Angela Duckworth MacArthur “genius” grant winner, researcher, and author of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.

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I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable people. This episode's remarkable guest is Angela Duckworth. She is a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also the founder and CEO of Character Lab. Duckworth has a BA in neurobiology from Harvard, a Master's in Neuroscience from the University of Oxford, and a PhD in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. She has written a book called the Power of Passion and Perseverance. It was a New York times bestseller for 21 weeks. Oh yeah. She also won a MacArthur Award in 2013 for her work on the role of grit and self control in educational achievement. In this episode, you'll hear one of the most insightful pieces of advice ever on this podcast, when to quit something. And if that's not enough, she provides two powerful ways to change your behavior. This podcast is brought to you by Remarkable, the paper tablet company. Focus More and Goof Off Less Using the Remarkable Tablet. I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable people. And and now here is the remarkable Angela Duckworth. I finished grit and about 1/4 of the way through, I said to myself, oh God, I would have accomplished more in my life if I had read Grit earlier.

You seem to have done just fine all by yourself. My husband is at his office, but he was like, oh my God, I'm going to fanboy. And I was like, can't do it unless you're in the room.

So that was my first thought. And then my second thought is, oh my God, I'm a terrible parent.

How old are your kids? How many kids?

Yeah, I have 27, 25, 19, and 16.

It's like a super family.

There's still hope that I can use some of the grit theories on my 16 year old. The other ones, they're beyond.

The ship has sailed. Why do I also suspect that those kids are also fine?

First question, is Lucy baking or playing the viola these days?

Currently, she's baking. I would say that there's been a pivot even from baking, but she is still baking. She works for a restaurant, and every Saturday she bakes for the restaurant. But she's definitely not playing the viola. And just recently, we were talking about how great it is that she is not playing the viola anymore.

So this kind of burst a few tiger mom stereotypes here. So maybe you could explain the two rules that you have effectuated in your family. That is the hard thing rule and the fun thing rule.

Yeah, the hard thing rule sounds like tiger parenting, but it's not. And that's why I had to make up the fun thing rule, just to make it entirely clear. So the hard thing rule in my family I developed when I was a young mom and also a young graduate student in psychology. And I said to my kids, my husband and I said to our kids, okay, everybody in the Duckworth family has to do a hard thing. There's three parts of this rule. One is that a hard thing, by definition, requires practice. And we wanted them to, even at a very early age, know the feeling of improving on something and trying again and improving, maybe a little less next time, but still improving and then doing it again. That's one part. The second part was you're not allowed to quit your hard thing in the middle. So we also wanted them to learn to stick with something to the end of a commitment, which, by the way, was, you know, like, eight weeks if you signed up for track, or six weeks if you signed up for, like, session two of ballet. And the third thing, and this is why it's not tiger parenting, I think it's. It's that nobody could pick your hard thing other than you. And I thought it was so important that my kids had choice. I thought the third part, the hard thing rule, would ensure intrinsic motivation in what my two girls did. But I realized about, oh, gosh, my kids were in maybe middle school, maybe the beginning of high school, that they had not quite gotten that third part. That the third part means, like, you have to enjoy it, right? You have to want to do it. Because younger daughter Lucy was slogging through viola. She loved her teacher, but she didn't really love viola. And so I never heard her listening to classical music. She didn't talk about it in her spare time. She just muscled her way through these practices. And so the fun thing rule is a second rule that we had to add on in our family, and that is that everybody in the Duckworth family has to do something because it's fun, like something that you enjoy. And I told my daughters, and I think they understand now they're older, now they're 17 and 19. I think they understand that, like, the game of life is really one, when your hard thing and your fun thing are the same thing.

And what is the new pivoted fun, hard thing?

Well, the younger daughter, lucy, is only 17. As I said, Viola was a hard thing, but it wasn't fun. Baking for her was fun, but it wasn't hard. I think she's discovered both that some people think Viola is fun. Also, she's discovered that some people, like Dorie Greenspan, who. Who writes the baking column for the New York Times, for some people, their funding is hard. So she understands that it's not that these things are absolutes, but they're very personal. I think she's still trying to figure out something that's both hard and fun for her. If I had to guess where she's trending, it's actually writing. So I think for her, writing essays and writing in her journal is becoming more and more, you know, where she wants to improve and also not quit and also choose what she does and also find kind of energy in doing it. And pleasure.

I have found, and this is a recently discovered fun, hard thing, podcasting. So podcasting is an extreme amount of work. It's very difficult, but it is the most satisfying thing I probably have done in my career.

So I would love to know more about both why it's fun for you, but also I bet a lot of people listen to you and don't understand how it could be hard. So can we start with how it's hard? Why is it hard?

It's hard because I have to do a lot of background research. So I do hours of background research about the person, and then I want my podcast to be 95% Angela, 5% me. And so, in effect, that makes it harder because if I could just take 50% of the conversation, I could just go mouth along.

Right.

But I have to ask you questions that lead you on to. To great discussions. I can't just can't wing it.

You can't just sort of like, say, what's on your mind.

Yeah, I just can't show up. I always try to ask questions, especially the initial ones where Angela or Katie or Jane or whoever immediately says, this guy has done his research. When I ask you if Lucy is baking, that's not because I read the Wikipedia entry and it says, Lucy, her daughter is a baker. I had to slog through a lot of. Well, not slog, but I had to go through a lot. I had to Go through a lot of stuff to figure that out.

That's a really good tip, by the way, because that means the first question is sending a signal, too.

Exactly.

Like, I respect you. I admire you. I came prepared. This is not going to be a waste of your time. I'm going to steal that trick. I'm really. Katie probably told you, Katie Milkman probably told you that we like to copy each other and we'd like to copy other people. I'm going to copy you. That's pretty great.

Imitation is a sincerest form of flattering.

Yes, exactly. So.

So that's. Those are two hard things. And then, unlike other podcasters who kind of record Raw, some of them just play it, whatever it is, others turn it over to a sound designer who does the editing. Yeah, I do the editing, not the sound design.

You do the editing. What?

So I'm going to take this 45 or 60 minutes and I'm going to go through every second of it by myself. Then I'm going to it to the sound designer who takes another pass at it. You cite examples in Grit about how I forget who it was. But you said, you know, the writer looks at what he wrote the previous day and the next day and makes it better. And makes it better.

Ta Nehisi Coates. The incomparable, poetic, dreamlike Ta Nehisi.

Just in case you couldn't quite make out the name, she said, ta Nehisi Coates. What do you think would have happened if your father had told you, Angela, you are a genius. You are highly gifted and talented. Would the arc of your life have changed it?

Most certainly would have. But one could say that about so many things, right? So that's the trivial answer. I guess the question is, how do I speculate? It would have changed. It's a great blessing to always feel like an underdog. I'm a very confident underdog, so I don't feel inferior when I talk to a Nobel laureate economist and ask questions that are surely, in some ways actually stupid. I have a kind of confidence that is not because I know what I'm doing, but that it's okay to not know. So I'm a very confident underdog. I never think that I'm smarter than the Nobel Prize winner. I never think I'm smarter than most people that I work with. But I feel like if my dad had given me an identity of someone who was gonna have things come easily, then I don't know that I would have, you know, grown up into this, like, very hardworking, persistent, confident, that she will eventually figure things out, but not confident that she already has kind of person.

And then all the work of Carol Dweck would have gone down the drain.

Who knows? I could have been oblivious to it. Or maybe, like so many people, I would have picked up her book and then realized that I had a fixed mindset. And then maybe Carol affixed to me, you know, into somebody who was different. But I think there are a lot of very, very smart people who feel like, in a way, it was a curse to be, you know, selected into the gifted and talented program to be told by everyone that they were the smartest kid in the class. There's a tremendous fragility in trying to protect this identity that you're always going to have. Things come easily to.

I think one of the most powerful conclusions of Carol Dweck's work is that if you have that fragility, if you have that self image of I'm a genius, I'm highly talented, I cannot fail. It means that you don't try things that you might fail because you don't want to ruin that self image.

If you have, like, a fixed mindset, it's actually fine. If you're winning, you get a fixed mindset. You get a 4.0 summa cum laude, varsity captain, prom queen, prom king. Who cares what mindset you have about your abilities? I think it's when you are not winning. Right? And the thing about the people that I study, these Olympic skiers like Lindsey Vonn or actors like Will Smith, I think what I most admire about them is not that they have won awards. It's that they have this desire to put themselves in situations where they're not winning because they're at the edge of what they can do. That's so admirable to me. They could coast, they could do things the easy way, but they just crave those situations where they don't know what they're doing and they're likely to partially lose and then grow. And that's when you really do need, I think, a growth mindset about what you can change about yourself.

This is kind of a convoluted and complex question. I hope I can properly explain it. But let's say that you see someone, you don't know what that person's background is. It's a surfer, a musician, a programmer, and clearly very good at what he or she does. What about the issue that years of hard work and grit can now be mistaken for innate talent and genius? So how do you know how the person got There because it seems like a lot of the literature they create a dichotomy of. It's either innate and genius and talent, or it's grit. But why can't grit be considered part of the innate genius talent? Why is it always separate in opposition?

How do you define the word talent? I think this is a great question to ask you because I'm sure at some level you've asked yourself, you've probably asked your guests, what would you say talent means? Like, if I were 7 years old and I didn't know what the word meant, what would you tell me?

I've been so indoctrinated, and I'm such a believer in your work and Carol Dweck's work that I would say that talent is the willingness to work hard.

And, wow, you really have drunk the Kool Aid. I haven't even made that Kool Aid. But you know what? Somebody else didn't ask. They told me that. So I was interviewing Rowdy Gaines, the Olympic gold medalist swimmer, for my book, and I asked him this question because just the way he was using the word talent was a little bit puzzling to me. And then I asked him, like, wait, what do you mean by talent? And he actually said that in so many words that included, you know, real, like heart and ambition and desire to work. So the word talent actually goes all the way back to biblical times. And as you may know, it was the. It was a currency. It was like a weight of silver or maybe gold. And so it had this idea of what is valuable. And then, of course, it became a parable in the Bible. And now when we use that word, I think it can mean many things to many people. It has this sense of, like, your potential, but also it has a sense of what you do that is different from other people that makes you special. I think that you could define it any way you want to. But the reason I define it in opposition to grit is because when we study the connotations that are evoked by this word talent, overwhelmingly people think it's innate. Like, they think, oh, it's innate, it can't be learned. And therefore, I think it sort of kind of goes with this sense of natural ability and that which is not practice or coached. So that's just a way of me saying that I think my research is all about the things that you can change that aren't entirely outside of your reach. My definition of talent is very narrow, and I don't think most people share it. It's just the rate at which you get better at something if you try. So if you're very talented at podcasting, that each successive episode should be better at a rate which is faster than somebody who is lower in talent. I think you can change your talent, too, but I'm just saying it's, to me, a rate variable. And effort is more of a kind of time variable if you think of rate times time.

But if it's a rate variable, I could be getting better and better at podcasting, but still nowhere close to freakonomics. So don't we also need an absolute value?

It could be like, there's an asymptote. You mean maybe you'll never be as good as Steven Dubner is like, the idea of that, like, you're, you know. Well, first of all, I also don't think that everybody is equally able to do everything, right? I mean, it would be nice to be able to say what. Any kid anywhere could learn to ski like Lindsey Vaughn. Any kid anywhere can learn to run like Usain Bolt. Any kid anywhere can learn to do physics like Albert Einstein. I don't think that's true. I know that it would make for a good sound bite, but I don't think it's true. So I think it's okay, you know? The reason I think it's okay is in the early 20th century, over 100 years ago, William James wrote these essays when he was in the psychology department at Harvard. And these series of essays were all called Energies of Men. So he obviously believed in practice, too, because he published the same essay in slightly different and improved forms, like, in multiple outlets over a span of years. But the project was about what we could be as people and our potential. And the reason I don't worry too much about asymptotes is that, like William James, I think we are all so far away from any kind of, like, ceiling imposed upon us. Like, you know, I can't run like Usain Bolt, right? Like, that's silly. So, yeah, we're not all the same. Are. Are changeable, but they're also, you know, there must be limits. I. You don't live your life that way. You're not like, well, since I'm. I can't be Stephen Dubner. I'm just gonna, like, you know, not even try to make this next episode. That's. That's not the way I don't think you live your life.

Not at all. I want Stephen Dubner to want to be Guy Kawasaki, but that's exactly what I say.

Like, I have a message for Steven. Listen, Carefully. And I want you to deliver it right.

Can I tell you, Asian to Asian, a funny Jackie Chan story that will.

Okay, 100%. Yes, please.

Okay. This will give you some insights into me. So one day I was in a Porsche. I happened to own a Porsche back then. And I was at this stoplight, and I look over and I see these four teenage girls in this car. And they're laughing, they're smiling, they're making eye contact with me, they're giggling and all that. So I'm thinking, God, you have truly arrived. Everybody knows who you are because of your writing, your Apple, your speech, your hot dot com startup, you know, I'm, like, happier than a pig in shit. So the girl in the front seat says, roll down the window. I roll down my window. She sticks her head out and says, are you Jackie Chan? Okay, so that's a funny story, but there's a punchline to this. And so I have to tell you, Angela, ever since that day, one of my goals in life is that Jackie Chan is in Hong Kong or Beijing or wherever the hell he lives. And he's in his Bentley or his S class or his whatever, and he pulls up to a stoplight. Four girls in a car next to him ask him to roll out his window, and they say, stick their head out and they say, are you Guy Kawasaki? So one must have goals.

Yes, one must. People like you, if I might venture. You just always are, like, looking for something which is going to be challenged. Right? Like, you don't like being comfortable. I don't think you probably enjoy kind of like, feeling like, you know, you have a ride. I certainly don't feel like that.

Having said that, if I ever get a MacArthur Ward, I'm. That's it. I'm quitting. That's it. I'm out. The game is over.

Email me when. Yeah, we'll go to celebrate.

You'll be the second person to know. By the way, I am friends with Stephen Wolfram, and we're talking about not everyone is created equal. So I can have a conversation with Stephen wolfram once every 10 years or so because his brain is so fast and so different. I'm exhausted. For a decade after I talked to him, he's, you know, there is a different chipset in him than me.

You know, when you talk to people like that, like, how does it affect your motivation? Does it leave it the same? Does it make it, like, less? Like, does it make it more to.

Like, you know, I have to say that I think that when you are secure in your own skin. It's not like you envy him. I am in awe of him, don't get me wrong. But it's not like I go away depressed and think, oh, if only I could be as smart as he. I also have come to believe I'm 66 years old. I have come to believe that just about everyone you meet is better at something than you are. You might feel superior to the plumber because you don't have to clean toilets and fix toilets all day, but that plumber is a much better surfer than you could ever be, guy.

Not to mention a much better plumber.

That too. And so I've come to really appreciate that everybody I meet is probably better. Maybe this person can make better Tiwalis than ever I could. Anyway, I don't know how we got on that tangent.

I think that's a good. Well, we can get off of that. But before we do, I'll just say I think it's a great way to live life because then. Then it makes you all, like, hunting for that thing.

Yeah. It also makes you treat waiters and waitresses and flight attendants better because quite frankly, they're probably better at something than you are.

Yeah, probably more than one.

So what. What is your top goal right now?

You know, I think all human, by the way, have hierarchies of goals. Like whatever it is you're trying to do. If someone asks you why are you trying to do it? Right? Like, oh, I want to lose weight. Why? Oh, I want to have more energy. That's already a hierarchy. Because losing weight is a way to achieve a higher level goal, which is to have more energy. Right. So we all have hierarchies of goal, but I have a very tall pyramid of goals, so it's many layered. And my top level goal really gives definition and purpose to everything I do professionally. I don't know that I could say that my goal to be a good mom is in this hierarchy, but as a professional, my top level goal is to use psychological science to help kids thrive. And everything, including this conversation, has to fit into that hierarchy or I shouldn't be doing it. So I make mistakes and I say yes to things that I shouldn't, and I misallocate my time sometimes. But just having the definition of a top level mission statement is actually very helpful for me. And I feel like I am not as conflicted as I was in my, you know, 40s or my 30s when I didn't have this structure, this kind of blueprint of what I was trying to Do.

A couple weeks ago, I contacted you, and I did do this episode about the psychology of vaccination in which I got nine people like Phil Zimbardo, David Aker, Bob Cialdini, Katie Milkman, Gretchen Chapman, and yet. But one of the most interesting things that happened in that process is that I asked you and you declined because you said, I had Katie Milkman. So I want to know why you declined. Is it because declining was not one of the lower middle goals that got you to your top goal? Was it because you had to go to a viola recital?

Was I making. What was it? What was I doing? Well, I declined in part because I don't think that my value is that great when you add it to what Katie has to say about vaccines. So Katie and I do a lot of our research together. And getting back to my gold pyramid and her gold pyramid, I said to Katie, like, my heart is with kids, right? So if we're talking about teenagers, we're talking about who gets through college, like, increasing equity for. Okay, that's where my heart is. I'll do all that. Part of the partnership when it comes to vaccines and emergency savings and getting people to exercise more. I will be your sidekick, and we will do everything together. But you'll lead and I'll follow. If you had to pick between the two of us for someone to talk about behavior change and vaccines, the better person to pick is Katie. We call it hashtag divide and conquer. And oftentimes when we're texting each other and we're like, dividing up, who's going to do this? It's. It's our little code for, you do the thing that you are good at and that you care about, and I'll do the thing that I'm good at and it'll come together.

By the way, I loved your foreword for her book.

Thank you. I think her book is fantastic. I'm really excited. Yay.

It could be, and I say this in the highest praise, it could be the next grit or could also be the next influence, as in Bob Cialdini. I love.

I love Bob Cialdini and I love influence. And he's writing his novel next book. So think about these people with present company accepted. Everybody who wrote a great book is probably writing another great book.

Present company accepted. On my side, going back to podcasting, I have decided, but I've said this 14 times. I don't think I'll ever write another book because I think podcasting is so much more powerful and timely. And imagine if you written A book that was just finished as the pandemic started, you'd have to throw that book away in business.

Do you think that people change because they're listening to this conversation or your other conversations? I mean, the reason that I wouldn't necessarily. I'm not saying I don't want to, like, cast shade on books, but I have been wondering whether there is another technology for helping people change in ways that they want to. And so far, I have literally not heard a single person tell me, oh, you could do it this way, you could do it that way. I'm not confident. Confident that most people who read my book, you know, have materially improved their lives in a way that they wanted to.

But are you saying you think that podcasting could be more effective?

Asking what you think. I wonder whether you think people, like, change more because of. Because it's more immediate or it's personal or it's.

I would say that. Well, from an author's perspective or a podcaster's perspective, I find podcasting both easier and harder, as well as more effective than writing, because writing. The delays are so long. True what you say now, I know as soon as the book is published, I know there's stuff I want to fix, so there's that. And I also think if a million people buy your book, how many do you think actually finish the damn thing?

Not a million.

Yeah, not a million. And then you could say, well, if a podcast lasts 60 minutes, how many listen to the whole podcast? That's also a point. But I just.

Do you think that, like, let's take the number of people, let's take the people who, whatever the fraction is, who actually finished the whole podcast or finished the whole book. There's also the question of so what? And again, I'm taking a bit of a, like, extreme contrary position only to push a little bit. Like, I have wondered, is that all? Is it. How good is it. How effective is it to deliver information in a form of a book or a podcast? Even if people did listen to the whole thing carefully, do you think that it's enough? Or is there something else we should be doing? Like, when Julia Child wanted to teach people to cook, like, you know, she wrote a cookbook and then she had a TV show. I guess her version of a podcast. Was that enough? Maybe that is enough. I learned a lot from Julia Child through those media, but I just wondered whether you thought there was another entirely different way in which people could teach.

People that is beyond my pay grade. But I think Julia Child is a Difficult example, because there's a sequence to cooking.

Right.

You have to dice this and you have to saute this, and, you know, it's step by step. But I think if people are on a hike and they listen to Angela and they hear Angela say, what we did with our kids is we had a hard task and we had a fun task, and we want our kids to find something that's hard and fun.

And then what happens? Do you think anybody would actually do that with their own kids, though?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Now, maybe this shoots my argument in the foot, but when I read Mindset, it changed my life. I mean, I really.

So tell me, like, when did you read it and what were you like before it and what happened?

I read it before there was such a thing as podcasting, but it was just as my kids were very young still or just being born. One of her key messages was, don't tell your kids that they're smart and they're geniuses and they're talented and all that. Instead, praise their hard work.

Right, right.

And that absolutely changed how I talk to my kids.

And it stuck like, you didn't do it for a day and then you went back to the way you were before you were changed.

When I read that, it was like the waters parted. I said, she's right. You should tell kids that it's about hard work and praise their hard work as opposed to, you're just a gifted child having my DNA.

So maybe. Okay, that's actually a great story. And, you know, maybe I'm like creating a problem that doesn't really exist. Because for me, after I wrote my book, I was, I was. I mean, I wasn't disappointed with how many books it sold. I guess I was. I was wondering whether it really made any difference. Like, you know, like, is that. Is that just a supply driven thing? Like, authors want to write books, so they do. Is it really demand driven? Is it like meeting a true need?

Do people ever come up to you and say, angela, you're a two by two matrix where you have to be supportive and demanding? That has changed how I parent.

They have. So I guess maybe I should listen to that and be encouraged. But I'm very eager to do better. Right. Like, it just seems to me like, let's see, the genre of the self help book has been around for, I think like 100 plus years. And like you've experienced, and some people might tell me they literally help themselves, themselves just by reading this book and thinking about it and doing whatever the book tells them to do. But I'm very eager to help a larger number of people in a more substantive way in something that must be beyond the technology of a book. But maybe I'm, like, missing all the value of the book itself, and maybe just all we need is, like, more great books. I don't know. I just have been, like, skeptical that I think for some people, they read the book, they feel good when they're reading it it. And they get energized when they're reading it, and then they put it down and they don't even finish it. But even if they did, they. I don't know. I just. I guess I, like, get cynical sometimes that, like, it's enough.

I could make the case that knowing my kids generation, if you really wanted to reach my kids, it's at one level, YouTube, but maybe even TikTok. So the Angela Duckworth TikTok about. About Grit might reach more kids than you.

By the way, my kids have taught me this about TikTok. They're like, literally any sentence with a subject and a verb that has TikTok in it. You're doing it wrong. Just like anything you say. Like, maybe we could, like, like, you know. Anyway, so I've learned not to use the word TikTok, because no matter how I use it, I'm, like, apparently not getting it right. But, yeah, maybe. Look, the world does know how to cook. Let's just go back to Julia Child. The world does cook better. Like, legit. We cook better. At least our coffee is better. There are. There is progress. So human beings are effectively teaching other human beings. And maybe it is just books and podcasts and YouTube videos and eventually, like, the knowledge of the thing. But I've been thinking about whether, like, we could make the whole world psychologically literate. So 500 years ago, most people could not read and write. Now everybody can read and write. Everyone has the expectation of reading and writing. Everybody learns it as a matter of growing up and a matter of actually actual formal education. So then that happened with numeracy, too, right? So at some level, I mean, you can complain, but at some level, we've all become much more numerate. We've become somewhat scientifically literate. People know what an experiment is. They ask, is this vaccine effective? Was there a control group, whatever. And I wonder about psychological literacy. I wonder if the next revolution will be that people would have the kind of appreciation of human nature that Carol Dweck has or some of your guests like Rob Cialdini. And wouldn't it be amazing if Everybody were a psychological, psychologically literate as Bob Cialdini, Carol Dweck and Katie Lookman. So I was thinking like, would would if that's a possibility. Does it happen through self help books or does it happen in some other way?

You're talking to an addict about a drug. I love behavioral science. I love behavioral economics and social psychology.

Right.

So you're talking to the absolute wrong.

Yeah, you're a junkie.

Yeah, I am a junkie. And Cialdini's book changed my life. Brenda Yulin's book, if youf Want to Write changed my life. And so I'm a believer. I think the irony of course, is that the Trump administration is going to bring to light how important these concepts are for good or bad.

Yeah, like by omission. Hold on, let's start talking about character since there seems to be a profound absence of it. Wow, that's really terrible. Yeah, maybe what's really important important is that if you put books and there are so many wonderful ones together with this openness that you had, I mean, maybe you would argue that you used to have a fixed mindset over, but you seem to have had a kind of like, kind of self improvement. You know, actually there's a term for this. There's a school in South Africa called the African Leadership Academy. And the founders of this little school have this ambition of creating these entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial leaders of. I think you go there for your last two years of high school. It's a fantastic school. And if you ask like educators, like really who know, they all know about African Leadership Academy. And the term that they use for this posture that you seem to have is like being an autodidact. Right. Somebody who is going to try to teach themselves. And you will find the books and find the podcast and you will read the books instead of leaving them on the coffee table. And then you will ask yourself, what can I do differently? And maybe what's needed is not a new technology, like a new platform or a multimedia whatever. Maybe we just need to figure out how to get more people to have an autodidact identity. I love that. I love. That was their term and when they told me about it and like they're like, and this is our whole educational philosophy. Because if we can take these 17 and 18 year old women and men and make them into autodidacts and then that's all you need to do for them for the rest of their life. Because like then the rest of it, they're in charge.

But isn't that Basically a growth mindset.

Yeah. I think that at the core of that is like a belief that you can. That your abilities can change. I think it's not. Not only that. Right. It's like curiosity. And then there's. There. There are other things that people need also. But, yeah, I think a big part of it is growth mindset is a great place to start.

My last thought about books and podcasting and YouTube and TikTok. It seems to me that the reason why Kodak and Polaroid aren't around is because they define their business as. As chemicals on film or chemicals on paper. But the business they were really in was the preservation of memories. So to me, one shouldn't define. I'm a publisher of books, I'm a podcaster, I'm a video creator. I am in the business of transferring knowledge. And it used to be stories are on a campfire, and then it was monks on papyrus, and then it was Gutenberg had a big breakthrough, and then there was desktop publishing, and then there's websites, and then there's podcasts. But all of those things, we're transferring knowledge. So how we transfer knowledge is not as important as realizing that the business we are in is the transfer of knowledge.

If Kodak or Polaroid had said, our top level goal is preservation of memories or helping people tell visual stories, whatever it is, that this is like this abstract purpose, then they would have had the flexibility and the ingenuity to be able to say, oh, digital is here. Because that's just a tactic. That's just a means to the end. And I think that's why for me, having a fairly abstract goal, use psychological science to help kids thrive. That doesn't say that I should be on Guy's podcast or not, or I should be a professor, I could do a startup. And I don't know that. Most people in my experience cannot say in 10 words or fewer, this is what my life is about. I have a mission statement and it's unlikely to change. And my dying breath will be taken in service of this. I can tell you, Guy, like, my dying breath will be taken in service of this. I'm not changing my top level goal as much as I might change the tactics of how I'm desperately and in very imperfect ways trying to achieve it.

So I will tell you, therefore, my top level goal. And I like to use mantras instead of mission statements, because mission statements are always 50 words long. My mantra is two words. Empower people. I want to empower people with my podcasting, my writing, my Speaking my investing.

My advising, when did that become conscious for you? When did you say, like, I can say it and I can say it in two words and like, I understand how it's the through line of everything.

I do about when I was 50.

That's pretty good. That's pretty good. And isn't it great? It's like a great thing. Like, I. I teach this undergraduate class and I tell them you're not 50, which is my age, by the way, and it's unlikely that you're going to be able to summarize your whole purpose professionally. But it's good to try and it's good to always be thinking that, like, at some point I'm going to build myself a compass and the compass is going to tell me TR North. So I just think the intentionality is, you know, a big part of it.

Man, we. I have never, in all the interviews of remarkable people, I have never gone so off script.

Sorry, I know you did all that preparation, then I ruined it.

No, no, no, no. So, okay, my next question. Back on script. So if people do enough work, they'll figure out that grit is a good thing. It's perceived as good. Pete Carroll thinks it's good. The Harvard admissions director thinks it's good. So now if you see someone who, to use a metaphor that you use, stays on the treadmill for a long time, how do you know if that person is gritty or just knows that staying on the treadmill makes me look gritty and Harvard will admit me.

Oh, like faking grit. Which actually, having a 17 and a 19 year old, both of whom went through the college admissions process, this has happened three times for you, I think, right? There is a lot of that. There is a lot of trying to look good rather than trying to be good, which I hate, by the way. And I raised my girls with a daily lecture of not doing things like that. I was like, that is not. First of all, I never had to do that and everything worked out fine for me. And second of all, like, it's just, you lose your integrity. But I think I felt like I was shouting into the wind because their peer group and the school that they go to, it was just this prevailing obsession with looking good for your college application. And of course, this applies to other parts of life, too, later on. I first of all think that it's very hard to fake authentic commitment for very long. And even if you could, I think it would be corrosive for me, actually, if I think of what true happiness is. It's when you are aligned, your goals go together, not against each other. When I wake up in the morning, I don't feel ambivalence. I just want to run downstairs. And I sometimes literally run downstairs and like, get my coffee and get back to work. And there's no conflict, like, oh, I should do this, but I want to do that. This is what other people think I should do. This is what I want to do. It's all of a piece, you know, I hope that we do a better job with our young people so that they can learn that it is so much better to be who you are and to be as good as you can be and to really not worry about what it looks like. The universe will take care of you if you do. If you work really hard and you do things for the right reason, like, the universe will take care of you and you can spend your energy the way it should be spent, which is on what you're doing, which is to.

Say that you are essentially positive about pursuing passion and pursuing your interests, as opposed to becoming a doctor, lawyer or dentist, because that's what's lucrative.

There's really like not being driven entirely by external extrinsic motives. Okay, that's one thing not to do. But I will say this. The reason I hesitated there, I stuttered a little bit, is that kids are kids, right? They don't actually have a defining mantra or top level goal because they're kids and they don't know what they're doing and they haven't even experienced very much yet. And I think I don't want to prematurely pressure young people into having the kind of passion that a 50 year old or a 66 year old might have. I think when you are 15, 16, 21, like you're exploring and I think you're dating, you're not married yet, right? So like, it's okay to go on a couple dates and then like never see the person again. And it's okay to like, do some things and not feel like, oh, it has to be my passion. A very wise person once said, a butterfly is a butterfly, but a young butterfly is a caterpillar. And we shouldn't make the mistake of trying to get our caterpillars to be butterflies until it's time. So I think that young people should be given a little bit of practice in doing hard things. I think they should begin to explore their interests, they should learn to do things that eventually they'll do better. But I don't think they should prematurely feel like, oh my God, I'm 16, and I don't have a lifelong passion. That's the wrong message. And I really hope that doesn't happen because my 17 year old told me that now, maybe because of my work, maybe not in college admissions, now, kids are like, oh, my God. I have to show that I've done one thing for many years. And yes, I want kids to learn dedication, but I don't want them to feel this premature pressure to be things that they aren't yet.

So when is it okay to quit?

I think it's okay to quit if you are quitting on a good day. So that's my rule. So if you're having a good day, you know, nothing terrible happened. There wasn't a rejection letter. You didn't trip and fall and embarrass yourself. If it's a good day, it's just like, you know, a good day, and you don't think that what you're doing is as good as something else that you could be doing, then you should absolutely, 100% quit. What I worry about is that most people, when they have that emotional charge, that's it. I quit. I said that to my husband several times when I was writing the book Grit. I literally said out loud, like, I quit. I can't do this anymore. This is stupid. And I can't believe you convinced me that this is a good idea. And that was all. Quitting on a bad day, which he didn't let me do. He was like, I love you too much to let you quit on a bad day. So I think people can use that as a kind of rule of thumb if you want to quit something on a good day. You're probably right if you want to quit something on a bad day. I would wait until it's not a bad day and then make that decision.

That is truly from the bottom of my heart. That is a fantastic piece of advice. I have never heard something. Okay, Angela. No shit. I will tell you that in the 60 interviews I've done, that may be the most insightful thing.

Well, that's what you get for going off track with me.

That's more insightful than anything. Stephen.

Wolfgang, tell Stephen that next time.

I will. I will when I see him in nine years.

Okay, good.

Now, tell me, why is lasting behavioral change so difficult?

I think it is in part the fact that whatever we are today, whatever our habits are, you bite your nails, you interrupt people, you drink three cups of coffee in the morning. Good things, too, you know, you go for a run, whatever it is, there are forces that are in your life that are impelling you to do that. It's like a physics diagram. Like, remember all those little arrows we used to draw when you were doing physics? What's going to happen to this ball? This force goes that way. So whatever you're doing right now in your life, there's lots of forces, lots of momentum, lots of reasons for doing that and to stay doing that. Now, one day you wake up and you say, I don't want to drink coffee anymore. I don't want to interrupt people. I don't want to bite my nails. I want to do things a different way. So you have another little arrow going the opposite way. That's you deciding not to do it. You're like, great. You read a book, you think, you listen to a podcast. And the reason why it's very hard to sustain that is because all those arrows that were pointing in the direction that they were already are still pointing in that way. I don't think it's impossible to change your behavior, but I think you have to recognize that there are so many forces that carry you in the direction that you used to be going that it's very hard to change course. And that is why, when I think about behavior change now, I think that the greatest hope that most of us have for changing our behavior is to do it with other people. If you want to speak French, move to France, right? If you want to be, like, in a healthy lifestyle, hang out with people and join clubs and do things with lots of other healthy people. Because then you put yourself into a different force diagram where now you've got more arrows pushing in the direction that you want. Being the only arrow pushing against is just very, very hard work. And eventually, I think most people stop pushing.

So this is the power of culture.

This is the power of culture. I am a psychologist, and I'm not supposed to study culture. I'll just say psychologists are not trained to study culture. But I think eventually every psychologist wants to study culture. Because if you want to know why we are the way we are and how to change the way we are, you absolutely have to start understanding culture. In addition to culture. The one thing that I think could be, in a way like the foundation for all personal growth is self awareness. Awareness. It's being able to take yourself as an object of inquiry and to look down in a way on your own self. Like having some outside perspective. Just the moment that you realize that you talk too much in meetings. Like, the moment that you realize that, you know, you have a bad temper. The moment that you realize that you can be really impulsive when it's like late at night, whatever. Like that to me is the key to unlocking like everything. Without that, you can't unlock any growth that I can, you know, see. But with that you have the possibility of changing almost anything. So I think that self awareness and culture are to me like two of the things that personally as a scientist I want to study more so that I can. I have a very similar top level goal to you. Just more words and maybe a little more specific. But yeah, I hope that empowers people.

So you heard it straight from the MacArthur Award winner's mouth. If you want to change your behavior, put yourself in an environment where there are other people who have the desired behavior and increase your self awareness. Get outside of yourself. If you combine these two factors and you embody the quality of grit, you will be remarkable. I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. The Remarkable People podcast is sponsored by the Remarkable Tablet Company. If you need a tablet that feels like a pencil on paper and has battery life of weeks, not hours, the Remarkable tablet should be on the top of your wish list. My thanks to Taylor Bledsoe of the Aiming for the Moon podcast. Without her help, I may have never gotten to Angie Angela. My thanks to Peg Fitzpatrick and Jeff C, two extremely gritty people who make this podcast remarkable. And speaking of grit, vaccines are on the way, but we still have to be gritty in our determination to avoid infection. So wash your hands, don't go into crowded places, wear a mask and get vaccinated as soon as you can. Mahalo and aloha. This is remarkable people.