Grit-scaling with Angela Duckworth

0:00Scaling a business in the US can feel like a maze. Each state has its own payroll, benefits, and compliance rules, pulling your focus away from growth, which is why founders use Deal. Deal is the professional employer organization, or PEO, that gives you a dedicated HR expert, plus Fortune 500-level benefits for your team. The National Association of PEOs says businesses can grow twice as fast if they use one. So, if you're scaling, make it simple with Deal. Go to deel.com. slash MOS and get up to three months free. If you're in private capital, you understand that your next great deal starts with who you know.

0:41That's why over 3 ,000 firms trust Affinity, the CRM platform purpose-built for private capital. Affinity's relationship intelligence reveals your team's strongest paths to founders, investors, and decision makers using insights It's hidden in emails, calendars, and meetings. With powerful AI tools like Affinity NoteTaker and Deal Assist, you'll spend less time managing data and more time closing the right deals. Learn more at affinity.co slash marketplace.

1:21I was a science major. I thought it would be, you know, really cool to teach kids how to, like, learn about solar energy by making, like, a hot dog cooker out of, like, tinfoil and cardboard.

1:35I go around to the school's classrooms, and I'm knocking one by one on the doors of, I think it was, like, fifth or sixth grade classroom. And I went into one classroom. I remember the teacher's name, Mr. Z. And he lets me do my little three-minute commercial. at the front of the classroom. And one little boy puts up his hand and is asking questions about it. You know, he's sort of leaning forward in his seat. He's got a big smile on his face. And Mr. Z interrupts him and he says, oh, not you. This is not for you. This is for the smart kids. And I nearly took a baseball bat to that man. I was like, that kid will never forget what you said.

2:16And God knows what you've been saying the rest of the school year. You know, I can't get that classroom teacher fired. I couldn't make decisions at a level of policy that would directly change that kid's life. But I knew I would never forget that story. And I never have. And it taught me a lesson, which is that, yeah, for sure we have genetic endowments. You know, I am probably lucky to have gotten certain genetic cards from my dad and certain from my mom. I don't want to deny that. But holy smokes. The environment you're in, the people who you're with, the opportunities that you have. I think we vastly overestimate talent that's natural and vastly underestimate the power of our environments.

3:03That's Angela Duckworth, author of the bestseller Grit and creator of one of the most watched TED Talks of all time. She's dedicated her life to understanding learning, motivation and achievement. She's a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania in Wharton and winner of the MacArthur Genius Grant. She also hosts the Freakonomics podcast, No Stupid Questions. And she has a new book brewing. More on that later in this episode. Angela's writing and research have profoundly impacted the way we think about perseverance, success, how we find our purpose, and how we reach our potential.

3:43She's a thought leader whose work has helped everyone from first-time founders to first-grade teachers. She's helped business leaders understand not only how to cultivate grit in themselves, but the grit they need across their organizations as they scale.

4:06You've got to have incredible talent at every position. It's like this huge push. There are fires burning when you're going home. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to, this is totally going to be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Oops. Working out of a three-bedroom apartment. Stuff that just seems absolutely nut balls. Ten years later, we're like, well, that's just how you do it. We haven't made it just how you do it.

4:36This is Masters of Scale.

4:45I'm Jeff Berman, your host. Angela Duckworth's book, Grit, The Power of Passion and Perseverance, became an instant success. Already a respected scholar, the book introduced a broad global audience to her research and insights on grit as a predictor of achievement. Angela's own journey as an academic, an author, and a public intellectual has been anything but linear. Her work has helped so many business leaders persist, scale, and succeed, but it took several major pivots for Angela herself to find a career fit, one that suited her strengths and met her deep desire to understand and help children.

5:27We'll start with Angela as an undergrad at Harvard when she took her personal passion to heart. To pursue childhood education, she had to step off the path that had been laid out for her.

5:44Well, not to stereotype, but I am the daughter of Chinese immigrants who grew up in suburban South Jersey. So it was a bit of cultural destiny to be pre-med. But along the way, I found kids. So I started tutoring actually back in high school. But as I got into my extracurriculars in college, you know, I just found like more and more hours on the side of the ledger being outside of the lecture hall, even outside of the lab. and in schools and in homes in the Cambridge, Massachusetts community. And at one point I did tally up and there were more hours on the side of the ledger of being in the community versus in the lab or in the lecture hall.

6:22And I made this discovery that kids are amazing. And just sitting next to kids who are like 11 years old, I was like, whoa, you're wicked smart, relative to me anyway. And then the epiphany of like, oh, I need to change my life was just that I, at the same time, had this dawning recognition that the education that these kids were getting was not at all like the education that I got growing up in my home and in the schools I had attended. So I made a hard pivot and I decided to not take the MCAT. My dad refused to talk to me for six months, I think, after I made that choice. And I decided to dedicate my career to kids and to initially education, teaching, nonprofit stuff, and now, as a psychologist who studies human development.

7:10This pivot from pre-med to education is more than a narrative twist that took Angela in a new direction. It's perhaps the first example of a framework that she's applied time and time again. You could sum it up with a simple maxim. Take your own curiosity seriously. When she felt the tug to work with kids, Angela did not set it aside as an inconvenient truth. She didn't try to get rid of it, She didn't allow herself to be frozen by the consequences it could bring as she migrated away from the career in medicine she'd been pursuing. Instead, she investigated her own curiosity. She trusted her instincts and followed the path where her energy and interest were naturally flowing.

7:52But pursuing that passion wasn't without personal consequence.

8:00Did it make you rethink the decision to pivot to kids? Okay, I was a little bit of a rebel. My dad and I had this incredibly close and affectionate relationship. I was the apple of my father's eye. But we had this dynamic where if he said no, I said yes. And if he said yes, I said no. And, you know, I have this I'll show you response that the moment someone says, oh, that's impossible, you curl your fist into a ball. There's a fire in your belly. You lean forward and you say to yourself and sometimes out loud, I'll show you. So when my dad told me not to go into education, yeah, I said back to myself because he wasn't picking up the phone.

8:41I'll show you. In her senior year at Harvard, Angela started a not-for-profit summer school for underserved kids. That helped set her up to pursue her life's work after graduating college. I rode around on my bike all senior year. I think I got almost every business in Cambridge, Massachusetts to donate photocopies or free ice cream. I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't have a business bone in my body, but I incorporated a 501c3 nonprofit. We had a board of directors. We opened our doors. And then, you know, we ran. And actually, it ended up being profiled as a Harvard Kennedy School case study and won the Better Government Award and celebrated its 30th anniversary recently.

9:20So it ended up becoming, I guess you would call that a successful startup that, you know, in some ways scaled. I think at last count, they serve 10 percent of the children in the Boston, Cambridge area. What exactly were you seeing back then that inspired you that may not be obvious to most of us? So when I was sitting next to a kid trying to help them do their homework, it was clear to me that they were very often extremely bored. And when they were bored, they couldn't learn anything, right? It was just like, you know, trying to pour water on a concrete surface. But when they were interested, so this would often happen not when we were doing the homework problem that they were begrudgingly trying to solve, but more like let's take a break and like talk about music or like talk about anything that you care about, skateboarding, you know, whatever.

10:03They could memorize facts. They could make connections like abstract general truths from disparate set of facts. I mean, all the things that we would call intelligence. And it was hard to ignore the gap between the obvious intellectual potential that these kids had, especially when they were interested and encouraged. And on the other side of this chasm, you know, their failing grades, their trajectory of not graduating from college. And it was in a way obvious. Angela ran the not-for-profit tutoring program for two years. Then she got a Marshall Scholarship to attend Oxford. Furthering her interest in learning, she earned a master's in neuroscience and planned to work in U.S.

10:44schools. But she graduated in October, missing the start of the academic year. So she needed a gig to tide her over. The global consulting firm McKinsey came calling. Basically, McKinsey hovers over Oxford like vultures waiting for a stag to fall over. So they just pounce on you. So I do my best, bumble through this interview, and I made an offer and I accept it under one condition. I said, I don't really care about increasing the productivity and the revenue and the profits of these companies that pay you obscene fees. But I really care about public education. If I come and work for McKinsey, can I do pro bono work for most of my time?

11:35Sure, that's fine. Just come. And I get there to New York. And of course, looking at my resume, neurobiology undergraduate from Harvard, master's of neuroscience from Oxford, I'm immediately put on all the pharma teams and all the medical devices teams. And I did do a little bit of pro bono work, but I only lasted 11 months. And I only lasted 11 months because that got me to September of the next school year. And I went immediately to work in the New York City public schools. It doesn't sound like this was a tough choice for Angela. She knew she was biding her time, but that wasn't a given. Prestige is alluring.

12:12Big firms can be flattering. They also come with life-changing paychecks, and for many, they're a great fit. With her personal passion propelling her, it was easy for Angela to decide to swap consulting for teaching. But the change in environment was startling. Imagine stepping from a massive company boardroom straight into a seventh-grade classroom. I mean, you know, you walk in, there are bars on the window. I couldn't tell whether they were trying to keep people out or keep people in, but it did have the feeling of a jail cell. There was like one terrible bathroom that everybody in the school had to share, like literally one, like one stall.

12:50So all the teachers, all the kids, you can imagine what that was like by the end of the day. But what truly surprised Angela was the increased challenge of the work itself. As a high-paid corporate consultant, she was bolstered by vast resources and legions of high-achieving colleagues. Compare that to sitting with a middle schooler one-on-one tackling word problems. Teaching seventh grade math, it was just so much harder. I mean, it was like, wow, I thought figuring out what to do with your$7 billion of excess cash revenue was a problem. Like, this is hard, right? What do I do with this kid who, you know, is sitting in front of me and has umpteen problems and I have 45 minutes to, like, change their life per day?

13:34So it was humbling. And I don't think I was a great teacher. I tried really hard, but I think the things I failed to do as a teacher probably were the inspiration for like everything I've done since then. Why were you not a great teacher? Well, I mean, I did try, right? So I was like, I will triple the amount of time these kids get math. When you're talking to somebody who's in seventh grade and they only have second grade skills, I mean, some of these kids were like barely adding. So the most obvious thing to do is just increase the time on task. I don't think that was wrong, but I think one of the things I have since learned is that learning is not just about quantity of time on task.

14:09It's about quality of time on task. There was so much I had yet to understand about how to make learning efficient. And I think the other major mistake was a failure to understand human motivation. So I thought just by kind of like exhorting children, try harder. If you try hard, you can make a life for yourself. If you try hard, you can go to college. You can get out of this hellhole where you live. And I thought these like sermons I would give on just like trying hard were going to motivate them. And I think for the vast majority of my students, it was not at all effective. And that's why I discovered many better ways to motivate ourselves and others today as a psychologist.

14:50So talk about the decision to pivot out of teaching. What was that next phase of the journey like for you? Well, Jeff, I first want to say it was tear-filled. I mean, we got this old couch from my parents. I ended up marrying my classmate from Oxford and then my McKinsey consultant colleague, Jason Duckworth. And that's where I get my very white-sounding last name. And we got this old couch secondhand from my parents. It was really ugly, but super comfortable. And it had these, like, huge overstuffed pillows. And Jason joked that if we could get all the salt out of that couch because I cried so much into it, we could just have enough salt for, like, New York City for the rest of the century.

15:27I cried so much because it was so uncertain for me, you know, and I didn't want to be a classroom teacher forever. I think that was very clear to me. It's not that I disrespected the profession, but it wasn't fulfilling all of my needs. There was a moment in time where I thought maybe I would start a charter school. I thought, oh, that's how to scale, right? I've got this classroom with 30 kids. I had this urge to scale my impact. But then I was like looking at these other principals and leaders. I just, I didn't have that leadership desire, actually, and I still don't. So I was really stuck. I was really angst-ridden.

16:02I was like, maybe I should get an MBA. Oh, my God, that sounds horrible. Like, what is human resources? Should I go into that? And then I looked into it and I was like, no, please, God. It took an important type of grit for Angela to let in this realization. That no matter how much she kept at it, teaching just wasn't for her. It meant stepping away from her life plan, starting over. Yet again. She was no longer an undergrad. Radical professional change can feel wildly different depending on your phase of life. Angela chose to embrace the unknown as a mid-career professional, married and settled in Philadelphia.

16:39She dug deeper into her own curiosity. What was it exactly that she wanted to know? She trusted that question to lead her. and then finally I kind of put two and two together and I was like I love kids and I'm pretty good at science and I think maybe I should go and get a PhD in psychology and figure out how to help kids not as a classroom teacher but as a psychologist who unearths their motivational learning processes I only applied to one graduate school because it was the only one within commuting distance, and that was University of Pennsylvania. And I was 32, I think, and I was accepted. So my classmates were like a decade younger than me, but I knew what I was in graduate school for, to unpack the potential of kids and to understand what motivates them, what enables them to be brilliant, and what does the opposite.

17:33And I started studying it in various ways. One of them ended up being the grit research that I've done on high achievers. But everything I did from the very first day of graduate school to where I am today was motivated by those kids that I was sometimes not helping as much as I wanted to earlier in my life. More on how grit led the way for Angela Duckworth to become a global thought leader after the break.

18:14Real leaders don't back down when the stakes are high. They innovate, they push forward, and then they take the stage at the Masters of Scale Summit. Join us in San Francisco, October 7th to 9th, to hear from the CEO of the New York Times, scientists using cutting-edge technology to find cures, the leader of crypto powerhouse Coinbase, a retired four-star general, and many, many more. Apply now at mastersofscale.com slash apply25. That's mastersofscale.com slash apply25. If you're ready to take your startup from idea to impact, then AWS is your launchpad. From data storage to machine learning to secure app hosting, AWS gives you the tech trusted by the world's fastest scaling startups.

19:04And here's the best part. Join AWS Activate today and you could score up to$100 ,000 in AWS credits tailored to your stage and network. Go to aws.amazon.com slash activate and start building. Expanding your business in the U.S. can feel like a maze. Every state has its own payroll, benefits, and compliance rules, which can pull your focus away from growth. That's why founders use Deal. Deal is the professional employer organization, or PEO, that gives you a dedicated HR expert plus Fortune 500-level benefits for your team. The National Association of PEOs says businesses can grow twice as fast if they use one.

19:48So if you're scaling, make it simple with Deal. Go to deel.com slash mos and get up to three months free.

20:02We're back with University of Pennsylvania and Wharton Professor of Psychology, podcaster, and bestselling author, Angela Duckworth. To watch our extended interview with Angela, visit the Masters of Scale YouTube channel.

20:16Let's talk about grit.

20:20Because when you do a Google search for Angela Duckworth, if you were to graph it, it would be a hockey stick starting in 2016. 2016. So how did you land on grit? How did you isolate that variable? It's really quite an extraordinary branding as well that you've done here around this word. It's a really powerful word. Just onomatopoeic. Yes, yes. Yeah, well, okay. So I did inherit something from my father. You know, I don't say this in the genetic sense, but being incubated in a household that talked about high achievement every single day. I think I was bequeathed, as it were, an obsession with excellence.

21:07I love the Olympics. I love three-star Michelin chefs. I mean, if you're a world-class plumber, I want to watch you work, right? There's nothing more beautiful to me than the ballet of, you know, human performance at its best. So I did the kind of straightforward, I don't know, I just didn't have anything else to do other than to talk to these people who were Nobel laureates or who had won a Grammy Award or, you know, you fill in the blank. And what I was looking for is not what made them different from each other. What I was looking for was the common denominator. You know, what makes a prima ballerina the same as a Nobel Prize winning physicist?

21:43I found that they had this common, you know, trait. They had this combination of passion for what they did, unfakeable, 24-7 love of what they did. and they had perseverance. And I think in both dimensions, passion and perseverance, the thing that was most striking was not the intensity but the stamina. And so I found this common denominator emerging and I thought to myself, how do I get kids to begin to develop on this trajectory? And then I also just wanted to reverse engineer those high achievers and ask the question, how close can we get to that kind of excellence in our own lives? So you embark on this research journey.

22:28You identify this common denominator. It's then a leap to become really a public intellectual, right? That was a total accident, by the way. I started being asked to do interviews even when I was in graduate school, which I thought was kind of ridiculous. You know, I remember being asked to be on the local news because I had published research. And now we have Angela Duckworth, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, here to talk about the science of success. News interviews led to more speaking invitations. Chris Wink, co-founder of the Blue Man Group, asked Angela to present at a TEDx event about creativity.

23:03Her reply? I don't study creativity, I study grit, right? And he said, anybody who's creative knows it takes a hell of a lot of grit for one moment of inspiration. I was like, yeah, that's so true. Angela may have found the media attention unpleasant, even off-putting at first. But it was in service of her larger mission. and it led to a worldwide audience for her work through another TED event. It was like this collab with a public broadcasting service. So Bill Gates and others who were really passionate about education were all asked to give TED Talks. I was one of them. John Legend was our emcee and host.