The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Stop Doing Things the Hard Way with Dr. Angela Duckworth

Episode Date: September 7, 2026

When we’re struggling to reach a goal, most of us assume the answer is to buckle down and try harder. But what if all that white-knuckling is actually making things more difficult than they need to be? Dr. Laurie speaks with psychologist Angela Duckworth, best known for her groundbreaking work on grit, about a surprising new approach to achievement. In her new book, Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best, Angela explains why changing what’s around us can sometimes be more effective than trying to change ourselves. Experts Mentioned: Angela Duckworth, Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania  Lee Ross, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University  Richard Nisbett, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Michigan  James Gross, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University  Adrian Ward, Associate Professor of Marketing at University of Texas at Austin Joseph Henrich, Professor of Biological Anthropology and Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University Bob Bowman, Director of Swimming and Diving and Head Men’s Coach at University of Texas at Austin Martin Seligman, Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania Anders Ericsson, Professor of Psychology at Florida State University Walter Mischel, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Columbia University Reinhold Niebuhr, Protestant theologian Viktor Frankl, Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist Resources Mentioned: Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best, by Angela Duckworth (2026) Grit: The Power and Passion of Perseverance, by Angela Duckworth (2016) The Person and the Situation: Perspectives on Social Psychology, by Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett (1991) Frog and Toad Together, by Arnold Lobel (1972) Man's Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl (1946) “The Serenity Prayer,” by Reinhold Niebuhr The Art of War, by Sun Tzu The Golden Rules: 10 Steps to World-Class Excellence in Your Life and Work, by Bob Bowman (2016) “A Stitch in Time: Strategic Self-Control in High School and College Students,” by Angela Duckworth, Rachel White, Alyssa Matteucci, Annie Shearer, and James Gross (Journal of Educational Psychology, 2016) “Self-Control and Academic Achievement,” by Angela Duckworth, Jamie Taxer, Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, Brian Galla, and James Gross (Annual Review of Psychology, 2019) “Self-control and SAT outcomes: Evidence from two national field studies,” by Chayce Baldwin, Kyla Haimovitz, Priya Shankar, Robert Gallop, David Yeager, James Gross, and Angela Duckworth (PLoS One, 2022) “Situational Strategies for Self-Control,” by Angela Duckworth, Tamar Szabó Gendler, and James Gross (Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2016) “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One's Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity,” by Adrian Ward, Kristen Duke, Ayelet Gneezy, and Maarten Bos. (Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2017) “A 2-Phase Labeling and Choice Architecture Intervention to Improve Healthy Food and Beverage Choices,” by Anne N Thorndike, Lillian Sonnenberg, Jason Riis, Susan Barraclough, and Douglas E Levy (American Journal of Public Health, 2012) “Innovation in the collective brain,” by Michael Muthukrishna and Joseph Henrich (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2016) Related Episodes: “Your Environment Affects Your Happiness More Than You Think with Dr. Leidy Klotz” “How to Spend Your Time and Money Better (with Nobel Prize Winner Richard Thaler)” “The Man Who Invented Happiness Science: Marty Seligman” “How Our Screen Habits Impact Our Stress Levels” See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. There's no shortcut for saving time, but saving money is simple. Just combine your car and home insurance with Bel Air Direct and save. Get a quote at bellair direct.com. Pushkin. Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. Happy September. Summer always has a funny way of ending rather unexpectedly.

One minute you're staying up late and squeezing in that last beach trip, the next minute, your calendar is filling up, the routine's return, and suddenly it's time to get serious again. As a college professor, I've always loved the energy that comes with the start of the fall semester. September feels like a fresh start. There's a sense of possibility

as students return to campus ready to tackle the academic year. I'm on sabbatical right now, which makes this fresh start moment even more exciting. I'm trying to think a little more intentionally about how I want to spend my time and what I hope to accomplish over the coming months. But this kind of new season reset

can also feel pretty, overwhelming. What should you decide to focus on? And where do you even begin? To help make the transition to the fall a little easier on all of us, we're launching a special new back-to-school season of the Happiness Lab. And since Back-to-School is all about nerding out, we'll be featuring conversations with the authors of some of my favorite recent books. Each episode will be packed with practical ideas to help us head into the fall with a little more clarity, purpose, creativity and joy. And we're kicking this new

back-to-school season off with a bang. Because today I'm chatting with a psychologist who's not just a brilliant researcher. She's one of my close friends, someone I've turned to for advice again and again over the years. I'm Angela Duckworth. I'm a professor at the University of Pennsylvania

and I'm a psychologist. Angela is probably best known for her 2016 bestseller grit, the power and passion of perseverance. Angela also has a TED talk on the same subject, which has been viewed nearly 18 million times.

The big question that drives all of my research, I think really from day one of graduate school, is the psychology of success. Why are some people more successful at achieving what they want to achieve than other people? I want to know what makes an Olympic gold medalist, an Olympic gold medalist, but I want to know how that's the same as being a three-star Michelin chef or a community organizer who truly changes the neighborhood. That common denominator has always been fascinating to me. And so many of our listeners know you for your work on grit.

How do you define grit? Well, the first way I tackled this question of what makes some people more successful than others was at least to me the most obvious, which is to look at individuals and try to understand what makes these individuals different. That set me on the trail of understanding effort and motivation and the idea that there are individuals who, whatever their natural ability, are extremely passionate and persevering over unusually long periods of time. And that's stamina to stay committed to a certain goal over years and to, on a daily basis,

dedicate yourself to making a tiny improvement toward that goal and being resilient in the face of the inevitable setbacks, that all together, that passion and perseverance for long-term goals is what I ended up calling grit. So that's what Angela has become famous for, studying how successful people buckle down, commit to their goals, and do what it takes to make them happen. But doing that is really hard. And maybe this is just where I'm at with the change of seasons right now, but honestly, exerting that kind of grit sounds kind of exhausting. In recent years, Angela has also started to wonder whether there might be a simpler way to achieve your dream. to become the person you want to be with a little less blood sweat and tears.

As you know, I've been looking for the philosopher who says, no, don't do it the hard way. That's just stupid. And there are writings, you know, Confucius, writings of the Buddha, and Sun Su, the ancient Chinese general who wrote down the principles of battle into the art of war, said, you know, it's foolish to try to beat an enemy through brute strength. You should never do that. You should always try to set up a situation in which the victory comes easier. In her new book, Angela shares what she's learned about using your situation to make achievement a little easier. It's titled, Situated, find the people and places that bring out your best.

You know, situation is a funny and particularly uncharismatic word, I will say, that one of the challenges of writing this book, it was like, what do I call it? You know, grit is a great onomatopic. It's a good word. It's so good. So good. So TED Talk. So TED Talk. It is a lot like what it sounds.

Situation is everything about your circumstances, not only the social aspects of your situation, like who are the people in your orbit, who are the people in your social network, who are your mentors, but also cultural elements. It's the norms, the values of the group in which you are. So I think when I say the word situation, what I'm struggling to say in so many syllables is everything, everything around you, outside of you, that is relevant to you. People around us, the spaces we occupy, the cultures we're part of, Angela argues that all of these things can help bring out our best selves. But if that also seems a little overwhelming,

fear not, because Angela is going to help us break it down. She'll teach us how making small adjustments to our everyday surroundings can make it a heck of a lot easier for all of us to reach our goals. Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos.

And so they often say that all research is me search, and I feel like your interest in grit is a case and point of that. explain how your early family life shape this fascination with grit and with accomplishment more generally. I think, Lori, you and I agree that all research is research. I mean, we don't have to go all Freud to say that what we're interested in is so often something we have or something we lack. But to be fair, Angela, I feel like in your case, it really is very Freudy. Like, it's like a little, it's a little Freud. Yes. It's a little Freudy. That is so true because there was a father figure. I will say that when I was growing up, My father, who's hard to describe without me sounding like I'm exaggerating, but my father really did come to the dinner table and the breakfast table with these stories of greatness. I mean, that is what we talked about in our house. Like, we talked about who won the Nobel Prize.

We talked about who was the greatest physicist of all time. These are the things that were on his mind. He was not great with kids, so he would just talk about what he wanted to talk about. And so at a very early age, I got the message that achievement is the most important thing. in life. My dad and I used to like to walk to this deli that was about a half mile from our house, and we would go on Saturday mornings, and we would have breakfast together, and then we would walk back. And one day, I was like a sophomore in high school, maybe 16 years old. And I think I had been assigned to write a paper in English class on the meaning of life. And I, as many 16-year-olds,

do feel like I had figured it all out. I was like, oh, I had to do this assignment for English class, and I think I figured out the meaning of life. So I said to my dad, I think the meaning of life is happiness. And my dad stopped in his tracks. And he said to me, not in an angry way, but in a very emphatic way, that he disagreed with me. And I said, well, if it's not happiness, that's the meaning of life, what is it? And he said, achievement. So this is the house that Angela grew up in. At that time, I was called Angie. So little Angie was trying to figure out how to become an accomplished person so that her father would pay attention to her, really. And I think that did endow me with a lifelong obsession with that singular question, right? Like what makes people more successful? And I think in a way

I can either thank or blame my father for everything I've done in psychology because of this upbringing. And so at first that interest slash obsession with achievement was focused on what's going on inside the person, right? Their passion and their perseverance. But these days, is you've been looking external to the person. Why is it so important to shift our focus to what's going on outside people when we want to know about achievement? Now, Lori, I think we both learned very early in our training about the fundamental attribution error and a book called The Person and the situation, a book I know you're familiar with. It was by Lee Ross and Dick Nisbet. And when I was in graduate school, I remember reading it and I remember thinking that I would never see the world in

the same way. The person in the situation says, that there's a fundamental mistake that we make when we try to explain other people's behavior, which we do all the time. Why that guy cut me off? Like, why did the barista leave the latte on the counter over here and not over here? Why did my husband say that he didn't want to have lunch with this couple on Saturday? You know, we're always trying to figure out why people do what they do. We do it spontaneously. And we make a mistake when we attribute behavior to the individual and neglect the features of the situation that are also very important. So, for example, you could say, well, my husband's an introvert, and that's why he doesn't want to

have a social lunch on Saturday. Or it could be that he's coming down with the flu and he's really tired and that's what's going on in his situation or that he has a crushing amount of work to do. So this idea that we make this error when we attribute the cause of a given behavior to the individual, the individual and the individual, and we ignore the situation that at a very basic level, we make a tragic mistake because as modern research has shown, and this is after this book was published, that when you look at people's behavior, when you ask a simple question, how much of this behavior can we trace back to that person's personality, their character, their habits and mindsets. And how much can we trace it back to what's going in their situation? The people around them, the places they are, the culture of where they are, the weather of where they are, what's within arm streets, what's within sight, you come to the answer that at least half and very likely more of variation and behavior is not due to the individual

and their personality, et cetera. It's actually due to their situation. So I think in this second half of my career, I have asked the question, again, what makes some people more successful than other people? But instead of going to grit or mindset or some of the things that I do think are important, I have let my attention expand, if you will, to the situation and all of those features that are at least as important. But there's a thing that's hard about the situation, which it's hard to even see it. We're kind of fish in water that don't notice that we're in water. And you've talked about why this is such a difficult subject to write about because we kind of don't notice it. Why is the situation so invisible to us?

So when we look at a scene, we immediately parse the object from the background. That's what the human eye does for you without any conscious willing. So you foviate, you focus on objects, and then the rest goes blurry. And the best way to communicate this, it's like when your camera is on portrait mode, right? You have this really high definition, detailed vision of what's in the center of your field of view. But then everything else kind of like fades into blurriness. And I think that is at some deeper level the way we process our experience, that when I remember having a conversation with you, Lori, maybe it doesn't register to me that it was a hot and muggy day or that, The stock market was crashing or our good friend Tamar was, you know, waiting for us. So we do pay

attention to the people in particular. And then the background is like literally the background, you know, like why would we pay attention to that? I would call that situational awareness. You know, how aware are we of the situation? I don't think our default is to be aware to notice how our situation is changing us for the good or changing us for the bad. And in some ways, I feel like what We are our fish in water where, you know, how cold the water is and the direction the water is going is not something we pay attention to. But I'll tell you, it really matters, especially because we can change the water. We can choose our current. And I think we have to consciously draw our attention to, I've noticed that I'm a certain kind of person when I'm with this friend, or I've

noticed that when I'm at work, I'm a lot more productive than I am when I'm sitting in my living room trying to get work done or the opposite. I think those things take conscious effort to draw our attention to. And so the situation requires this conscious effort, but there's something that we notice a lot whenever we're trying to achieve a goal. We really notice when we're thinking about achievement, willpower. And I know this was something that you noticed a lot and that you thought about a lot when you were trying to achieve your own goals and in your early research. But in your book, you talk about noticing that willpower wasn't doing the work that you thought. it was. And one of the stories I really loved is a story of you reading to your daughters, a particular

book that questioned the power of willpower. So tell me a little bit about that story and what it showed about willpower. When I was in graduate school, I was pregnant with my second daughter, Lucy, and I was still nursing my first daughter, Amanda. And what I then had to do was to basically become a graduate student, become a psychologist, but also essentially grow into motherhood all at the same time. And it was around the time that they were in preschool towards the middle or end of my PhD, that I would read them stories from Frog and Toad. And Frog and Toad is, I think, the most psychologically wise children's series that there could ever be. Like every single story could be its own academic publication, and they were written by the incomparable Arnold Lobel. And in particular,

Amanda and Lucy really liked the cookies story, Frog and Toad, who are best friends, are baking a big batch of cookies. And they're eating them, you know, fin over fin, and Frog or Toad says to the other, like, we must stop eating these cookies or we will be sick. And then the reply comes back like, Indeed, we should as he reaches for another cookie. And the dialogue progresses. And then one of them says, you know what we need. We need willpower. Willpower is trying hard not to do something you really want to do.

So they try to use willpower. That fails. At the time in graduate school, willpower was at its zenith as the idea of the moment. And for me, as a graduate student, what I was taking from this is that willpower is a muscle. You have to exercise it. you have to force yourself. That was what was going through my head as a psychologist. But as I'm reading this story, you know, you turn the page.

And what you find out is that frog and toad are smarter than that. They figure out that better than forcing themselves in the moment to resist temptation, they can change their situation. And they scatter the cookies on the grass. And they have done the ultimate situational agency move. And by that I mean they have taken charge of their own situation. They have invited the birds. I say, come birds and eat the cookies.

And the birds come and they eat all the cookies. And then, of course, frog and toad don't have to resist them anymore. And I think that, to me, was a profound lesson. It did take me several years to fully appreciate this lesson. Like, I literally made willpower interventions where I tried to get kids to do hard things, like row on a rowing machine and ergometer. And I thought, like, okay, they do this for, you know, five, six weeks. They get stronger, not only physically but mentally.

then they'll be more self-controlled, total fail. I tried a number of other approaches. And I think what I've concluded now as a scientist is that absolutely we all have to do things that are in the moment not the easiest to do, maybe not the funnest to do. That includes staying off your phone. That includes eating the healthier option at lunch or not snacking after 9 o'clock at night. That includes not being on your phone in the middle of a meeting that you're supposed to be paying attention to. Of course we all need to do that.

But willpower, simply trying hard not to do or to do those things, as the case may be, that's so dumb. And what we need to do is turn the page and like Frog and Toad exert situational agency, change the situation so that it is our ally and not our enemy. And you've actually done some specific studies on this. I know with your colleague James Gross, you looked at whether or not this frog and toad effect was true for people's everyday temptations. What did you find? Well, you say my colleague, but I have to say our colleague. Our colleague, I'll steal him too. And our mutual friend, I know, is there anybody in psychology that is more widely respected than James Gross? No, nor is there someone who should recognize the power of self-control more than James Gross because he's a very self-controlled guy.

He's the most self-controlled person I know. That is so true. So I met James, I think around the same time I met you, Lori. I know that it was a meeting at Yale. I think it was 2010 or 2011. And I was sitting in this darkened amphitheater. And one after another researchers, including myself, went up and we gave our little, basically a TED talk, right? But only for other academics. And James was the first talk.

And his talk to me was life-changing. Because when James got up there, he said, as somebody who studies emotion, that one of the big mistakes, mistakes that people make is they try to use willpower essentially to change their emotions. Like, you know, I'm feeling depressed and I don't want to be a downer. So I'm just going to make myself not feel this way. I'm going to make myself be cheerful. That's called emotion suppression in his line of work, but it's essentially a form of willpower. And he said from the stage, don't do that. It doesn't work very well. It makes you actually feel awful. And he said that if we understand the process by which our emotions and our impulses come to be, we can intervene earlier. And that did lead us to the

earliest stage, which is situations. And so we've been working together since that Yale meeting on situational strategies. So if you are depressed, who can you be with or where can you be where you will feel less depressed? And not only for regulating your emotion, but also your impulses, like if you have a problem with your phone, where can you work and who can you be around that will make it more likely that you will be off your phone? And so we've done, a lot of work together. I'll say that the work that to me really kind of brought it home from an experimental standpoint was that we randomly assigned kids in an experiment. We did this with high school students. We also did it with college students. We found the same results. We randomly assigned

students to one of three conditions. One was a willpower condition. That was the control. We were like, you know, willpower is really important. You got to try hard to do things sometimes in life that aren't fun. There was a treatment condition that was to learn about situational agency, just learning that you could push temptations away. That would be another way of managing temptation. And then finally, there was no treatment control, meaning like, okay, those people didn't get anything. And here's what we found. One week later, we asked students to report on their progress toward their own academic goals. And we found that the only difference that was significant was that if you learned about situational agency,

if you learned that you can proactively change your situation to make doing the hard things easier, that had a significant impact on your own goal achievement, and it was better than either the other two conditions. But if simple changes to our situation can make our goals easier to achieve, why do so few of us make them? And why are we, as a culture, still obsessed with doing things the hard way? Angela will answer those questions

and share her tips for how you can take agency over your own situations when the Happiness Lab returns from the break. Eating well shouldn't be complicated, but somehow it turns into recipes, prep, cleanup, and half your Sunday gone. Factor solves all that. These are fresh, ready-to-eat meals

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That's up to $90 off and free shipping, but only with the code fit at factormeals.ca. Factor, Canada's number one meal delivery service. There's no shortcut for saving time, but saving money is simple. Just combine your car and home insurance with Bel Air Direct and save. Get a quote at bellairdirect.com. Welcome back to the first episode in our special back-to-school season of the Happiness Lab. I'm chatting with my friend, the psychologist Angela Duckworth, about her new book situated, finding the people and places that bring out your best. Before the break, Angela and I

discussed why willpower is overrated and how we can achieve our goals a little more easily if we learn to take advantage of our situation. But Angela says that embracing this way of thinking isn't always easy in a culture that celebrates working to the point of exhaustion. I think it's so interesting, you know, the question of do we say to ourselves when we see someone else who is using willpower, you know, frog and toe, just trying not to eat the cookies. When we see that, do we have an admiring view of that person and of their character? Is it even moral to us that that person is willing themselves not to? And does it seem, by contrast, a little bit like cheating to put the cookies on the grass and

let the birds take them? Or is it a little bit cheating to install an app on your phone that prevents you from going on Instagram, you know, between the hours of nine and five. Like, is it morally better to do it the hard way? The answer, by the way, is yes. Like, it does seem to people morally elevated or admirable a sign of character to just force yourself as opposed to using the situation to advantage. You know, so many statues, movies, theme songs are really about the triumph of the individual against their situation. I think there is this valorization of doing things the hard way of grimacing, white-knuckled. I don't know. This is beyond data, Lori, but I'm like,

oh, they're so male. Definitely some guy was like, oh, you know, we want the hero to look like this. But to me, it's so much smarter to do the graceful move of making the whole darn project easier. Like, why is it heroic to white knuckle your way through difficulty? Isn't it just as noble to use your situation to advantage? So I think if we can get away from macho ideas of, you know, the only way to become fit, to eat right, to like live a productive life is to have a life of strain or just do it and say, look, let's be smart about this. How can I make this easier?

It's not that you're not doing hard things. It's that you're making hard things easier for yourself to do. So that's one thing that I think we get wrong. We take the macho approach, right? We like people who do things through willpower alone. But I think we also like people who achieve their goals just alone, period, especially in the individualist culture that we're in. Especially in the United States, I was going to say, yeah.

Yeah, especially in the United States, right? And so have you noticed some examples of this where it's like we just assume that the way you achieve your goal doesn't involve other people. It's sort of character building to just go at it by yourself. I mean, I notice this even in my own narrative, right? Like, oh, did you have somebody help you write grit? And I don't even let the person finish the question. I'm like, no, I wrote it myself. I didn't have a book coach. I didn't have a consultant. And I will tell you with the second book that this was a book written by one scientist with a huge pit crew. I mean, I had multiple editors.

I had multiple consultants. I had friends like you who gave me very helpful advice. I had a husband who poured over every page and gave me all kinds of ideas and feedback. My daughters read the book and made line edits. I mean, my editor at one point said, you know, this book isn't crowdsourced. It's mob sourced. He was like, who are all these people in the Google Dog? They're like 45 of them.

And I was like, well, I'm just getting a little help from my friends. And doing things DIY does have some appeal, right? Like, because you get 100% of the credit. You don't have to divide the pie. But in my older age, Lori, I think it is something that I'm increasingly very happily embracing. If I can produce a better book because I had multiple editors, consultants, friends, and the like, you know, help me. Then awesome. And so those are some of the misconceptions that we have about why we shouldn't be using the situation, right?

We kind of moralize willpower. We moralize doing stuff on our own. But I think there's another misconception about the situation that leads people not to realize its value. It's just the idea that we assume the situation can't be changed, that we're kind of stuck with it. When there's cultural wisdom about the situation, it's like, well, you got to radically accept what's going on. Yeah. We have that serenity prayer. But you've pushed for this alternative serenity prayer that you talk about in your book. Do you want to share that with us? You know, Serenity Prayer was written by Reinhold Niebuhr, who was a Protestant minister, and he was very active during World War II, advocating really for the United States to take a

more active role in what then later became widely known as atrocities against humankind with what the Germans were doing. And he was trying to kind of, I think, rouse the American public into an awareness that, no, no, no, we should not be hanging out on the sidelines, you know, we're an ocean away, but we need to take action. And he wrote this prayer that has taken different forms because, for example, Alcoholics Anonymous has it really embraced it. But the prayer, widely known as the Serenity Prayer, goes like this. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Courage to change the things I can and wisdom to know the difference. But what to me was so interesting about the historical context of this prayer is that he wrote that prayer very much as a call to action, right?

You should know when it is time to have courage to change the things you can. And of course, you know, you should have the serenity to accept the things that you can't change. Okay, great. I think for the situation, people assume that you should have serenity about the situation because, you know, you can't change your zip code. you can't change your family, you can't change your boss who you hate. Make the best of it. Change what's inside. Change your attitude. Change your mindset. Be an optimist. And I don't think that's what Reinhold Niebuhr wanted. And I say that in part because I researched this prayer and then what his daughter, Elizabeth Sifton, wrote about what her father meant. And it was very clearly the opposite

that he wanted us to take the situation into our own hands, that the situation of the Jews in Germany was unacceptable and that we needed to change it. Another person who is sometimes miscredited with saying, well, you can only change what's inside you, but you can't change your situation, is Victor Frankel. Victor Frankel wrote Mansearch for Meaning, of course, about his experience in the camps, including Auschwitz during World War II, and he survived, but his wife and his parents did not. And he indeed writes about how there are times in life when the only thing you can do is to change what's inside your head because if you are in a concentration camp, you can't just decide to walk out. You can change very little. But in mansearch for meaning, he says that it would be masochistic

to suffer through a situation that you can change. And if you can change the situation, that is the first and most important thing to do. So when I think of changing the things that we can, controlling the controllables, as a lot of athletic coaches like to say, I think that does include the situation. You can choose where to put your phone. You can choose the people that you spend more time with. You can change, in many cases, the zip code that you live in, or at least the block in that zip code where you live. You can change where your desk is at work. You can change, in many cases, whom you work for. So it is, to me, an element of agency to change your situation. It's not only internal mental work.

And so now that we figured out that we should be changing our situation, we can ask the question, how do we do that? And you've argued that agency over your situation requires four different elements. And I want to go through each of these in turn. The first of these is setting up your space. Why is the immediate space around us so critical? Well, I did try to give people an understanding of their situation at four levels, you know, from near to far, from easy to change to hard to change. But the nearer. and the easiest change is your personal space. It turns out that scientists who study space, they define personal space as the three-foot radius around a person. And the easy way to do this is, like, if you literally put out your arms, that's your personal space. I can't in here because I'm in like my podcast clause. I'm going to rip my green screen. Yeah, you'll knock over your microphone. Yeah. So when you get outside, Lori, you know, it's like the Leonardo da Vinci sketch. It's very important what's in your three foot radius because that is what you can reach. And I actually think as a

psychologist, that's why the objects in your personal space have a disproportionate impact on you. You can see them. They're in clear focus. And you can reach them without getting up. And that's huge. If you have a bowl of chips in front of you that you are trying to resist and you push it four feet away such that every time you get a chip, you have to like get up out of your chair and reach over, I guarantee you, you'll eat fewer chips than if they are two feet or one feet away. And we know this not just from intuition. There's really good studies in behavioral economics that have found this. Tell me about the hospital cafeteria study. So there was a cafeteria that decided that they would try to get people who are in the cafeteria.

These are typically families of patients, try to get them to eat healthier. And so they thought about different ways to do this. Of course, one way to do it is to pay people to eat healthier. You can incentivize them that way. But they thought they would just change the space in which people were making their food selection. So, for example, when you put water bottles at eye level, instead of soda bottles at eye level, and you also put a little basket of water bottles right by the register where while you're standing there, you can simply grab one and put it on your tray. That increases the purchase of water bottles, decreases the purchases of soda. Same has been found for healthy food. So if you want to eat fruits and vegetables, you should put them on the counter where they are within sight and within reach.

If you have to do anything, like, oh, you have to open the package, you have to open up the refrigerator, that friction is going to make it less likely that you will enact to that behavior. So you can friction up the things you don't want to do and you can friction down the things that you do want to do. I love this idea. Even in my little podcast studio right now, I'm using elements of this stuff. like I've been trying to hydrate more for various reasons. And so I have this huge glass of water that's right here that just makes it really easy to do. I'm also doing this in a bad way, which is that I have my phone here. I forgot to leave my phone outside the studio. And it's been leaping while I'm here. And I'm having a really hard time not looking at like, who's been texting me? Literally, I'm in like a two-foot closet and I still have the effects of the space around me. Lori, do you know the brain drain study by Adrian Ward? I do, but please talk about that. So Adrian Ward and his collaborators did a random assignment study where college students, I believe, were all taking an IQ test. And there are three conditions.

In one group, the phone is as close as possible. It's on the desk with you while you're taking the IQ test. The second group is it's in the room, but outside of your reach, so more than three feet away. And then I actually think it's in their backpack, so it's out of sight and out of reach. And then the final condition is it's in another room. It's in a secure locker outside. So near to far. And the question is, what does your IQ score look like under these three conditions?

And the bar graphs are beautiful. I mean, you are your dumbest when your phone is nearest you. And you are your smartest when the phone is far away. I've replicated this finding in the field with teenagers. The farther the phone while they study, the higher their GPA, from school records, by the way. That study is my favorite study to share with Yale undergraduates, because I'm telling them this and they're very into their grades that yell undergraduates. And they have this moment of horror where they're in my class where they look and their phone is like sitting on their desk right near them.

They're like, don't tell, don't know that on the very first day of my class because I don't know about your classroom, but I will say that my classroom is like you walk in and it's like 1980. So on the first day of class, I teach them the brain drain study. I say this was called the brain drain study by the scientists who ran it because they believe that some of your cognitive. bandwidth is drained away while you are paying attention, even in little fits and starts, to the phone you're trying to not look at, right? I show them that, and then I say, here's the tech policy for this class. There will be no phones. There will be no tablets, and there will be no laptops, and it begins now, and it ends at the very end of class, and by that, I mean, it includes our breaks. So if you need to use any electronic,

device for any reason, you can step out of the room. You can do that as often as you need to, but at one-hour intervals, my TAs are going to be giving you a point for not having your phone out, for not having a tablet out, and not having a laptop out, and every hour they'll be checking if you do have one of those devices out, not even that you're using of it, just out and visible. You will not get your point. And the reason is that Adrian's other studies show that It's bad to have your own phone and your own screen out. But if you're near someone else, it's actually even worse, like the second hand smoke of being around somebody else's screen. I will say that there are students who have an accommodation.

You know, they can only take notes on a laptop. They can't take them by hand. I have an answer to that. I employ a full-time note-taker. I was like, no problem. I'm going to take notes for every class. So there are no excuses. There are no students in my classes on electronics.

So that is the power of our very close by space. it is affecting us more than we think, which reaches this interesting question of like, what should we be putting in that very close space? And one of the things you suggest in your book is that we really want in our close space to have the right reminders. Why are reminders so important? You know, our attention is just whatever is in front of us. You know, we're not that different from dogs and squirrels. It's like, oh, chips. You know, like, oh, phone. So if we know that, then we have to architect our space in a way that reminds us of the things that we do want to have our minds on. There's a restaurant.

tour I really admire Will Godera, who was the restaurateur for 11 Madison Park, and that was deemed the best restaurant in the world. And he's very thoughtful. And when I was interviewing him, he like waved around this kind of like paperweight. And it was engraved with the saying that his father had about being bold and taking risks. And Will would be able to say that verbatim to you, because it's like he doesn't need a reminder of a one sentence thing that his father said. So why did he go to the trouble of keeping this paperweight on his desk. It's the same reason why Toby Cosgrove at Cleveland Clinic had his own paperweight made with his own reminder of, you know, what can be conceived, can be achieved. I mean, all of these reminders are there, not because we can't

remember one sentence, but because we want to have that brought to mind. You know, there are many people who have a religious faith that's part of their identity. You know, why do we wear the Jewish star or the cross or, you know, for a lot of people, they choose to get tattoos, like people have needlepoint pillows with, you know, phrases that they want to remember. It's because human attention is very reactive. So you have to install in your space things that you want to be reminded of. I'll give you an example of a world-class achiever that is familiar to many of us. Michael Phelps is not only the most decorated swimmer in history.

He's also the most decorated Olympic athlete in history. And one of the salient characteristics of his childhood is that he had a great situation. He had a terrific mom. I think Debbie Phelps should win the Nobel Prize for being a mom. He had a great coach named Bob Bowman. But talking about fiscal space, Michael, even at age 11, would write down on a piece of paper his goals. Michael's goals in his little 11-year-old boy handwriting. Like very specific swim times. He was trying to do it at the very bottom. He was like, I will do this through perseverance and consistency. It was very cute. But why did he post that near his bed? Well, because Michael and his coach figured out that he needed to be reminded of these goals. I mean, this little boy had the wisdom of Socrates to say, you know what? I'm going to write down what's important to me and I'm going to install it in my personal space so that every day I see it. And Michael has said that on days that he was.

discouraged, for example, he would look at that for motivation. And finally, just to give you a little data on this, I did a study, Lori, with the college board. So these are the makers of the SAT. We asked thousands of teenagers across the country what they did to practice and study for the SAT, and they kind of filled out a little inventory of all things they did. And the one thing that I remember from that study, because it's so consistent with what Michael did, is the best predictor of all the individual strategies was I write down my study goal. concretely, and I put it somewhere that I will see it. So yeah, I am a big believer in screensavers and stickers for your laptop, and I don't want to tell everybody in America to go out and get a tattoo,

but in whatever way you can install reminders to bring your attention back to your values, to your goals, and the things that you want to keep top of mind, it all beats willpower. So, being intentional about our space, check. But that's just the first of Angela's four pillars of situational agency. When we get back from the break, Angela will break down the final three. And I'll also ask her to make a final ruling on what's more powerful, the situation or grit, the trait that Angela has spent her entire career proselytizing. We'll hear her answer when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment.

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beyond just our immediate space to the things that can be in our neighborhood, so to speak. And one of the biggest ones that you argue that we should harness is the people around us. Why are peers such an important part of the situation? Well, Lori, I think being friends with you has influenced me, and I am guessing that being friends with me has influenced you. We are peers. We talk. We're very influenced by what the other person thinks is cool or a bad idea. You know, I think that in less obvious ways, our peers influence us just on the way over to this conversation. I was talking to a young woman who's 22 years old, and she said, I got caught up in the current, right? So she graduated from college with a lot of other people in applied math, and everybody's going to go into management consulting.

You know, you look to your left, you look to your right, and you just swim where everybody else is swimming. So I think in profound ways, we are influenced by the people around us. One of the people that I interviewed for the book had studied Alcoholics Anonymous for a long time. And this was a professor at Harvard Medical School. And I asked him, why did you end up studying Alcoholics Anonymous? And he said, oh, well, this thing, which costs nothing, right? It's not a patented drug. It's just a group of peers who, in some church basement on folding chairs with a really bad cup of coffee, spend an hour together, talking about trying not to drink.

it's the number one best treatment, I guess you would call it, for alcoholism. The power of peers, you know, we are social animals, as Aristotle said. And in some ways, these are kind of obvious things like, oh, yeah, I'm really influenced by my best friend's opinion on who I should marry. And in other ways that are more subtle, you know, like everybody's going to management consulting and suddenly I see myself applying for management consulting. And what I would just like to add to this, because as we've discussed many times, philosophers talk about the situation being powerful, but being something you can't change. You can

change your peers. I mean, every parent knows that kids change their peer groups with sometimes astonishing frequency, like who you're hanging out with. But for me, I think a big change in my life has been to try to be around scientists who I enjoy and who I really admire. When I was first becoming an independent scientist after I had earned my PhD, I was really DIYing all of my my research. I was like, okay, well, I had this idea and like try to do it. And by the way, most of these things were not successful. I'm like, nope, those results were not significant. And it's only been really in the last half of my career where I'm very deliberate about, like, I never do a study alone. I always look for the smartest, funnest people to work with.

And those people change me. And when I'm around them, I'm different. And the last thing I'll say about this is like, I've been hanging around these economists. And these economists are really incredibly organized. Like, I thought I wasn't organized to and being, but I had become like 50% more organized since hanging out with these. There's a procedure for everything. There's like a file name. There's a system for file names. Those economists are changing me. So I think the power of peers is in a way the positive side of peer pressure, right? And if we think about it as an opportunity to shape ourselves, to be like the people that we're with by choosing people that we admire. I think that, to me, is a very profound and overlooked way to develop yourself.

And there's a couple different ways people can affect us, right? One is that we just kind of soak up other people's traits. We can use other people for accountability. You probably don't want to be disorganized in front of all these economists friends. They'll make fun of you. It'll be embarrassing. Yes, they would. But another thing that we do is that we learn from other people. And this is the lovely work of Joe Heinrich and his colleagues. Tell me about that. So Joe Henrik, the anthropologist at Harvard, you know his work better than I do, but I have been really persuaded by Joe Henrik and the idea that there is no individual who can be smarter than the group. Joe Henrik, as you know, has a very provocative theory of what makes homo sapiens the most dominant species on the planet. And it's not that our brains are, what, 20% bigger?

You know the answers. I mean, how much bigger are our brains than chimpanzees? Don't ask me to do like phylogenetics on the flag. A little, though, right? I mean, they're bigger. They're bigger. They're bigger. Definitely bigger.

Definitely bigger. But they're not 10 times as big. They're not twice as big. So Joe Henrik asked the question. He was like, all right, a chimpanzee cannot build a plane. A chimpanzee hasn't figured out the internet. No chimpanzee has ever written a poem. They don't do things that we do, even though they're just a little dumber, right?

Like, what's going on? And I've been really persuaded by his notion of the collective brain. What makes homo sapiens different is that we learn from each other. We learn through this podcast. We learn from the books that we read that the authors have long been dead. We learn at dinner when somebody says, hey, something really interesting happened to me. Chimpanzees do not learn from each other the way people do. So if we can understand that, we can sort of celebrate the idea that we do things collectively, not individually.

There is no individual who writes a book entirely on their own. There is no pilot who can totally get a plane from point A to point B on their own. So I think it's time to embrace the collective brain. I want to go back to the story of Bob Bowman because we had him on the podcast. We had him on Happiness Lab a while back. So tell me your story of meeting Bob Bowman and why were you so interested in his approach to behavior change? I stalked Bob Bowman. I even learned how to do Instagram messaging just so I could, you know, connect with him.

I had no, you know, personal connection to him. but I wanted to meet the greatest swim coach in history. I knew that he had coached Michael Phelps, and not only that he had coached him when Michael was 11 years old, but also all the way through his retirement at age 32, I knew that Bob Bowman had coached many other Olympians, including Leon Marchand, who was the most decorated athlete in the Paris Games. He won the most individual gold medals.

The reason I wanted to meet Bob is that I knew that a world-class coach had to be a world-class mentor. And I define a mentor as someone who is more experienced than you are in some way and caring enough to help you down the path. I read his book, 10 Golden Rules for Success. And when I read it, I recognized a lot of things that I had studied, you know, a lot of elements of grit, but also there was a very clear statement that his advice, if you want to be great, is to find the people and places that bring out your best. And I wanted to know what it was that Bob thought about the importance of mentorship, what was his experience. And he said to me that Michael Phelps was obviously as talented as they come. That was abundantly obvious from the very

first swim practice. It then became clear he was as gritty as they come, right? As Bob is quick to point out, Michael didn't miss a practice, I think for like 10 consecutive years and hardly missed any during his entire career. I think the importance of a mentor, though, is to say to Michael on days where he wasn't feeling it, that he was going to get in the pool and do the drills and to have that disciplined regimen that was going to bring out his best. If you ask the question, like, if Michael had on a clipboard all the things that Bob Bowman was telling him to do, like if it were coming to him through Chachipit, right, we'll do this today, do this on Thursday, do this on Saturday. Could Michael have ever done what he did? Absolutely not. I think

all of us can think back to our formative moments. Lori, I wouldn't even be a psychologist if it weren't for Marty Seligman. Like, is Marty perfect? Oh, hell no. Marty Seligman is not perfect. But did Marty Seligman bring me into being as a psychologist? Absolutely. He shaped how I think.

He shaped how I prioritize my time. The list goes on, Anders Erickson, Walter Michelle. And when I think about anything I've done, you know, really is that expression of standing on the shoulders of giants. You know, for me, my mentors have been everything. I think this is something that people definitely don't think they can change in the situation is like who they have around them to be mentoring them. I mean, of course, we know we can like hire a piano tutor or something like that. But I think for just so many subtle things, there are mentors around us all the time that we're just not taking advantage of. And this is

something I know you've talked about because you also talk about a way that we can give back to our to kind of keep those relationships alive. You've talked about this act of being a mentor magnet. What do you mean there? If there's one thing as a psychologist who has studied mentorship that I might share with people is that you should be more proactive about attracting mentors into your life and thanking the ones you already have. I think sometimes people just assume it's chance. And it's not.

You know, I've met people in my life younger than me typically. And I just am drawn to them. I'm like, you know, offering to help them when they didn't ask me for favors. I'm like, you know, you should meet this person. I'm going to be in L.A. on this date. Like, maybe we could have lunch. And I have asked myself, like, I'm a busy person. What am I doing?

And I'm very drawn to these people because they are grateful, because they benefit from any advice or help I offer. And because they are kind to other people. And I think these features of a mentor magnet are all. all acquireable. Like, you can be prepared and you can be the person who sends the thank you note and you can ask, like, oh, is there any way that I can help you or is there any cause that you are working on where, you know, my skills would be useful. I think we can become mentor magnets. When we do, we bring into our lives these like guardian angels. It's a great source of joy to mentor someone. I mean, I have my best days when I feel like I have helped somebody younger than me

do something a little differently, think a little more expansively about their world or their decisions. And one mentor said to me, you know, when you look at somebody you're mentoring, you see who you were. And when they look at you, they see who they can be. And there's really nothing more beautiful than that. And so that's pillar number three of situational agency. We should be finding our mentors and we should be doing our best to be a good mentor magnet. Now we get to the final element of situational agency, which is at the broadest level. of our situation. We need to choose our culture. There are lots of different definitions of the

word culture. As I'm sure you know, Angela, what are you thinking of when you mean culture in this broad sense? I think culture most succinctly is the way we do things around here. I grew up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Cherry Hill had a culture. I'm at University of Pennsylvania at the Wharton School and in psychology. There's a culture there. The business schools definitely have a culture. Yeah, exactly. Business schools have a culture. my department has a culture, my neighborhood has a culture, the block in which I live, that's its own microculture. And it's different. And, you know, New Haven has a culture, Boston has a culture. And I just want to say to anyone who thinks that their culture is fixed. That's not true. You know, I tell the story in the book. It's a true story. And I don't even know this person very well.

But Johnny Mehta, who's a very famous design guru, was standing in line in front of me. We were at a graduation. And he and I were making small talk about our lives. And I said to him in a moment of, you know, confession, I guess, that I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do. I think I had recently gotten tenure, so I knew I wasn't going to get fired. But I didn't know what to do next. And he said, why don't you move? And I said, what?

And then I immediately just ticked through all the reasons I couldn't move. I'm like, oh, my mother is older. You know, my father has Parkinson's. My mother-in-law lives here. You know, my husband's a real estate developer. It doesn't get any more local than that. You have to basically stay where you are. Like, I can't leave my university.

My kids are in school. And he didn't say much more than, well, you should consider it. And it took me a few more months to think this through. But my husband and I did decide to move. Now, we didn't move to St. Louis. We just moved four miles from the suburbs of Philadelphia into the city. But four or five miles is a world away. So I think the changes that it afforded me, I ended up walking to work instead of driving to work.

My kids ended up going to the Philadelphia public schools. That was a different culture, I will tell you, than the suburban schools that they had come from. Our neighborhood was a different place. The people that I would just meet in the course of a day were different because of my neighborhood. So we are so quick to tell ourselves the story that I can't change my job, I can't change where I live, I can't change the culture that is shaping me. I just think that's not true. I think even if you don't have a lot of money or a lot of latitude, there's almost always something you can do to navigate toward the culture, the way we do. things that is the way you want to do things too. I just love this one quote that you have in your

book about this mistake we make. You know, we think of culture as where we're from, not where we can go. And that was just like, mind-blowing for me because it was like, oh my gosh, I totally do this. Like, oh, well, that's where I'm from. I'm not thinking about, well, how can I shape the culture around me, whether that's my job or where I am or even just the microculture? Use this term in the book, microculture. What do you mean there? So it turns out that the culture that really matters is the culture that is right around you. So, for example, there are macrocultural trends that some of us don't like, you know, political polarization, the amount of time people are on screens, how much ultra-processed food is consumed in the United States. But that matters less than your

microculture. Like, how much ultra-processed food is being eaten around you every day in your immediate proximity? And you have much more control over your microculture than you do over the macroculture. cultural trends that, again, you may or may not like. And I think that's very empowering. I think that if you understand that and economists are quick to point out that if you change blocks sometimes, even within the same zip code, it really can be night and day. And therefore, there is more latitude if you have the courage to change. And I think, Lori, we know from research on status quo bias that sometimes the obstacle is not financial. It's not logistical. It's psychological. We cling to the familiar, even when we know change is good for us.

And so I think this might be a message to end with this idea that we cling to the familiar. In so many ways, our situation is the kind of thing that we can change, right? From like what's literally in arm's length right now to the people we're hanging out with, to the mentors we pick, to the culture that we're in. We can change all this stuff. And so how has this realization changed to you? Have you stopped focusing on your own grit and switched to changing your situation? more? I think that focusing on situation has, if anything, added to my grit, not diminished it. And I know it can seem like in either or, like, either I'm going to work on my grit or I'm going to work on

getting situated. But when you are situated, when you are with people and in places that bring out your best, you will find that you are in a very willing and spontaneous way, more passionate and more persevering. When I am working with colleagues who I just think are amazing and have things to teach me, I want to bring my passion and perseverance to the projects that we work on. When I'm in a culture where the values are aligned with what I believe in, I am more motivated, not less motivated. So to me, it's not either you get gritty or you get situated. The ideal is that you get both. Well, Angela, thank you for being part of my situation that I am very grateful for. Lori, thank you for being part of my situation. You bring out my best.

There you have it from the grit lady herself. It's time to stop worrying about what's wrong with you and start thinking about what's wrong with your situation. Rather than doing things the hard way, take a look at your physical space, your peers, your mentors, and your culture, and consider how adjusting the situations around you could make it a little easier for you to reach your goals so that you can become the person you want to be.

Next week, we'll continue our Back to School series with neuroscientist and mindfulness expert Richie Davidson. He'll explain while you're, brain is changing every day, whether you realize it or not, and how just a few minutes of intentional practice can help shape it for the better. Five minutes a day actually produces real change. It produces change in our experience, and it even produces change in our biology. That's all next week on the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Lari-Santos. This is an I-Heart podcast, Guaranteed Human.