The Science of Grit

power combo of passion and perseverance. Angela says natural ability and access to opportunity will of course give you a head start, but they alone won't get you to the finish line, and focusing too much on natural ability can be counterproductive because it's something we can't change about ourselves. So when it comes to reaching our big goals, Angela wants us to reorient our focus to the thing we can change, which is the sustained effort we pour into

the things we care about. When we say like, oh, well, you know she or he's a genius and I'm not. I mean, it really does let you off the hook, right, Like if they have something you don't have some magical X factor, right then you don't have any obligation to wake up at five in the morning and train and to like, you know, do all the hard things. On today's episode, Angela Duckworth teaches us how to cultivate grit, channel that grit, and resist some of the temptations that

often get in the way of achieving success. I'm Maya Shunker, and this is a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change. Angela is a true expert on grit. She's been studying the topic for over a decade now as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She's also the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant, and her TED talk on Passion and Perseverance has garnered over

twenty five million views. I started at our conversation by diving into the basics, starting with the definition of grit. I define grit as the combination of passion and perseverance over the very long term. So that doesn't mean that like every day you're doing the exact same thing, but you have a kind of overall ambition or goal, you know, like I want to help people live better lives through behavioral science. You know, I want to be the best pediatrician that I can be. You know, I want to

be a great musician, whatever it is. And there's also a perseverance like working really hard, taking feedback and learning, I mean really trying to stay in a game and work hard at that game in a resultant way over time. So passion and perseverance for long term goals. When I was a kid, I remember feeling like it was all about natural talent. Like in music school, everyone was so quick to try to identify the latest prodigy. Absolutely. I

remember there was this violinist Rachel. Not that I still remember you, Rachel, but you were amazing, hiel hi Rachel. I won't say your last name because I don't embarrass you, but she was a few years younger than me, and she was such a gifted violinist. I mean, I felt like everything that was hard for me seemed to come easily to her. And rather than internalizing, oh, I guess this is a lesson to me that I need to work harder, I actually just felt despondent, right. I felt like, Okay,

well should I just give up? Because I don't have it. I don't have what it takes, and so the only way forward was for me to just keep practicing. But I can't say that wasn't without some suffering and mental anguish about the fact that I I always felt like I was a little behind, and so I feel so passionately about evangelizing your research in this space because I feel like I fell victim to aspects of it as a child. Right, it actually hurt my psychology. Do you

do you know the research of Chia Jung. Say you've wrote about her in your book, right, yeah, okay, right, so exactly, and I wrote about how Chio was a musician like you, right, and how she I think, you know, given her personal experience with music. I mean I think that music in particular, Right, there are certain domains where, you know, people talk about prodigies, and you know, there

are YouTube videos of prodigies and really is amazing. And you see a kid who's five, you know, do something that it just makes you think, like that must be something that's born, not made, and those people are special, and like you, she really felt, I mean so impassionate about like, hey, you know, come see the thousands of

hours of practice. And you won't use the word now natural, you know, so flippantly, And I'll just say that, you know, it's not that anybody, or at least that I would say that we're all equally talented I mean I think that would be right, like ridiculous. And I think the key is is that you know, when you're young and you're trying to figure out like should I keep going

or should I not keep going? Or Frankly, I guess at any age, if you just obsess about these differences in things that you can't change, I do think it can overshadow you know, the things that you can change, right and um, and all those thousands of hours of practice that that you put in, that you have put in, you know, those are like not very fun to watch on YouTube. Frankly, yeah, um, you know I want to hear Maria Angela? Why why are we such suckers for

natural ability? Like I was talking with my husband the other night and he was saying, in high school, you're really cool if you got good grades without trying at all. And by the way, I mean really cool in very nerdy circles. I say, just to clarify, I go to just to clarify, I just to clarify. But it's like, oh, he got to be plus without studying, Like imagine if he had study, you know, And there's this this is aura around people who don't try hard. What in our

human behavior gives rise to this fascination with natural ability. Well, I can only speculate, but people do have a preference for people that we consider it to be naturals, and we prefer them over strivers, even when we know that

they have accomplished the same thing. And you know, I remember reading what Nietzsche wrote about this, and he said, you know, when we consider that other people are naturals, but we aren't, right when we say, like, oh, well, you know she or he's a genius and I'm not.

I mean, it really does like let you off the hook, right, Like if they have something, you don't have some magical X factor, right, then you don't have any obligation to wake up at five in the morning and and train and to like, you know, do all the hard things. I think there's at least a part of it that's like that. And you know, there's something kind of fun about thinking that people are like demigods or like we tell little kids like, oh, you're a child prodigy in

piano or painting. I think there's just something fun and mystical about it too, right, Like we like to think they're they're just qualitatively different. I do think though, that if we can, you know, till things such that the honor and the glory goes to people who have earned what they do in a very transparent way that's maybe not as romantic, then we will be doing a great service to our kids, because I mean, I really don't know anybody who has become world class and economics or

at being a political leader or anything else. You know, a classroom teacher, a nurse like without you know, just years and years of effort. So at this point in our conversation, Angela has made a strong argument for the importance of grit. But it's grit like talent, one of those things you've either got or you don't like. In addition to raw talent, did Rachel the Violent also have more grit than me? Okay, she probably did that. That's because she's Rachel and so of course she did. But

here's the good news. We can cultivate grit. Angela says there are four key things we can all do in our lives to build some grit. Number one, find out what interests you. People who are really gritty have this intrinsic interest and curiosity about what they're doing, so you can,

you know, start a book club. If you're at work in a job and you're like, hey, I don't learn a lot, you can, you know, start listening to a podcast like this one that you know really engages your mind, etc. But interest, I think is the first seed of passion. You know, interests are you know, what naturally grabs our attention. I think that's the best definition of what an interest is. It's like, you know, without effort or without will, you

just want to think about it. Yeah, And one thing you've said is that our interests actually remain relatively stable over the course of our lives and even our personalities. And so one way we can identify what we're naturally interested in is to look back at our childhood and try and remember what it is that lit us up or made us tick. I do want to say, man, it's important to know that, you know, interests evolved, so

they're not static. So it's not like, you know, if you're interested in something when you're fourteen, that's exactly what you'll be interested in when you're fifty four. But I do think actually, if you introspect a little bit and you remember what you were like in high school, right, this is during the period of adolescence when interests tend to get more specific and differentiated. And if you think back enough, I think back, you know, to my own

sixteen and seventeen year old self, what was I interested in? Well? I signed up for a summer school class in psychology, and I signed up for a summer school class in nonfiction writing. Right, I didn't pick chemistry, I didn't pick philosophy. I didn't pick up So I think in some ways, you know, what do I do now? Well, I do a lot of psychology and I do a lot of nonfiction writing. So I do think that trip down memory lane can sometimes just you know, remind us in a

way of the things. But another tip for you if you don't want to just introspect, is like literally ask the people that you that you love most. You know, if I asked my husband, like Jason, what am I interested in? I mean, it sounds like a crazy thing to ask, like shouldn't I know? But he will tell

me what he observes. He's like, well, when I see you read the newspaper, you're always reading the food section, vows you know, Like He's like, you just when we went to visit houses, when we were shopping for houses instead of asking about the plumbing and the mortgage and the abatement. I was like, so then they got divorced, and then what happened the routes are was like, well, and then and my husband was like and this has nothing to do with this house, And I'm like, I know,

but it's so interesting. I just want to know. So that's me and human nature. So take a trip down memory lane. But also ask some people who know you and love you, you know, what do you think I'm interested in? And I think you might learn something. Yeah, oh my gosh, you and I are totally the same. That's always my interest too. I must not buy a terrible fathay. Angela's second tip for building grit. Once you found an interest, go all in, engage in focus, practice,

and set clear goals. Step three is all about thinking about the big picture. Angela says to ask yourself, why are you doing the thing you're doing, what's your sense of purpose? And then, finally step four, cultivate a growth mindset, which is the idea that we should think about our mind as a muscle that can grow with hard work and perseverance. Basically, being optimistic about how people's abilities can change, and how we're not necessarily as fixed as sometimes we're

tempted to think we are. And it's something that you know, I'm still working on. I saw him slip into a fixed mindset sometimes, and I try to let my growth mindset voice have it say. One person who inspires Angela to keep her growth mindset front and center is a former student of hers, David law. So David Long I met years ago when METSI more than twenty maybe now. I was a high school math teacher in the San

Francisco Public schools and David was in my class. And I noticed from you know, the first week of school that this kid, David really liked math, and frankly was pretty talented, but apparently not talented enough to have made it past the cut score that would have placed him in his freshman year in a higher level math class. So I marched David over to the department share whose name was Liz, and I say, Liz, like, you know, a grievous error has been made. This kid should be

in the higher level math class. And Liz is amazing, and she moved things around. So what happened next, Well, David graduated from high school and then he went on to get a PhD in aerospace engineering as somebody who basically uses math every day. And so I think the lesson of David is that it's very easy to make a mistake, you know, about somebody's potential. You know, like oh they're sah, she scores not high enough. You know, it's like, oh, you're not gifted and talented. But these

other kids, they are gifted and talented. You know, these kids they're going to go to AP calculus. Those kids they're not. And we do it all the time, right, And I think if we can restructure education in a way that doesn't have these like, um, you know, problems of off ramps and on ramps where we're like sorting kids and frankly we're doing it very early in their life. And if we could say instead, hey, if you have the motivation and if with support you can keep up

in these classes, like the door is open. I mean, I think that would be a much better way to run things. Yeah, And one thing I loved about David's story is that when he was moved to the advanced class and initially wasn't scoring very well on those early exams, right, getting a C and they're getting a D. He brush it off. He's like, I wasn't happy about it, But you know he didn't. He wasn't demoralized. He didn't give up. He just kept working harder. You know that knife edge, right,

you get a D or a CE. My own daughter, Amanda, when she was maybe a little younger than David, I think she was still in middle school, but she had tested into this more advanced track and so she, you know, she settles in and you know, she's getting her first exams back. I think she failed. I mean failed. She's gonna say like failed, I believe, like the first few exams and I had to confess to you, Maya. I

was like, oh, maybe this isn't for you. I mean I looked at this math curriculum and I was like, holy smoke, like this is really hard. You get like all the way through BC calculus before the end of junior year. I was like, why don't you just not do this hard thing? And my husband was such a better parent than me. He you know, worked with her, and I remember the stacks of scrap paper they had. I mean, they just put in so much work, and I think for him it was very important that at

that young age that she not encode. I can't do this, like I'm not smart enough, like I'm a girl, I'm whatever, but like I can't do this. So he didn't really care that she, you know, became a mathematician. But I will tell you what the epilogue of that story is Amanda's twine. She is um on track to being a

math major at Harvard Um. You know, she would not say that things come easily to her, like she would not say that like in her math classes, you know, you know she's the fastest or that you but she does love math. And I think those early experiences where it was a threat to her you know, self image, but then that she had a loving parent who I wish I could say it was me, but it was it was my you know, my better half. I just

think that's really important. And I know that one of the things that you have worked, you know, you know, so hard on his equity, and I think that, like, you know, one of the very deep issues in this country is like how many kids have somebody in their life who's going to do what my husband did for my daughter, or do what I had time to do with David and his you know his other teachers, and you know how much you know wasted potential is there,

and how many kids are walking around thinking they're not that smart because you know they haven't had the opportunity to see what they can do. We'll be back in a moment that the slight change of plants. We're back with Angela Duckworth. He's teaching us about the science of grit and how it can help us achieve our goals. Once we've cultivated grit, the next step is to make sure we channel whatever grit we do have in the right way, and this is where deliberate practice comes into play.

Deliberate practice is a term that was coined by Andres Erickson, who was a great cognitive psychologist. I mean really he was the world expert on world experts and really believe strongly. He always, you know, would talk about growing up in Sweden in a family that you know shared with him the worldview that like honors you know, if you're really interested in something and you are willing to work hard at it, like who would be the one to say

that you couldn't do great things? So he grew up without a kind of talent myth in his own personal life, but then he encountered it as he you know, would then move on into like, you know, wider circles. And so a lot of his research was on the practice

element of excellence. In fact, you could argue, like all of his research in some ways was that there are let's say three elements, but if you if you count the fact that you have to do them again and again in repetition, then you could say, Therefore, of deliberate practice, one is that when you're practicing something right, and we're all practicing something right, you know, you want to make a better on lit, you want to be a better podcaster,

you want to be a better writer, better leader, better mother, or whatever whatever it is that you're working on, you have to actually fractionate your overall performance into like tiny parts. And what experts do is they only work at one thing at a time. So this is kind of laser

like focus on one small element of their overall performance. Right. Yeah, I love this notion of sub goals and it reminds me when I was working in government in public policy, there was research coming out on how we can motivate folks to seek employment after they lost their jobs. So folks that are on unemployment insurance, and it's very psychologically daunting to say my goal is to find work, and so parsing it into these micro steps, these more manageable steps,

like Tomorrow, I'm going to go get a business suit. Friday, I'm going to edit the top half of my CV. Saturday, I'm going to reach out to three different employers. You know, that type of technique was so effective and accelerating people's success when it came to finding work. You know, whether it's learning to walk again or whether to write you know, how to write a book? You know what does anything that's daunting to you, like applying to college, you know,

getting your driver's license. You know the secret to doing those things is to not do the big thing, but to make it into manageable small things. And if you ask me how small, I would say, you can't go too small and and and that is because like, if you do accomplish the tiny, tiny goal that you set, guess what, you just have more confidence going into the next one. Yeah. So we've talked about articulating specific goals

versus general goals. What's next after that second element is that you really have to focus one hundred percent I mean, you have to try. You know, it's like the opposite of multitasking. And I know this sounds kind of simple and straightforward and obvious, but just as an indication of what honors means, I mean, really, the top performers that he tended to study would only do true deliberate practice at this level of focus and concentration for a few

hours a day. Was seemingly not possible to do much more than that, even at the peak of your powers. So that's full concentration and effort. And then the third element is feedback. And feedback is that gift that you know, we don't want to unwrap, right, And I think one of the remarkable things about these world class performers, you know, much more than their gold medals or their statues or their te fees, is that they are remarkably open to

and even eager for feedback, especially when it's critical. And that's the remarkable thing. So, so, do those three things have a precise goal, what exactly it is that you're working on. Work on that with one hundred percent focus and attention. Get feedback usually immediately is the best. And then after processing that feedback, repeat the cycle. Okay, So now we've got our four strategies for building grit and a deeper understanding of what it means to really practice.

So we're all set right, Not quite, And that's because temptations of all kinds creep into our daily lives and prevent us from acting on these recommendations. And so Angela being Angela has four tips to help us reel in the temptations. My number one trick for this is is to use your situation for you, not against you. If you're on your cell phone too much, don't keep it in your bedroom, you know, keep it based down, keep it on a high shelf. Frankly, give it to somebody

else and have them take it away from you. I think that's probably the ultimate self control trick. But that's all about your situation. You can say, look, if the situation is really influential, you know, I'll put my sneakers by the door to remind me. I'll I'll like, you know, find a gym that's closer to me. I'll find a form of exercise that's that's more fun for me. And all these ways are changing the situation and not changing willpower. The second trick is to change where you pay attention.

You know, Bob Mankoff, the editor of the New Yorker Cartoons for for many years. You know, he would actually point his you know body, like away from the monitor that had his email because when he had really hard editorial work to do, like he knew he had to like look over here and not look over there. And this is very instinctive for many of us, but just you know, do it more intentionally. The third trick is

to actually change the way you think about things. Right, so you have to like, you know, maybe you rethink exercise, if it's it's on your to do list as a chore, could you make it? You know, like Adele has recently said, you know her knee time, right, like that shift to this is time where I can be me and like, you know, nobody else is like asking me to do anything, Like I can listen to the music I want, I

could do whatever I want. Like that's a way of changing the way you think about a situation that can improve self control. And then fourth, I'm going to say something that is you know, really important for anything that you want to do, and that's to make a plan. You know, if you think, like, oh, that trick about cell phones, what a good idea? Or like, oh that

trick about attention, what a good idea? Well if after this, you know, conversation that you listen on a podcast, like, you don't make a plan about like when you're going to do that, you know it's just going to evaporate into the air. So so, in other words, I think there are all kinds of tricks, but if you want to organize them, change your situation, change your attension, change the way you think about your situation, and then finally

make a plan. In other words, rather than trying hard to exert willpower and then failing as we often do, it's really about setting up your situation so that you don't even need to use willpower. Something it seems many

kids have already figured out. I love in the Walter Michelle's study with the marshmallow tests, And obviously there have been some critiques of what the study showed, but there's one element that certainly holds, and just for listeners who aren't familiar, In this particular study, kids were offered a choice between one marshmallow, which would be immediate, but if they waited and didn't consume the marshmallow for some period

of time they would actually be given two. So it's a test of delayed gratification and kids willingness to exert self control in the moment. And some of the kids who are most effective at waiting modified their situation. They would physically cover the marshmallow, or you know, they very cutely cover their own eyes so they couldn't see the marshmallow. And that was their way of minimizing the need for willpower, right because you can't see it, then it's less of

a temptation. And actually Walter then did random assignment experiments because you know, you wanted to know is it really cause all, like, you know, how can I really And when you put a plate over the marshmallow, kids can wait, you know, more than twice as long as when the

marshmallows are right there. And so once you're a little more consciously aware of this, it just means that in those momentary conflicts between good for me versus a little easier for me, you know, you've got to switch the dynamic. Don't say like I'll just use woolpower. It doesn't it doesn't really work. Yeah, now I'm just chuckling right now, remembering like eleven year old Maya who would take her Calvin and Hobbs books and put them on her music

stand over her sheet music. That's the opposite of what we're asking here, right, Well, depending on what your goal is, yeah, that might be. I think my goal is to practice, but actually ended up getting through Bill Waterson's you know, for book collection. Okay, So one of the people I interviewed as Annie Duke, and you know, she talks about the importance of learning how to quit more. And obviously

these two concepts are compatible. There are context in which it makes sense to quit versus grit and vice versa. In your experience, what are examples of situations where you think people have shown grit but they probably shouldn't have, Like, are there any signals people can look out for that can tee up? Oh yeah, maybe actually this is a moment where I should step back or I should stop trying. I completely agree with both you and Annie that it's possible to hang on too long. Like you can throw

good money after bad. I mean, you could you buy a bicycle and think it's a bargain and then you're not, Like you end up replacing the wheels and the fender and like pretty soon you have the cost of more than a bicycle, but you keep you know, repairing it. I mean, it's just at some point in that process, if you had walked away and said, you know what, I wasted seventy dollars, But if I keep with this,

I'm going to waste one hundred and seventy dollars. Right, Like, it's very hard for us to some times detach ourselves. So so when to quit and when to grit is an excellent question. And I think for me, the the when to quit and when to grit question is answered with why, you know, like why did you buy a bicycle? Right?

And if the answer to that question is you know, answerable, like okay, well, the reason why I bought a bicycle is because like I really want to get to work faster, or like I want to find a way to work out, or but you know, it's the end not the means. When you've reflected on the why, you're like, okay, what am I doing here? Like why am I doing this? And you think, okay, you know what, there's an easier way to get there. You know, there's a better way

to get there. That's when you should quit and then take that other route. However, if you think about what you're doing and you're like, this is why I'm doing it and there is no other way, then you know it is rational to keep going. So I think actually asking yourself why, you know, in those moments of frustration, it's not just you know, is it the noble thing to keep going or not? It's it's not that simple.

You have to ask, you know, in a way that's reflective, like why am I doing this in the first place? And I think it can give you that flexibility that

you need to know question your assumptions. Yeah, And I think we're seeing people act on that, like in sports, for example, Simone Biles, Naomi Osaka, others who are saying, oh, actually I am pushing myself beyond the limits and maybe there why is ultimately I do the sport so that I can be happy, and at some point the infringement on my well being is so severe the cost benefit doesn't pay off anymore. Right, There's at least some awareness

around that. Yeah. Angela's recently developed an exciting new college course at the University of Pennsylvania. It's called grit Lab. It's a semester long course dedicated to getting students to walk the walk on all the recommendations we talked about in this episode. So if you're a student in my class, you read about grit, but you also every week have an exercise. So I know you want everyone to go out and try deliberate practice. Well, that is a home

work assignment for my classes. Like this week. You know, you can all practice what you want, but we're all going to do deliver practice and then reflect on it. Goal setting Okay, everybody's going to set a goal and make a plan this week, and then we're gonna reflect on that. You know, Curiosity Okay, everybody's going to go out have a curiosity conversation with some of they don't know about something that they're interested in, and then we're going to reflect on it. So what have I learned

from teaching students grit Lab. Well, I think people make changes when they do it with other people. Say you're listening to this conversation and you've made a little resolution and you know you shouldn't use willpower. You're going to change your situations. But if you do that with your spouse or your girlfriend or boyfriend, if you do that with a best friend, if you do that with a coworker. Now you have the two of you, and it's social and it's totally different than like you on your own,

failing or succeeding completely in isolation. And so grit lab is all built around teams, etc. But it's kind of this social thing that we're doing together for fourteen weeks and not just like, oh, go off on your own, read this book and do things entirely by yourself. So that's just one of the insights. But I guess personally, I'll just say, like, you know, my why maya, Like you know what wakes me up early and keeps me

going on bad days is for me. You know, everything that you talk about, you know in this um, you know format and everything that you've worked on, everything that I work on. It really has the potential to harness behavioral insights to make people's lives better. Oh I love that. Well. I will tell you your students love grit Lab and actually reach out to some of them before our interview to see how the class might have changed their life.

And I just wanted to share our one testimonial listener feedback, which was really beautiful and moving. One of my biggest struggles at Penn has been learning how to admit to myself when I need help and to proactively ask for help from others, whether it be a friend or a classmate.

Grit Lab taught me that seeking out feedback, wisdom, and advice from others is not a weakness but an incredible power that we all have that allows us to foster our own growth by being open and honest about our limits. I love that, and I'm that student remembers we had a whole week on feedback, you know, the science of feedback.

We had to practice giving and getting feedback, and every class, the student remembers I got feedback, and I was you know, rated by the students on a scale from zero to ten. From zero like that was a complete waste of my time, doctor Duckworth to ten, like you blew my mind, but like that was amazing. And then I got, you know,

qualitiative comments. And I was very open with students about how defensive I felt when I got low numbers and when they told me things that I could do better and differently, and then I tried to model over them,

like hey, look I'm defensive. That crushed me. And I learned three things and this is why like today, we're going to do things differently, and I don't want to make it seem easy, but I do think that just that student's testimonial and just the potential for you know, the signs of feedback, the signs of practice, you know, the signs of interest, the science of situation modification. You know, there is this enormous, untapped potential to make our lives better.

Join me next week when I talked to Amanda Knox, she was wrongfully accused of murder and spent four years in an Italian prison before she was exonerated and allowed to return back to the US. When I first came home, I thought that I was going to get to have the life that I had left behind back that once this is all worked out and everyone agrees that I'm innocent, then I get to go back to my life that I lost that was on pause, and I realized that

that life didn't exist anymore. A Slight Change of Plans is created, written and executive produced by me Maya Shunker. The best part of creating this show is getting to collaborate with my formidable Slight Change family. This includes Tyler Green, our senior producer Jen Guera our senior editor, Ben Holliday, our sound engineer, Emily Rosteck, our associate producer, and Neil Lavelle, our executive producer. Louis Skara wrote our delightful theme song

and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so big thanks to everyone there, and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lane. You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Schunker and please remember to subscribe, share and rate the show to help get the word out. See you next week.