32. Angela Duckworth Explains How to Manage Your Goal Hierarchy

23:34Angela Duckworth:I was going to ask you to analyze yourself there. Isn't that interesting? Somehow I think my identity wasn't tied to being smart, even though I'd always felt smart. And the same thing happened when I got to Chicago. I would sit around the table at lunch and I would look from person to person and I would say, wow, I am clearly the dumbest person at the table. This is awesome. Well, what is your identity tied to if it's not being smart? I think it's tied in some ways to being different, that I just accept myself as being different. And it doesn't bother me that I can't succeed in conventional ways.

24:13What's interesting, you said there's this idea that I may not be good at something, but if I wanted to, I could be good at it. So that's not me at all. So in fact, you talked about nonparametric econometrics. And another strange experience I had was in my second year of grad school, a professor named Whitney Newey taught nonparametric econometrics. and I honestly did not understand a word of the entire class. It was completely beyond me. I thought, wow, I've heard other people say this before and now I'm experiencing it. And it was exciting to experience it. It didn't bother me. I have this limit and I'm just going to stay as far away from this particular thing as possible.

24:51Interesting. And a couple of times I've needed it in my professional life. And I said, well, I'm not going to waste one minute thinking about that because that is beyond me. And so I'm going to call in one of the hundred people I know who's great at that and they're going to do it for me.

25:14On a scale from zero to 10, how would you rate your self-esteem?

25:19Angela Duckworth:10 being the highest. Self-esteem? Probably like a nine or a 10. I mean, I know I'm not very attractive and I know that I have a lisp and I'm not that good an athlete, whatever. But I'm really comfortable, by and large, with my limitations. I know a lot of people have this negative self-talk in their head where there's this monkey sitting on their shoulder telling them they're not good enough. But the monkey that sits on my shoulder chats with me about the world. What does a monkey on your shoulder say? I think my monkey would be like, hi, you're great. I think self-esteem has gone out of fashion.

25:53Angela Duckworth:Since you say that you don't know a lot about psychology, I will just give you Self-Esteem 101, like a brief history of self-esteem. Self-esteem is the idea of liking yourself or holding yourself in high regard. And even though there's self-esteem, which suggests it's about how you esteem yourself, there is built into the idea of self-esteem how you believe others regard you. That's largely because we're social creatures. We exist in hierarchies in society. And so it is a spontaneous appraisal of how you think you're doing and how you think other people think you're doing. And the reason why self-esteem went in and out of vogue, I think, is that there was a time in the mid-20th century or it was like the 1960s where everyone thought, oh my gosh, self-esteem is how we should raise our children.

26:42Angela Duckworth:and the name of the game of good parenting is to increase the self-esteem of your daughters and sons. And then what happened is that this whole idea of self-esteem went out of vogue, largely, I think, because there was work led by Roy Baumeister, who I'll just tell you, Steve is a very famous psychologist, but you probably have heard of him. No, I haven't. You haven't heard of Roy Baumeister? Oh my God. Roy Baumeister had this paper about how when you look at all these correlational studies of self-esteem and good outcomes, high grades, job performance, not being depressed, all of the positive things that self-esteem had been correlated with.

27:23Angela Duckworth:He said, we've got the causal arrow wrong. I mean, economists would have stood up and cheered. He said, you know, really, if you carefully look at these studies, there's not a shred of evidence that self-esteem causes these outcomes. So then it went out of vogue. But very recently, another eminent psychologist, I basically only hang out with like really eminent people in their 90s. So Tim Beck, who is the creator of psychotherapy, modern cognitive therapy anyway, he is going to be 100 this summer. And I asked him recently, what is your grand theory? And he said, I actually have one. I'm like working on my magnum opus right now, as he put it.

27:58Angela Duckworth:And he literally said, this is my E equals MC squared. He said, the fundamental drive of what all people want and what gets us far in life, but also gets us into trouble is the need for self-esteem. And he said, I know that's really out of fashion, but I think when you have sadness, it is because you perceive a loss of self-esteem. When you have anxiety, you worry that your self-esteem is going to go down in the future. When you're angry, it's because you feel like somebody has threatened your self-esteem. And when you have happiness and joy is when you have an increase in your self-esteem. After this short break, Angela and I will return to talk about self-esteem and raising kids.

28:38Angela Duckworth:Make a kid feel like they're loved unconditionally, but also that part of life is to challenge themselves and to try to do better.

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30:01Angela Duckworth:Join me, Cindy Lauper, with Chef Michelle Bernstein and Dr. Panico to talk about psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis, the potential connection and risk of developing permanent joint damage. Cosentix Secukinumab is prescribed for adults with moderate to severe plaque psoriasis 300 milligram dose and adults with active psoriatic arthritis 150 milligram dose. Don't use if you're allergic to Cosentix. Before starting, get checked for tuberculosis. An increased risk of infections and lowered ability to fight them may occur, like tuberculosis or other serious bacterial, fungal, or viral infections. Some are fatal.

30:39Tell your doctor if you have an infection or symptoms like fevers, sweats, chills, muscle aches, or cough, had a vaccine or planned to, or if inflammatory bowel disease symptoms develop or worsen. Serious allergic reactions and severe eczema-like skin reactions may occur. Learn more at 1-844-COSENTIX or cosentix.com slash cindy.

31:22Angela Duckworth:Then schedule a pickup right from your home or office. For a limited time, go to stamps.com and use code podcast for a free welcome gift. Taxes and fees apply.

31:35So today's listener question comes from John. And John writes, I'm wondering if there's someone you admire mostly that you are interested in talking to, but also nervous or scared to talk to in some way. And the answer to that question, John, is not so much, because there are really only two things that make me really nervous. And the first one is being unprepared. And the second one is pretending to be someone or something that I'm really not. And the great thing about this podcast is that I can prepare as much as I want. And number two, I'm always completely myself on the interview. I never pretend to be anything that I'm not.

32:17Now, that being said, sometimes when I'm being interviewed, I can be extremely nervous. And in particular, when I went on the Colbert Report with Stephen Colbert, I was beside myself with nerves. Because, first of all, there's no way to prepare because who knows what he's going to say or do. And second of all, I couldn't really see how I would be myself. because that character he played on The Colbert Report was just so weird that I felt like I had to be weird or different too. And I was just completely lost. Well, it turns out I was right to be nervous. I sat down at the table with him and the camera started to roll and there was a stack of index cards in front of him that his producer had prepared.

33:00Questions about my book. And he asked me the first question and I answered it. Okay. And then he took that stack of index cards and he just pushed them aside. and he started asking me completely bizarre questions that I had no idea how to answer. So I remember the first one was about birth order. Did it matter whether you were the first or the second sibling born? I didn't know anything about that. So I babbled something and it just went from bad to worse. By the end, he was asking me questions and I honestly had no idea what he was even talking about. It was so bad that as I walked off the stage, the producer pulled me aside and said, I'm really sorry that went so badly.

33:39and it wasn't your fault. And I said, no, I'm sure it was my fault. I did terribly. And we all just tried to forget it as quickly as possible. And I never got invited back to be on The Colbert Report ever again. Now, going back to your question, John, let me be honest. There's one person who I actually might be a little bit nervous interviewing, and that's Taylor Swift, because I admire her so much. I love her music. and I think what she's done to challenge the music industry is also so fascinating. So thank you, John, for that question. And if you'd like to hear your question answered on the show, send me an email.

34:16Send it to pima at freakonomics.com. That's P-I-M-A at freakonomics.com.

34:32do you remember the prediction i made before the interview that it wouldn't take long before angela started interviewing me i would say i called that one perfectly so one thing i find really special about angela is that when i talk to her about regular everyday stuff she almost always manages to say things that sound simple and obvious but somehow had never occurred to me It's bizarre how often I've left conversations with her thinking about the world differently. So in the time we have left, I'm just going to ask her some questions that I really care about, like how to raise happy kids and whether being gritty gets in the way of being happy to see if she can work her magic.

35:12So I have all these kids. That's six of them. And I want them to grow up happy and I want them to secondarily to achieve. But most importantly, I want them to be happy and content and inquisitive. So does any of this give us a guide to how parents should raise their children?

35:30Angela Duckworth:I do think that the idea that you should raise your kids to feel that they are worthwhile, I mean, to have high self-esteem in the sense that I am a worthwhile person, worthy of my own admiration and the admiration of others, I think that is a good idea, but there's a semicolon in the sentence, right? I think that kids should not be raised to think that you can have high self-esteem and be dishonest or sit around all day eating Cheetos and not do anything productive and useful. I think the thing that parents need to do is both give kids a sense of unconditional love. I will love you no matter what.

36:10Angela Duckworth:And therefore, you have this foundation on which to build your self-esteem and your life, but also to feel like that part of their existence has to be based on their merits. For lack of a better word, my daughters are only two, so I have a third the number of children that you do. But they're both actually incredibly hardworking. I wondered how it was that they turned out that way. They woke up before dawn most days of high school without me telling them to. Like, I was busy doing my own work. And I don't think it's because they're insecure in that they don't think mom loves them or dad loves them.

36:44Angela Duckworth:But I think they have a sense that part of life is to do things well. I had a similar experience with my daughter, Lily. She was maybe 13 years old. And it was after midnight. I saw the light was still on in her room. and I said, Lily, what are you doing? She said, well, I have to finish my Chinese homework. And I said, no, you don't. You're 13 years old. No one cares about whether you do your Chinese homework. It doesn't even matter. Sleep's important. You don't have to be so intense. She said, dad, there's nothing more important than doing my homework. And I said, okay. And I stepped back and I thought, wow, that is weird because that is honestly not a trait I ever tried to build into my kids.

37:28Angela Duckworth:Not explicitly, right? You weren't like, I'm going to make them feel like work is the most important thing. And what was so interesting about it is that it actually had a transformational effect on what I was doing research-wise. Because at that time, we had started preschool, John Liston, Roland Fryer, and I. And we also had started something called the Parent Academy, where we were bringing in parents of young children, and we had been training them to be lifetime teachers of their kids, so how to teach them math and how to teach them reading. And it suddenly occurred to me that actually what we really wanted to teach these parents is whatever it was that got instilled in my daughter, Lily, she had just internalized the idea that...

38:11You modeled it then. Exactly. If we were going to try to teach parents something, it should be how do you model behaviors that your kids can follow. That really framed my view of the world, which is that I'm not sure what you say to your kids matters very much. I think at some fundamental level, it's what you model 24 hours a day in your own behavior. So I think what my kids saw was they saw me willing to get up at five in the morning to go to the golf course to practice doing the same thing over and over. And that somehow instilled in them the idea that even though it it was golf, which seems stupid, that hard work and diligence paid off.

38:51Angela Duckworth:Let's not forget, by the way, you were also modeling your work as an economist. Yes, you were devoted to golf, but... Yeah, I was pretty lazy about academics by the time the kids came around, to be honest. Really? Oh, wow. I think I didn't model as well as I probably should have. Okay. It seems to me that this modeling part you can't really fake because it's 24 hours a day and it's who you are. Do you actually think there are things you can actively do other than who you are as a parent that will help kids? Yeah. Bandura, remember the Stanford guy, 90s? I do. I do remember that. Okay. So that was a huge part of his research.

39:30Angela Duckworth:So when he talked about self-efficacy, et cetera, he also relatedly was talking about modeling. When you have a mom or a dad who wakes up in find the morning works on their golf stroke or persists through a problem for months and then make some inroads, that is increasing the self-efficacy of the child watching because you've shown what's possible. You may not have even dreamt it before, but then you saw somebody do it. So most of the great teachers that I have studied are great models, and they're quite explicit about telling the students like, oh, by the way, the moral of the story here while we persisted through this very difficult math problem is that there are a lot of things in life that are hard and you're going to feel discouraged when you first try them and you're going to feel stupid.

40:17Angela Duckworth:And what we did here together is we showed persistence or grit. And then I will say also make a kid feel like they're loved unconditionally, but also that part of life is to challenge themselves and to try to do better, to become more honest, more kind, more empathic, more skilled. I mean, you could boil that down to supportive and demanding. And there's a lot of research, decades of it, showing that parents who can say to their kids or show to their kids, you are supported unconditionally. You have a firm foundation on which to build your self-esteem, but also demanding, right? Like, I'm going to give you things that you can't yet do, and I'm going to give you that work ethic, probably through modeling and explicit speeches and sermons.

41:01Angela Duckworth:I think that's the recipe for good parenting.

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42:50so look it's obvious that grittiness is associated with achievement i'm not sure it's highly correlated with happiness and here's what i mean so obviously when you're gritty about something when you're really obsessed in pursuing it there's enormous joy that comes from that task But what I found in my own life is that when I'm engaged in that kind of behavior, the rest of my life becomes a burden. So I find this tension where I'm often happiest in a time when I'm very present, where whatever I'm doing is good enough. Whereas when I'm super motivated by something else, I'm not that happy because every moment I'm not doing it, I'm like, why am I not doing that?

43:33And it gets in the way of living life. Have you experienced anything like that?

43:35Angela Duckworth:I think happiness is the feeling of pursuing goals that are intrinsically rewarding. The goals themselves are inherently interesting and aligned with my core personal values, right? They're fully owned by me. I'm pursuing them and I'm making some progress. I think that is happiness. Unhappiness is, I think, a goal conflict. Hey, I want to do this, but oh my gosh, I have this other goal. It's also really important to me and I can't do both at once. For example, I want to be on vacation with my kids in Florida, but I also want to like finish this manuscript that I've been working on. Goal conflict, I think, is one way to be unhappy.

44:17Angela Duckworth:You feel this ripping apart psychologically and it's incredibly corrosive and aversive. I love that. Okay, goal conflict. I've never heard of that concept before. So what do you do about it? Sometimes you reflect and you're like, you know what, this other thing, it kind of evaporates. And then that is one easy way to disfake a conflict. But I think more often than not, the goals are real. I have a goal to spend time with my 17-year-old before she ships off to college and I become an empty nester. But I also have the goal to do all these things professionally. Like I want to actually create a unifying theory of behavior change.

44:50Angela Duckworth:But I can't have breakfast with Lucy, but also work on my unifying theory of behavior change at the very same time. So I think there are some insoluble goal conflicts, but I do think that reflection allows you at least to sequence things, right? I can say to myself, I've got these two important goals. They are mutually exclusive, but I've decided I'm going to have breakfast with my daughter and spend a good 45 minutes making avocado toast. And then I'm going to switch over into work mode. And I think it doesn't make the goal conflict evaporate, but it does allow you to at least align your daily activities in ways that you know you're doing the best you can.

45:31Angela Duckworth:And I think the reason why goal conflict can be especially corrosive in the absence of reflection is that you never get to this revelation that you can't do everything and you're constantly laboring in this illusion that you can do all possible things which you can't. I really like that because the only thing I've learned about parenting is that I cannot parent and do anything else. At the same time. Which is what I mostly try to do anyway, even though I know I shouldn't do it. I think I could probably read this book at the same time that I watch my kids. I could think through this theorem while also singing this lullaby.

46:07But I love the words you use for the sequencing. When I'm being a parent, I have to be a parent. And when I'm not being a parent, I shouldn't be a parent. Like, it's so obvious, and I've understood it, but I think that's going to help me in my everyday life. That was really useful.

46:21Angela Duckworth:And you said you liked to be present. That hints of mindfulness, right? The experience of being present or mindful, I think, is the very absence of goal conflict. You're not in two places motivationally and mentally. You're in one place. And because you have reflected in advance, you know that there's going to be a time where you're going to shift into the next thing. But you do it sequentially. So this life that we lead with 168 hours a week, whether you're a mere mortal or somebody who's like really accomplished, you get the same 168 hours. I think the idea of pursuing goals that are upon reflection, the ones you fully want to own, and then doing things sequentially when needed.

47:05Angela Duckworth:To me, that's why achievement and happiness are not necessarily intention, right? And when I look at really unhappy people, it's actually something about either goal conflict that hasn't been resolved and hasn't been reflected upon, or they just don't have any goals at all that they're pursuing. And that is its own special torture. So I think there is the pursuit of happiness, but really I think happiness is in the pursuit.

47:40Angela Duckworth:did i convert you though because earlier you said that you're like oh i don't know maybe i'm not like you i don't really pursue goals and i just do things i like no i pursue goals the goals i pursue are not part of some bigger like scheme no five-year plan scheme of like making the world better. So I am trying to make the world better at risk in my U of C center, but it's not because I have this burning desire. It's because I thought, well, what's really fun are problems. And I tried consulting and I didn't like the way that problems came up there. And I tried academics and I didn't really like the way problems got solved there.

48:18Maybe if I can find this do-gooder space, I'll have the opportunity to tackle really interesting, hard problems in a way that I can't otherwise, because I have this basic view of the world that in doing social good, all of the easy problems have been solved. And so the only ones that are left over are the really hard ones.

48:37Angela Duckworth:So like social change is just the Sunday crossword puzzle to you? You're like, oh, this will be more fun and challenging. And as a byproduct, lives will be saved and children will grow up to be their best selves. Really? I think one of the misunderstandings of grit is like the sound of the word is like you grit your teeth. But really, I think it is about pursuing things that are things you like to do. And I do enjoy what I do. I mean, today I woke up, it was before dawn. And my first thought was, I'm going to read that paper on self-control strategies and experience sampling method that I didn't get to finish last night.

49:15Angela Duckworth:I can't wait. I enjoy what I do. I don't find it drudgery, but my elevated sense of self-worth, and I'm sure it's the vanity of itself is like, oh, and it will help kids do better if I figure out what this paper said. But you have all the opportunities in the world. You can do whatever you want. I'm surprised you still read these papers. I'm surprised you're still willing to do this log. Why do you not read papers? Papers are great. I know, but you have the ability to reach audiences and to compel people through your amazing speaking abilities and your writing abilities. I'm just surprised that you still find an attraction in the details.

49:56Angela Duckworth:Do you not? Really? Not in the details of academics. I want to live in a space of ideas, and strangely, academics turns out not to be the best space to pursue ideas, is my own experience. When I wrote Grit, I thought to myself, well, I guess I'll just try to explain without jargon things that psychological scientists would be able to appreciate with jargon. But I have to say, it was the most intellectually challenging thing I had done because I had to put things together without the artifice of jargon. Also, I had to put everything together because the naive reader actually has a much higher intellectual standard than a reviewer for a paper because they want to know how this makes common sense.

50:35Angela Duckworth:It was an intellectually heroic act relative to anything else I had done. So I don't want to disagree with you there, but I continue to read papers because I think that for me, there is definitely some value in the empirical work of scientists who publish a paper that has an insight that I wouldn't have been able to figure out on my own or through reason or just by reading poetry.

51:08I'm not sure you know this about yourself, Angela, but everybody loves you. And I can barely have a conversation with someone either in the education space or the behavioral economic space without someone expressing adoration for you and not just for your work, but you personally. Why do you think people love you so much?

51:31Angela Duckworth:Well, first of all, that's very nice. I will say this. sometimes I meet people, and this is rare, but you know those people where you're like, they are so great. They're so nice. I can name a few people, but they're all psychologists, so you'll be like, who? But I remember thinking to myself at some point earlier in my career, I want to be that person who's like, oh, just a fantastic human being, so kind, so generous, so uplifting. And I'm not saying I am those things, but I really explicitly aspire to that. And the worst thing is to be a jerk. I want to be my mother's daughter. If you ever meet my mom, she is the nicest human being.

52:12Angela Duckworth:I would love to live a life where I'm not only my father's daughter, but my mother's daughter too. I think you're doing a really good job at that, to be honest. Because the first time we really met, so I sat in your seminar, but we didn't really talk. But the first time we really met was when you came out to Chicago with Stephen Dubner to tape an interview for us on some anniversary of Freaking Island. Oh, yeah. I think it's the reissuing of Freakonomics. Yeah, exactly. So I will say I was primed not to like you. I expected to hate you. I wanted to not like you. Why? Because I don't really like psychology that much.

52:47Angela Duckworth:Because you've been hanging out at University of Chicago Economics for decades. It seeped into you. But I have to say that within 10 minutes of meeting you, I was just like everyone else. I loved you. And I couldn't get enough of Angela. Oh, my God. how can we make Angela part of Freakonomics? So I think you're doing a really good job at that. Well, here's the two-part recipe. We moved to houses in third grade, and I had to make all new friends in the middle of the school year. Very traumatic. And my mom taught me that if you like yourself, and if you genuinely like the other person, then they will automatically like you back.

53:28Angela Duckworth:And I do like myself and love it. I like you. So no surprise you like me back. Talking with Angela got me thinking about my early days at the University of Chicago Department of Economics. Everybody thought I was crazy to go there at the time, but it's hard to argue looking back that things could have turned out much better for me. I don't often talk about this, but there was one thing that particularly attracted me to Chicago, and it was the fact that the old professors, the ones in their 70s, 80s, even their 90s, were still passionate about academics. Just like the psychologists that Angela was mentioning today, who all seemed to be in their 80s and 90s.

54:09In contrast, the older faculty at Harvard and MIT, they were mostly distracted by other things, advising governments, working with companies, or, God forbid, enjoying their leisure time. I really wanted to be the kind of person who loved academics so much that I did it into my 80s. And I thought surrounding myself with those types of people would make that happen. Well, like so many things I believed about myself and about the world in my 20s, that turned out completely wrong. Pure academics was a terrible fit for me. I found that the real world was much more fun. And it took a long time, decades, to admit that to myself when it probably should have been obvious much earlier.

54:45If only Angela had explained goal hierarchies to me 20 years ago, I might have saved myself so much time.

55:03Angela Duckworth:People I mostly admire is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network and is produced by Freakonomics Radio. Morgan Levy is our producer and Dan DeZula is the engineer. All of the music you heard on this show was composed by Luis Guerra. We can be reached at pima at Freakonomics.com. That's P-I-M-A at Freakonomics.com. Thanks for listening.

55:31Angela Duckworth:We have to have like a meta conversation about like podcasting. I'm actually really enjoying it. A scale from zero to 10. I'm like, dude, it's like nine. Pretty good. It's like avocado toast.

55:45Angela Duckworth:The Freakonomics Radio Network. The hidden side of everything.

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