on the role of that person who steps in. And when you're in this fierce process of growth and learning and struggling, the importance of having somebody else alongside you who can zoom the lens out a little bit

and look at what's happening, have the wisdom and the experience to understand how to help you move through a moment that you perceive as unmoved throughable, for lack of a better way of putting it. And so when you talk about Lindsey Vaughn or professional athletes or people at the top of their game who are able to do this, I wonder how often his lens was, this is a mission critical piece. It's almost impossible to push to this place long-term and survive this process if you don't find or have that person or multiple people. I wonder if you have seen or think the same thing. Yeah. And Andres passed away this summer and it's an appropriate

time, I think, to honor this life. I mean mean, Anders really was the world expert on world experts. And when you talk about, you know, a mentor or a guide, you know, he wasn't my coach the way like Lindsey Vonn had a skiing coach, but he was actually a mentor for me. And so I was able to belatedly, I guess, you know, I wrote a gratitude letter, which I read at his memorial service. And I was able to say in that letter, you know, I am quite sure I would not be where I am today without you, which is exactly as you say, you know, what Anders surmised after studying experts for his whole life, that people rarely, if ever, truly go it alone. There are lots of reasons why that is. One that you mentioned is the motivational one, right? I mean, I don't know many people who are the ones to like, you know, realize like how

to put things in perspective and to give themselves the pep talk, you know, like the day they really need it. I think for most of us, we can think like, oh yeah, that's what my husband does or my wife does or my peer does or my mentor, my coach, my boss. The other reason though Anders would want us to talk about is that when you think about the practice that world-class experts do, it's goal-directed, it's very strategic. It's not like, oh gee, I wonder what I should do with this like two hours. Like it's highly choreographed and it's well thought out. And I think in Anders' experience, it is extremely rare that the person that is the performer

can do all that mapping out. Like you need a Phil Jackson to say like, what we're gonna work on is this. I mean, you need a trainer who says like, all right, today we really have to work on that. And I think that's really a profound point. I would call Anders occasionally. I met him when I was still in graduate school. I think it was like toward the end of graduate school for me.

And I would call him for advice, especially when I was feeling lost, which was somewhat frequent. And he really did. He gave me... I couldn't just write in my journal and come up with the advice that he would give me. And he would tell me to like, look for a salient role model and to, you know, to try to like copy what they did. And he would ask me to like, define what success looked like and to like, think about the obstacles. Anyway, he said a lot of things that I think enabled me to become better at what I did. And I think that's his, you know, that it's true. It's exactly what he was working on, you know, when he passed away. Yeah. I just found it so compelling. And especially that last point you were making where it's, part of it is about the motivation, but the

role of having somebody who, for lack of a better word, is in possession of a different set of mental models and experiences and the ability to reflect to you what you don't see and offer a frame that is just not within your experience. I remember when he shared that, I was just like, yeah, I never really thought about it that way. But that to me is, I think, a much harder thing and maybe more important than this sort of like, quote, you know, like pumping you upside of things. You know, the term my colleague Ethan Cross might use is psychological distance, right? And it's so true. of on most nights and we really try to take a little walk, right? Like a walk after dinner with our masks on just to process our days, which have usually been filled with small to medium sized stressors. And just for him to be able to tell me the things that went wrong, I mean,

I have distance, right? So it's really helpful to have another human being who cares about you, but they didn't go through the same bad day, right? So they have a little perspective. He was a really, truly, as you know, I think like kind and funny and fun person. I feel like not everyone also would know that, right? They're like, oh, the 10,000 hour rule, which as you point out, is like usually misinterpreted. And then, you know, his like monumental work as my own advisor, Marty Seligman would say that not many scientists can say they really discovered something important, but Anders could say that. And for all those reasons, like he should be memorialized, his obituary appeared in every major newspaper. That's all correct and right. And everybody should buy his book, Peek, and everybody should read it. And you could literally

become better at what you do in a more efficient way if you understand Anders' work. But he was such a good person. His wife said at his service that in her very long marriage, she could not remember a single occasion when he was unkind to anyone. So anyway, I think it's a wonderful thing to be mentioning him in this conversation. No, I love that. And I didn't know that you were so close to him and he had played such a meaningful role. Pretty sure he got me tenure i wrote that in my graduate letter i was like pretty sure you were you know a big reason why um anyone would want to you know believe in my work yeah that's amazing whether you're in your running era pilates era or yoga era dive into peloton workouts that work with you from meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program,

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Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday, we've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him.

Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. And it's interesting also because it kind of like, you know, as we zoom the lens out from GRID and you have not just been solely focused on this one thing called GRID. It has been a piece of your work, but also as part of the character lab, you know, it's, it's really looking at the other elements of the human experience of what makes us the way that we are of, you know, beyond achievement. How do we treat others? You know, it's sort of a deeper exploration of the life of the mind and what goes on in there and all the different things that contribute to the way we bring ourselves to the world and to a certain extent, the way the world returns certain things to us. Do you like the word character? I do.

But there's probably a weird reason for it. Yeah, what's your reason? I think it's hokey and I think it's, it hearkens to a time. To me, it's, it's kind of an old timey word that speaks to a moment where the quality of a human's heart, of their intellect, of their service, their contribution was at the center of life. And I, and I sometimes wonder whether that is not so much the case these days. And I like the word because I think I, I don't think I mourn the loss of it because I don't

necessarily believe it's gone, but I yearn for more of its return. That's beautifully said. Yeah. I've been thinking about the word lately. Well, not just lately, but also lately. I think Aristotle used the word character in translation. Martin Luther King said intelligence and character, you know, these are the true goals of education. Maria Montessori, John Dewey, like there are many great thinkers who have embraced this term. One of my favorite thinkers is Jackie Bezos, who among other things is the mother of Jeff Bezos. And she says, character is how you show up in the world. And I think these are the reasons I do like the word character. But I think sometimes people think like, it sounds like accusatory. And it, you know, it sounds like you're blaming the victim, like, oh, they have poor character, like that's why they're not doing. So like any word, I guess it has its pros and cons. But I did create this nonprofit called Character Lab

with two educators, Dave Levin and Dominic Randolph, and they really liked the word character. They had been very attracted to the work of Marty Seligman, who was my advisor in graduate school, as I said. Anyway, I do think that some emphasis on, you know, how you're showing up in the world and also like, as you say, like how the world returns that and to emphasize that, like how the world treats you is part of where your character is shaped. I mean, so again, because this conversation has taken us to complexity and to

nuance. I, I think that's very important. It's not like your character is just something you're born with. I mean, you know, where do kind people come from? I think kind people come from people being kind to you and you know, where do unkind people come from? Like probably people being unkind to them. So, so I think it's, it's a nuanced thing. But I, I, yeah, I'm proud to have a nonprofit called Character Lab. And I like it. I like the association with the word. I can see how it may be loaded for some people. But I also, for me, when the way that I, the frame that I have for it is positive, and it's sort of like drenched in meaning and meaning and love and contribution and purpose and things like

that. It's interesting that your reflection though, I was recently having a conversation with a friend about the experience of shame. And she said, well, there's a shame that society, that's sort of from the outside in when you're not living up to blah, blah, blah. And then there's just the inner shame. And I'm like, nobody's born with shame. You know, like there, there is no inner shame until it comes from the outside in. It's very interesting. Yeah. And did they really mean like some inner shame

that like is just, you know, springs out of your arteries and veins or something like. That was my curiosity. You know, like I, I feel like sometimes we live with a certain frame or experience for so long that we almost can't imagine it not emanating from within us. Yeah. Interesting. It just feels like it's like coming out of your pores or something, you know, it's a moral emotion that emerges during the preschool years, shame, guilt, and I'm sure there could be arguments about why you wouldn't want someone to not be capable of this moral emotion. But there's so many reasons to think that it can be a very toxic emotion. I spent a lot of time in my 20s feeling like, I mean, I even would say out loud, and I certainly would write in my

journal, like, I'm a bad person, like, for whatever reason, like, you know, I'd fallen short from some expectation or hadn't, I don't know, something ridiculous, like, I didn't eat healthy that day, and like, oh, I'm a bad person. And I think shame, like, can be so debilitating. And I'm glad that, like, I grew up a little bit, and now I'm and now I'm 50. And I don't have that kind of self-incrimination that I had when I was a younger woman, not nearly as much anyway. I think age, well, maybe not for everybody, but I feel like sometimes age helps. I mean, there are plenty of times where I'm 54 and where I have messed up or I've done the wrong thing or said the wrong thing and I've caused harm.

I've gotten into this habit of just when I'm starting to feel that thing inside of me, asking, at the time that I made this choice or did this thing or said this thing, did I feel it was right action and do I still? If the answer is no and sometimes it's not, then I'm like, okay, I need to fix this. This was messed up. But if the answer was yes, then it just, it allows it to settle differently with me. So the question you ask is what again? Was it right action?

Was it right action? Yeah. It's sort of like a bit of a Buddhist frame. Yeah. But it works for me for some reason. And it also sometimes helps me understand when I need to right a wrong. Yeah, no, I think you like to ask questions, obviously, in so many ways. I was thinking like, if I had a New Year's resolution, if you can have a New Year's resolution in like September, well, the new school year anyway,

I'm about to start teaching two classes. And I was like, you know what I need to work on this year? And Anders Ericsson would very much endorse this because you should have a specific goal for improvement, not just kind of try to improve everything. I'm going to really try to ask more questions, like more authentic, open-ended questions that don't have a yes or no, right or wrong answer. And so I love that you ask questions as a matter of being, and I'm going to try to do that more, like in everything. Brian Grazer, who's a person I really admire, very curious person, also of, you know, accomplished film producer, et cetera. I had a conversation with him recently.

He has this idea of a curiosity conversation and that's how we met. But then, you know, of course became friends. And he was saying how, like in his leadership, as, as every Hollywood producer also has to be a leader, like he's learned, um, instead of telling people, you know, what to do and what not to do is to ask questions, you know, that are much more generative and don't make people, but anyway, I just think it's great. I'm like, yeah, questions, questions are great. Questions are a superpower. Like I am not asking enough, like real questions. No, I love that for a minute. And it's also a really nice segue into your podcast. Oh yeah. I didn't even think that that's true. We, uh, we have a podcast, we meaning Stephen

Dubner and I have a podcast called no stupid questions yeah i mean with everything else that's going on your life is not unbusy i literally didn't know that this podcast was weekly like he was like i was like so when is this season over and i was i was i was like you know like is it 10 episodes and he was like i'm not sure i know what you mean i was like well i mean you know and then like we take a break and then like, you know, the next year. And he was like, oh, did you not read any of the emails? Like this is a weekly podcast.

And I was like, got it. Check. So it's been a little more frequent than I had originally like thought. That's my my fault. And I really like Steven. Talk about like nice people. Like actually, Steven has a bias. I now know him pretty well. And he really likes good, nice people. And he's a good, nice person.

So we get along because he's so great. You got to love that. And it's sort of like the perfect to have two good, nice people who are sitting there hosting conversations around, you know, the podcast is called No Stupid Questions. Really basically inviting everybody to say, come on, just like, what do you got? You know, let's go there. But some of the topics you explore, I think all the topics are actually like super cool. You went into something which I think for a lot of people is super relevant now, which is why it is so hard to be alone with your thoughts, was one of them. And I would imagine a lot of people are going through that and questioning that these days. Yeah. I mean, the pandemic is a time when some people, I mean, I think about my mother-in-law and my mom, like they are like really alone, right? I mean, they're sequestered and with very few exceptions,

they have 168 hours in their week, just like we all do, but like almost all of those hours are alone. And I was talking to Stephen Dubner about this question. I think he, it's hard for me to remember which questions he asks me and which I ask him. The structure of this podcast is that it's one of each. So there are two quick conversations that college students who send us emails are like, this is what I miss about college. Like, this is the kind of, you know, it's like fun conversation that I used to have when I was in attendance. And that question, I think he asked me, but I can't be sure.

It immediately made me think of research by Tim Wilson and colleagues on how people are so averse to being alone with their thoughts that even for many of them rather shock themselves electrically at great pain rather than do nothing than sit there with their thoughts. It also reminded me, by the way, of the marshmallow task, which is this famous task that preschool children are waiting in a room, it's empty, there's nothing in the room to do or look at. And they are delaying gratification, hoping to like get two marshmallows instead of one if they can wait until the experimenter comes back. And I remember watching the video of this original task, and then also replicating this experiment myself with slightly older children. And it struck me that,

you know, maybe even harder than waiting and resisting a marshmallow is not doing anything. And I do think that's part of the reason why the task works, is that it's very, very difficult to sit alone. Now, some people would like nothing more than to be alone with their thoughts. And I think it's something we can all learn, which is, you know, mindfulness. I mean, if mindfulness becomes part and parcel of what people learn to do when they grow up and practice when they are at any age, like I think that would be a, I can only imagine how wonderful the world is going to be. But mindfulness, I think, is nonjudgmental awareness of the present. And I'm guessing that if you had like Richie Davison in a room, you know, by himself for not only minutes, but hours, like he'd be very content. He'd be like, cool.

Like, here I am. Yeah, it's a really hard experience for so many people. And I have about a 10 yearyear-ish meditation slash mindfulness practice. So I've gotten a lot more comfortable with it, but sometimes really enjoy it. But it's been a long process. Is it hard for you? How do you describe the experience of when you're practicing mindfulness now? To me, I sort of split it into two things. One is a sitting practice and

one is just an ethos. But I think the sitting practice builds the capacity for the ethos that you just carry throughout your day. So I can much more readily just snap into a conversation, a moment in interaction, you know, a tiny green bug crawling up my hand much more easily because I've had this daily practice for so long now. So I don't experience the daily practice as fun or necessarily any easier than it was 10 years ago when I started. But I noticed the flow through to just moments of my waking orientation that where I'll stop for a moment. I'll be like, oh, I'm more present or I'm less reactive. Like I just, I know five years ago, I would have experienced this in a much more reactive way

and it would have led to a worse outcome for everybody. So it's almost, it's that, which is actually the much more meaningful thing to me. That makes sense. I'm learning, I don't have a daily mindfulness practice, unless you count yoga, which I think Richie was like, you can count, that's a moving meditation. Anyway, but I think he would really love to have heard you say that, because when he communicates to me what it really means to me, he's like, it's not necessarily,

it really is just being able to, you know, throughout your day, adjust and like be in that state, which is, I guess, why you do that daily. I mean, it's not that different from exercise, right? It's like you want to be vital throughout the day. That is why it helps to do half an hour of, you know, calisthenics or something. Yeah. Right. My ultimate goal is not to be able to sit for longer and longer amounts of time. I could care less about that. What I care about is how it changes the quality of my life just moving through each day, which feels like a good place for us to kind of come

full circle as well. So sitting here in this container of the Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? To me, to live a good life is to do three things. One is to exercise strengths of heart, which is just about you and other people. So you could say, oh, I'm going to do that through gratitude. Or you could be like my mom and do it through generosity or kindness. You could do it through however you want, but it's a way of interacting with other people in a positive way. Then there's exercising strengths of mind, like you, asking questions and being curious, or maybe being a deep learner. Or you might say, like, my strength of mind is intellectual humility.

I think there are many ways you could enter that, but strengths of mind. And then there's what I study, strengths of will, grit and self-control, optimism. I would say growth mindset. And I think those are all the kind of like getting things done. So when my dad said, you know, life has thinkers, doers and charmers, you know, they roughly correspond to these categories, not exactly in that order. But I do think if you imagine a person's life, who they're in some way, like working on trying to interact with other people in a giving positive way in some way they're trying to like exercise the life of the mind we could put mindfulness

in there if you wanted and in some way they're trying to get things done for a higher purpose and and being effective like i don't know it's hard to imagine that you would go too wrong i love that thank you thanks donathan thank you so much for listening and thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help Thanks, Jonathan. online assessment that will help you discover the source code for the work that you're here to do. You can find it at sparkotype.com. That's S-P-A-R-K-E-T-Y-P-E.com. Or just click the link in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, be sure to click on the subscribe button in your listening app so you never miss an episode. And then share, share the love. If there's something that you've heard in this episode that you would love to turn into a conversation, share it with people and have that conversation.

Because when ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold. See you next time. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Actual results will vary.