World-Leading Psychologist: How to Change Your Life by Changing What’s Around You | Angela Duckworth - EP 814

23:23Angela Duckworth:And what the research shows is that even in high stakes medical decisions, like even when the change is clearly better, people still have a bias toward the status quo. It is so true. And it's so hard to overcome that, that barrier. And I remember most of my career was implementing technology solutions. And as the person implementing it, the people who are our customers, the business customers, most of the time, always thought that technology was going to make the huge impact. And I would always tell them, technology is like 15 % of the equation here. Like 50 % or more is you changing your habits.

24:04It's fundamental process and behavior change that needs to happen to make any of these technology solutions work. Because if you don't change the way you've always done things, having a new solution isn't going to make anything any different.

24:18Angela Duckworth:It's interesting that you could offer the word, the 50 % versus, some people call it the 5 % problem, which is like 5 % of people will use a technology for what the technology can do. 95 % of people, some would argue, don't. Look at Khan Academy. Khan Academy is a terrific learning resource. I mean, for free, you can get world-class tutoring from Sal Khan himself, possibly the world's best teacher. And 5 % of Khan Academy users, they come back, they learn calculus, they learn statistics, they learn programming. And then 95 % of people don't come back to this free online, 24 seven friendly UX awesome platform.

25:02Angela Duckworth:You can tell I'm interested in the topic of behavior change. I know you're friends with my collaborator, Katie Milkman. We believe whether it's 50 % or 95%, so much of what needs to change is the sort of thing that you talk about on this podcast. And I love it in your book, you have a whole section on how we change. On that note, after reading the book, I kept coming back to this distinction, Angela, between shaping and revealing. Do great situations fundamentally change who we are, or do you think they simply permit parts of ourselves that were always there to emerge? That is a next level question.

25:38Angela Duckworth:Maybe I I would say PhD, not just MBA, because there is a nuance here that I'm delighted to elaborate on. I think the situation does both. One is it reveals how great you are. Just imagine a really gritty entrepreneur, but now in the right circumstances, all that effort, all that tenacity, all that ingenuity pays off. Because for example, they live in a country with a free market. We sometimes forget, like there are people who live in countries where it doesn't matter how entrepreneurial you are. There's no market. There's no meritocracy. There's just ingrained social order. And you don't even have the legal right to sell things, right?

26:21Angela Duckworth:Those other societies exist today. I thank God that I was born in the United States. My parents immigrated here so that they could have the land of opportunity. They literally came here for the land of opportunity so they could have those opportunities. So in that way, I think the situation America revealed the grit, the intelligence, the talent that my parents had, but I think it also changes us. So my answer is both and because when you put a person in a situation where their effort pays off, something happens to that person. That person wants to work harder. They have seen the fruit of their labors.

27:01Angela Duckworth:That opportunity that creates a better future for you, there's nothing more motivating. And so I think that situations really have a double effect on us, both in terms of revealing all of the capabilities that we have and actually enhancing our capabilities over time because they really unlock, I think, a level of motivation that, you know, is only available to us if we are in a great situation. Yeah, I've got a great story for you on this. When I was at Lowe's, I come into this new job. Listeners have heard me tell this story, but I was brought in because Lowe's at that time had experienced the largest hacking incident in retail history.

27:45So I was being brought in part to fix that. But a week and a half into my job, new head of HR had recently done an employee engagement survey, calls me into her office and said, not only are you going to have to deal with cleaning up this technology security issue. But oh, by the way, your group that you inherited was just ranked dead last in Lowe's out of 350 ,000 employees. And so I start getting into this. And what I found out was that the environment that had been created for the employees was suppressing the very capabilities that the employees had, meaning they were being micromanaged so much that none of them were given the agency to perform their jobs the way that they felt it should be intended.

28:30And I will never remember, I was talking to a manager who had been at Lowe's for about 18 years, and we were implementing this new set of solutions, strategy to rebuild the group. And he says to me, well, what exactly do you want me to do? Well, he's on a 24 by seven watch. I said, I can't be there with you. I am intending you to use the best knowledge that you have given the circumstances to create unique solutions to motivate your employees and do things differently. And Angela, I will never forget it. He looked at me, almost tears in his eyes, and he said, this is the first time, the entire time I've ever been at Lowe's where anyone has ever given me the ability to do what I thought was best in the situation instead of what I was told to do.

29:19And I couldn't believe it.

29:21Angela Duckworth:That probably brought tears to your eyes just to fathom that was the first time somebody actually cared about what was in his head. I have a parallel story from my graduate student. Now she's a professor at Kellogg, the school of business at Northwestern, and her name is Lauren Eskos-Winkler. When she was a PhD student, she went to a school and she was testing an intervention where you asked young people what their advice was for doing better in school. And that was the whole intervention. It was just like, hey, what's your advice to other kids about how to do well? And she asked everyone. It wasn't like, oh, let's go to the gifted and talented questions.

29:55Angela Duckworth:Let's go to the honors classes. She just did the intervention at the school. And afterwards, one of the students who was, I think, maybe special education, like certainly not a thriving student at the school, with tears in their eyes, you know, it gives a little boy, tears in his eyes, approached her and said, nobody has ever asked me what I think about how to do well. And it was a failing student. And I'm not saying that these kids are perfect. And I don't believe in romanticizing the poor or anything, but it really stuck with her for the rest of her career. That people do matter, that we so often treat each other like they don't.

30:37Angela Duckworth:in my little lab, because I'm not a real leader, but I have a tiny little lab and I have a rule, which is if I tell you something, please hold me accountable to the what, the why, and the when. This is what needs to get done. This is why it needs to get done. This is when it needs to get done by, but I should let you decide how, right? And I think that autonomy that you're talking about, this sort of like, yeah, you matter and you probably know better than I do. Who am I to tell you that job. I agree. That's a critical element of situational leadership, not one that I would say I'm a master of, but I recognize it's important.

31:13Angela Duckworth:I'm trying to do better on that one. I want to explore identity because I've been doing a lot of work recently trying to figure out what influences the identities that we give ourselves. And we talked about this a little bit in the beginning of the episode, but something you wrote really has me thinking about this and future solo episodes. You write that what we think influences what we do, but where we are influences what we think. And to me, the first thing that jumps to my mind is family that we're born into, like how much our family situations determine what we think. But I was hoping you could expand on this.

31:54Angela Duckworth:This is in some ways an encapsulation of modern psychotherapy, John, because cognitive therapy is the bedrock of much of modern psychotherapy. If you go to a therapist today and you say, I'm depressed or I'm anxious, many, if not most of them will really pull out the tools of cognitive therapy. And that is about your thoughts influencing your response. So if you're feeling depressed or anxious, that therapist is going to want to know what thoughts lead you to feel depressed or to feel anxious. Maybe you're having catastrophizing thoughts. Maybe you're having thoughts about your identity and feeling like nobody likes you.

32:30Angela Duckworth:I don't belong here. But my point in this book is that you can ask a follow-up question, which is, gee whiz, where do those thoughts come from? And I do think that our family origins have a kind of, you know, long shadow in our lives. They really cast a shadow in the sense of being influential. I sometimes hear my father in my own voice or my mother. By the way, I prefer when I hear my mother and my father's daughter and my mother's daughter, but I think I am my best self when I am my mother's daughter. So that is partly the legacy of our situations, right? So part of what we think today is because of the situations we were in the past.

33:08Angela Duckworth:But one very interesting feature, I'll go out on limb here and say what I think. I think very often psychologists today are like, wait, let me just narrowly say something about this one particular finding. But I am a student of human nature, and I will go out on a limb and say that our current situation has more influence on what we think than our past situations. And there's a very famous psychologist that no one's heard of, well, very few. His name is Michael Lewis. A lot of people have heard of Michael Lewis, the prolific and amazing writer, but this is not the Michael Lewis who wrote the big short and Moneyball.

33:43Angela Duckworth:This is Michael Lewis, the developmental psychologist. And he made the compelling claim that of course, as a developmental psychologist, people always would ask, what is the influence of like where you were when you were three or four on the man or the woman you are today? And they were waiting for the answer. Oh, enormous. Like wherever you were at three or four, whether you had an attachment style that was secure or parents who were this way or that way. Well, that's how you can explain your middle-aged self. And he argued that your current situation exerts dramatically more influence. So let's say you're a grumpy person and you have this sense that maybe you're a grumpy person and you don't want to be a grumpy person.

34:22Angela Duckworth:You could blame the grumpy people in the family that raised you and the grumpy neighborhood that you grew up in. But you could also say, I notice that when I'm with really positive people, I'm a little less grumpy because I bet that's true. I bet there are people that bring out your humorous side, your sunny side, your optimistic side. And my advice is go hang out with them more because you can't change your past, but you can change your future. And you can't change the situations that you were born into, but you can change the situations that you move into. I'm going to share something with you because I just released a solo episode this week on the movie Hook about Peter Panning.

35:08Angela Duckworth:Oh, even the children. Yeah. I'm going to relate this to what you just said. So in this movie, Peter Panning, who's played by Robin Williams, is this mergers and acquisitions attorney, and he's doing global deals. He's making all this money, but he feels completely empty inside. And what ends up happening is he gets taken back to Neverland where the Lost Boys look beyond who this adult is now. And they see that this is actually Peter Pan. And they're like, you're Peter Pan. And he goes, no, I'm not. I'm not Peter Pan. I'm Peter Banning. I'm this mergers and acquisition attorney. And the movie keeps going on and on.

35:50And eventually he discovers that he actually is Peter Pan and it culminates with him flying. And then I think what people don't think about in that movie is then he goes back to his real life, his real wife, his real kids. And he realizes that so much of who he was, he has been putting a mask on because of the situation he has evolved into. that much of the joy, the things that made him feel alive, he's been suppressing so long, he completely forgot the prior version of himself. I think it happens in both directions. I think sometimes we forget the things that make us who we are. And in other cases, we look too much at our modern life and we forget our past.

36:35Angela Duckworth:There's something I didn't put in the book, but I thought about it. And I think I must've written a draft of the book that had it. many actors will say that when the Oscar goes out for set design or costumes, by the way, this is the part where people go and get something to eat, right? Because they're like, oh, costume design. And sometimes they actually have those awards in a different part of the day because they're like, not the red carpet, everybody tuning in. But many actors will say, and I guess I include actors and actresses under that one term, that it's so important that when you step onto a set and you're either in a crowded boardroom or you're in a subway or you're whatever it is, the set and the costume.

37:17Angela Duckworth:Are you wearing a doctor's coat? Are you wearing an artist smock? Are you wearing a chef's apron? Are you in rags because you're supposed to be playing somebody who's on the streets? Are you playing a stockbroker? These things matter because we step into the role. And I'm sure in this draft that never made it into the book, I'm sure I quoted Shakespeare, all the world is a stage and each of us is a player. And therefore pick your stage carefully, right? If you want to be a different person, then choose a stage where that is the role. So I love that because I think for a lot of us, we did probably prefer our childhood self to the self that we are walking around us today.

38:00Angela Duckworth:And I don't think this means go back to your childhood bedroom, I think it means just being in a place that evokes those qualities that you miss about yourself. Curiosity or kindness or playfulness or humor. I don't know. Ask yourself, where can I be that way more? I'm glad you brought that up. I am so excited in November to go see Rush in concert. And one of my favorite songs by them is Limelight, which uses that exact quote in it. Oh, really? Wait, Rush is still in concert playing? That's impressive. Yes, they brought in a new female drummer who is absolutely killing it. I can't imagine trying to replace Neil Priart, but she's doing it.

38:43Angela Duckworth:That's great. I have no music aficionado, but sometimes I'm like, what? They're still on tour? They're still alive? Amazing. Well, enjoy the concert in November. I will not be with you, but I will be with you in spirit. Angela, I can't talk to you and not bring up service academies, given your work around West Point. And one of West Point's most famous graduates is General Stan McChrystal. And I spent a good deal of time studying Stan, and I had the opportunity to interview him. And in my first book, I wrote about something that I call the gardener, like your gardening model of leadership. the idea that leaders don't manufacture growth so much as cultivate the conditions that allow them to emerge.

39:27And as I was reading Situated, it made me think, are great leaders less like architects imposing structure? And are they more like gardeners designing environments where people can flourish?

39:40Angela Duckworth:I couldn't more enthusiastically endorse gardening and the gardener as a metaphor. And John, I'll have you know that I know you have a copy of the book and you know how it's got arrows on the, it's like, oh, you're getting where you want to go. There was an alternative cover that had a plant on it. It was just like, because what you want to be is a plant that is being taken care of by a great gardener. To be with a great leader, and I don't know General McChrystal, but I'm a huge admirer, and I've actually read some of his writing, and I just, I got to write him a fan letter someday, because I practically shout out with enthusiastic agreement with so much that he says.

40:15Angela Duckworth:I think that the leader is a gardener because there are people who come under your leadership and you don't get to control their genetics. You don't get to control their past. You have the opportunity though, to plant them in really rich soil and to expose them to sunlight and to water them. I think that idea that this is not like architecture where it's like, this wall is definitely going to go here. But more, if I fertilize, if I provide some, let's see what this person can be. It's a lot more open-ended. And I know you have a great respect for autonomy of individuals. That, I think, honors their autonomy, right?

40:54Angela Duckworth:You're not saying that your job as someone who follows me is to be what I specify in complete detail, but more that it's my job to help you be the best version of yourself that you can be. So I'm going to ask a follow-on Academy question. So the last time you and I spoke to remind the audience and to remind you, I mentioned to you that I happened to be at the Academy when we had the largest cheating scandal in the Academy's history. And not only was I there a part of it, I was one of the top five or six people on the Honor Brigade Board who were administering the whole court cases that were going against the individuals involved.

41:35And I wanted to ask you, because here you have a situation where it involves a double electrical engineering course. It happened to be the final for the midterm. And you had what ended up being about 400 individuals from that class who ended up cheating on this test. If you were analyzing this event today through the lens of situated, how much responsibility do you think belongs to individual character? And I know you study self-control a lot, intentionality. How much belongs the environment that normalized certain behaviors that allowed the cheating to begin with?

42:14Angela Duckworth:You're asking me a straightforward question, John, and I want to give you a straightforward answer, but I also really want to be complete because it's zero to 100%, right? How much is the individual responsible? How much is it character, right? And how much is it in the situation? 70-30, 50-50? You tell me, Angela, right? That's a very common question, I think. Like how much is the person and how much is the situation? I don't want to answer that question. It's not because I'm running for office. It's because it's a lot more complicated. First, I'll say that when a person cheats, I think they should take 100 % responsibility.

42:49Angela Duckworth:I have two daughters. And if they ever come home and say, well, I had to lie because I'm like, I don't want to hear the because lying is wrong. I don't care whether you're trying to get a lease approved or try to get a promotion lying is wrong and it will always be wrong. And I think if a person cheats, even if there are 399 people who are cheating alongside with you, it doesn't make it any less wrong. So that's the first thing is I think individuals should take 100 % responsibility for their ethical behavior and misbehavior. That doesn't make me a saint. It just makes me clear about what I think is right and wrong.

43:26Angela Duckworth:Second, when 400 cadets are cheating, you have to ask the question, are we putting cadets into a situation where it is easier to cheat. And despite the fact that they should take a hundred percent responsibility, could we put them in a situation where that's less likely or less easy? Think about dieting, right? If you overeat, then the only person who overate is you. Nobody is tying you down, putting food in your mouth. But if you are like at a baseball game or a children's birthday party, it's really hard to eat well, right? What are you going to eat? Where are the vegetables, right? Where's the protein?

44:03Angela Duckworth:So I do think we should acknowledge that people are a hundred percent responsible for their behavior and the situation is enormously powerful. 400 cadets cheating has to point a finger at a situation that needs fixing. So hopefully both and doesn't sound like I'm running for office and I want it both ways, but I do think the person is paramount. The situation is more powerful than anybody can really imagine. And the way out of all this is if you're a leader at West Point, you do two things. You remind the young women and men at West Point that they duty on our country, right? That they are part of the long gray line and they are responsible.

44:47Angela Duckworth:The second thing you do is you try to find a way that situation doesn't happen. And one of the things that the psychology research on dishonesty clearly shows is that when it is frictionless, when it is the norm, absolutely more people are going to cheat. Not everyone, but more. So put in friction and don't make it the norm. In my class, John, I start every class with a quiz. So I have solved the attendance problem by saying that you can come whenever you want, but there's going to be a seven minute quiz at the beginning of the class. So show up whenever you want, but it's over in seven minutes and I'm collecting the hard copies.

45:23Angela Duckworth:And though I honor my students by assuming their honesty, I also make it easier for them not to cheat. How do I do that? I make it easier because there are four forms of the quiz. So you have form A, B, C, or D. There's only a 25 % chance that the person whose paper you're looking at is your form. That's better odds to just look at your own paper. I also make it easier for them. I say, I'm going to make it easy for you. I'm going to walk around the room because gosh, I'm so glad to have you here. I'm going to walk around the room for seven minutes. I got to get my steps in. I'm going to just be with you.

45:54Angela Duckworth:And now they've got a professor walking around the room. They've got a hard copy quiz that they really can't easily cheat on and their eyes are on their paper. So it is the person and it is the situation. Thank you for answering it. I look back and I think from my own personal experience being there, I think a lot of it has to do with the tiny environmental frictions that existed at the time. Can you tell me more about them? Yeah, because I'm just curious, because that was a scandal that so many people heard of because it was so huge. So this is electrical engineering, if you've never taken it, is one of those concepts that you either get or you fundamentally don't.

46:32And if you're at a surface academy, you don't have the luxury of being able to go to a fifth or a sixth year. You have to graduate with 160 credits. When I was there, my lowest number of classes I was ever taking was like 21 credits. So junior year, it's even worse. I'm taking probably 24, 25 credits. In addition to that, I'm division one athlete. You have military bearing that you're responsible for. You're doing training. You've got all these distractions, temptations, interruptions, and what I think are hidden taxes that are placed upon you. And you know that if you don't do well in this course, you're either going to fail it, and then you're going to have to go to summer school and repeat this when you've got all these other things on you.

47:22Angela Duckworth:Yeah, you have other things going on, right. And so I think there's so much pressure on it and they throw it at you during an extremely difficult semester or year because it's the most pivotal one for your whatever major you're doing that a lot of people are just trying to find an easy way to get through it because of the amount of pressure that's thrown at you. It's not right, but I do think that friction in some ways is causing it. There's a philosopher, I think he's more of a philosopher than a psychologist named Christian Miller, who studies character. He's at Wake Forest University, if I'm not mistaken.

48:02Angela Duckworth:And maybe you've interviewed him. He's great. You should have him on the show. Have you had him, Christian Miller? I haven't, but I will definitely look him up. He's really brilliant. And he's thought a lot about honesty and character. And I read his book on character. And the part that's jumping to mind right now is that he ends with prescriptions. It's like, how do we have more character? Because that's a goal for people personally, as parents, as leaders. And he does say, let's put people in situations that are amenable to character. If you're a gardener, how do you cultivate an environment where honesty is not only the norm, but just possible.

48:40Angela Duckworth:And I know that a lot of young people today, when they say, oh, I was under so much pressure, I needed to cheat. Just talked to a young woman. She's 22 years old. She just graduated. And her professor said, don't use AI. And then she did and asked if she ever told her professor, she said no. And to me, that's cheating. That's cheating. I can't tell that young woman that I think it's right. I have to say it's wrong. And we do need to examine the situation. So both and like it's wrong. And how can we make people not feel like they're under that much pressure? What you described, I think is a lot more pressure, frankly, than most young people are actually objectively under, but still Christian Miller is right.

49:24Angela Duckworth:Let's create character conducive situations. And I think that's a concept that I don't know how popular this will be about the book, but I end the book about situational responsibility. And that's where I address leaders and parents and so forth, because we have a responsibility to create situations for other people that are the best. We are all gardeners if we are parents or leaders. You're absolutely correct. You and I have talked a lot about mattering, but can someone matter to an organization, a family, or a community, and still feel fundamentally insignificant within it based on your work?

50:03Angela Duckworth:I'm sure there's a lot behind that question. I may not be interpreting it in its full sense. I think if you feel like you matter, then you do feel significant because almost by definition, I feel like mattering is feeling significant. My favorite definition of purpose or mattering is to feel that you are part of and in service to something larger than yourself. that doesn't mean feeling like you're the head of the thing or you're the most attractive or smartest part of the thing just part of the thing and in service to it and I don't know I think it be very small I feel it every day if I do something really small I felt like my mother's daughter the security guard in my building whose name is Pete and it's just like amazing and everyone loves Pete and I love Pete and when he said hi to me because he says hi to everyone I noticed that he sounded a little horse.

50:59Angela Duckworth:And I was like, Pete, what you got going on there? And he was like, oh, getting a cold. And I said, mint tea with honey. And he was like, yeah. And I was like, they have it on the eighth floor. He was like, okay. So I was on the eighth floor later and I was making myself a tea. And I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna make a second tea and put some honey in it. Cause that's what my mother would do. And I went down to the first floor instead of mine, which is the fifth floor. And I just brought him the tea. And I don't even think Pete likes mint tea with honey, but I felt like I mattered. How does that matter in the school of Wharton that one guy has a cup of tea with men and how much does it matter to me or how much do I matter?

51:34Angela Duckworth:It's just a tiny thing. But John, I felt good for the rest of the day because I felt like I was in, I was part of and in service to someone, something that wasn't me. And it was, it was, I really truly feel like my best self when in small ways I can do a good thing. Angela, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm going to put the book up here one more time, Situated. Thank you. And I just wanted to tell the audience, I just did the tip of the iceberg version of this. You really want to read this book because there's so many stories we didn't get to, like with Kurt Lewin, Walter Michelle, the one that I had hoped we'd get to, but we didn't was Roger Barker, but Michael Phelps is in here, Aaron Beck, and we didn't even touch on your three boxes model.

52:23So I would encourage so many of the listeners to read this book. It is very difficult to create a second book as great as it was, but I think you've done it. So congratulations to you and thank you so much for joining me again.

52:38Angela Duckworth:Thank you, John. I'm honored to be a guest here. I'm honored to be a friend of yours. I really appreciate both. I hope that conversation with Angela Duckworth gave you a different way to think about your own potential. We spend so much time asking, how can I become better? But sometimes the more important question is, where can I become better? Because the people we surround ourselves with in the environments we choose don't just influence how we feel, they bring out parts of us that might otherwise remain hidden. And I think that's a powerful place to begin the new series. If today's conversation resonated with you, I'd love to hear your biggest takeaway.

53:17Share it with me on Substack, LinkedIn, or Instagram. And if you know someone who's been working hard but still feels like they're not thriving, send them today's episode. And if you haven't already, be sure to follow PassionStruck on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube so you don't miss what's coming next. Because Thursday, we're continuing the Adaptive Human Series with one of the world's greatest thinkers, Jared Diamond. Jared is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, and his new book, Prophets, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings, asks a deceptively simple question. When do leaders actually matter?

53:54He looks at leadership across history, business, sports, and religion, and explores how much a leader's impact comes from their individual ability and how much comes from the circumstances surrounding them. And that creates a fascinating connection to today's conversation. Angela asked us to look at how our environments shape the person we become. Jared asked, what happens when those environments shape the impact a leader can have? Because leadership doesn't happen in a vacuum. The right person in the wrong circumstances may accomplish very little. The right circumstances can make an extraordinary difference.

54:31I think you're going to love this conversation. If a couple who are about to get married asks, what's the secret of a successful marriage? I know that couple is at risk getting divorced because to have a successful marriage, you've got to get 37 things right. You have to agree about sex and money and children and religion. And if you think that one thing is most important, your marriage is going to end up in disaster. Similarly, if a leader asks, what is the one most important thing? And I would say the one most important thing is to stop looking for the one most important thing, to focus on getting 37 things right.

55:03Until then, remember, you may not be able to control every circumstance you're given, but you can become more intentional about the circumstances you choose. I'm John Miles, and as always, stay curious, stay intentional, and stay passion-struck.

55:28Thank you.