In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen - Grit with Angela Duckworth

Episode Date: June 29, 2022

BONUS EPISODE: The importance of Grit has been discussed by several guests on this podcast. We therefore invited the world leading expert on the topic, Angela Duckworth, to discuss Grit with Nicolai Tangen. Are we able to develop Grit individually or within an organisation? Check out this bonus episode!   The production team on this episode were PLAN B's Tor-Erik Humlen and Olav Haraldsen Roen. Background research were done by Sigurd Brekke.Links:Watch the episode on YouTube: Norges Bank Investment Management - YouTubeWant to learn more about the fund? The fund | Norges Bank Investment Management (nbim.no)Follow Nicolai Tangen on LinkedIn: Nicolai Tangen | LinkedInFollow NBIM on LinkedIn: Norges Bank Investment Management: Administrator for bedriftsside | LinkedInFollow NBIM on Instagram: Explore Norges Bank Investment Management on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As you know, we've had a lot of really, really interesting guests on the program. And interestingly, pretty much all of them talk about the importance of grit. So to investigate, we are thrilled to have the world-leading expert on the topic, Angela Duckworth, with us in the studio. Very welcome, Angela. Nicola, I'm so excited for this conversation. It's good to see you. Very good.

Well, let's start with the basics. What is grit? I define grit as the combination of two things, passion and perseverance for long-term goals. So not just perseverance for long-term goals, not just being resilient and taking feedback and trying to get better every single day, but also doing all that for something that you love. You know, passion is a word we use for romance, for the people we fall in love with. And I think that when I, you know, give you a picture of what a truly gritty person is, you know, you should see the sweat, you should see the kind of like bouncing back and the

optimism moving forward, but you should see all sweat, you should see the kind of like bouncing back and the optimism moving forward. But you should see all of that in service of something that that person stays in love with for a very long time, years, decades, sometimes a lifetime. How do you measure it? As a researcher, as a psychologist who studies excellence, I typically use a completely fakeable questionnaire called the grit scale. Nikolai, when I was just starting out studying high achievers, and that's really what I do, I try to reverse engineer human excellence, figure it out, see if we can begin to manipulate or I guess I would say emulate some of the things that high achievers do. I interviewed people, honestly, like you, but like a lot of the people you've been talking

to. And I just started to hear, you know, recurring, like phrases, you know, like finishing whatever you begin. Setbacks, you know, not discouraging that person, but almost motivating them more than they had been before the setback. And also this language of love. I mean, this language of feeling and abiding devotion to something. And so I wrote those statements down into a questionnaire and it works for research with people who have zero incentive to fake their scores. I think from a practical standpoint, right? If you're hiring or if you're admitting students to university, I don't think this scale works at all. Because people are going to fake

the answers? Yeah, it turns out that there are like a number of different problems with questionnaires. Let me just highlight two of them. The more obvious one is exactly what you said, right? Like, I finish whatever I begin, you know, I know what the right answer is, as opposed to a math problem where you cannot, you know, fake or guess, you know, the right answer in a personality questionnaire and a questionnaire of your character, of course you can. So I think that's the big limitation and maybe the more obvious one. But let me actually tell you about another one, which I think is very interesting because it lends a window into kind of like how human beings think of themselves, even when they're being honest. So in research that I haven't yet published, but it's in the process of being published, what I found is that for

questionnaires, people, when they get a question like, I'm a hard worker, I finish whatever I begin, they have to make comparisons with other people. Like, what does it mean to be a hard worker compared to whom? So Nikolai, I could compare myself to you. Well, I'll tell you one thing. You'd be a very hard worker compared to me. Well, I have to say, I'm guessing, and I don't think it's a wild guess, that in our peer group, what it means to be a hard worker is different than, say, I don't know, ask your typical 14 year old kid, you know,

like, you know, like, ask, ask whoever. So, so what we find is that there is this phenomenon called reference bias. And that is that we all have a frame of reference as we have to have, we cannot answer any question. I mean, you know, novelists like Herman Melville said, there is no experience except through comparison. Is it cold? Well, it depends on compared to what? said, there is no experience except through comparison. Is it cold? Well, it depends on compared to what? Is it warm compared to what? Am I happy compared to when? So I want to say that another problem of administering a questionnaire like the grit scale, if you're hiring, for example, is that people have different reference points. And in some ways, paradoxically, the person who is going to give themselves an extremely high score on the grit

scale because they really think they are resilient and tenacious and devoted because they have maybe lower standards, right? Like that the score can go in exactly the opposite direction. So for all these reasons, the grit scale is, you know, it's all I have for research, but it's highly imperfect. So starting then with your scale, right? What's the relationship between the outcome on your scale and people's success? So in these low stakes, no stakes settings like research, where your data just go to a researcher that you don't care about. And by the way, also Nikolai, with large samples, something that I hope we get to touch upon

in this conversation is what I think is an emerging consensus among social scientists that, you know, like the weather, you know, human destiny is extremely difficult to predict. So when I tell you about what I'm about to tell you, which is that grit predicts outcomes like graduating from the, you know, arguably the most competitive military academy in the United States. Yes, you know, arguably the most competitive military academy in the United States. Yes, it does. But with huge samples, right. And also that it's explaining some of what happens to people, but the vast majority of the variation in people's outcomes remains a mystery. And so, in other words, I want to say as a social scientist, let's not pretend that life is as simple as saying like, well, I saw that kid at seven years old and I know what they're going to be when they're 77.

You see a kid at seven years old, you can make an educated guess, but you will probably be surprised at item questionnaire to say cadets at West Point, that is the military academy in the United States that provides one in four officers to the U.S. Army eventually. And it's it's very difficult to get into. You need top grades, top test scores. You need to be an elite athlete. I mean, typically these are, you know, athletes who play multiple sports, often captains of multiple sports. And even just to apply, you have to be nominated by a U.S. congressman, senator, or the vice president of the United States.

So it's a very kind of fine mesh sieve that these young people go through. And even so, historically, there's been a very high attrition right at the beginning of the program. So when you first get there and you come from your high school and you were, again, captain of many teams, you were the star, you were sometimes the valedictorian, the top student. And I think what's happening in those very first weeks is that not only is it physically grueling, not only is it, you know, wake up at dawn, you know, work nonstop till midnight, not is it only, you know, like a socially difficult time,

I think they take away your cell phone. But most important, I think you are no longer the star. I mean, by statistics, half of these extraordinary women and men are below average for the first time, I'm sure, in their lives. So what happens is that you have a very high attrition rate. And when we measure grit on day two, so that's basically the day after you get there, we can predict prospectively the likelihood that you will make it through those high attrition periods of training at the beginning of your four years at West Point. But also we can predict your graduation four years later and your successful transition into the Army, which is really the contract that you make when you sign up for West Point. So grit

ends up being a better predictor than, for example, measures, objective measures of physical talent or objective measures of intellectual talent, right? Standardized tests of cognitive achievement. So that is, you know, one of the reasons why I do believe grit is worth a conversation without, I hope, Nikolai, overselling grit as the only thing that matters or the idea that if I give you this 12-item questionnaire, I'm going to be able to predict with reliability whether you're going to be a successful entrepreneur. Those are sometimes the wrong conclusions. Yes, grit matters. Why it matters is something we can talk about as well. But it's not a simple story the way sometimes it's understood.

Angela, it is quite extraordinary that it can predict these kind of things, yet you can't use it as an entrance exam because people are just going to fake it, right? Yeah. In my study, the scores just go to me, right? In fact, they don't go into your record. You know, we give every assurance, and it's true that, you know, truly, purely for research purposes. I have to say, Nikolai, I have yet to meet the CEO who isn't interested in hiring people who have this quality. Because when you look at Olympic athletes, when you look at people who win the Nobel Prize, when you look at people who build

truly great lasting companies, they, to a one, have this passion and perseverance and this stamina. At some point, like Isaac Newton said, when introspecting about why he discovered the laws of mechanics, like why, why Newton, right? Was he just head and shoulders of giants. But he also said that he kept working on the problem and other thinkers walked away. So I think CEOs are right for looking for this quality of passion and perseverance for long-term goals. I also think we can talk, I would love to hear your ideas about how you would pick up on this in the hiring process.

I have a couple of ideas, and of course, none of my good ideas have anything to do with a fakeable questionnaire. It's very interesting. I don't think necessarily we have a lot of mutants walking around in the investment fund where I work. But it is for sure important because we need to take losses and wake up the next morning and continue to take risks. So grit is one of the things we really, really look for here. But is it possible to develop it? I absolutely think yes, that grit can be developed. Now, why do I say that?

I have a couple of reasons. One is that the research on human development over the lifespan, and in addition, the neuroscience on what happens to the brain over the lifespan, affirms definitively that there is much more plasticity throughout the entire lifespan than anyone could have thought. You know, even maybe 30 years ago, when I graduated with my degree in neurobiology, I was trained to think that essentially, after you're a young child, perhaps after adolescence, I mean, nothing very exciting happens to personality or the brain. And now we know that's not true. There's neuronal growth and certainly remodeling. And there's actually documented changes in character and personality, not just ones that happen with age and experience in a kind of slow and steady way, but also intentional ones like therapy, for example, has been shown to reliably change personality in desirable ways. And of course, now we have intervention. So let me just say what the second reason I think the answer to

your question is, yes, grit can be developed. There was a random assignment study recently done by an economist named Shuley Allen. Essentially, the intervention was to increase grit and also growth mindset, the belief that your abilities are, in fact, changeable. So you can actually have more of a growth mindset. I think people can change or you can have more of a a growth mindset i think people can change or you can have more of a fixed mindset i think people can't change and surely alan had read the research on grit and growth mindset she read as an economist uh that psychologists like me and carol dweck were showing that people who have this you know belief of you know i can change

people can change tended to be grittier you know, they tend to just stick with things and get up again and learn and move forward. And she decided to do a random assignment study in Turkey, which is her native country. And she randomly assigned schools and classrooms to either learn a curriculum, this was late elementary school students, you know, learn about, you know, this, she was very clever. So they were like cartoon characters, or like parrots and stories. And then, you know, all of these messages were just about, you know, grit and growth mindset. And the control group did not have that. And what she found is that over time, including I think, up to two years later on standardized tests of academic achievement, that there were measurable benefits of this brief

grit and growth mindset curriculum. And so, you know, that's children, not adults, but it's a demonstration, I think, that people can and do change. I mean, even one could argue, as a result of listening to a conversation like this, or like other conversations that you've had, I mean, you can learn things. And that's, I think, the distinctive feature of human beings. That is why we are on the planet as we are. And we learn better and for more of our lifespan than any other animal. Perhaps on the back of this, Angela, the whole Norwegian population will be full of grit after this podcast.

Yes, we can get them all to listen to your podcast. Have you got an example of an organization where you think they have really moved things in the right direction? You know, I have examples of a few organizations and then quite a number of companies. I have to say that, you know, at least I can't say because I haven't, you know, interviewed every person

in a 45,000 person organization, but it's palpable to me, both at the top, right, when I meet the leader and on an occasion where we were together a few years ago, I quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson that an organization is the long extended shadow of its leader. And so, for example, a leader like Toby Cosgrove, I'm thinking of the leader I probably mentioned in the same conversation. Toby Cosgrove was arguably one of the greatest cardiac surgeons at the time that he retired from cardiac surgery and took on the CEO position of the Cleveland Clinic, which is arguably one of the very best medical institutions in the world. And, you know, he is grit incarnate. He was profoundly dyslexic as a boy, was told many times that he didn't have what it took to be a physician,

much less the most competitive kind of residency you could do, which is cardiac surgery. And every time somebody told him, no, you can't, he said in response in so many words, I'll show you. And when he took over the CEO position, you know, the opposite of complacency, the opposite of like, well, I'll just rest on our laurels because we're already famous around the world. You know, he really revolutionized things. He brought empathy to the forefront of care. He really revolutionized things. He brought empathy to the forefront of care. He took a quantum leap forward in making the medical records, electronic, et cetera.

So I could hold out to you companies or organizations cultural level, right? At the level of an entire company or an entire team. There is a school called Expeditionary Learning. It's a really a school system or a kind of like a, I want to say a chain of schools, but these are, you know, obviously not, these are nonprofit schools and these are schools for kids, right? Like little kids, middle school kids, high school kids. And they are all in this kind of philosophy of, you know, really working hard, but also demonstrating, you know, other aspects of character, like teamwork. And I'll just say that when I not only, you know, talk to the very top, right, you know, the top leaders, but also when I interact with, you know, teachers at these schools and students

at these schools, like, to me, I understand that culture is not just do you live in Norway, or do you live in Sweden? You know, do you live in New York City? Or do you live in Paris. Culture is any place where a group of people have a shared set of beliefs, of values, of traditions, of language, and identity. And when I go to a school like Expeditionary Learning, or I, you know, walk around the Cleveland Clinic, and I, you know, talk to, you know, professionals there, or I visit a sports team, you know it. It's just the same as getting off of a plane in a new city and you're like, wow, there's a culture here. And I do think cultures play an enormously important role in encouraging or discouraging

qualities like grit. You mentioned dyslexia and um so talk a bit about um adversity and how that impacts it and perhaps also touch on you know post-traumatic stress syndrome take which kind of takes that to the extreme how does that impact it the question of whether adversity is good or bad for character development is as old as um as a civilization and you know Nietzsche of course famously said that what doesn't kill me makes me stronger that's the question is is adversity the crucible of our character or is it not right and um I think the reason why it remains a question is that it's not a simple answer of yes or no. Here's what I think research over the last century would suggest

about adversity and character development or healthy development, right? Becoming the kind of people that we, you know, I would say what Aristotle meant by character is doing what is good for you and good for others, right? So how does that happen? I think with adversity, it's not a linear relationship. It's not that the most extreme amounts of adversity are any better. It's not like monotonic. In other words, there is probably more of a curve where there is some amount of challenge of, oh, wow, I don't know how I'm going to handle this. Like some of that, that, you know, you think of your own children, like how can they grow up to be strong and wise, incapable without some adversity in their lives? At the same time, you would never wish for your own children or anyone else's the highest dose, right? The highest, you know, unmitigated

dose of adversity. When you mentioned PTSD, you know, that is, you know, unmitigated dose of adversity. When you mentioned PTSD, you know, that is, you know, arguably the kind of trauma that is, you know, not what Nietzsche or anyone else would say makes you stronger, because there's a certain dose, which is beyond. But I think in addition to just saying that, like some moderate amount of challenge is necessary, I want to add one very important thing, Nikolai, which may be even more important. And that is that challenge without support, I think, does kill you. I mean, challenge without support creates what some neuroscientists call allostatic load. It's the wear and tear on your immune system and your your certainly on your motivation and your self-esteem that happens when you are, you know, if a young person or anyone else is struggling to do something they cannot yet do, but they know that they're loved and they know

that there's a foundation under their feet and they know that there are people who care about them who will lend a hand, give advice, have a conversation on a Saturday morning, have another conversation on a Sunday morning. I mean, that is to me the recipe for character development, for healthy growth. Some amount of adversity, but with an enormous amount of support. It's a tough one to get right. Now, what is your view on soft parenting?

You mean the ones, the parents that we're thinking of who solve all the problems for their kids and that kind that kind of thing so yeah it goes by different names sometimes it's called snowplow parenting because you get all the obstacles out of the way sometimes it's called helicopter parenting which emphasizes that you're chronically monitoring i was in a conversation recently with an investor um like you and um he had a very thoughtful and evolved philosophy not only investing but of life and of parenting. And that's where our conversation went. And he said something that I won't forget. He said, I have thought a long time about what I need to give my children. And I believe that the most

important thing, and the thing that I keep front of mind at all times is that it is my job to help them be independent. And then he elaborated, and essentially what I think he was getting at is that if you keep in mind that your goal as a parent is not actually necessarily to make your kids elated at all times or to have the easiest life or the most, but just that your job is to help them become independent, independent of you, right? Then that recommends against the kinds of things that I think we're all probably to some extent guilty of, you know, like solving a problem for our kid, going back and getting their textbook that they forgot, emailing a teacher who, you know, the student doesn't really feel is very supportive so that you can solve the problem because you talk to the teacher about what they are doing or not doing. And I think that the idea of parents, especially now, I mean,

if you think about how history has changed, you know, people have so many fewer children today in Nikolai. And I think economists would tell you, and I would tell you, that when you have one child or two children, and you have an enormous amount of time, children are also spending more time with their parents, talking more with their parents. Of course, that's wonderful in many ways, but I do wonder whether we're being overprotective and we're losing sight of really what childhood and adolescence are for. And they are for, of course, being happy while you're there, but also for becoming independent, right? Because, you know, you do want to grow up. And I do worry

that of myself, of course, and a lot of us that we're not allowing our children to fall down, to get, you know, a bad grade if, you know, they screw up, to miss an assignment, you know, a bad grade if, you know, they screw up to miss an assignment, you know, to deal with some of the things that are just part of life. Are we the cause of some of the mental problems that young people have today? Well, first, I want to say that when we talk about mental health, and if anybody asks me, you know, like, is it really true that there are changes in mental health in recent times? I want to say 100% unequivocally. And there is some, you know, doubt in some people's minds, like, oh, is it really? Is it just because we're measuring it better? Or maybe people are just saying that they're having mental health issues. Just if

you look at hospitalizations, you know, admissions to the emergency room, suicide attempts, I mean, there are a lot of, you know, sort of objective measures that corroborate questionnaires and surveys that say, you know, people of all ages, but especially adolescents are, you know, feeling sadness, depression, anxiety, insecurity, low self-esteem in ways that are different. I think that's partly the pandemic, but I think actually you could look at some of these trends as preceding the pandemic. So first I want to say, this is a very good question, Nikolai, because it's something that has to be explained. Are parents the primary cause? I don't think so, but I will say this. I don't think science has a definitive answer.

You know, is it social media? You know, there are, you know, some studies that suggest, you know, random assignment studies, actually, that being on social media, like basically flicking through an endless stream of curated photos of your same age peers, all of whom appear to be having a much better life than you. You know, that seems to be, you know, negative for self-esteem, for mental health, but it doesn't have an effect size, a magnitude of an effect that is, you know, likely to explain the whole thing. So it's not simple. It can't just be social media. It can't just be changes, I don't think, in how much time parents are spending with their kids or how much they protect them. I do, though, think that there must be

some greater attention to this. And we're beginning to see some of the things. I have one theory that I think is really interesting. Some years ago, I was speaking to a physician, but also a good friend and somebody who had been a philanthropic investor for many years in education. And she said in her humble way, you know, I don't know what's going on with the increases in, you know, the generational increases in anxiety, in particular, but also depression. But she said, I wonder if it's that

young people aren't spending enough time outside. She said, oh, you know, I'm not a scientist. I'm not wrong. But I just wonder whether nature and our separation from nature. And since she said that casually, I've been looking actually at the research literature, and there are not only very strong correlational studies that control for a lot of confounds that document a positive relationship between positive mental health and green space. But also there are random assignment studies that show that when you are in nature, you know, your attention goes from like within yourself. One of the problems with adolescence, but also adolescence mental health is like your focus

is entirely on yourself and your own problems and how unhappy you are. And when you are in nature, you know, nature in a very gentle, but a very enticing way, like draws your attention outward. And there's, again, I don't want to say it's like, it's all about nature and being out in green space. But I think a number of factors have changed the way young people are growing up today. And I do wonder whether this is exactly the time to, you know, basically make our own history, right? Like to not just like let these currents take us where they will. And recently we had a guest on the show, David Salomon of Goldman Sachs. He said that if you are happy 70% of the time, that's pretty good.

And what did he mean by that? Like some amount of unhappiness is necessary for productivity or I wasn't in that conversation. No, just that you need to kind of hang in there at work and take some bad days and not give up. What do you think is the optimal proportion of happiness? I mean, how happy do we need to be? Well, I think that, first of all, I like the precision of the comment, even if it's just a way of making a point. I think he's right in that no person can be or actually should want

to be a 10 out of 10 on happiness all the time, right? I mean, I want to say something about emotion, right? Happiness is an emotion. Sadness is an emotion. Anxiety is an emotion. Jealousy is an emotion. Fear is an emotion. Like these are emotions that we have because of evolution, Nikolai. These are emotions that help us adapt and survive. Well, what is happiness for? Happiness is, I think, you know, if I think about Tim Beck, Tim Beck died at age 100 and not very long ago. He was the creator of modern psychotherapy, cognitive therapy, sometimes known as cognitive behavioral therapy. But it is really what modern psychotherapy is. We're no longer Freudian, right? And Tim Beck in his 100th year was working on his

magnum opus, as he called it. He actually happened to live just a couple of blocks away from me. So I would see him on Sundays. And we got to be talking about self-esteem and about happiness as an emotion. And his theory was that what happiness is, is the emotion that comes from the thought that my self-esteem is going up in some way. I mean, maybe not verbally exactly like that, but you're having a win. You're having things getting better. And so that produces the emotion of happiness. And why would that be important from an evolutionary standpoint? Well, that's a very good thing for an organism to know. The

things are getting better. But we also need to have the emotion for loss. Things are getting worse, you've lost something, that's sadness. We also have to have an emotion for like things might be getting lost. That's anxiety, right? We also need an emotion for you know what, someone's taking advantage of me, that's anger. So I want to say about this comment about, you know, happiness, and, you know, we shouldn't try to be happy 10 out of 10 100% of the time. That's true. We won't, we don't want to have any emotion 100% of the time because these are signals of how our life is going. And so I want to say, you know, that happiness is an emotion that comes from the sense that things are getting better. And because things are not always getting better, right, we should not expect that we should have happiness 10 out of 10, 100% of the time, 24-7. Are people with more grit less happy?

In fact, it is exactly the opposite. So let me tell you about a study that I'm about to publish with some collaborators from Korea and China. And we look at happiness repeatedly over time. We have, in particular, a sample that was collected in China with young people, and we measure their grit, and we comprehensively measure their happiness. So not just, you know, how satisfied you are with your life, but also we index a sort of an array of positive emotions, an array of negative emotions. And we can create a composite well-being score that I think is a pretty good, and it's usually, it's like the scientific standard for how you measure happiness. So we have the grit scale. We have this happiness measure. We have it every six months.

We do this for years. And now we can ask the question, not only how are they correlated, Nicolay, but which leads to which in the stronger direction? So yes, they're positively correlated. But what surprised all of us when we looked at the data is that happiness is a stronger predictor of changes in grit than grit is a predictor of changes in happiness. In other words, if there is more causal, like, you know, emphasis here, you know, like, where is the center of gravity of the causality

it seems to be more with happiness driving grit than the other way around why is that you know i've since you know thought about that and i i've been trained my phd advisor was marty seligman you know the grandfather the godfather of positive psychology right he uh very much is responsible for the worldwide study of happiness as a scientific subject. And I thought about what I learned at his knee, you know, getting my PhD and then working in the same department now as a professor. And I think that happiness truly is causal, Nikolai. And this may be one of the most important things that we cover in this conversation. You know, I think for a long time, people thought, like Tim Beck, that happiness was an emotion that was a signal that things are getting better in your life.

And that is very important because a signal is important. But I think it is also causal. I think happy people, and I think the research is, you know, what I'm saying, not just Angela Duckworth thinks, but the research is, they perform better at work. They're better at making relationships. They make better decisions. They're more creative. You know, I think happiness is not only a signal that things are getting better, but a cause of things getting better because you are now engaged. You're not withdrawn. You are also attractive to other people. But how do you get there in the first place?

So then the question is, right, like, okay, great, you've sold me on happiness. So if you're sold on the fact that happiness is not only a great outcome, but also an input, right, like an input, like how do we get more? So I think the summary of the positive psychology literature over the last 30 years could be said as this, that there are a number of exercises that people have studied, like the blessings exercise. This is where you think of three good things that have happened to you in the last few days. And there's a gratitude letter, there's, you know, knowing your strengths, etc. But just so I can illustrate this one and make it real, Nikolai, would you mind telling me three good things? Maybe, you know, things that you can just honestly report as the first things that come to mind when they say,

what are three good things in your life that you could think of that, you know, maybe be relevant over the last few days? Well, I attended a board meeting today and some of the board members really cared about, you know, how I was doing. Yeah, that's lovely. That's one. What's another thing? Spend time in nature lately. It's been very good. Yeah, you went out for a hike? I sure did.

And spend time with the family. Wonderful. Yeah. And that made you feel, I'm sure, very happy. If I extrapolate from my own experience with my family, you know, I could think of three good things too, you know. It was Father's Day here in the United States on Sunday. And my husband is amazing.

Like he is a wonderful father. And my daughter wrote him a letter that brought tears to his eyes. And then when I got it, because he passed it around, it brought tears to mine. I had a lovely dinner with my mother-in-law. It was a very perfectly cooked steak. I mean, you know, like the corn was ripe. And a third thing is like, I'm having a fun conversation with you, right?

So that's the three good things exercise. And I think I'm using this mostly as an example for what positive psychology has found to make people happier. Just then, just in that moment, it was a free exercise, Nikolai, right? It took you less than 60 seconds. It took me less than 30 maybe. It took me less than 30, maybe.

Our attention was not on bad things. It wasn't on things that you or I can't change. It wasn't on the things that keep us up at night in a bad way. It was just on three wonderful things. And the thing about human attention is that, you know, as Danny Kahneman, the Nobel laureate would say, what you see is all there is. So when I bring my attention to something positive, it kind of like takes up the whole psychological field of view. Now, the default for human nature is to dwell on the negative, right? And again, years of evolution have taught us that we should constantly scan the horizon for threats and bad things. But what positive psychology would say is one of the major paths to happiness

and perhaps the royal road to happiness is to draw your attention to things that are good, to look for the good in other people, to look for the possibility in a company that you're figuring out how to take into the next quarter. Look for the positive. It is a form of optimism, I guess. look for the positive. It is a form of optimism, I guess.

Coming back to McBritain for a moment, do you see any differences globally on this? I mean, in Finland, they have an expression called Sisu. And in my mind, they are really tough people. Are they? I wanted to ask you since you're closer to Finland than I am. Yeah, I mean, they've been fighting the neighbors and these kind of things. Yes, right. So how does it differ geographically? So remember we talked about reference bias and people make near comparisons. It turns out they make very near comparisons.

For example, when I study children in a school, you know, they're not even comparing themselves to other kids in the school. They're only comparing themselves to the kids in their classes, right? So if you want to know how your son or daughter thinks of themselves, they just look at their close peers, like that's their comparison set. So it's very difficult to compare then somebody from Finland to somebody from Phoenix, you know, in the United States, because the comparisons are just like who you see around you. And that is why on international studies of character and personality, often you get these like very puzzling findings. Like either you get findings like everyone's the same, there are no differences in national character, which seems implausible for anybody who's ever taken a

plane outside of their country. Or you get paradoxical results, like in one very, very well done study, they had 56 countries take the same personality questionnaire. And on that questionnaire, there was a category called conscientiousness. And that is the family that includes grit, but also orderliness, responsibility, duty. And the countries that came out very low, the lowest out of 56 were Japan and Korea. And you're like, really? But again, I think that's referenced by I think the standards to which you know, those citizens hold themselves for being orderly for being punctual for being responsible, you know, are really high. So it makes as a as a scientific question. You know, are the Finns really the grittiest people? Like, are they more gritty than other

people? Like very, very difficult to answer. But I will give you just an anecdotal kind of like my hunch. And I have to say it's a hunch and not based on data. I think there are countries that clearly, as a value, promote persistence in particular. But I also want to say that when you think of, for example, Japan and Korea, as countries where, you know, they have, you know, aphorisms, you know, sayings like eat bitterness, for example, Japan and Korea as countries where they have aphorisms, sayings like eat bitterness. They just have all these hard work sayings. If you look at the number of hours that people work or study, you think, wow, they're the grittiest. But I want to say this as a hunch.

I think some of the countries that are highest in perseverance are actually very low in passion. And I think it will be to their own demise. I think if you have a culture that is all about hard work, but doesn't have the ability for people to work on things they intrinsically care about, they will never win the Nobel Prize. Like you will never get to be truly great at something that you're doing only because somebody else told you to. And because, well, that's your job, it's hard work, you have to do what you love as well. And I would imagine from my conversations with you, Nikolai, like that's something that you would understand. Like, you know, like to work hard at what you love is entirely different than working hard at something that you do not love.

Last question on this. Do you see differences between gender and also age? I find a very reliable difference, and now this has been replicated in labs around the world, so I think I can defend this one without any equivocation, that I find a very strong relationship or reliable one between age and grit. The older you are, especially throughout adulthood, the higher your grit score. You know, it's not like the correlation is one, but it's highly reliable. In other words, it's been found over and over again. What I also have investigated is gender differences. And the reason I did was because so many women have come to me and said, we must be grittier. Come on. I mean, there's so many more

obstacles. So if adversity with support can make you stronger, then, you know, certainly we've had a lot of adversity. And I've heard that actually also from minority groups who, you know, are in less advantaged positions in society. So the answer on the gender issue is that I have not found a reliable difference between women and men. I can't say whether that's because of reference bias or anything, but I do not find a difference favoring either sex, I should say, right? So it's not that men are grittier, it's just that I'm not finding any. And I have such large samples, Nikolai, I have to say that if there is a difference, it must be a tiny one, at least on these questionnaires.

Yeah, I'm a big believer in your sample size. Yeah, sample size is great. Now, what else are you working on for the moment? What can we expect from the fabulous Angela Beckwith? I don't know how fabulous I am. I'm working on two things that I'm very excited about. One is this. When I studied grid, I wanted to reverse engineer high achievers.

I'm obsessed with excellence, and I thought, it can't be a mystery. It can't just be a God-given gift. Like, let's figure out the mindsets and the skill sets of these extraordinary women and men so that we can be a little bit more like them. But the next logical thing is this, is what are the circumstances, the objective outside circumstances that enable you to develop these internal mindsets and skill sets that then make you happy and successful? In other words, I'm sort of swimming upstream, if you will, to figure out like, what are the schools that enable you to develop a growth mindset? What

does the parenting look like? And what are the, you know, for example, like, you know, pollutants seem to have an effect on psychology. What about, you know, where you stand in society? So I'm swimming upstream, and I'm trying to write a book that's provisionally called Habitat, which is about the objective circumstances that lead people to thrive. So that's one thing. And this is the second and last thing I'll say is, you know, I've been working on interventions to increase not just grit, but self-control and happiness for my entire career as a psychologist. And I'm pretty disappointed.

I give myself maybe a C minus because some things work, but most things don't. And nothing'm pretty disappointed. I give myself maybe a C minus, because some things work, but most things don't. And nothing works for very long. And about three years ago, I had a bit of an existential crisis, a midlife crisis, if you will, I was like, what the hell am I doing? Like, this is going to have brief effects, small effects, unreliable effects. And here's the direction I think we maybe all need to go in but certainly i'm going in i think the difference between the things that i did in the past is uh and what i'm doing now is in the past i would do very quick interventions like let me tell you about grit or mindset or failure for 20 minutes and let me just tell you you know you are being randomly assigned

so the kid next to you might be learning something in the control group so don't talk nobody nobody interact interact with each other. So I'm just going to tell you this. I'm going to tell it to you very briefly. Sometimes I would do interventions where I don't even really tell you much at all. I'm sort of like giving you such a small portion of the picture that you really don't understand what's happening in the mind and the brain, why it is that you're experiencing stress, etc. So the direction I want to move in are interventions that are much longer, that are truly explicitly educational, and that are social, that you are not learning on your own, but you're learning in a group. And to me, this better matches the few cases we see when somebody really makes a sea change and how they're, you know, it's like they have understood something they really didn't understand before. And most often they do it in a group. You know, it's not just they are changing, but maybe their

whole family's changing or they and their friend group or they go to a different school. So I think the future of behavior change is social. I think the future of behavior change is educational. And last, we don't have a lot of time to talk about it, I think it's experiential. I don't think people change just from information. They need to have an actual experience that feels like something in their bones, you know what I mean? And certainly in their hearts for them to make a lasting change. Well, I think that's a fantastic place to end. And Angela, not only are you the grittiest person I know, but you are also the cleverest. I cannot be. It's been such a privilege talking to you. I hope we have another conversation soon. And I really enjoyed this one.

I can't wait. Take care now. Thank you so much.