Good Life Project - Caroline Adams Miller: The Road to Grit.

Episode Date: July 24, 2017

Guest: For almost three decades Caroline Adams Miller, MAPP has been a leading voice in applying the science of goal-setting, grit, happiness and success.In 2015, she was named “one of the ten Positive Psychology coaches to follow.” Her latest book is, Getting Grit: The Evidence-Based Approach to Cultivating Passion, Perseverance, and Purpose.Story: A fiercely-competitive athlete and academic even in her youth, Miller was exposed to Bulimia at the age of 14 and turned to it as an outlet and control mechanism. Outwardly successful by every external measure, she eventually attended Harvard, got married and started a family, all the while keeping her disorder secret. Until one day, gripped by the need to control her disorder any more, she began to reveal her secret life and seek help.Fortunately, she heard the right words at the right time during a support group meeting, which helped turn her life into one of purpose. Caroline drew upon this life-changing experience to write a book about bulimia that exposed the disorder in a way that is still saving lives. That also started her down the road to understanding the human condition, studying positive psychology, writing a series of books and eventually focusing in on goal-setting and grit.Big idea: Grit is only good when it’s used for the right reasons, in the right context, and awes and inspires other people to play bigger and be better.You’d never guess: Why Caroline’s great-great-grandfather was in Abraham Lincoln’s Honorary Guard and why Lincoln and other presidents frequented his store in Washington D.C.Current passion project: Educating thousands of people around the world on the science of goal-setting, grit and their intersection with Positive Psychology.Rockstar sponsors:Get paid online, on-time with Freshbooks! Today's show is supported by FreshBooks, cloud accounting software that makes it insanely easy for freelancers and professionals to get paid online, track expenses and do more of what you love. Get your 1-month free trial, no credit card required, at FreshBooks.com/goodlife (enter The Good Life Project in the “How Did You Hear About Us?” section).Are you hiring? Do you know where to post your job to find the best candidates? Unlike other job sites, ZipRecruiter doesn’t depend on candidates finding you; it finds them. And right now, my listeners can post jobs on ZipRecruiter for FREE, That’s right. FREE! Just go to ZipRecruiter.com/good. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

and I thought I was going to die. And suddenly I thought, wow, I think I'm going to live. And so the dark side of goal setting and excellence is what got me to this dark place. That ironically was the seeds of what I now see was true joy. I had to ask myself, who am I? Who do I want to be? How do I want to get there? What is joy? Whose goals are these? And so ironically, in the seeds of this disaster, I found happiness, I found purpose, I found gratitude, I found altruism. And ultimately, I found grit. Because what I realized was I didn't have grit, I had success. And I had talent growing up. And those things were rewarded. But I kind of protected it at all costs. I didn't go too far out of my comfort zone. I tried to

make sure I'd shine here or shine there. And this was the thing that kicked my butt made me say, this is really hard, but I'm going to figure out how to get better. So have you ever wondered how some people seem to be able to commit to something really big, really hard, really challenging, maybe years in the making and somehow motivate themselves to just not give up, to stay with it until this incredible outcome happens? Well, I'm really curious about that too. A couple years back, there was a huge buzz around this idea of grit as a critical quality of success in pretty much anything. And it was, I think, brought to the world's attention by the researcher Angela Duckworth. And one of the big lingering questions was, well, okay, so we know grit is really

important in big, meaningful, successful outcomes in life now. But how do you get grit? And if you're not someone who feels like you're just wired for it, can you somehow create it? Can you cultivate it? Can you train in the art of grit? That's why I'm really excited to be sitting down today with Caroline Adams Miller, who is a positive psychology author, researcher, somebody who was in the first graduating class, actually, at UPenn's Master of Positive Psychology program. And she's written a book called Getting Grit, which really dives into that next stage. It answers that question, what do you do to actually get grit in your life? How do you cultivate this in a way that allows you, that gives you a much better

chance of achieving those really big, hard, challenging, profoundly meaningful things in your life? But we don't just talk about that. This is a real deep dive. It's a powerful, transparent conversation about Caroline's own personal journey, her life growing up in DC, and also being introduced very early to the world of bulimia and eating disorders and how she navigated that, how it affected her and what her thoughts are on that and how that actually was something that was maybe one of the opening moves in discovering grit in her own life. So excited as always to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.

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.

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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. Good to be hanging out. You grew up in D.C.

I did. Like in D.C., D.C.? One block outside of D.C. I grew up in a neighborhood that's the first neighborhood off Massachusetts Avenue outside of DC, right off Westmoreland Circle for people who know that, but I'm fifth generation Washingtonian. Wow. And so this is the cool thing. So when you're asked to introduce yourself and you say, what's unusual about you? Okay, so here's what's unusual about me. My great-great-grandfather was the number one watchmaker and jeweler in Washington, DC. His store, Jacob Karn's Sons,

is now the Federal Trade Commission. So it occupied this extraordinary spot. And I went to see it just to pay homage to my great-great-grandfather last year. You walk out, you see Capitol Hill, you see the White House. So Abraham Lincoln and other presidents would walk from the White House to his store to get their watches serviced and fixed and get the right time. He also kept time on Capitol Hill. So he's the official timekeeper. He was in Lincoln's honorary guard. So he would ride with him to the summer White House. But my other grandfather was his childhood friend and they played handball together in Springfield, Illinois. So I am a native Washingtonian fifth generation. And it's

a small town if you grow up there. It's very small. I would imagine a small town, political town, obviously. Oh, gosh. Tough town right now. Yeah. But I mean, it's got to be interesting, just sort of like the, I mean, forget about right now, but growing up there and having family that's been sort of generalizationally there. It's just, do you feel sort of like even as a kid, even when you're growing up, the sort of energy and ethos of power and struggle and conversation there? Yeah, you do. And maybe I felt it more than some families because I went to the National Cathedral School for Girls. And that's often a choice for families that come into town suddenly, let's say in the middle of the year, and they're in the cabinet, they're in the president's cabinet. So the girls would slide in, assuming they met the criteria for admission, middle of the year. So we had Secret Service agents pretty much all the time in the halls of the school, black limousines lined up outside. But here's the thing that I liked about that, because you can kind of get

off on the power if you want to, but you develop a different attitude towards politicians and their children if you grow up there, because they're the ones whose birthday parties you go to. You go there and Congressman X or Vice President Y, he's just a dad. She's just a mom. And so I found myself slightly apolitical because I can't talk about them as if they're cardboard cutout figures, this politician and that politician. To me, I grew up, they're moms and dads, and their kids are very vulnerable. And so I have a lot of appreciation for what it's like to be a politician in DC and to be a politician's child, and it's brutal. And for that reason, I try not to take sides at times. It's a different environment right now, I think, for a lot of us, but

you just have a different look at politicians. And I see people change. You see it happen when they come into town and let's say they meet a Kennedy and suddenly there's somebody else you're thinking whose personality just emerged from that person that you think you know. So you see people get warped by being around a quote unquote political name or family. So you become even more focused on just being a person connected to a person. And that's the biggest impact growing up in Washington had on me, I think. Yeah, that's so interesting. So it's almost like you went the other way and said, let me stay connected to the humanity side of it.

Yeah. It sounds like you're also a really competitive kid, driven from an early day. Well, you story shape us. You just did a great podcast on storytelling. And, you know, I grew up with the storytelling of my great uncles, the Olympic champions. And so I grew up, my father's father's little brothers, Platt and Ben Adams got one, two in the Stockholm Olympics in 1912. And Platt set the world record in the standing high jump, and then they discontinued the event. So, you know, but I grew up with, you know, legends around greatness and Olympic fame, and being smart and being the best. And I think that the bar was set very high for us as children. But I have that personality type that I think took it to the dark side, what I might call stupid grit now, which is what I talk about. So the dark side of goal setting really took me under, and the competitiveness really took me under with my eating disorder. But, you know, one of the things that I would like to see come back is a little bit more competitiveness. I think we have

a little too much of the law of junta in this current environment that we've raised children in, or the tall poppy syndrome, the watering down of standards. So I appreciated knowing what the standards were to be excellent. I didn't always meet them. I'm certainly no Olympic champion. But I like knowing what's the bar to be really good at something. And then how do you get there? Because then you appreciate the work that went into it. Yeah. And I want to go there in a fair amount of detail, but I don't want to skip over something that you just offered in the middle of that, which is your eating disorder. So take me there. What happened? Yeah. So when I was 14, 15, somewhere around there, I know it was ninth grade, very close friend of mine who was also a year round competitive swimmer, she and her friend were in a bathroom just outside of the lunchroom and I could hear them vomiting their food. And so when they came out, I confronted them

and I said, are you guys doing that thing that's called bulimia? And the swimmer looked at me and she said, yeah, it's great. You can go to swim practice after school and you could have eaten a big lunch and you don't feel it and you can swim fast. And the other girl said to me, yeah, and my mom showed me how to do it. Her mother was a beautiful model and they did it together. And so in that short dialogue, I got all the messages I needed to hear that made me want to try it. You know, maybe I'd swim faster. I could eat whatever I wanted. It wasn't harmful. People do it together. Mothers do it with daughters. Why not? And so as I look back, what I realized is I literally signed my death

certificate that day. So for the next seven, almost eight years, I was pulled under by this brutal addiction. And now I think it's considered a disease of addiction. This is back in the mid 1970s when I developed my eating disorder. And it went from being something I could control that I did when I wanted to, to something that controlled me, very much like other addictions. Were you aware, like, was there a moment where you became aware of the fact that it made that flip in real time or was it only upon reflection years later? No, in real time, I knew that there were a number of times I would say,

well, I'm not going to do this anymore because I would throw up blood or I had gouges on the back of my hands from, you know, where my teeth scraped the back of my hands when I was using my finger to throw up. I did an overdose of syrup of Ipecac. And I just remember finding out that I couldn't will it away. I didn't have the self-regulation or the ability to delay gratification and say no to myself. And you have to remember, this is back when there was no hope. If you had an eating disorder, it was this mythical thing that happened on sororities and on some sports teams and gymnasts and figure skaters, but nobody got better. It was hopeless.

And there also was no conversation. There was no public conversation about it. No public conversation. It was the last taboo, I would say. It was this embarrassing thing that white, overprivileged, bratty sorority sisters got. And so here I am, a 14-year-old swimmer, realizing that a lot of other swimmers are doing it, but nobody talks about it. And I just kept thinking, well, you know, if I get this SAT score, get into this college, or, you know, I kept kicking the can forward thinking, I'll just get better if I change my environment. It's called the geographical cure and 12 step programs. And the problem was every shift took me to a place where I went along with myself and my eating disorder. And so I couldn't

kick it. And that's when I realized this thing has control of me. And there's deep shame that you can't control something as fundamental as feeding yourself. I didn't know what a limit was. I didn't know what an average portion size was. It felt like a fog at times. It would descend upon me and it was like a light switch would be tripped and I'd be off to the races in what might be called junk flow. I mean, you're in an altered state of consciousness, almost a fugue state, just making the rounds. So, you know, I got to Harvard. I thought, well, if I get into Harvard, you know, what could possibly go wrong there? And I get there and I get worse.

And I would make the rounds around Harvard Square, you know, ice cream stores. And I just remember thinking, I am never going to beat this thing. But my last hope was to ask someone to marry me on our second or third date. And he said, yes. So I got married a week after I graduated, magna cum laude. So I was this billboard. I was performing here and dying inside on the other side, silently. Which is this really interesting contrast. Because on the outside, looking and using all the metrics,

somebody would measure to judge the success of your life. It's like you are on the most extreme end of success, but there's this one area that you don't have control over that's massively destructive. Well, so this is the dark side of goal setting. I set all the wrong goals. I had the bumper sticker of virtues, the bumper sticker goals. I didn't know what happiness was. I thought happiness was that great, that SAT score, that swimming time, that this, that that, marrying that man. And none of those things brought joy. And it was in 1984 that I hit my last bottom. And I found myself in a 12-step group for compulsive eaters. Did you choose to go there or were people becoming aware from the outside of what was

going on? Nobody knew. Even your husband? No. I chose to tell him after we got married one day. It was a really vicious, vicious purge, set of purges. I think it was an all-day thing. It was horrible.

We were living in Baltimore and I was aware of the fact that Shepard Pratt Hospital had a unit for eating disorders, but I think it was a padded room. It was literally like a psych ward kind of disorder. And I wasn't going to go there. I didn't think I was crazy. I just knew I had a problem with food. And I had nowhere to go. I had nowhere to go.

And I thought a 12-step program, it's free, it's anonymous, I'll go. And, you know, they're turning points in life and miracles happen. And miracles happened to me because I happened to be in a meeting at the right moment with the right people. And a woman said a sentence that changed my life. She said, my name is Betsy and I'm recovering from bulimia one day at a time. And I still get goosebumps when I say that sentence because I'd never heard those words. I don't think most people had heard those words. I didn't know people got better. I didn't know they talked about it. I didn't know any of those things, but I looked at her. She was tall. She was blonde. She was athletic. I thought, my God, she got better. So I can get better. And so in that moment, my entire life changed. I became

not a woman with other people's goals, but a woman with a purpose. And my purpose was to get better. I was going to get better. I wanted to live. I was 22 years old. And I thought I was going to die. And suddenly, I thought, wow, I think I'm going to live. And so the dark side of goal setting and excellence is what got me to this dark place. That ironically was the seeds of what I now see was true joy. I had to ask myself, who am I? Who do I want to be? How do I want to get there? What is joy? Whose goals are these? And so ironically, in the seeds of this disaster, I found happiness, I found purpose, I found gratitude, I found altruism. And ultimately, I found grit. Because what I realized was I didn't have grit, I had success. And I had talent

growing up. And those things were rewarded. But I kind of protected it at all costs. I didn't go too far out of my comfort zone. I tried to make sure I'd shine here or shine there. And this was the thing that kicked my butt and made me say, this is really hard, but I'm going to figure out how to get better. And I did. And I wrote the first book by anybody who ever got better. So that book, my name is Caroline, came out February of 1988. The New York Times Sunday Book Review reviewed it with some of the most damning, mean sentences you'll ever see about a book, like, this is such a revolting disorder, who would ever want to read about it? Turns out that book is still selling almost 30 years later, and it saved a lot of lives.

And that, to me, feels like a mitzvah. I've given hope to, I lost count, hundreds of thousands of letters I've gotten over the years. People leaning over me while I'm giving birth to my third child. I remember a nurse leaned over and she said, you wrote that book, didn't you? I was like, what book? And she said, that book, that book about getting better from bulimia. She said, you saved my life. And I get that constantly. And so that set me on a course that has brought me here. And I think it was the start of being somebody who can set big goals, inspire others to be hopeful, and help others to also learn how to

flourish and create their best lives. So my eating disorder was the worst thing and the best thing that ever happened to me. But it really defines everything I've done since then. And it's the thing I'm proudest of to this day, hardest thing I've ever done. But I did it and I'm still in recovery. And that's now the anomaly. The eating disorder world has an Achilles heel. And for me, it's like, where are all the role models of people who got better and stayed better? Because the holy grail was getting better. Back then, it's like nobody got better. Okay. So now we get better and every celebrity and famous person who's had two months of recovery suddenly on the, you know, front of People Magazine talking about recovery. And I'm thinking, you people don't know what you're doing.

You're setting yourselves up to hurt other people. Wait till you've got four years, five years. Get through relationship changes, body changes, then talk about it because other people will see you as a role model. And if you fall, they'll start to think they'll fall too. So I wrote the first book by anybody who's gotten into 30 years of recovery. And that book, Positively Caroline, came out a few years ago. Because I find it important to make sure my daughter's generation, so I have two sons and one daughter, but a daughter in particular has many of the same pressures I had on her. I want them to know that you get better. Because I've had a lot of them sitting in my kitchen for years talking about their mother,

their mothers and their crazy eating habits. I've been the display at show and tell in their schools. And I just felt like my daughter and her friends had no role models other than me of women they could point to who liked their bodies, were athletic, looked good, felt good, were happy, but who had beaten an eating disorder and stayed in recovery. So I thought, okay, I'm going to come back out into this world, this eating disorder world, and I'm going to bare my soul. And I'm really going to tell the whole truth about how I got better and stayed better. So I had to go to some really controversial places and talk about my father's abuse. My mother's a borderline. My mother tried

to give me to an orphanage when I was seven years old. She called me the bad seed. She didn't love me and she never attached to me. And borderline mothers pick one child for special abuse. And I was that one child. I don't know why. I'll never know why, but I don't care. And I had to overcome my biggest enemies being in my own family in order to also get better. So I had to tell that story. If people are going to know, how do you get better? You have to know, you may not have support inside the tent, find support outside of the tent. So I got better and stayed better. And it's hard to be that person who admits this horrible, shameful thing. My mother never loved me.

But my father gave me a massive gift two months before he died. And I haven't had many experiences like this. But he waved me over to my car. I was in my car. And he was walking through the parking lot of a pool near our house. And he had me roll down the window and he said, I need to tell you something. And I just remember thinking atoms in the air were square because I remember suddenly all the atoms around me became square. So it was this altered consciousness thing.

And he said, your mother never loved you. I said, I don't know why. We fought about it, but she never loved you. And that statement set me free because I didn't have to wonder if I was misperceiving it or whatever. And it set me free in the last possible way, which was, that's just what it is. And I felt freer than ever to tell that story if I had to, because you know what? I am friends with a lot of powerful women, and this is the untold story of powerful women right now. Women with borderline mothers, mothers who've never loved them. I don't think my mother's ever held my hand. I don't think she's ever kissed me, put her arm around me. She's never said, I missed you.

She doesn't care if my plane takes off, lands. I've never had that. I don't know what it's like. But there are other women like me who suffer silently. And this to me is the next last taboo. So my next book is going to be about gritty women because there's this threat running through a lot of our lives. Threat of parents, like mothers and fathers who are sort of dissociated and don't attach.

Mothers who just, well, I think there's an attachment issue, but I think more than anything, it's borderline parenting, a borderline mom. And it's the most shameful thing. I used to think talking about my eating disorder was shameful. I don't care about that at all. That's no big deal. This was a big deal to acknowledge it, to put it in print, to say, you know what? I got better even without that cushion, that soft place to fall. And you know what? If I did that, you can too. Because there's this family-centered approach in recovering from an eating disorder and the Maudsley method, that wouldn't have worked with me. What if you don't have a family that wants to support your recovery? What if you have a family that's your biggest enemy? Then what? So I think that a lot of women secretly struggle with this more than you would

think. So interesting. Have you had a number of conversations with the women that you know, who are in powerful places in their lives? Tons of people. And you're seeing that. I am. And there's a vibe. It's like I can eat with just about anybody and within three minutes know if they have an eating disorder. There's a look.

There's a furtive shifting of the eyes. You can just see the light switch on, off, and you just see the world disappears except for the plate. You see it. Same thing with women with borderline moms. It comes out within five minutes of conversation. I think we vibe to each other and then we feel safe.

It's almost like you can see it in each other somehow. There's some perception there. Yeah, and you feel less alone. So interesting. So I found older women mentors who literally adopted me and gave me hope and strength and courage and love. They loved me. And there's something about having an older woman who loves you. And one of those women was my grandmother, my mother's mother, who was powerless against what was being done to me,

powerless. I could see it killed her. She knew what was happening, but she couldn't do anything about it except pray. She was a Christian happening, but she couldn't do anything about it except pray. She was a Christian scientist. She's the only person whose picture is next to my bed. Her ashes are next to my bed. She is a piece of why I survived. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

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iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results 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 gonna 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 gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. So our awesome friends at Freshworks make ridiculously easy cloud accounting software for freelancers and small business owners who know that making every single moment count is a really important part of getting a lot of stuff done and being able to do the things that they want to do in their business. By drastically simplifying things like invoicing,

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automatically. They have notifications and awesome customer service. To claim your month-long unrestricted free trial with no credit card required, go to freshbooks.com slash good life and enter the good life project in the how did you Hear About Us section. So when you come to this realization and when you start to emerge, when you start to reconnect with a different set of metrics for what a life well lived is, first, how did you discover what that alternative set of metrics were and how did that sort of start to lead you into a different direction? I think it happens gradually. Because when you grow up in Washington, again, with bumper sticker virtues,

and which college did you get into? What are your SAT scores? And how fast did you swim? And did you play Concerto No. 1 by Beethoven on the piano? What I found was the greatest joy I had was being a sponsor in a 12-step program. And that's when I discovered it was all about other people. So, of course, it's wonderful to get a MAP degree at Penn and find out that positive psychology boils down to other people matter, because that's how I found

out, is you hear these great slogans in 12-step programs. And one that really changed me was, you can't keep what you don't give away. And so so for the first time, I felt like I had a gift to give other people, which was I had a little bit more recovery than they did. I was doing well. So you know what? If I'm doing well, I'll help you do well too. And you give your phone number out and you call people. So that's how I discovered that altruism and giving brings a lot of joy.

And then I began to ask myself, who am I? What do I want to do? And that's when I realized I want to write about this. And I always knew I'd be a writer, but that's how I wrote my very first book way back when. So I think the process of getting better, asking yourself, who do you want to become? Who's your best possible self? How do I give this away to others? Attitude of gratitude

one day at a time. I mean, all those slogans are just the prototypical positive psychology statement. So that's how I got into this life that I'm in now. But I think I just keep getting deeper and richer in terms of who I know, what I know. I listen to your podcast a lot. I listen to Scott Barry Kaufman. I listen to a lot of people who ask good questions and make me go, huh. And I just keep feeling like I'm on a mission. And the mission isn't about me. The mission is about giving back and helping other people to have hope and tools to achieve something important to them. So at a certain point, you end up going to, you mentioned MAP, which is short for Master's in Applied Positive Psychology at Penn. You were the first graduating class.

I was. Right? 34 pioneers. And you know, like that, for those who don't know, that's sort of like that was the original program in the country by, you know, like Marty Seligman and sort of all the luminaries that were the founders in the field. Why did you decide to actually go back in that direction? What drew you to sort of like the credentialed academic path? Well, so back to my eating disorder book, and then going public is

I just remember Dear Abby wrote about me once and I went to the Baltimore Post Office and everybody who worked there came to the front with a box loaded with letters, heaped, and they thought I'd won the lottery. They all wanted to see the lady who'd won the lottery. And so what happened was even without me expecting it, I had no expectations for the book. I just thought, I'm going to tell the truth, people will get better. But what happened was people began to come to me for advice on how to set and achieve goals, big goals. How do you save your own life? Gee, if you can do that, maybe you can do other things. So I kind of backed into the field of coaching,

wrote a few more books that have been translated into lots of languages. And so I had a platform to become a credentialed coach. What troubled me about the coaching field, so I started my credentialing in 95, 96, finished in 2000, was the training was just abysmal to me. It was airy-fairy, it was law of attraction, it was buff it up, there was no evidence to it, there was no research, and I was just really troubled that I had clients whose professions had real standards

for inclusion and ours didn't. So I was going to actually go to the Albert Ellis Institute. I applied and was accepted. And I thought that stuff appeals to me. I get rational emotive behavior therapy, or I was thinking about becoming an MSW or LCSW, or even becoming a psychologist because I had great therapy throughout those years. But instead I backed into the field of coaching and then became troubled by the standards. And then cover of Time Magazine, like January 2005, the big smiley face. That's right. I remember that issue.

Remember that? I think everybody was like, huh. Yeah, look at that, like the little asteroids around the smiley face. And somewhere in one of those articles was a paragraph that started to like flash as I looked at it like a neon sign said the University of Pennsylvania is taking 34 people from around the world. And I just thought, I have to go, I just have to go. And I'd never seen my transcript from Harvard. I didn't even know what my grades were, to be honest. So I had to write, it's like, hey, do you have transcripts from 1983? So because I had to get my hands on it. So that was the first time I saw my grades. I thought,

wow, grading has really become inflated these days. And so I applied and they asked three questions or something. And I remember I added a fourth and I said, you didn't ask this, but why should you take me? So I gave them 10 reasons why they should take me. And that year, I knew the year would change me. I knew I had to be there. I wasn't prepared for how fundamentally it changed me as a person, as a woman, as a sister, as a mother. It just altered every atom of who I was. Because I think most grad school programs, you go to become a dentist or a lawyer or this or that. You go into MAP thinking, well, I'm going to use positive psychology to be a better lawyer, better coach, better this, better

that. What you don't expect is that you cannot unring the bell after you hear happiest people have four friends. You're sitting there going, God, do I have four friends? Or Jonathan Haidt had a throwaway comment in October of 2005. He said, well, I'm a liberal atheist Jew, but hey, the happiest people have spiritual role models. And I remember thinking, well, I'm a liberal atheist Jew, but hey, the happiest people have spiritual role models. And I remember thinking, God, do I have any spiritual role models? Oh my God. So I went home, called somebody, said, take me to that Bible study class you go to. I just want to see, what are you studying? Community Bible study. So you end up challenging your perception of yourself with every bit of research that's put in front of you. And in my case, my life was changed

because we were assigned a bunch of articles, again, around October of 2005, that just made me live backwards and forwards. And the first one was Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect by Laura King, Sonja Lubomirsky, and Ed Diener. And it was this conclusive finding, hundreds of studies,

longitudinal, qualitative, quantitative, you name it, that said all success in life is preceded by being happy first, not the other way around. And suddenly I'm having this eureka moment, like the heavens part, the angels sing, I think, that was my childhood. I was sold a bill of goods that if I got into that school or did that, I would be happy. So I was chasing this elusive happiness. This piece of research is staring at me saying, wow, you got to be happy first to succeed at your goals. And here I am a goal setting coach. Oh, and this is just another reason why was I interested in MAP, was I owned every goal setting book on the market. I had them all, Brian Tracy, Zig Ziglar, whatever. And I get to Penn and realize that all the books that are important that we're using as references have footnotes and research.

And I go back and look at these goal-setting books, and there's no research. There's no footnotes. There's nothing. And then I dig a little deeper and find out the Harvard study of 1950 is an urban legend. Every goal-setting book on the market was snake oil, every last one of them. And because I was kind of seen as a goal-setting specialist, we were assigned goal-setting theory by Locke and Latham. And this was another piece of research. Right, which is like the classic setting.

Yeah. It was like, there's a thing called goal-setting theory. And then I realized that all these tens of thousands of coaches around the world who are calling themselves coaches, who are actually challenged by the International Coach Federation to manage progress and accountability and goal setting. None of them know goal setting theory. So then what are they managing? If someone comes to you and says, these are my goals and you don't know what to ask because you don't know goal setting theory. I just remember, it's like I'd shot myself. It's like, oh my God. So I said to Marty Seligman, my capstone project has got to be a book proposal about this. I said, I have to write the first

evidence-based goal-setting book because there are none on the market. And he argued with me, he's like, oh, why don't you write about healthcare, this or that? Because he wanted this first class to really be pioneers and kind of make, and finally just kind of went, oh, Carolyn, you're going to do it. Just go do it. And I did. So my capstone project became the book Creating Your Best Life, which was Barnes & Noble's number one release in early 2009. And to this day, I'm still amazed by this fact, but I'll say it because I'm proud of it because there's so many things I can't do. Like I burned lamb meatballs last night, so I'm not a cook, but here's what I did.

I wrote the first evidence-based book, mass market book on goal setting that connected the science of happiness with the science of success that had evidence and footnotes and solid research. And mine was the first. I was the first to talk about priming, changing your passwords to match your goals. I mean, and in some ways you get penalized for being the pioneer. So now I think everybody knows it, but I was the first and the book has done very well in lots of different languages. So I'm really proud of the fact that all this research came together and I came up with what I call the bi-directional coaching loop.

And I realized that you can intervene at anyone's goal setting process. You can intervene at building self-efficacy because there are four ways to build self-efficacy and one of them is mastery with small goals. You can intervene with wise interventions to up their well-being. You can also intervene around helping them to design the right kinds of goals, learning goals, performance goals. So in my head, I saw a little triangular loop, and I realized this is a new model for coaching and goal setting.

So I teach at Wharton now. I'm the first person they've ever brought in to teach the science of goals at Wharton. I said, how could this be? How could you turn out all these business graduates who don't know goal setting theory? And they said, we just have never had anybody with that as their specialty. So I'm really honored to interact with a lot of people and teach grit and goal setting. So talk to me about those. How does goal setting lead you to the conversation around grit? Okay.

So in Creating Your Best Life, I dug up all this interesting research. And one is that the happiest people wake up every single day to hard goals. That's Bruce Heddy's research. So you wake up every day to hard goals that are clear cut out of your comfort zone. And these are people who don't whine, don't make excuses. Is that how you define hard goals? Hard goals are goals outside of your comfort zone. So when you look at goal setting theory, Locke and Latham, what they found is that whether it's learning goals or performance goals, you'll always get highest and best performance if they're what's called challenging and specific.

So what that means when I'm talking about it, I always put my hand out and I say, they're past your fingertips. That's challenging and specific. That's outside of your comfort zone. You don't have a guarantee you'll get there, but you're willing to be uncomfortable in the process of trying to get there. Not so far out that you're overwhelmed and anxious, but it has to be hard because there's research showing that most people, A, don't set goals, B, set mediocre goals. So at the end of the day, whether people know it or not, we're all scanning our days for what we did that day that it's hard. You know why?

It's because it's what builds self-esteem, authentic self-esteem, right? So that's interesting research too. And so I included a chapter in Creating Your Best Life about grit. And I think I was the first person to bring Angela's work to the mass market because it was just coming out then about the National Spelling Bee finalists and West Point. Angela being Angela Duckworth. Oh, sorry, Angela Duckworth. So she was running in and out of the rooms at Penn. That's where I first saw her. And she was just starting to work with Marty Seligman on her PhD. And these cool findings were coming out. So I had learned as much as I could, got a chapter in my book on grit.

Because if you look at the fact that the happiest people set hard goals and pursue things outside their comfort zone, then you have to have a discussion about grit. So if you have hard goals, how are you going to get there? So you can't just talk about self-regulation or conscientiousness or risk-taking or all of those things without including, so the hardest goals on your list, how are you going to achieve those? Well, you need grit. And so what I realized in hindsight, again, sitting in math, learning about grit, is that I'm a poster child for someone who developed grit who didn't have it. So I became very interested in how do you cultivate grit? Because you don't have to be born into a family with the right genetics.

I mean, it helps. Angela's research finds that about half of your ability to be gritty is hardwired, but the other half, just like happiness is learned. It's learned behaviors, habits. It's what you choose to think about and what you choose to do. And so then I decided I wanted to go as deep as I could because in my coaching practice, when people come to me and pay the fees they do, they're not looking to accomplish easy goals, they're looking to accomplish hard

goals. So I've worked with people directly for 15 years on how do they cultivate the character strengths and the behaviors that will allow them to be that person who becomes a finisher, who changes the channel in their head when things get hard mentally and emotionally. And so I've spent the last few years just going deep in how do you cultivate grit? And that's the burning question in the field. Angela's book, Grit, great book, made everyone aware of the importance of grit. And of course, there's challenges to it. And there's always some kerfuffles going on in academia about people saying, oh, that's not valid or that's not valid. But she hit a nerve. She hit a nerve for a reason. And I decided to literally do an add-on book. It turns out that

her book is the great place to start. Mine is the one that helps you go, okay, now that you get it, how do you get that grit? And so that's what I wrote about. So that's how I got there. I had to understand the importance of hard goals, their connection to well-being, and then go, okay, but then how do you develop that quality that to me has gone missing in our society for lots of reasons that I go into. Yeah. And I want to start to go down that path a little bit with you. But for those who may not be familiar with what we mean by grit, let's take a moment and just sort of like, when you talk about grit, what are you talking about? Wow, great question. So I will start with what the given definition has been for a while that most people will think of. So Angela Duckworth's definition, and the thing that's

measured on her 12 question grit scale is passion and perseverance and pursuit of long-term goals. So that's been the given definition. But as I pondered this, when last year, everybody rejected my grit book and I said, you know what, I have something to say. So I pushed in all the chips in the middle of the table, canceled my coaching clients and went and hibernated in Florida at a friend's house and marched on beaches and thought, what do I have to say? What I realized very quickly is that in the process of working with people, that definition

doesn't do it. It doesn't do it because you very quickly get into discussions about people who have what I call stupid grit. So they have the wrong goals for the wrong reasons with the wrong kinds of outcomes that hurt themselves and other people. So you can think about Osama bin Laden's and Adolf Hitler's and other kinds of people who've had goals, big goals that they were persistent in pursuing, and they had a passion for them, but that's not good grit. So what I realized is I talk about a different kind of grit that I call authentic grit. And to me, grit is only good when it's used for the right reasons in the right context. But then one step beyond that is it awes and inspires other people to play bigger and want to be better. So I call

it authentic grit. So it's the passionate pursuit of hard goals that awe and inspire other people to take positive risks, you know, go outside of their comfort zone and live their best lives. And so I have good kinds of grit and bad kinds of grit. And that's, I think what most people are excited by in my book is that I have categories and definitions that help you wrap your arms around why is grit not always good. So I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, writing about it, talking about it. And when I was in Australia in March, a big positive psychology researcher, Peggy Kern, said to me at the University of Melbourne that she could really buy into my ideas because she felt like it fits systems theory, because when the change occurs, the system changes for the better.

So when the goal is accomplished or the behavior is pursued, everybody is bettered. And one of the stories I have in my book that I think encapsulates it is a guy named Kevin Downs, who's an Iraq war veteran who was blown up in a Humvee in 2005. I think six people were in the Humvee with him. Five of them died. He lived. He comes down, hits the ground, lucky to be alive, but his body is mangled. He returns to Tennessee, purposeless, doesn't have anything to wake up for, you know, God, country, honor. But he goes back to the high school, Harpeth High School, where he was a three-sport athlete. And he says, can I cut the grass? You know, can I just get up and cut the grass, be around the high school, Harpeth High School, where he was a three-sport athlete. And he says, can I cut the grass? Can I just get up and cut the grass, be around the high school,

do something that I know needs to be done? They said, of course you can. So there he is silently cutting the grass, not giving speeches about grit or any of that. But the most interesting thing happens. And that is that the football coach makes the observation that the kids all stopped whining because he was just there doing his job. He wasn't getting a certificate for being the special person of the day. He wasn't getting a trophy like so many of our kids have been witness to overcoming and just having a purpose and doing it without complaining, showing up on time, people were fundamentally changed. So for me, that story is illustrative of what does the best kind of grit do? It's the Malalas. It's the Kevin Downs. It's the people who, by virtue of simply doing what they're doing, extraordinary things in ordinary circumstances, they elevate the game of play for everyone else. And when you look at Kim Cameron's research from the Ross School of Business on positive energizers,

it's identical to that. These are the people who are the energy hubs in corporations. So I've been thinking, what if we embed veterans and other examples of grit in corporations and communities? What if that's one of the ways we reverse this tide of narcissism and the self-esteem parenting movement that really defines this culture of millennials who aren't bad people? It's not like they've done anything wrong, but the standards were lowered across the board for this group. And they don't always know what hard is. They don't always know how to do hard things, even if they identify what's hard. And so that's what I talk about in the book. Yeah. So it's not really that one is grit and one is not. It's that

they're all grit, but I hesitate to use the word motivation. The intention and the desired outcomes can determine whether this type of grit is the type of grit that you want to cultivate and whether it's the type of grit that is not beneficial to you or society. book, we call it stubborn grit, but everybody likes stupid grit, which is what I use most of the time. I think it sounds true thought maybe that would be offensive, but people like it, they get it. So for me, stupid grit is like summit fever. It's like people climbing a mountain and they just see the goal, there it is, I've got to get there at all costs. I'm going to drag these other roped in climbers up with me, I'm going to make the Sherpas go up with me. And then you die on the descent. So stupid grit are people who have a goal and a fixed mindset. They don't have any humility and they cause damage to themselves or others because they lack the ability to read the situation, to change course, to be emotionally flexible. And so it's bad outcomes for the most part, if not all the time. So stupid grit is

summit fever. Then there's selfie grit. And I think about Rob O'Neill, you know, the Navy SEAL who's decided to out himself as the special forces guy who shot Osama bin Laden. Now, whatever happened to the quiet professionals? You know, this generation sees nothing wrong with standing up and saying, me, me, me. I did it. I did it myself. Didn't have anybody really helping me. So there's a little too much of this narcissism, I think. When you look at song lyrics from the 1990s, you see the primary words used were I, me, and my. So there's just a lot of absorption. So I call this selfie grit. So you've done hard things, but you have to tell everybody

all the time. That doesn't elevate the game of play. That doesn't make people want to be better. These are the people who are always bragging about the hours they put in at work. And then there's faux grit, a nice pretentious word, faux or false grit. And these are people, most egregious example I have in the book are people who buy the Medal of Honor on eBay or flea markets. It's the highest award in our military. And it's given for gallantry and intrepidity, you know, beyond the call of duty. These are people who have risked everything to save a fellow soldier, do something heroic. There are only 78 living Medal of Honor winners, but there are hundreds of people who buy fake Medal of Honors and they put it on their resume and they wear it and they're in parades. So to me, when you have this desire to be seen as a gritty person, but you're not

willing to do the hard work to be that person, to suffer, to do what's necessary, if you're someone who fakes your research to get a PhD, if you're performance enhancing drugs like Lance Armstrong, that's faux grit. Yeah. I mean, is that even faux grit or is that just fraud? Well, it's- Because is that great at all? Well, it's fraud once it's discovered. Right.

But until it's discovered, it's people who go, look at me, I'm a Medal of Honor winner. Look at me, I won the Tour of France seven times. Look at me, you know, I got a PhD. But once they're found out, it's definitely fraud. So the thing of those three, the thing that really fascinates me is this, what you call stupid grit. Because I see this in the world of business and entrepreneurship, especially in entrepreneurship. I almost feel like it's celebrated and exalted as the mindset that you have to have. And so many people come to the world of being a quote founder because they want to be known for being a founder or much more benignly because they have this great idea. And they come to it,

not because they want to be in service of, but because they want to make something and they see it in their head, and they love it. And they also think this will help a bazillion people. Awesome. And then you always start something like that with a blend of data and assumptions. And as soon as you start taking action, the assumptions get replaced by information. And almost always, the vast majority of information shows that all the assumptions or most of the assumptions you made were wrong. And that either the thing that you thought was going to be incredible shouldn't happen, or you're going to need to change direction really dramatically to make it do what you thought it would do.

And I've seen so many people, and look, I'm raising my hand here also, I'm a human being, become so attached to that initial vision and say, and then if you try and move that forward within a culture that says the people who become the unicorns in Silicon Valley and the captains of industry are the ones who never give up. There are times where it's really, really smart to give up. Right. And Google X, I think, has perfected this. So Google X pays people to kill projects off. So it's not just the lab of moonshot dreams. It's the lab of, okay, you've taken your moonshot, you're gathering enough data to show that this is going to be a waste of time, energy, money, or all three.

We will now throw a party and celebrate the fact that you're killing off a project because there is a fine line between being a quitter and having grit. And there are two kinds of passion. Robert Valoran's research on passion is very interesting. So there's harmonious passion and there's obsessive passion. And you can have both in the service of pursuing something that's important to you. And you can go back and forth. But for the most part, he's found that obsessive passion is to the detriment of everything

else in your life. Everything else is suffering. And harmonious passion is you're still passionate about it, but you have the ability to step back. You have the ability to challenge your assumptions. And this is what is the key hallmark between some kinds of grit and bad grit. And that is the lack of humility, the ability to take in data from the environment or other people saying, you know, back up, reconsider, do something different, consider this, consider that. So I've coached a lot of entrepreneurs and you see all kinds of stupid

grit, but then you also see people who are smart enough to have a board of advisors that they listen to. I think one of the interesting things I've been reading about with Travis Kalanick with Uber is he was advised by a number of people to stop going in that direction with Uber. That's stupid grit. I mean, it's probably all kinds of things going on there. You also see with entrepreneurs, they don't know the difference between learning goals and performance goals. So they're chasing performance goal outcomes when in fact it's learning goals and they haven't learned how to do it. Especially in the early days. I mean, because learning is the primary metric. Right. Exactly.

It's like, am I right or am I wrong? A startup is not a business. It is a quest and search of a business to see whether one exists or not. And we kind of forget that. We're like, no, this must succeed rather than, huh, I wonder if this is something. And that's the thing, the curiosity. And that's what I find so interesting about learning goals is you can still have challenging and specific learning goals, but it ends up being about how many different solutions or potential changes can you come up with? How many different pieces of advice can you take in from disruptive thinkers that will challenge the way you see this? There's all kinds of ways to make a learning goal challenging and specific,

but people don't do that. They chase profit. You know, it's like, that's why Howard Schultz came in and said to Starbucks, the investors, when he took back over, I'm not giving you reporting, you know, I'm not giving you numbers. I'm going to take Starbucks back to one cup of coffee, one person. And he went back to the mission of Starbucks. And so these are people who end up going, this is about learning how to be great again, not just hit the forecasts on Wall Street. Yeah, it's such a different mindset. And I think one that is really needed. So cultivating grit. We've talked a lot about what grit is, what isn't, and sort of like the good,

the bad, and some of the stumbling blocks. But there's still this big open question. Right. How do you get it? You know, if half of it or so is somehow wired into you and half of it is through environment and action, for that half that we have some level of control over, what do we do? A couple things to do. And I think this is why I have a chapter called Baking the Gr grit cake, because you may have some of the ingredients and not others. So grit is something that I think you can spend years building the repertoire of character strengths necessary to achieve something important to you. And the story I like to tell is about Carrie Strug in the 1996 Olympics.

And the US gymnast, the women's gymnast had not beaten Russia since 1948. And there they are in Atlanta in 96. And the team competition is coming down to like the last few vaults. And our best vaulter, I think Dominique Mochiano, fell, really. And it's unbelievable, like, oh, my God, she never falls. And so, you know, beating the Russians came down to Keri Strug, the least flashy, you know, most humble, just kind of always doing the work that needed to be done, came down to her. And she, a lot of people remember this.

She ran and did this vault. And when she came down, she tore all the ligaments in her ankle. And Bella Caroli said to her, I am so sorry, but you've got to do it again. You've got to do it on that ankle. 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,

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Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna 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 she went and she did it and she stuck it. And then she fell to the ground. The place went wild. The Americans won. She gave herself in service to the team. She wasn't able to compete in any individual events after that. Now you might call that stupid grit,

or you could call it authentic grit, which is what she calls it. Because she says, what she did in that moment was something she didn't know she was capable of until the moment arrived. She had gone to all those practices. She had done all the work. She'd done the routine. She'd done everything you needed to do to be ready for your Olympic moment. And her Olympic moment came, and she performed. She said, that's been the touchstone for everything else she's done in life. And that is, I did that really hard thing under that kind of pressure. So I'm capable of doing these other hard things. And that's what I found with my eating disorder. I did that. I can go do these other things too. And so you have to build these character strengths. Some of them are humility.

I mean, one thing I say to people is, you know, don't post selfies for a week. Don't talk about yourself. One of the exercises I give at Wharton is interview the person next to you about the thing they're proudest of, and then tell their story to other people. See what it's like to have that feeling of capitalizing other people's good news, capitalizing it and sharing it with other people, active, constructive, responding. Take the spotlight off yourself. Don't be the star of every conversation. So there's social humility and intellectual humility. You can build your intellectual humility by not being afraid to be seen as the person who doesn't have all the answers. Be curious. Beginner's mind.

Beginner's mind, exactly. So that's one of the character strengths that's so important is this humility. Patience is another one. And I was picking blueberries. I was picking blueberries on Sunday. And I started to think, now this is the perfect exercise for cultivating patience, because I was at a place called Butler's Farm Orchard, just outside Washington. I went after my swim practice, and I thought, my husband's birthday is on Wednesday, I'm going to make a blueberry pie. So it's all these people on a tractor being driven and dropped off at the blueberry bushes. And you're looking at everyone else's bucket going, are there enough blueberries for me? So what you see are people jumping off the tractor and then running down the blueberry bushes and they take the blueberries they can see and they just keep going. It's like the easy wins, right? So I'm going to take the one blueberry bush approach. So I planted myself in front of one blueberry bush and I stood there.

And I stood there and stood there and stood there until I saw blueberries because you don't see them at first, but you see them if you stand there for a while. Suddenly I saw big clusters hidden here that people had not taken the time to actually stand there and work on. So I found myself for two hours, two and a half hours, and I picked seven pounds of blueberries by simply not moving, working around the bush, finding these hidden crowds. I thought, this is it. This is how you develop patience is you don't do the bush, finding these hidden crowds. I thought this is it. This is how

you develop patience is you don't do the easy quick thing. You find a way to stay focused on one thing at a time. And that's one of the exercises in the book. I cribbed it from a Harvard professor who sends her students to a museum and their assignment is to sit for half an hour in front of one piece of art. Don't look away. Don't look at that magnificent thing over there. Half an hour, sit there and just take notes about what you see. And then what do you notice in the top right corner of the painting or whatever? We have a generation that if you introduce a 30-day course on the internet,

80% of people aren't doing it by the second day. We navigate away from websites that don't open in three seconds. We don't wait for anything. So we have to develop this delayed gratification, this ability to be patient. So maybe get rid of technology altogether for a day. Find a way to what Cal Newport talks about, deep work, monotask. One of the biggest character strengths we have to have in the 21st century work environment, if not life itself, is the ability to focus, the ability to do deep work. We don't have innovations and breakthroughs unless you're able to focus. So there's a generation

that has the focus of one second less than a goldfish, seven seconds. So the goldfish focuses for eight. So you've got to develop the mindset that allows you to stay focused. And then another thing I like to talk about, because I interviewed so many people for this book, and I found the ones with authentic grit, they change the channel in their brains. So when the going gets tough, emotionally, physically, otherwise, they go to a place in their brain where they see something or they hear something. Could be a biblical quote, could be a record. I mean, a song. When I interviewed Sandy Grimes, the woman who was one of the two women who caught Aldrich

James, one of the biggest spies in US history in the CIA, for nine and a half years, she tried to figure out who is the mole. She thought it was him after a few years, but they couldn't connect the dots. So for nine and a half years, she went at it. And finally, she put together the fact that his bank statements reflected deposits of $9,999 the day after he met with this Russian handler. So he'd leave a dollar off to evade. Right, he doesn't get reported. Right. So I said, Sandy, didn't you ever want to quit?

And if you did, what did you think about? She gets this look on her face. And all these people do. They get a look like, what do you mean quit? She said, I saw my dead Russian assets in my head. And then she said, I saw his little supercilious smirk. So she would see pictures in her head that motivated her. I've interviewed triathletes who tell me they always want to quit on the bike. And so they know it's

coming. And this guy said to me, well, you know, Bill at mile six, he's not allowed. He's not allowed to make the decision about quitting, but the Bill at mile 10, we'll let him decide. So he keeps kicking it forward. So you find that these resilient mindsets, I call them wooden shoes mindsets because of Voltaire's quote saying history is filled with the sounds of silken slippers going down the stairs and wooden shoes going up. To me, it's a wooden shoes mindset. You got to figure out where are you going to go in your head when the going gets tough. So sports psychology research has found that the body will keep going until the brain tells it to stop. So you have to control the mental chatter. So you have to develop that, the science of goal setting. You do need to

know how to set performance goals, learning goals, know the difference, be able to measure the metrics, the accountability, the feedback. I mean, all of that is important. You have to learn to take risks. I mean, I think this generation doesn't always take risks because they haven't had to. If everyone's a winner, then why be uncomfortable? And I saw this happening in my kids' lives because what I found was suddenly they were just all coming home with trophies for everything, just standing on a soccer field, just going to a baseball game. Everyone's a winner. So who is going to take a risk to find out they're not a winner? I don't know if you've noticed this.

I don't know what the playgrounds are like in New York City, but there's no risk-taking on American playgrounds. There's also no risk-taking. I just was in New Zealand and Australia. The same thing over there, wooden ships galore, surfaces where you bounce back up. No one gets hurt. There was that article recently, I think it was last year on a playground in Japan where it was dangerous and people were losing their minds because they're like, kids shouldn't be risky

like that. Well, there's one here in New York. It's also there's, I mean, we live in a culture that's very litigious too, which is everyone's, it's all about that. But yeah, the question is, what are we losing by that? It's been studied. So the finding is that, you know, kids aren't climbing trees. They're not breaking their arms. They're not getting hurt. And so when you trace it up, and this is one of the things I like about my book is because I traced it from coming home from the hospital. And there's this whole profession of, you know, people who are baby proofing your house, the outlets are covered, everything's cushioned, little gates everywhere. So we've got this protected society. And then you go to the playgrounds and nobody gets hurt. Nobody even

wants to go there. The slides are only two feet tall. It used to be metal slides when I was growing up. I mean, your legs got hot. It's like big deal. You know what? You survived. I survived. My legs got hot. I went down the slide. Sometimes I fell. Oh, well, you know, we all survived. But yeah, the litigious society. So they've traced it. American entrepreneurship has gone down 9% in this generation. They're not taking risks. And get this, all these comfort animals, these people showing up on college campuses saying they can't get through a day without their dog, their cat, their rooster. I've got stories in my book about pigs, people showing up with pigs. They can't get through the day without pigs.

So I was on Qantas Airlines going to Australia and I'm saying to the stewardesses, do you guys get a lot of comfort animals here? And they go, oh my God, they're rolling their eyes. And I said, can you tell the difference? And they said, you can always tell the difference between a real comfort animal and another one. And this one woman said, you know, we even had a guy try to bring his kangaroo into first class last month. So there's this comfort animal thing. And not only that, have you heard of cuddlers? No.

It's unbelievable. I mean, there's a germ of a good idea in all these things. But this is a profession where you can hire people to hold you for a dollar a minute. And it's spreading. So it's people who cannot self-soothe. They cannot sit with discomfort. They can't sit with feeling bad. They haven't always learned that bad feelings pass and that you can have post-traumatic growth. You can find out what you're made of. So cuddlers are people you hire to just hold you. They'll even spend the night with you holding you. It's not what you're thinking, but it is a licensed profession. Somebody said to me, if I can be

wilderant, do you have to be certified? I said, I don't know. I went and looked it up. Yeah, there's a certification because you can hold somebody in 16 distinct ways. So looking for a side job, there you go. And I think in all of these things, you know, the legitimate needs and the legit, I mean, there are needs for service animals and for comfort animals. And it's when you start to extend it as a coping mechanism for something that maybe we could develop and would be really healthy for us to develop without that over time, where I think it becomes problematic. I want to start to come full circle with you, but there's one other thing that's bouncing around my head that I want to ask you about, which is,

what have you seen around the role of social support in the context of grit? Because I look at that and the research that I've seen is that when we're doing something in the context, when we're trying to do something big and important and hard and long-term, and we have the right social support, the right context for it, that our likelihood of succeeding at that goes up dramatically. And at the same time, my concern with that is that if the vast majority of the scaffolding that allows us to take the consistent action needed to accomplish that thing is external, what happens if and when that goes away? Well, that's interesting.

And it's a good point. One of the things that I'm fascinated by in Angela's research is that gritty people often do hard work alone. And they hate the hard work as much as everyone else. But they find ways, for example, the National Spelling Bee, people who make the finals, whom she studied, they don't get quizzed by other people with flashcards and parents kind of hanging around. They're reading the dictionary by themselves. They're doing a lot of solitary studies. So you find that people with the right kind of grit are not being propped up endlessly by other people

holding them accountable. In fact, I'm working towards another black belt and it's in the discipline called Seaway Cune. And we have somebody testing for his third stripe in his brown belt on Saturday. So it's an all day test. And we were given instructions last week, no saying you can do it when he's in his 29th minute of horse stance and sweats pouring off. And he said, we're at black belt level now. You don't need that rah-rah all the time. This is about kind of finding the mental toughness to get through things. So he said, I don't want any cheering. I don't want people just kind of clapping and whistling. So there's a kind of social support though, that is mandatory. Because when you talk about grit, you're presupposing that these are hard goals that you will not accomplish quickly. So there's this baked in assumption that these are hard goals that will

take maybe a few years, maybe longer to achieve. Sandy Grimes with Aldrich James, nine and a half years. What you do need is a soft place to fall when you're discouraged. You need the right people around you. You need active constructive responders. And I don't think you need a ton, but you need a team. So every person I interviewed had a team, you know, but let me talk about women for a minute. Can I talk about women? Because women are really in trouble. They are really in trouble right now. And women have not figured out for the most part how to be surrounded by constructive, positive people. I just taught at the Brookings Institute in Washington, their women's leadership course. And I asked them how many of these women, these high potentials, these women in leadership positions studying to be even better leaders, how many of them were in a mastermind group with other women where they were sharing their goals and their challenges and brainstorming. I think maybe one person out of 150 raised their hands. Now this has been shown time and again to be true. Women don't network effectively. They don't build bridges with each

other. And part of that is because women are so afraid of being seen as not nice that we endure frenemies. 84% of women will cop to having friends who are enemies around them. So we are hurting ourselves in a lot of different ways. And when you look at the fact that middle aged women in particular are now dying from diseases of despair in record numbers. So the number one group that's dying from alcoholism, prescription drug abuse, suicide, eating disorders, are middle-aged women. We're the only group that's actually dying younger, not older. Other cohorts are living longer. Middle-aged women went down in the last year or so. And so what's happened to women? Why do we have all of this despair? Because I think for many of us, we haven't redefined our purpose. Let's say after our

children leave, there's this thing called mattress sense. When you become a mother, you become purposeful. It's about, for most women, developing kind of a protective, educational component to raising a child. But for a lot of women, they don't feel useful. They don't feel purposeful. They lose themselves in their children's goals, their community's goals, their parents' goals, their husband's goals, their partner's goals. And they've lost the sense of what do I want to do? And that was the beauty of my eating disorder. When you're rock bottom and you have failed, the only thing you can do is go up. You have to ask yourself, who do I want to be? How do I want to get there? You know,

if I only have one life to live, what's it for? It's not in the service of great grooming. It's not in the service of looking, having that body or that's, it's really about other things. And so the rest of my life, as far as I can tell, is going to be devoted to using whatever time and platform I have to help women become the right kind of wonder women, because we need gritty women, not pretty women. And I'm really concerned about the fact that there are these really awful, scary findings about women. Because there's something that I found in interviewing people for my book that I ran by Angela Duckworth, because I was so fascinated, and she didn't understand it either.

But I'm really thinking about this, because I think my next book is called Gritty Women, is every person, male or female, whom I interviewed for the book, male or female, right? So I interview a man, interview a woman. I'd say at some point in the interview, where did you learn to have that mindset? Where did you learn to dream big? Where did you learn to find the right people? Where did you learn how to keep going? Who's your role model? And almost invariably, the first name that came to their lips was the name of a woman, a grandmother. I was just listening to Drew Faust, the first female president of Harvard University. Just yesterday, I'm listening to her on a podcast talk about her grandmothers, both of them. She said they were the powers in the family. Sandy Grimes, her grandmother, for me, my grandmother. Malala

Yousafzai talked about she would channel female warriors and goddesses while she was recovering in London in the hospital. And so I've got this interesting finding, which is many people will name a gritty woman as a role model, somebody who upheld the standards of excellence for them. And it became the blueprint for achievement of excellence. But then we have all these women dying from diseases of despair. And so I go back to my 12 step roots and I think you can't keep what you don't give away. You really can't. And so I want to work on how do we make grit contagious for this very vulnerable population, these women who maybe don't see themselves as gritty or are really suffering as a result of having a US president who talks so openly and in such a vulgar way about women's looks and numbers,

and they're done by the age of 35. I mean, the fact that he was elected with that viewpoint and these many incidents of abuse and abuse of power, so troubles me because women, I was just reading a study on the train coming up here, many women feel confident except when it comes to their body image and how they feel about how they look. And if they're not pursuing greater opportunities or believing in their abilities because of how they look, and we've got this standard, this bizarre standard for beauty held out there, you know, where, you know, 60 is the new 50, whatever that means, you know, and you have to look beautiful and you have to have muscles and you have to have a job and you've got, you know, and you have to look beautiful and you have to have muscles and you have to have a job and you've got, you know, blah, blah, blah. I just think it's very, very difficult in this society to thrive as a woman. So I'm thinking about Wonder Woman, the movie. I haven't

seen it yet. I'm thinking, what's it about superheroes that draw us? It's transparent, high standards for being elite and excellent. It's like Special Forces. It's out there. By the way, Special Forces movies have proliferated during the millennials because I think we want to know what's excellent. So this Wonder Woman thing, and by the way, all superheroes lose their parents as children. So they're all orphans, which is very interesting to me. So they all have to have post-traumatic growth and they all have to be resilient and thrive. But we need more women who are Wonder Women with all the right qualities and who can teach it to other women and give it away so that we're growing up in an environment in which

women want to play bigger and do bigger with the support of each other. And the ability to dream big dreams and feel like you can reach it. If you look up in boardrooms and you don't see a single female face, how do you go for it? So anyway, I'm in formulation here, but I really do think that women have to overcome so much to just reach adulthood that we have to be grittier. And that's why we become the stuff of stories and stories are what elevate people and change their minds. So women are the stuff of stories if they actually survive. And I want to say one other thing. that this huge number of women who'd been married or connected with partners for decades were suddenly turning to their partner and saying, hey, guess what? I was sexually abused too. Same thing happened to me. I turned to my husband, husband of 34 years. I said, hey,

it's time I told you I was sexually abused by a chiropractor when I was seven months pregnant with our oldest child, my son, my oldest son. And he just looked at me and I said, I don't know why I haven't told you this. I'm not embarrassed. I just don't think I knew what to do about it. And my brain has come back to it over and over because I think, my God, I've got a black belt. I'm a competitive swimmer. I'm 5'11". And it happened to me. I'm certainly not a shrinking violet. And I just think it's what so many women put up with. And I think enough is enough. And we need to come together and galvanize and prepare the next generation, our daughters, to be ready to be gritty because this is a tough world and we got to be better and do more and be tougher

than everyone around us, especially men. And if we don't teach each other how to have that grit, I just don't know how women are going to survive and thrive. And we have to. I think a lot of people can get behind that. So let's come full circle. So as we sit here, this is a good life project. So if I offer the phrase out to live a good life to you, what comes up? Do hard things. Do hard things. I mean, it always comes back to that. Do hard things.

Thank you. Thank you. And as we wrap up, I want to give a final shout out to our awesome sponsors and supporters. Right now, you can post a job on ZipRecruiter for free. That's right, for free. Just go to ZipRecruiter.com slash good. Today's show is sponsored by FreshBooks, which is a super cool cloud accounting software.

To claim your month-long unrestricted free trial with no credit card required, go to FreshBooks.com slash good life and enter the good life project in the how did you hear about us section. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If the stories and ideas in any way moved you, I would so appreciate if you would take just a few extra seconds for two quick things. One, if it's touched you in some way, if there's some idea or moment in the story or in the conversation that you really feel like you would share with somebody else, that it would make a difference

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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.