Angela Duckworth: The Gritty Road to Growth

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Hello again, it's Guy Kawasaki, and you're listening to the Remarkable People podcast. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. Today we have for her second time, the extraordinary Angela Duckworth. The last time we had her on, I interviewed her about her book, the Power of Passion and Perseverance. It was a New York Times number one bestseller. She is, in a way, the mother of grit. Angela is a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. She's also the CEO of Character Lab, and she has won a MacArthur Award in 2013 for her contribution to the concepts of self control and grit. If all of this wasn't enough, Angela is also the co host of a podcast called no Stupid Questions. It's a great podcast. You should listen to it. When a podcaster tells you to listen to somebody else's podcast, there's no higher form of praise. Anyway, I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is remarkable people. Let's give it up for Angela Duckworth.

So, Angela, you're in rare company because only you, Bob Cialdini, Jane Goodall, and Julia Cameron have repeated on this podcast. I want you to know that.

What? Oh, my gosh. Little pressure there for me. All right, I'll try not to screw up. That's impressive. The other people are impressive.

We. We saved this honor for MacArthur Fellows.

I think you're just waiting to get the other guest back. This is my alternative explanation.

First of all, I want to catch up a little. Is Lucy still playing viola?

Oh, my gosh. Has it been that long since we spoke? Yes, because. No. Lucy, my younger daughter, is no longer playing the viola and hasn't played the viola. Gosh, I don't know how long it's been then. Since we talked. For a while. Right, because she's 20 now and she's in college. She hasn't been playing the viola for a while.

And when she quit viola, did she pass the hard thing rule or did she just bag it?

I had been, improbably the outspoken Advocate for quitting viola for not weeks or months, really for years. And I think I have backup on this. You could ask other people in our family and you could ask Lucy. I was the one who said, I think you should quit viola. Like what? I think you should do a different hard thing. So, guy, you're referring to the hard thing rule, which our family, we raised our kids with this rule that everybody had to do a hard thing. A hard thing was defined as something that took true practice according to the kind of, you know, practice that I researched the experts were doing. It was a rule that also said that you weren't allowed to quit the hard thing in the middle of your commitment. So that didn't mean you could never quit it. It just meant that you can't quit in the middle of track season, right? Or if you've paid for 20 lessons of viola, like you can't quit in the middle of your commitment to your teacher. And the last part of the hard thing rule was that nobody got to choose your hard thing but yourself. So I thought this brought together everything I knew as a psychologist and I was trying to figure out as a mother of all the things that go into somebody developing a passion. I was very certain that my daughter Lucy was not developing a passion for viola because she never talked about it outside of her required practice. She never read about it. She didn't want to go to concerts. She wasn't even watching YouTube videos of people playing the viola. It was as certain as anything I knew that she probably shouldn't be doing that as her hard thing. And I told her that over and over again. And I'm not saying that she finally listened, but she did finally quit.

I'm having an out of body experience, Angela. So the mother of grit told her daughter to quit. That's the head.

Yeah, I know. Doesn't that sound crazy? Oh, my God. Grit shaming or something? Or quit shaming. I don't know what it is, but I think one of the intuitions I had then that has only become stronger since then because of scientific research that's been published, but also just the more I reflect on it is that the essence of grit is not never quitting anything. Right? It's true that there's one item on the GRIT scale questionnaire I use in most of my research on grit, and this question says I finish whatever I begin. And of course, to get the highest score on the grit scale, you would have to be 5 out of 5 on I finish whatever I begin. I think that item gets at Something very important. I own up fully to that. If I could go back in time, I just would have argued more loudly and more vigorously to quit earlier. Because I think Lucy quit Viola years later. And it's not that I think kids should quit everything. It's not that I don't believe in practice. It's not even that I don't believe in music. It's just that when you learn to do things that are hard, I do think you learn to fulfill your commitments and to do something that's not immediately gratifying. I think it's a lesson that we have to learn. It's a lesson that I'd rather young people learn earlier than later. To do something where in the moment of the practice, in the moment of doing the scales, in the moment of revising a sentence, there's a thousand things that you could do that are easier and more fun. So I think it's an important thing to do, a hard thing. But I think one of the most important things you have to do, especially as a young person, but probably all of life, is to figure out whether it's the right hard thing for you. And the word for this in scientific research is called sampling. So eventually you do want to become a specialist of a kind, to become really great at anything. You have to specialize, but what research is finding. And I even had this intuition before the research that's come out in the last few years. And it would have been too late for my kids because Lucy's now 20. But even then I had the intuition that scientists have seen since affirmed, which is that sampling is a necessary prerequisite to specializing for almost every expert, not all. There are definitely the David Beckhams. I don't know how much sampling David Beckham did before he committed to playing football slash soccer, depending on what continent you're in. But most professional athletes who are truly world class, and for example, Nobel laureate scientists, if you look back into their childhoods and you ask the question, how did they spend time when they were young? When they were young, they were not specialists. They were actually sampling a variety of things. And we could have a conversation about why that's so important. But absolutely, I encouraged Lucy to quit viola and to start another hard thing.

Okay, so now your daughters are in their 20s. So are they basically grit monsters? Are they just put anything in front of them and they're gonna take that hill?

It's dangerous to talk about daughters who are 22 and 20 because they're old enough to hear and they're young enough to care, but at the risk of being overly candid. So Lucy and Amanda. Lucy's 20, Amanda's 22. You know, are they hardworking? Yes, they are hardworking. Do they quit commitments in the middle? No, they do not quit commitments in the middle. I don't know that either of them, however, have the kind of fierce ambition that Jason, my husband, and I had when we were 22 or 20. I mean, we were really driven, maybe in a way that was less healthy. Like we spent less time with our friends than they spend with their friends. Like, we were just. I think, for me, I think I was sleeping probably like four hours a night. And then all the other hours, like all the other 20 hours a day, seven days a week. I was basically being productive in one way or another. And I don't think, I don't think that would be a true statement of my daughter's.

Yeah, you know, I feel the same way that each generation gets lazier and lazier and I'm third generation.

Do you feel that about. I know you're supposed to be asking me about my family, but now I'm just curious, like, how has it been for you?

So my grandfather and grandmother's side, they came to pick sugar cane. My father was a fireman, my mother was a housewife. I am who I am in tech. My kids, I don't see them working as hard as I remember. But that could be selective memory.

You know, it also could be regression to the mean. Right. Like, statistically, the more you are an outlier, the less likely it is that your kids will be just like you. The more you are. Exactly. I mean, just statistics. Right. Like, I remember being in this. Well, for some things you'd be like, wow, there's hope. Right? Maybe you won't be as screwed up as I am because it also works on the other end of the distribution. Outliers of any kind get closer to the mean the next time you roll the dice. But I remember being in a meeting, it was still in graduate school. And I remember, I can picture the conference room. It was this like, windowless conference room that somebody had the good sense to paint, like the ugliest peach color you can imagine. Anyway, we had all of our scientific meetings in there. It was probably good for concentration because there's nothing else to do other than listen to the speaker. And the speaker was Ed Deener, who was and maybe always will be. He's now passed but the reigning monarch in the study of happiness. So he really founded the field of well being. And he was holding forth. And it was a scientific talk on a number of topics that I cannot remember. But one thing I'll never forget was he looked at everybody in this room. It was a room of very eminent academics. I think it was a conference of some kind that happened to be held with that particular talk that I was able to attend. And he said, none of your kids are likely to be as successful as you are. And by the way, if you're extremely happily married, they're unlikely to be as happily married as you are. And if you're really good looking, they're unlikely. And by the way, nobody really needed that to be told to them because it's a basic fact of statistics, and they all knew it. But just to be told, it was kind of startling. So, yeah, maybe it's not that every generation is lazier than the one that came before, but maybe the more we are something gritty or extroverted or whatever, you know, maybe our kids are just unlikely to be like that because you've rolled the die. And when you throw the cards up in the air, if you started out with a royal flush and you pick up five cards, they're probably not gonna be a royal flush.

Angela, I don't know if that makes you feel.

I mean, that sounds incredibly denigrating. I feel like that sounds terrible. Like, oh, you know, I'm a royal flush and my kids are not a royal. I'm not at all hinting that, by the way, when I look at my kids and how they're living their life, I was not a tiger mom. I have no regrets about that. And I think that in so many ways, my kids are making wiser choices than I did. And certainly my husband would say the same. Were we wrong to spend so much time working? Like, when we go to our reunions, we hardly know anyone. I'll speak for myself. My husband may be a little bit more socially successful, but when I go back to my reunions for college, I hardly know anyone. They're all like. The only people I know are ex boyfriends, because I had a number of those. But I don't really have a lot of friends from college. It's my fault. Wow.

This interview is not turning out how I thought it would.

I'm probably taking you off track.

That's okay. Okay. What's your current thinking about the roles of talent, grit, and luck in success?

I think there's something on that list that I think I would add, unless you want to call it luck. But I started off thinking only about talent and grit. I started off only by thinking there's how fast you get good at something, let's call that talent. And then there's how long you work at it, call that grit. And I started out thinking it's a kind of tortoise and the hare story. And what I'm gonna do in my life and in my research is shine a light on effort and how important it is and how it's easy to find the hares, but it's really important to follow the tortoises. And then clearly, the fact that there's other things than talent and grit, that began to shape my perspective. But I don't know if it's just luck, because it depends on what you mean by luck. So first, let me ask you, when I say, well, yeah, there's also luck, what immediately springs to your mind? You've thought about success a lot as well.

If I look at my own life. So I'm lucky to fundamentally be healthy. I'm lucky that I was born in Hawaii, multiracial. I was lucky that my parents appreciated education and made sacrifices for me. I was lucky that I met someone at Stanford who hired me at Apple. I didn't earn any of that. I just showed up and that happened.

Whereas, say, grit and talent, you could say they're part of you. So there's a distinction between luck and, like, things that are you.

Those are not me. Those are luck in my mind.

Yes, exactly. I'm saying that luck is like, what's not you.

Right.

You can't take credit for in any way because they happen to you. If you define luck broadly that way, then I don't need a fourth thing. And you could just. Three is a better number than four for list. But I'm only thinking about those things these days, actually. And it's not because I've decided that effort doesn't matter, and it's not that I've changed my mind. And I think talent is everything, but I think these things that you would say are not you, but they shaped who you are. They broadened your horizons, and for some people, narrowed their horizons. So I wrote this book, Grit, I don't know, nearly a decade ago. And I wrote that book very much motivated by my father's story. And my father played such an outsized role in shaping my identity. He gave me an obsession with excellence and achievement. And he probably gave me a kind of, I don't know, like a sort of I'll show you sense. Because I kept trying to prove him wrong, too, because my dad loved talent. But Then since writing the book, I've been spending more time with my mom. And my mom, I never really paid much attention to growing up. They both immigrated from China. My father seemed to me like the ambitious and gritty person who made a career at dupont and was a very successful scientist. He never won the Nobel Prize, but there are lots of innovations in car paint that my dad can put his name next to. My mom was the devoted wife. She was the soul of generosity and affection. But I never thought of my mother as ambitious and I never thought of my mother as gritty. I only recently got to understand my mom's full story. So my mom came to this country in her early 20s. She couldn't speak a word of English. She had come via Taiwan, but originally she was born in China. She came here as the very first person in her family. So she was not joining brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins. She knew nobody. And she came here because she had an ambitious dream. She wanted to become an artist. And she didn't think she could do that in Taiwan or China. So she enrolled in this art academy in Philadelphia, Academy of Fine Arts. And she ate, drank and slept art. And she had all the sort of ups and downs that anyone does, being told by her professor that she's merely copying other people's work and that she needs to find her own style. But the reason I never knew this story is that by the time I was born, I was the third of three children. My mother had transformed into an entirely different person. You know, at that point, there was no talk about art. She never even asked to go to a museum, much less have her own room to paint. And the misunderstanding that I had was that my mom lacked grit. But really, I think my mom lacked luck. She didn't have an advocate, a coach, a group of like minded artists who wanted to talk about art after work and compare notes and show each other their work. And most of all, she didn't have a part. So my father, who was a great person in many ways, was an absolute failure, I think, in the respect of supporting my mother's ambition. She said that sometimes she would, early in her marriage, paint something and hang it up in the kitchen by the dining table where my father would sit every breakfast and every dinner. And months would go by before he might even notice there was a new painting up. So really, I think what I'm thinking about these days are all the things that are not directly that person's grit or that person's talent that enable them to do things or in some cases, like my mom's, hinder them from realizing their ambitions.

I love when we go into stuff like this because I bet you never discuss stuff like this on your podcast or when you're interviewed, right?

So now this is like, to the bone.

Let's take this as a given that these things you don't control, not part of you, are a big factor. But what's the practical implication of that? Because get lucky is not a strategy either. So what do you do with this knowledge?

So I think one of the reasons why we don't think about these things, especially when I say we, I think really hardworking, ambitious people often think about overcoming the poor odds that they've been given. They think about the situation sometimes as the thing that you can't really change, but you are gonna overcome it. Because one thing you can change is your own attitude, your own effort, your own will, right? And I think that's half right. Or I could just say, I think that's not quite right. That's the kind of obvious thing about the situation. There are many factors. My mom couldn't directly change my father's attitude towards art, towards the right of a woman to have ambition in a marriage. She couldn't directly change those things, right? So oftentimes, hardworking, ambitious, gritty people think about the situation as merely to be overcome through personal will. And I think that's why we like poems. You know, I am the captain of my fate. I am the master of my soul, right? But the reason I think that's a grave mistake is that you asked the right question, which is, well, what are we gonna do? And I think there are things that we can do sometimes and in some ways to actually change our situations, right? So instead of thinking the situation as that which we cannot change, and there's so many quotes on this guy from every religious tradition, from every philosophical tradition, like, you can't change the situation, but you can change how you re. I think that's not true. Sometimes you can change the situation. In my mother's case, I'll tell you what she did very recently. So my father died during the pandemic. It was the end of a very long illness. It doesn't make it any less tragic. But he. He died. And when he died, my mother was, I'll say, emancipated from this role that she had that in some way she was born into, given her upbringing and the way her mother talked to her. But my mother was liberated to do whatever she wanted, and she lived in this and still does live in this kind of, like, senior community that had everything up to the most skilled nursing care. And that's why they were there, because of my father's illness. And my mother was still in independent living because she's as spry as a fox. So she walks down to the manager's office, it's called the Quadrangle. And she says, I'd like to rent another unit. And they ask her what's wrong with her unit. You know, it's got good sunlight, it's quiet. She says, oh, I want to keep my unit. I just want to have a whole other apartment. Still more confusion. Why would you need two? Like, they've never had a resident in history asked to own two separate units and pay rent on two separate units. And she says, oh, because I'm an artist and I need a place to paint, and I need a place to mess up and not worry that it's a mess. And when she told me this story, I immediately thought of Virginia Woolf, right? A Room of One's Own. And this idea that a writer or an artist or a maker of any kind, that I went back and reread because I read that when I was in high school. And I went back and reread the passage that gave this book its name. And Virginia Woolf said that when you have an idea, it's like a fish. And the fish is darting here and there through the water, and you're trying to catch the fish, right? And maybe you'll catch it and maybe you won't catch it. But one way never to catch it is to be interrupted because the doorbell rings or you have to make your husband breakfast, or you have to rub his back, or you have to clean the dishes from dinner. And then you come back and you're looking for your idea, and it's gone. So my mom had a situation that was not ideal. She's now 89, about to turn 90, but in her late 80s, decides to change her situation. She didn't say, oh, the situation is something you can never change. She said, I have agency. Let me create opportunity for myself. So now my mom has two units at the Quadrangle. One of them she lives in, and the other one is her art studio. And she's painting. She's never been more prolific. She just had an art show in Tennessee. She just flew back, got back at 2 in the morning, actually, today. And I think that is a kind of parable for me, anyway. I mean, it says to me both that we should have humility when we see somebody who is or isn't obviously ambitious. Before we pass judgment, we should think, what is the role of the situation here? How much has this person been supported or hindered in their dreams? And then the second lesson of this parable, I think it goes along with humility, is hope, which is that it's never too late to try to change your situation when you can. And so my mom, to me, is belatedly. And that's my fault, not hers, teaching me these. These important lessons, and they're not really lessons about will and what you should do to overcome the situation only through your own. Like changing the things inside you, they really are about changing what's outside you. This is what I'm thinking about, Guy. This is literally what I'm thinking about when I wake up in the morning, when I go to bed at night, and every moment in between.

Angela, I can tell you that that may be the best story we have ever heard on this podcast.

Seriously, My mother's story. I mean, my mother's the nicest and kindest person I have ever met. So if she has the best story you've ever heard, it would only be appropriate and Guy, to be at the age that I am and to realize that, my God, I've lived more than half a century without really paying attention to my mother and my mother's story. I mean, what a hero, right? And my whole life, if you ask me, like, who in this family has ambition? Who in this family cares about excellence? Who has a dream? Who's willing to work and do anything, sacrifice anything? I would have said my father. I wouldn't even have been able to tell you that. My mom sailed across an ocean not knowing anyone, learning a new language, being so lonely. She told me how hard it was to be totally alone in this country. She painted this painting that I have in my house. It's my most prized possession. If there's ever a fire, it'll be the one thing that I take with me. It's this painting of an ocean, and there's a big rock in the middle. It's like an island made out of rock. And in the distance, you can see these little white sailboats. And she painted that painting when she was 24 years old. And she told me the story of that painting. She said, while I was here in Philadelphia, I knew no one. And my professor had just told me, teresa, you know, you can't copy everybody else's style. You have to find your own art. That's what it is to be an artist. So if you really have this dream that's what you have to do. And she went home and she decided to come back to the studio and paint this picture of this mountain island. It was a symbol of everything she had left behind. It was a symbol of stability, of family, of friendship, of knowing the language, of fitting in, of belonging. And she painted that painting because it was a painting to show that she was willing to sacrifice all of that for her dream of becoming an artist. And I'm embarrassed to say, Guy, that I've had that painting for many more years than I knew that story because I never asked, I never even thought to ask my mother about who she really was and who she wants to be.

Up next on Remarkable People.

And sometimes the DNA was certainly the things that go with the DNA that make it express. So, like, you know, Mark wasn't entirely wrong. So we're continuing revising. I think that the world is ready for a more complicated version of science. I think if I think back to the last 20 years, it's in the New York Times changed now they actually have scientists saying things and research. But the next 20 years will be like people are going to be sophisticated enough to understand when things are not settled and that there are two sides or more to a question.

If you find our show valuable, please do us a favor and subscribe, rate and review it. Even better, forward it to a friend. A big mahalo to you for doing this. Welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki. We are so freaking deep.

I am sure this is not at all what you want to talk about because I haven't really told people about.

What I'm actually, this is thinking about beyond my wildest expectations. We gotta lighten up for a while because my head is gonna explode. I have to say that I love your new show about no Stupid Questions. So can we veer off into that?

Totally. Okay, little levity.

First of all, just fundamentally, how do you come up with the questions that you decide to answer on the show?

So no Stupid Questions is a show on the Freakonomics radio platform. And I started it with Stephen Dubner, oh, gosh, maybe three and a half years ago. And we had the idea that there are no stupid questions. I mean, there probably are a few stupid questions, but questions are just things that you don't know. And there's this definition of curiosity that I love. So scientists who study curiosity often say it's simply wanting to know. That's what a question is anyway. It's the formulation of something that you want to know. So Steven and I would come up with questions and Then we would ask the people who listened to no stupid questions what questions were on their mind, what they were curious about. And so now I have a new co host. His name is Mike Maughan. He's like you. He's from tech, so he's interested in human nature like you, but he comes from a tech background. And every week we have a question that is either from a listener. I think that's about half of the questions. We just get these emails and we read through them, and if there's a question that we think there's. There actually are no stupid questions. But the question has to be one where there's, like, something to say from a behavioral science perspective. Otherwise, I'm not especially helpful. So we pick half the questions from that, and then I would say the other half of questions just come from things that I'm thinking about or Mike's thinking about.

Okay, so that's how you get the questions. Now what's the process to answer the question?

There is a little of a conceit, if you will. It's not that I have a spontaneous conversation. Nothing's rehearsed and nothing is scripted. But I think about the question for a week or so in advance. We decide, oh, let's take these questions. And then I'm on my side. Anyway. I think Mike probably does the same, but he does it without science. He looks at stuff and, I don't know, he reads things in the newspaper. He thinks about stories. For me, if anybody asks me any question, I look at scientific research. Really almost any question anybody asks me, my first instinct is to ask what research has been done. So I make sure that I've put in my working memory things that I think are important to say. And then we really do just have a conversation, and then we cover the things that I think are important, the things that he thinks are important. I think, to me, the model, in a way, was, did you ever listen, click and clack? The two guys, were they from mit? Yeah, Right. They had this great Boston accent. The Tapit brothers, I think they were called. Anyway, they would have that show where they would, like, talk about a car problem. Every time was car talk. Right. And they would just answer the question about somebody's carburetor. But also they would digress and they would. So that was a little bit the model.

Okay, but. But getting even more tactical. So when you say you want to seek the answer to this question and you look at all the research. Exactly how do you do that? Do you use Google Scholar or do you Go to the Journal of Applied Psychology. What do you use?

That is a good journal, guy, by the way, the Journal of Applied Psychology, okay, this is the way I would go about research. So this is, I think, the advice I would give to my graduate students. But humans can do this if they want to know the answer to a question and they want to know what science. So I do go to Google Scholar, by the way, ChatGPT is quite good and I use that as well. I think Everybody should use ChatGPT every day. And I try to discipline myself because otherwise it's like physical therapy. I just feel like I should do it every day and make sure I'm keeping my chatgpt muscles toned. But I first go to Google Scholar because when you enter anything into Google Scholar, so say you say income and happiness, right? Like perennial question, if I get richer, will I be happier? And you just put income and happiness into the search bar for Google Scholar. What you'll get is a rank ordered list of scientific publications with some algorithm on the back end that's pretty damn good because they give you the most highly cited, but it's not exactly in order of citations like the most prominent, well regarded journals like the Journal of Applied Psychology and whatever they're doing on the back end. To give you that, I will tell you because I can search for things that I really know well and I would give like roughly the same rank ordering. So if you look at the first 10 or 20 references when you do a Google Scholar search for anything, you have a medical problem, you have a problem you just solve at work. Oh, you don't have a behavioral scientist or another scientist on lookup, just put into Google Scholar. So I go to Google Scholar and I do ask ChatGPT, which sometimes actually I think what this new generative AI is so very good at is. And the reason why it's a good adjunct to doing Google searches, but you know, you know more about this than I do, I'm sure, is that it is really able to synthesize. So instead of just getting the top 10 or 20 hits, I mean it's looking at all the hits and then it's putting it all together for you. So I triangulate between those things and I think for any topic and I don't know what you think because you've done a lot more interviewing and a lot more thinking about like how to get smart about a topic. I think fast. But for me in science there's always between three and five key people. And I say this to my doctoral Students, if you can find the three to five key people and then just follow the breadcrumb trail of the things that they've done. And I would read their work in reverse chronological order. So once you do the Google Scholar search and you're like, oh, I see this name a lot and like this article is really good, then find that person, go to their profile and read in reverse chronological order. In other words, read their most recent stuff first and give it the most weight. Because if they change their mind in 1985, you don't really need to know what came before 1985. Right. And you can get pretty smart on a topic very fast.

I just want you to know that you, Katie Milkman, Bob Cialdini and Brene Brown are probably my three to five key people that I follow.

Okay, you're Mount. You're Mount Rushmore. I don't want to put myself on. I think you've named, and I include Brene Brown on this, right. Because I think she's not exactly in my social network. Because she's not. She's not primarily dedicated to like publishing academic research. But I would count her actually as a world class psychologist. I think her training is more like sociology or whatever. But sometimes I read things and sometimes they're like poets or novelists or CEOs. Sometimes I hear or read something and I think that person is a world class psychologist. I often am talking to a high school track coach. I'm thinking of one in particular, his name is Kirk. And when I talk to that person or I'm thinking of an 8th grade teacher named Alhassan. Like they are world class psychologist. So I have my own little Mount Rushmore also. But I think these insights into human nature. I think Peter Drucker said at the end, not at the very end, maybe toward the end of his career as a management guru, Peter Drucker said something like, the challenge of our time is not a technological challenge and it's certainly not an industrial or manufacturing challenge. The challenge that faces humanity is to understand itself. Right. Like human nature is the next frontier. And if you just look at our physical health and the climate and how we're getting along these days, and war and voting and politics and education, I just can't see how Peter Drucker could have been more right. We have to understand human behavior and emotion and thinking now more than ever. I think that is exactly the challenge of the 21st century.

Yeah, I love that you love Peter Drucker because Drucker said something like the task of a company is to create customers. And I have held that in my brain since I read that all about creating customers.

What does that mean? To create customers? As opposed to what?

As opposed to make money, as opposed to create jobs, as opposed to foster innovation. The way you create customers could involve any of those. But the goal is to create a customer where was no customer before.

I would say that I love Peter Drucker, but maybe I can't say I'm a Peter Drucker aficionado because I didn't know that then again, I never had to read Peter Drucker to run anything. I was actually reading him for his.

You should read the Effective Executive. It's really. I think his.

Is that his best work.

He best. Yeah. Best work, yeah. So now let me ask you.

That's very good.

When you first come up with this question, how often does your intuition prove to be right versus wrong?

It's such an excellent question. I think I only have half an answer. And the answer that I'll give you is I'm not often surprised by what I find when I look at something and go. But the reason why I think that's half an answer is that I am most certainly committing confirmation bias. Right? When somebody asks us anything, we have an idea. We have an intuition. The problem is about human cognition, is that we then search for all the reasons why we're right. And that's called confirmation bias. And I think I'm guilty of that. I do think, though, that all of these biases, so many people are familiar with Danny Kahneman's work. If you're gonna have a Mount Rushmore, by the way, you have to have Danny Kahneman. Do you not have Danny Kahneman on your mount?

University of Chicago.

No, Princeton. You know who's at University of Chicago? I think you're thinking of Richard Thaler. And they're very good friends, and they're both credited with birthing behavioral economics. But Danny Kahneman spent the last decades of his career at Princeton, and he's still alive, by the way. So he's like a living legend. And he pioneered this field where, like, oh, there's this bias and there's that bias, and here's another one, and yet another. But one of the things that I think Danny would like readily and loudly, not only admit to, but want to shout out to everyone, is that all these biases that exist, anchoring bias, et cetera, they're there for a reason. You think about them as mistakes, but there are these rules of thumb that mostly work and sometimes don't so confirmation bias probably has a sort of function. And I'm not saying there's not a problem with always looking for reasons why. You're right. It's a problem in hiring, It's a problem in decision making. You don't want to run a business and be prone to confirmation bias all the time. But it's also helpful, I think, to. For me, I do have this very simple framework that I've learned in psychology that I'm probably confirming all the time. But without that framework, and I can tell you what it is. But without that framework, I think I would be like flotsam and jetsam on a very tumultuous ocean. I'd be like, I don't know, somebody would ask me a question about what they should do with their kid who feels anxious because she said something that she hopes her friend doesn't hear. And if I didn't have a framework where I was like, let me go and confirm this with my framework, I would be like, I don't know. I have no idea. So I'm probably engaging in confirmation bias. But that's maybe not entirely a bad thing.

Wait, wait, what's the framework?

So the framework is so. So I'll use the term that Stephen Dubner used to use. He was like, oh, the three box frame. I was like, oh, yes, the three boxes. So he causes, like, the three boxes model. It's that when you try to understand anything. So say your daughter is anxious or you're anxious, right? You're ruminating about some negative feedback that you got from your. For me. Oh, I got some negative reviews on this course that I just taught at Wharton. I got positive reviews, too. But of course, I'm only thinking about the negative reviews. So I'm ruminating, right? And I'm trying to understand the rumination. I'm trying to also maybe change the fact that I'm ruminating. So that's box number three. That's one of three boxes. And that is, like, how I'm responding right now. I'm feeling anxious, a little bit embarrassed, maybe preoccupied. Okay. If I want to understand box number three and even change box number three, all I have to do is reverse engineer the boxes that came before. And there's only two others, right? So what's box number two? Box number two. Are these what clinical psychologists often call the automatic thoughts? Right. So before I have the feeling of embarrassment or anxiety or shame or regret or happiness, joy, you know, fill in the blank. And even before I do anything, there's always this box that comes before, and that is this very quick thought of what's going on. And sometimes we're conscious of these thoughts, but very often you're not conscious. And that is why a lot of therapy is the assistance of another individual to help you realize what those fleeting, automatic, but very powerful thoughts are that lead you to then feel anxious, to lead you to then feel pride or to make a decision in one way or the other. So those are your thoughts, automatic thoughts. Again, not always conscious, very often not conscious. And then box number one is the objective situation that gave rise to the thoughts, that gives rise to the response. So it's situation, thought, response. It's a three box model for all the things that human beings do for good or for ill. And the reason why I find this to be very helpful is that first of all, three is a very good number because it's small and people can remember it, but it gives you three points of entry for changing things. So what most people try to do is they just try to change box number three directly. Like, oh, I'm feeling anxious. I should stop feeling anxious. Oh, I'm ruminating, I should stop ruminating. Oh, I keep eating too much, I should stop eating too much. They attack box number three directly using willpower. And then what they failed to think about is like how to, you know, attack earlier, right? I read parts of the Art of War by Sun Tzu, and one of the major things that this great strategist said is you're trying to, like, you defeat the enemy, right? The worst thing to do is to just fight them in hand to hand combat, right? You have to think about things more strategically. So more strategically you could work on box number two. You could change how you think about things. That's a lot of therapy, reframing things, putting things into perspective, taking some distance from things that might seem catastrophic because you're losing perspective. I think that's very important. And I'm a big fan of therapy and I'm a big fan of my therapist, whose name is Dee, and I love her. But what I'm increasingly thinking about these days and trying to write a book about, partly because of the things that my mother had to go through and how she changed her situation. But box number one solutions, like when you are unhappy or your weight isn't what your weight should be, or you're not as productive as you want to be and you're procrastinating instead of trying to attack box number three directly, which generally doesn't work, I will tell you as a behavioral Scientist willpower eventually fails, and instead of just working on box number two, oh, maybe I reframe things. Maybe I think about things differently. I won't procrastinate. What about changing box number one?

So.

So one very specific example. I have not yet met a young person who has a healthy relationship with their phone. And what would you do? I'm not gonna advocate using willpower to resist Instagram or being on TikTok at all hours of the night. I'm also thinking that just box number two isn't the only thing you could. Oh, reframe this. Think about your phone as something which is not only good but also bad. But just put your phone in a different room. If you literally put your phone in a different room. I do this in my classes. I'm like, put it somewhere you literally can't see it. And. And it's not directly in arm's reach. You have to bend over and unzip something. I think those box number one solutions are sometimes the least obvious and the most effective.

This is the purview of tiny habits. Right?

Oh, the. Is that B.J. fogg?

Yeah.

Is that his.

B.J. fogg? Stanford University, now Maui.

Yeah.

Okay.

Oh, he moved to Hawaii. I don't know. B.J. fogg. Yeah. I think, honestly, like Ariana Huffington, I think a of lot people have had this intuition that if you want to change your habits, you should make changes to your, like, the cues in your situation. So I. I'm not taking any claim of originality. I think Balanchine, the great choreographer, said, there are no new dances. There are only dancers that we forget and then remember. So I don't think anything I've said is genius or original. But when someone asks me a question in psychology, I think I always go back to these three boxes and I'm like, okay, they're trying to. Usually they're trying to understand boxes number three. And then I'm like, what was box number two? And what's box number one? So I think that's probably converging with probably what a lot of other people.

You'Ve talked to now on your podcast. What happens if the research that you do is conflicting? There's no clear right answer. But one respective scientist says one thing and the other one says the opposite. And the two are in direct opposition. And you can't say one is a kook and one isn't. What do you think? When does it mean?

Yeah. And you literally can't say. Right. Like, you don't. It's not just, I can't say because it would be impolitic. When things are in conflict in the scientific literature, who am I to judge? So I'll give you an example of this. There is an author and a scientist who studies generations like the millennials versus the Gen zers, et cetera, et cetera. And her name is Jean Twang and she's a very prolific writer and oft quoted thinker. And she really does believe that there are generational differences. And she has a really provocative thesis, by the way, which is that if there's one singular force that has changed culture and therefore change the way we think and act and feel as individuals, it's technology. So anyway, that's Gene Twenge in one corner and in the other corner are people who are critics and they have methodological concerns and they have their own studies and they will sometimes come to different conclusions. On our podcast on no Stupid Questions, I try to represent both sides. I think it's almost always the case that both sides have some thing that is true that they are strenuously advocating for. You know, and when I believe that one side has a lot more evidence, I, I'm not shy about offering my personal opinion, but that's just an opinion of one person. But one of the things I think that's misunderstood about science is that it's kind of like, oh well, when scientists say, they say it in a chorus and it's fact etched in granite. But the whole endeavor of science is to keep discovering more, which means that almost certainly the things that we say today are wrong. The whole beauty of the scientific engine is that that it's continually updating and revising. So things that we thought were true about DNA aren't quite the same as we know. We all thought Darwin was right and his rival Lamarck, who said that giraffes have longer necks because they stretch their necks and then they have a baby giraffe and the next giraffe has a slightly longer neck. And we thought, oh, Lamarck was wrong. Like how stupid. And Darwin was right, right that, no, that's not true. It's just through genes and the genes just get selected through natural selection and the taller giraffes survive and they have more babies. And so we're like, oh, Darwin. But you know what is true now with epigenetics, it's like, eh, you know, Lamarck wasn't totally wrong. It turns out that if you experience famine, there are changes in your, in sometimes the DNA, but certainly the things that go with the DNA that make it express so, like, you know, Lamarck wasn't entirely wrong. So we're continually revising. I think that the world is ready for a more complicated version of science. I think if I think back to the last 20 years, it's the New York Times changed. Now they actually have scientists saying things and research. But the next 20 years will be like, people are going to be sophisticated enough to understand when things are not settled and that there are two sides or more to a question.

You know, one of the great examples of this is when Tony Fauci, at the start of the pandemic, says not to wear a mask. I don't know, because there's a shortage of masks. And then two years later, he says, everybody should wear a mask. And then people point out, tony, you said we shouldn't wear a mask to years ago, you don't know what the hell you're talking about.

Right? Yeah. And this term, flip flopper, right. I think that's the, like, the highest compliment you could give to a scientist is that they're a flip flopper. Right. Like, the highest compliment you could give is somebody who would say, hey, I said this before, and by the way, we were just talking about confirmation bias, you know, how rare the person is who can say, oh, you know what? I was wrong. And you know who says that more than anyone? He's on my Mount Rushmore. Danny Kahneman. Danny Kahneman says I was wrong out loud and in writing more often than any person I have met. And there is no greater thinker than Danny Kahneman, hands down. And that's like an excellent example. Right. And you could say, oh, well, we can't trust Tony Fauci because one day he said this, and the next day, no, there's humility in that person. And also there's curiosity, and he's getting a better answer.

It seems to me that when people say they don't know something, it gives them greater credibility when they say they do know something.

Right.

I think, and I'm not sure, so I should say I think. I think there's research affirming exactly what you said. That when people are like, you know, I don't know, but here's what I think, or here's what I do know, but I mostly don't know. I have to look that up. But I think people have the opposite intuition, that you don't want to show any weakness, you don't want to show any hesitation, you don't want to show any uncertainty. But I think you're right.

Well, if Angela Duckworth Thinks I'm right. I can take that to the bank. So, okay, so now can we have a little speed round? And the reason why I want to have this speed round is not only because I want to hear the answer, but I want to illustrate to all of you listeners why you should listen to Angela's podcast. It should be near the top of your list of podcasts, maybe tied with. Wait, wait, don't tell me. Okay, we did some research about the most recent questions you've asked or answered on your podcast. And to give the readers a taste for the kind of questions you ask and the kind of questions you answer. And you don't need to spend 15 minutes on all of these. Just give us the quick gist. Okay.

The one liner.

Yes, the one liner. Okay. Why is it so hard to make decisions?

I can't do this guy. This is too hard. I was like, wait, no, I can't do this. You know why? It's unsatisfying. But there are too many thoughts in my head. They don't fit in a line. And, like, one liners don't have semicolons. So I'll feel like I'm giving you shitty answers. That's the problem. How about this? I'll pass. And then let's see if there's any that. I feel like I could give you a one liner.

Okay. Why is astrology so popular?

Because it gives you answers for questions that you have, and it makes you feel like the answers are right.

Okay. What is the point of IQ testing?

I don't think there is much point to IQ testing.

What is important in your choice of words?

I think the answer is that words and language are actually changing. And so anytime somebody says something and it really annoys you because you think they've said it incorrectly. Me and my friend went to the mall, and I literally jumped out of my skin when I saw my friend from fourth grade. Right. Like, for me, oh, my gosh. That I know. We might not be alive to, you know.

Is it harder to make friends as an adult?

Yes, it is. But there are ways to do it. And the number one thing I would say that people mistake about friendship is that friendship is just like exercise or learning to play the violin. It's time on task. And the number one mistake I think people make is that they just don't invest enough time. They don't make it a ritual.

Okay. Is marriage worth it?

Yes, I think it is worth it. I think it is worth it. And if you had allowed me a semicolon. Yes. What Marriage really is. Is a lifelong commitment. And I do think there are different kinds of marriages. People sometimes are kind of married to a best friend, but I believe in lifelong commitments. Lifelong commitments will never go out of style. And marriage itself is a great version of a lifelong commitment.

Are we getting lonelier?

Everyone thinks that we are, but the unequivocal data is that we are spending more time alone. So we are getting a loner, but there's mix results on whether we're truly getting lonelier. That's more to say about that, but we are definitely spending more time alone.

Okay, and the last one. Would we be happier if we were more creative?

Pretty much, yes. Creativity and happiness are related positively, not negatively. A lot of people think that unhappy people are more creative, but there's no real research suggesting that's true. And in addition to happiness making you more creative, being creative looks like it might make you happier too.

Okay.

Julia Cameron will be happy about that.

Answer too, because she's a happy creator.

And just FYI, Julia Cameron has been on my podcast four times, so you have a goal.

Whoa. Yeah.

We'll bring you back for your new book. So that'll be three.

Can you tell me who she is? Because I'm ignorant and I don't know.

Julia Cameron wrote the Artist's Way.

Oh, I haven't read that. Oh, you should write that down with the effective executive.

Or you can just listen to the podcast we released today. It's her fourth time. Okay.

Yeah. I don't know what you call it.

After a three, she would absolutely do backflips over the story of your mother, the one you told earlier.

I will buy her book. I think she will love it if I listen to your podcast with her and buy her book.

I would love the former. She would love the latter.

She would love the latter. This is a way to make both of you happy. No, I'll buy a copy for me, and I'll buy a copy for my mom.

Okay.

I was thinking about having, like, a family book club. You know what I mean? I think that would be fun.

Okay, so now I'm just gonna rattle off some questions I hope you consider for your podcast, and we'll call it the day.

Okay.

You don't even have to write them down. Maybe none of them passed the test.

Okay, good. I'll just listen then.

I think in the year 2024, you should answer questions that are at least related to politics to help people make decisions. I would argue you may have a moral obligation to do that, but I digress. Now, I suppose you could start something simple like, what was the cause of the Civil War? Because at least one person needs that question answered.

Because.

But I digress. Here's some questions.

We won't name names, of course.

No, no, no, no, no, no. It would be like Haley's Comet. Anyway, so here's some questions. As an active political wonk, like, I love politics. I would love to get the combined brain power of the two of you to answer. Okay, you ready? One is.

I'm ready.

Does gerrymandering really work in the intended make my party win? Second question is zoom. And all the other virtual conferencing. Is it a net positive or a net negative? Because in my podcast, Tom Peters and Julia Cameron both said it's a net positive. It's not nearly as destructive and inefficient as people say, third question. Or whatever number. Does plagiarism truly represent a threat to society? Next question. Does the electoral college system work as intended? Or, I mean, does it work at all, really? Next 1. Does DEI programs improve a company? Next one. Is there a correlation between wealth and wisdom? I'm not seeing any evidence of that, just to tell you the truth.

Yeah, I was going to say, I bet you have a hypothesis about that. You could have asked, are they inversely correlated?

I think it tops out around 5 million. And after that it degrades. But anyway. And then I have an agenda here, but I think you should answer the question, do you think that anyone can become remarkable? And as you may guess, you know how I feel. But I would really like to hear, do you think anybody can become remarkable?

Can you just. I know what you. I know the one word answer, but can you give me the three sentence answer?

Well, to go back to our. The start of our interview, there are at least three factors, which is talented, grit and luck.

Luck.

And I would say that based on 200 guests, some of the most remarkable people have been on our podcast are people who have been imprisoned for 22 years for a murder charge, or they were homeless or they were smuggled across the border as a baby. And my inclination is anybody can become remarkable. It's not something that's genetics. It's a real combination of luck and perseverance more than anything.

Yeah. You won't be surprised that I agree with you. And I was like writing in my journal because it's the beginning of a new year and I'm thinking about what I want to do, and when I think about the people who are most inspiring to me, they're not Even my peers, they're not even people who are, like, doing what I do, but just doing it better. And they're not celebrities. They're like high school football coaches. And I'm not, like, glorifying having a job that you don't get a lot of attention for. It's just that these. When I read about certain people who are just doing what they do for reasons that are truly sincere and deep, and they're trying to do it really well and be decent people, you know, and care about character more than reputation and help as many people as they can help in their craft. Like, they cultivate their garden, and they try to do it very well. And they're not looking for fame, and they're not looking for fortune. They're not choosing, you know, a path that's gonna lead to the most prizes. I have to say, I'm, like, genuinely inspired. I wrote in my journal this morning for a long time, instead of doing work, I was like, oh, I could work or I could write in my journal about what I want. And I was like, I'm just gonna write my journal. And I think those people really are remarkable. Like the people that we probably already know. Yeah.

I will tell you that in our book, we bend over backwards saying that you don't need to be Jane Goodall or Steve Jobs to be remarkable. You can change just one life and be remarkable. And one more plug for Julia Cameron. I'll give you the gist of her main concepts. So, believe it or not, concept number one is every day you write in your morning journal. It has to be longhand. It's on paper. You cannot type it out. Every morning, you write in your daily journal. The first thing you do. The second thing is she believes in walks. And this is a walk. Not with your phone, not with your dog, not with your spouse. It is just you walking. The third concept is the concept of artist dates, where you take yourself on a date to go surfing, or you take yourself on a date to go visit the zoo, or you. You have this, like, joyous thing that you do by yourself.

Huh? Oh, so it's a date with yourself.

Yeah, it's a date with yourself. And it could be going to your favorite bookstore, or it could be going to listen to someone play the viola.

Yeah. And so these are three things, and you do them all by yourself. Right. You write in your journal in the morning, basically. Yeah. Go on a walk without even a podcast in your ear. And then you take these artist dates where you. And yeah.

So, Angela, I love it. I just love interviewing.

I'm definitely gonna do the first two things. I definitely gonna do the first thing. I'm gonna do the Daily. The Morning Journal. I have to think about the last one and I'm not sure about the second one.

Her most recent book is she adds a fourth thing, but I'm not going to tell you what it is because I want you to be curious and figure it out. Her book came out just now and it's her fourth thing. It took 30 years for her to write this book. And I asked her, why did it take 30 years to write this? And she said, because I thought people would think I'm too woo woo. Which that definitely draws me now.

I really want to know. You definitely wet my appetite. I love it when I say that I'm ignorant because I don't know, I was certainly ignorant of her. It's not a name I know, but I know it now. Julia Cameron.

I'm a Julia Cameron evangelist.

Yes, you are a Julia Cameron evangelist. That could be your new title. I think the reason why people like you so much is that you really are an evangelist, but you're not an evangelist for yourself. Like, I think that's the secret. It's like, oh, how to be an evangelist for. For like Julia Cameron, you know, or like, you know, or Angela Duckworth. Exactly. And I'm not kidding. I was like, you know what? That is really profound. I am gonna think about that. Oh, by the way, you sent me headphones, but then I was like, oh, I'm coming to Baker. So then, like, I kept them in case you want me to send them back to you.

No, no, no, no.

Because I was like, well, because you might need to give those to people who are recording from home.

No, we give every speaker new ones. I have to admit that one of the reasons why we send free headset to every guest is not just that we want high audio quality, but in a sense, it's a signal, Right? It's like, we are probably the only podcast team that sends you a headset because we are so attentive to detail and we want such a high quality product. And this is proof.

And then it's also. It's a gift, right? It's a gift. It's generous.

There's no denying that Madison and I are generous people. But truthfully, the reasons why we give our guests a headset is because we want a very high quality recording for you, our listeners. And I also believe that by giving them that headset, we are signaling to them that we really care about quality. Quality. I dare say it's probably true that no other podcast that you listen to sends every guest a headset. Anyway, I digress. So that was Angela Duckworth for the second time. And I have to tell you that I was not at all prepared for that story about her mom and getting that second room to create an art studio and just blossoming at 89. And that is one of the best stories ever on the Remarkable People podcast. By the way, Madison and I have written a book called Think 9 Paths to Transform your life and make a difference. The book is divided into three sections, Growth, grit and grace. Growth, as you might suspect, features Carol Dwight. Grit, as you might suspect, features Angela Duckworth. Please check it out. Think, Remarkable. And now, my thanks to the Remarkable People podcast team. That would be Jeff C. And Shannon Hernandez on sound design, Tessa Nismer on research, Madison Nismer, producer and co Author and Louise McGowan, Alexis Nishimura and Fallon Yates. We are the Remarkable People team. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. Mahalo and aloha.

This is remarkable people.