Stop Doing Things the Hard Way with Dr. Angela Duckworth

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27:25It's the way insurance should be. Amica, we're your priority number one. Visit amica.com and get a quote today. Welcome back to the first episode in our special back-to-school season of The Happiness Lab. I'm chatting with my friend, the psychologist Angela Duckworth about her new book, Situated, Finding the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best. Before the break, Angela and I discussed why willpower is overrated and how we can achieve our goals a little more easily if we learn to take advantage of our situation. But Angela says that embracing this way of thinking isn't always easy in a culture that celebrates working to the point of exhaustion.

28:05I think it's so interesting, you know, the question of do we say to ourselves when we see someone else who is using willpower, you know, frog and toad, just trying not to eat the cookies. When we see that, do we have an admiring view of that person and of their character? Is it even moral to us that that person is willing themselves not to? And does it seem, by contrast, a little bit like cheating to put the cookies on the grass and let the birds take them? Or is it a little bit cheating to install an app on your phone that prevents you from going on Instagram, you know, between the hours of nine and five.

28:45Like, is it morally better to do it the hard way? The answer, by the way, is yes. Like, it does seem to people morally elevated or admirable a sign of character to just force yourself as opposed to using the situation to advantage. You know, so many statues, movies, theme songs are really about the triumph of the individual against their situation. I think there is this valorization of doing things the hard way of grimacing, white knuckled. I don't know. This is beyond data, Lori, but I'm like, oh, they're so male. Definitely some guy was like, oh, you know, we want the hero to look like this.

29:25But to me, it's so much smarter to do the graceful move of making the whole darn project easier. Like, why is it heroic to white knuckle your way through difficulty? Isn't it just as noble to use your situation to advantage? So I think if we can get away from macho ideas of, you know, the only way to become fit, to eat right, to like live a productive life is to have a life of strain or just do it and say, look, let's be smart about this. How can I make this easier? It's not that you're not doing hard things. It's that you're making hard things easier for yourself to do. So that's one thing that I think we get wrong when we take the macho approach, right?

30:13We like people who do things through willpower alone. But I think we also like people who achieve their goals just alone, period. You know, especially in the individualist culture that we're in. Especially in the United States, I was going to say. Yeah. Yeah, especially in the United States, right? And so have you noticed some examples of this where it's like we just assume that the way you achieve your goal doesn't involve other people? It's sort of character building to just go at it by yourself. I mean, I notice this even in my own narrative, right? Like, oh, did you have somebody help you write Grit?

30:44And I don't even let the person finish the question. I'm like, no, I wrote it myself. I didn't have a book coach. I didn't have a consultant. And I will tell you with the second book that this was a book written by one scientist with a huge pit crew. I mean, I had multiple editors. I had multiple consultants. I had friends like you who gave me very helpful advice. I had a husband who poured over every page and gave me all kinds of ideas and feedback. My daughters read the book and made line edits. I mean, my editor at one point said, you know, this book isn't crowdsourced. It's mob sourced. He was like, who are all these people in the Google Doc?

31:29They're like 45 of them. And I was like, well, I'm just getting a little help from my friends. And doing things DIY does have some appeal, right? Like because you get 100 percent of the credit. You don't have to divide the pie. But in my older age, Laurie, I think it is something that I'm increasingly very happily embracing. If I can produce a better book because I had multiple editors, consultants, friends, and the like, you know, help me, then awesome. So those are some of the misconceptions that we have about why we shouldn't be using the situation, right? We kind of moralize willpower. We moralize doing stuff on our own.

32:07But I think there's another misconception about the situation that leads people not to realize its value. It's just the idea that we assume the situation can't be changed, that we're kind of stuck with it. When there's cultural wisdom about the situation, it's like, well, you got to radically accept what's going on. We have that serenity prayer. But you've pushed for this alternative serenity prayer that you talk about in your book. Do you want to share that with us? You know, serenity prayer was written by Reinhold Niebuhr, who was a Protestant minister. And he was very active during World War II, advocating really for the United States to take a more active role in what then later became widely known as atrocities against humankind with what the Germans were doing.

32:50And he was trying to kind of, I think, rouse the American public into an awareness that, no, no, no, we should not be hanging out on the sidelines. You know, we're an ocean away, but we need to take action. And he wrote this prayer that has taken different forms because, for example, Alcoholics Anonymous hasn't really embraced it. But the prayer, widely known as the Serenity Prayer, goes like this. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. But what to me was so interesting about the historical context of this prayer is that he wrote that prayer very much as a call to action, right?

33:34You should know when it is time to have courage to change the things you can. And of course, you know, you should have the serenity to accept the things that you can't change. Okay, great. I think for the situation, people assume that you should have serenity about the situation because, you know, you can't change your zip code. You can't change your family. You can't change your boss who you hate. Make the best of it. Change what's inside. Change your attitude. Change your mindset. Be an optimist. And I don't think that's what Reinhold Niebuhr wanted. And I say that in part because I researched this prayer and then what his daughter, Elizabeth Sifton, wrote about what her father meant.

34:13And it was very clearly the opposite, that he wanted us to take the situation into our own hands, that the situation of the Jews in Germany was unacceptable and that we needed to change it. Another person who is sometimes miscredited with saying, well, you can only change what's inside you, but you can't change your situation, is Viktor Frankl. Viktor Frankl wrote Man's Search for Meaning, of course, about his experience in the camps, including Auschwitz, during World War II. And he survived, but his wife and his parents did not. And he indeed writes about how there are times in life when the only thing you can do is to change what's inside your head.

34:53Because if you are in a concentration camp, you can't just decide to walk out. You can change very little. But in Man's Search for Meaning, he says that it would be masochistic to suffer through a situation that you can change. And if you can change the situation, that is the first and most important thing to do. So when I think of changing the things that we can, controlling the controllables, as a lot of athletic coaches like to say, I think that does include the situation. You can choose where to put your phone. You can choose the people that you spend more time with. You can change, in many cases, the zip code that you live in or at least the block in that zip code where you live.

35:34You can change where your desk is at work. You can change, in many cases, whom you work for. So it is, to me, an element of agency to change your situation. It's not only internal mental work. And so now that we figured out that we should be changing our situation, we can ask the question, how do we do that? And you've argued that agency over your situation requires four different elements. And I want to go through each of these in turn. The first of these is setting up your space. Why is the immediate space around us so critical? Well, I did try to give people an understanding of their situation at four levels, you know, from near to far, from easy to change to hard to change.

36:18But the nearest and the easiest change is your personal space. It turns out that scientists who study space, they define personal space as the three-foot radius around a person. And the easy way to do this is like if you literally put out your arms, that's your personal space. I can't in here because I'm in like my podcast clause. I'm going to rip my green screen. Yeah, you will knock over your microphone. Yeah. So when you get outside, Laurie, you know, it's like the Leonardo da Vinci sketch. It's very important what's in your three-foot radius because that is what you can reach. And I actually think as a psychologist, that's why the objects in your personal space have a disproportionate impact on you.

37:01You can see them. They're in clear focus. And you can reach them without getting up. And that's huge. If you have a bowl of chips in front of you that you are trying to resist and you push it four feet away such that every time you get a chip, you have to get up out of your chair and reach over, I guarantee you, you eat fewer chips than if they are two feet or one feet away. And we know this not just from intuition. There's really good studies in behavioral economics that have found this. Tell me about the hospital cafeteria study. So there was a cafeteria that decided that they would try to get people who are in the cafeteria.

37:38These are typically families of patients, try to get them to eat healthier. And so they thought about different ways to do this. Of course, one way to do it is to pay people to eat healthier. You can incentivize them that way. But they thought they would just change the space in which people were making their food selections. So, for example, when you put water bottles at eye level instead of soda bottles at eye level, And you also put a little basket of water bottles right by the register where while you're standing there, you can simply grab one and put it on your tray. That increases the purchase of water bottles, decreases the purchases of soda.

38:13Same has been found for healthy food. So if you want to eat fruits and vegetables, you should put them on the counter where they are within sight and within reach. if you have to do anything, like, oh, you have to open the package, you have to open up the refrigerator, that friction is going to make it less likely that you will enact that behavior. So you can friction up the things you don't want to do, and you can friction down the things that you do want to do. I love this idea. Even in my little podcast studio right now, I'm using elements of this stuff. Like, I've been trying to hydrate more for various reasons, and so I have this huge glass of water that's right here that just makes it really easy to do.

38:52I'm also doing this in a bad way, which is that I have my phone here. I forgot to leave my phone outside the studio, and it's been weeping while I'm here, and I'm having a really hard time not looking at it. Who's been texting me? Literally, I'm in like a two-foot closet, and I still have the effects of the space around me. Laurie, do you know the brain drain study by Adrian Ward? I do, but please talk about it. So Adrian Ward and his collaborators did a random assignment study where college students, I believe, were all taking an IQ test, and there are three conditions. In one group, the phone is as close as possible.

39:25It's on the desk with you while you're taking the IQ test. The second group is it's in the room, but outside of your reach, so more than three feet away. And then actually, I think it's in their backpack, so it's out of sight and out of reach. And then the final condition is it's in another room. It's in a secure locker outside, so near to far. And the question is, what does your IQ score look like under these three conditions? And the bar graphs are beautiful. I mean, you are your dumbest when your phone is nearest you and you are your smartest when the phone is far away. I've replicated this finding in the field with teenagers.

40:01The farther the phone while they study, the higher their GPA from school records, by the way. That study is my favorite study to share with Yale undergraduates because I'm telling them this and they're, you know, they're very into their grades, the Yale undergraduates. And they have this moment of horror where they're in my class where they look and their phone is like sitting on their desk right near them. They're like, dun, dun, dun. I showed that on the very first day of my class because I don't know about your classroom, but I will say that my classroom is like you walk in and it's like 1980.

40:28So on the first day of class, I teach them the brain drain study. I say this was called the brain drain study by the scientists who ran it because they believe that some of your cognitive bandwidth is drained away while you are paying attention, even in little fits and starts to the phone you're trying to not look at, right? I show them that, and then I say, here's the tech policy for this class. There will be no phones, there will be no tablets, and there will be no laptops. And it begins now, and it ends at the very end of class. And by that, I mean it includes our breaks. So if you need to use any electronic device for any reason, you can step out of the room.

41:13You can do that as often as you need to. But at one hour intervals, my TAs are going to be giving you a point for not having your phone out, for not having a tablet out, and not having a laptop out. And every hour, they'll be checking if you do have one of those devices out, not even that you're using it, just out and visible. You will not get your point. And the reason is that Adrian's other studies show that it's bad to have your own phone and your own screen out. But if you're near someone else, it's actually even worse, like the secondhand smoke of being around somebody else's screen. I will say that there are students who have an accommodation.

41:51You know, they can only take notes on a laptop. They can't take them by hand. I have an answer to that. I employ a full-time note taker. I was like, no problem. I'm going to take notes for every class. So there are no excuses. There are no students in my classes on electronics. So that is the power of our very close by space. It is affecting us more than we think, which raises this interesting question of like, what should we be putting in that very close space? And one of the things you suggest in your book is that we really want in our close space to have the right reminders. Why are reminders so important?

42:23You know, our attention is just whatever is in front of us. You know, we're not that different from dogs and squirrels. It's like, oh, chips, you know, like, oh, phone. So if we know that, then we have to architect our space in a way that reminds us of the things that we do want to have our minds on. And there's a restaurateur I really admire, Will Gadara, who was the restaurateur for Levin Madison Park, and that was deemed the best restaurant in the world. And he's very thoughtful. And when I was interviewing him, he like waved around this kind of like paperweight. And it was engraved with the saying that his father had about being bold and taking risks.

42:59And Will would be able to say that verbatim to you because it's like he doesn't need a reminder of a one sentence thing that his father said. So why did he go to the trouble of keeping this paperweight on his desk? It's the same reason why Toby Cosgrove at Cleveland Clinic had his own paperweight made with his own reminder of, you know, what can be conceived can be achieved. I mean, all of these reminders are there not because we can't remember one sentence, but because we want to have that brought to mind. You know, there are many people who have a religious faith that's part of their identity.

43:35You know, why do we wear the Jewish star or the cross or, you know, for a lot of people, they choose to get tattoos like people have needlepoint pillows with, you know, phrases that they want to remember. It's because human attention is very reactive. So you have to install in your space things that you want to be reminded of. I'll give you an example of a world class achiever that is familiar to many of us. Michael Phelps is not only the most decorated swimmer in history, he's also the most decorated Olympic athlete in history. And one of the salient characteristics of his childhood is that he had a great situation.

44:17He had a terrific mom. I think Debbie Phelps should win the Nobel Prize for being a mom. He had a great coach named Bob Bowman. But talking about fiscal space, Michael, even at age 11, would write down on a piece of paper his goals, Michael's goals and his little 11-year-old boy handwriting, like very specific swim times he was trying to do at the very bottom. He was like, I will do this through perseverance and consistency. It was very cute. But why did he post that near his bed? Well, because Michael and his coach figured out that he needed to be reminded of these goals. I mean, this little boy had the wisdom of Socrates to say, you know what, I'm going to write down what's important to me and I'm going to install it in my personal space so that every day I see it.

45:04And Michael has said that on days that he was discouraged, for example, he would look at that for motivation. And finally, just to give you a little data on this, I did a study, Laurie, with the College Board. So these are the makers of the SAT. We asked thousands of teenagers across the country what they did to practice and study for the SAT. And they kind of filled out a little inventory of all things they did. And the one thing that I remember from that study, because it's so consistent with what Michael did, is the best predictor of all the individual strategies was I write down my study goals concretely and I put it somewhere that I will see it.

45:40So, yeah, I am a big believer in screensavers and stickers for your laptop. And I don't want to tell everybody in America to go out and get a tattoo. But in whatever way you can install reminders to bring your attention back to your values, to your goals, and the things that you want to keep top of mind, it all beats willpower. So, being intentional about our space, check. But that's just the first of Angela's four pillars of situational agency. When we get back from the break, Angela will break down the final three. And I'll also ask her to make a final ruling on what's more powerful, the situation or grit, the trait that Angela has spent her entire career proselytizing.

46:25We'll hear her answer when The Happiness Lab returns in a moment.

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49:11we want to have these reminders in our space of what our goals are we want to friction up and friction down as you mentioned we want things that we don't want to do to feel really hard they have lots of friction we want the things that we want to do to feel really easy to feel really rewarding but that's just setting up our space now we're moving out a little bit beyond just our immediate space to the things that can be in our neighborhood so to speak and one of the biggest ones that you argue that we should harness is the people around us. Why are peers such an important part of the situation?

49:43Well, Lori, I think being friends with you has influenced me, and I am guessing that being friends with me has influenced you. We are peers. We talk. We're very influenced by what the other person thinks is cool or a bad idea. I think that in less obvious ways, our peers influence us. Just on the way over to this conversation, I was talking to a young woman who's 22 years old, and she said, I got caught up in the current, right? So she graduated from college with a lot of other people in applied math, and everybody's going to go into management consulting. You know, you look to your left, you look to your right, and you just swim where everybody else is swimming.

50:22So I think in profound ways, we are influenced by the people around us. One of the people that I interviewed for the book had studied Alcoholics Anonymous for a long time. And this was a professor at Harvard Medical School. And I asked him, why did you end up studying Alcoholics Anonymous? And he said, oh, well, this thing, which costs nothing, right? It's not a patented drug. It's just a group of peers who, in some church basement on folding chairs with a really bad cup of coffee, spend an hour together talking about trying not to drink. it's the number one best treatment, I guess you would call it, for alcoholism.

51:01The power of peers, you know, we are social animals, as Aristotle said. And in some ways, these are kind of obvious things like, oh, yeah, I'm really influenced by my best friend's opinion on like who I should marry. And in other ways that are more subtle, you know, like everybody's going to management consulting, and suddenly I see myself applying for management consulting. And what I would just like to add to this because as we've discussed many times, philosophers talk about the situation being powerful but being something you can't change. You can change your peers. I mean, every parent knows that kids change their peer groups with sometimes astonishing frequency, like who you're hanging out with.

51:38But for me, I think a big change in my life has been to try to be around scientists who I enjoy and who I really admire. When I was first becoming an independent scientist after I had earned my PhD, I was really DIYing all of my research. I was like, okay, well, I had this idea and like, try to do it. And by the way, most of these things were not successful. I'm like, nope, those results were not significant. And it's only been really in the last half of my career where I'm very deliberate about like, I never do a study alone. I always look for the smartest, funnest people to work with. And those people change me.

52:17And when I'm around them, I'm different. And the last thing I'll say about this is like I've been hanging around these economists and these economists are really incredibly organized. Like I thought I was an organized human being, but I have become like 50 percent more organized since hanging out with these. There's a procedure for everything. There's like a file name. There's a system for file names. Those economists are changing me. So I think the power of peers is in a way the positive side of peer pressure. Right. And if we think about it as an opportunity to shape ourselves, to be like the people that we're with by choosing people that we admire, I think that to me is a very profound and overlooked way to develop yourself.

53:02And there's a couple different ways people can affect us, right? One is that we just kind of soak up other people's traits. We can use other people for accountability. You probably don't want to be disorganized in front of all these economist friends. They'll make fun of you. It'll be embarrassing. Yes, they would. But another thing that we do is that we learn from other people. And this is the lovely work of Joe Heinrich and his colleagues. Tell me about that. So Joe Heinrich, the anthropologist at Harvard, you know his work better than I do, but I have been really persuaded by Joe Heinrich and the idea that there is no individual who can be smarter than the group.

53:34Joe Heinrich, as you know, has a very provocative theory of what makes Homo sapiens, the most dominant species on the planet. And it's not that our brains are, what, 20 % bigger? You know the answers. I mean, how much bigger are our brains than chimpanzees? Dude, don't ask me to do like phylogenetics on the fly. A little though, right? I mean, they are bigger. They're bigger. Definitely bigger. Definitely bigger. But they're not 10 times as big. They're not twice as big. So Joe Henrik asked the question, he was like, all right, a chimpanzee cannot build a plane. A chimpanzee hasn't figured out the internet.

54:06No chimpanzee has ever written a poem. They don't do things that we do, even though they're just a little dumber, right? Like, what's going on? And I've been really persuaded by his notion of the collective brain. What makes homo sapiens different is that we learn from each other. We learn through this podcast. We learn from the books that we read that the authors have long been dead. We learn at dinner when somebody says, hey, something really interesting happened to me. Chimpanzees do not learn from each other the way people do. So if we can understand that, we can sort of celebrate the idea that we do things collectively, not individually.

54:41There is no individual who writes a book entirely on their own. There is no pilot who can totally get a plane from point A to point B on their own. So I think it's time to embrace the collective brain. I want to go back to the story of Bob Bowman because we had him on the podcast. We had him Unhappiness Lab a while back. So tell me your story of meeting Bob Bowman and why were you so interested in his approach to behavior change? I stalked Bob Bowman. I even learned how to do Instagram messaging just so I could, you know, connect with him. I had no, you know, personal connection to him, but I wanted to meet the greatest swim coach in history.

55:17I knew that he had coached Michael Phelps and not only that he had coached him when Michael was 11 years old, but also all the way through his retirement at age 32. I knew that Bob Bowman had coached many other Olympians, including Leon Marchand, who was the most decorated athlete in the Paris Games. He won the most individual gold medals. The reason I wanted to meet Bob is that I knew that a world-class coach had to be a world-class mentor. And I define a mentor as someone who is more experienced than you are in some way and caring enough to help you down the path. I read his book, Ten Golden Rules for Success.

55:56And when I read it, I recognized a lot of things that I had studied, you know, a lot of elements of grit. But also there was a very clear statement that his advice, if you want to be great, is to find the people and places that bring out your best. And I wanted to know what it was that Bob thought about the importance of mentorship. What was his experience? And he said to me that Michael Phelps was obviously as talented as they come. That was abundantly obvious from the very first swim practice. It then became clear he was as gritty as they come, right? As Bob is quick to point out, Michael didn't miss a practice, I think, for like 10 consecutive years and hardly missed any during his entire career.

56:37I think the importance of a mentor, though, is to say to Michael on the days where he wasn't feeling it, that he was going to get in the pool and do the drills and to have that disciplined regimen that was going to bring out his best. If you ask the question, like, if Michael had on a clipboard all the things that Bob Bowman was telling him to do, like if it were coming to him through Chachapiti, right, we'll do this today, do this on Thursday, do this on Saturday. Could Michael have ever done what he did? Absolutely not. I think all of us can think back to our formative moments. Laurie, I wouldn't even be a psychologist if it weren't for Marty Seligman.

57:16Like, is Marty perfect? Oh, hell no. Marty Seligman is not perfect. But did Marty Seligman bring me into being as a psychologist? Absolutely. He shaped how I think. He shaped how I prioritize my time. The list goes on. Anders Ericsson, Walter Mischel. And when I think about anything I've done, you know, it really is that expression of standing on the shoulders of giants. You know, for me, my mentors have been everything. I think this is something that people definitely don't think they can change in the situation is like who they have around them to be mentoring them. I mean, of course, we know we can like hire a piano tutor or something like that.

57:57But I think for just so many subtle things, there are mentors around us all the time that we're just not taking advantage of. And this is something I know you've talked about because you also talk about a way that we can give back to our mentors to kind of keep those relationships alive. You've talked about this act of being a mentor magnet. What do you mean there? If there's one thing as a psychologist who has studied mentorship that I might share with people is that you should be more proactive about attracting mentors into your life and thanking the ones you already have. I think sometimes people just assume it's chance, and it's not.

58:30You know, I've met people in my life younger than me typically, and I just am drawn to them. I'm like, you know, offering to help them when they didn't ask me for favors. I'm like, you know, you should meet this person. I'm going to be in L.A. on this date. Like maybe we could have lunch. And I have asked myself, like, I'm a busy person. What am I doing? And I'm very drawn to these people because they are grateful, because they benefit from any advice or help I offer, and because they are kind to other people. And I think these features of a mentor magnet are all acquirable. Like you can be prepared and you can be the person who sends the thank you note and you can ask like, oh, is there any way that I can help you?

59:15Or is there any cause that you are working on where, you know, my skills would be useful? I think we can become mentor magnets. When we do, we bring into our lives these like guardian angels. It's a great source of joy to mentor someone. I mean, I have my best days when I feel like I have helped somebody younger than me do something a little differently, think a little more expansively about their world or their decisions. And one mentor said to me, you know, when you look at somebody you're mentoring, you see who you were. And when they look at you, they see who they can be. And there's really nothing more beautiful than that.

59:52And so that's pillar number three of situational agency. We should be finding our mentors and we should be doing our best to be a good mentor magnet. Now we get to the final element of situational agency, which is at the broadest level of our situation. We need to choose our culture. There are lots of different definitions of the word culture, as I'm sure you know, Angela. What are you thinking of when you mean culture in this broad sense? I think culture most succinctly is the way we do things around here. I grew up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Cherry Hill had a culture. I'm at University of Pennsylvania at the Wharton School.

1:00:26And in psychology, there's a culture there. Business schools definitely have a culture. Yeah, exactly. Business schools have a culture. My department has a culture. My neighborhood has a culture. The block in which I live, that's its own microculture. And it's different. And, you know, New Haven has a culture. Boston has a culture. And I just want to say to anyone who thinks that their culture is fixed, that's not true. You know, I tell the story in the book. It's a true story. And I don't even know this person very well. But Johnny Maida, who's a very famous design guru, was standing in line in front of me.

1:01:05We were at a graduation. And he and I were making small talk about our lives. And I said to him in a moment of, you know, confession, I guess, that I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do. I think I had recently gotten tenure, so I knew I wasn't going to get fired. But I didn't know what to do next. And he said, why don't you move? And I said, what? And then I immediately just ticked through all the reasons I couldn't move. I'm like, oh, my mother is older. You know, my father has Parkinson's. My mother-in-law lives here. You know, my husband's a real estate developer. It doesn't get any more local than that.

1:01:38You have to basically stay where you are. Like, I can't leave my university. My kids are in school. And he didn't say much more than, well, you should consider it. And it took me a few more months to think this through. But my husband and I did decide to move. Now, we didn't move to St. Louis. We just moved four miles from the suburbs of Philadelphia into the city. But four or five miles is a world away. So I think the changes that it afforded me, I ended up walking to work instead of driving to work. My kids ended up going to the Philadelphia public schools. That was a different culture, I will tell you, than the suburban schools that they had come from.

1:02:17Our neighborhood was a different place. The people that I would just meet in the course of a day were different because of my neighborhood. So we are so quick to tell ourselves the story that I can't change my job. I can't change where I live. I can't change the culture that is shaping me. I just think that's not true. I think even if you don't have a lot of money or a lot of latitude, there's almost always something you can do to navigate toward the culture, the way we do things that is the way you want to do things, too. I just love this one quote that you have in your book about this mistake we make.

1:03:02You know, we think of culture as where we're from, not where we can go. And that was just like mind-blowing for me because it was like, oh my gosh, I totally do this. Like, oh, well, that's where I'm from. I'm not thinking about, well, how can I shape the culture around me, whether that's my job or where I am, or even just the microculture. Use this term in the book, microculture. What do you mean there? So it turns out that the culture that really matters is the culture that is right around you. So, for example, there are macro-cultural trends that some of us don't like, you know, political polarization, the amount of time people are on screens, how much ultra-processed food is consumed in the United States.

1:03:38But that matters less than your microculture, like how much ultra processed food is being eaten around you every day in your immediate proximity. And you have much more control over your microculture than you do over the macrocultural trends that, again, you may or may not like. And I think that's very empowering. I think that if you understand that, and economists are quick to point out that if you change blocks sometimes, even within the same zip code, it really can be night and day. And therefore, there is more latitude if you have the courage to change. And I think, Lori, we know from research on status quo bias that sometimes the obstacle is not financial.

1:04:23It's not logistical. It's psychological. We cling to the familiar even when we know change is good for us. And so I think this might be a message to end with, this idea that we cling to the familiar. in so many ways, our situation is the kind of thing that we can change, right? From like what's literally in arm's length right now to the people we're hanging out with, to the mentors we pick, to the culture that we're in, we can change all this stuff. And so how has this realization changed you? Have you stopped focusing on your own grit and switched to changing your situation more? I think that focusing on situation has, if anything, added to my grit, not diminished it.

1:05:01And I know it can seem like an either or, like either I'm going to work on my grit or I'm going to work on getting situated. But when you are situated, when you are with people and in places that bring out your best, you will find that you are in a very willing and spontaneous way, more passionate and more persevering. When I am working with colleagues who I just think are amazing and have things to teach me, I want to bring my passion and perseverance to the projects that we work on. When I'm in a culture where the values are aligned with what I believe in, I am more motivated, not less motivated.

1:05:36So to me, it's not either you get gritty or you get situated. The ideal is that you get both. Well, Angela, thank you for being part of my situation that I am very grateful for. Lori, thank you for being part of my situation. You bring out my best. So there you have it from the Grit Lady herself. It's time to stop worrying about what's wrong with you and start thinking about what's wrong with your situation. Rather than doing things the hard way, take a look at your physical space, your peers, your mentors, and your culture, and consider how adjusting the situations around you could make it a little easier for you to reach your goals so that you can become the person you want to be.

1:06:17Next week, we'll continue our back-to-school series with neuroscientist and mindfulness expert, Richie Davidson. He'll explain why your brain is changing every day, whether you realize it or not, and how just a few minutes of intentional practice can help shape it for the better. Five minutes a day actually produces real change. It produces change in our experience, and it even produces change in our biology. That's all next week on The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.

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