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

Passion Struck with John R. Miles

In this episode of Passion Struck, host John R. Miles interviews Angela Duckworth, renowned psychologist and author of 'Grit,' about her new book

Key takeaways

• Success is not just about inner grit; it's also deeply influenced by external circumstances.
• The people and environments around us either amplify or diminish our strengths.

Main topics

• The role of external environments in personal development
• Situational awareness and its importance

Notable quotes

"Whether you are optimistic or discouraged... is not just a function of what's inside you. It's also a function of where you are."

Conclusion

This episode reframes personal growth by shifting focus from internal effort to

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) What if the problem isn't that you need more grit? What if you're simply in the wrong situation? We spent years being told that success comes down to what's inside us. Our discipline, our mindset, our perseverance. But when I sat down with Angela Duckworth, she challenged that idea in a way I didn't expect. She told me that sometimes the difference between struggling and thriving isn't a different person. It's a different environment. Take a listen to this. Speaker 1 (0:32) Whether you are optimistic or discouraged, whether you think your work is interesting and that you matter, or you think the opposite, is not just a function of what's inside you. It's also a function of where you are. It's your friend John, Speaker 3 (0:47) and welcome to Passion Struck. I'm so glad you're here. Whether you're a longtime listener or someone who just discovered the show, thank you for pressing play today. Maybe you've built the life you were supposed to want, but you've quietly wondered why it still doesn't feel like enough. If that's you, you're in the right place. Every week, I sit down with the world's top scientists, researchers, and thinkers to uncover what it actually takes to build an intentional life that matters. Thanks for joining me. Let's get into it. Speaker 2 (1:26) This is Speaker 3 (1:27) episode 814 of Passion Struck, and today we're kicking off a brand new series called The Adaptive Human, How We Thrive in a Changing World. Last month in the Adaptive Brain series, we explored how our brains change. how biology influences us, how our environments shape our behavior, and what it takes to keep becoming. Now we're widening the lens because adapting isn't something that happens inside your brain. It happens in relationship with the world around you. And I can't think of a better person to begin this conversation with than Angela Duckworth. You probably know Angela from her groundbreaking work on grit. the power of passion and perseverance over time. But in her new book, Situated, Angela takes the idea somewhere much deeper. She argues that grit is necessary, but it isn't sufficient. The people around us, the places we live and work, the cultures we're a part of, and the situations we find ourselves in can either amplify our strengths or diminish them. And that raises a question I couldn't stop thinking about while reading the book. Do our situations change who we are or do they reveal who we already are? Because think about your own life. There are probably people who bring out your confidence. Places where you feel more creative. Environments where you become more generous, curious, ambitious, or courageous. And there may be other situations where you become a version of yourself you didn't particularly like. Angela and I get into all of that. We talk about situational awareness, the power of mentors and peers, why willpower is often the least effective place to intervene, and how leaders can create environments where people are more likely to flourish. And we go somewhere especially important to me and for the work I'm doing around my upcoming book, The Mattering Effect. Can the situations we create actually communicate to people that they matter? Angela and I explore what happens when people are constantly required to prove their worth and what changes when an environment instead communicates, you belong here, your contributions matter, we want you to succeed. This conversation made me rethink something I say all the time. Sometimes the most intentional thing you can do isn't to try harder. It's to challenge the conditions that you're trying so hard to survive in. So let's dive in. Here's my conversation with Angela Duckworth. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now, let that journey begin. I am absolutely thrilled to welcome Angela Duckworth back to Passion Struck. Angela, it's so great to see you again. Speaker 1 (4:34) John, I'm so happy to be talking again. Speaker 3 (4:36) Last time we shared a conversation about your book, Grit, and we discussed and really tried to help people understand how passion and perseverance matter enormously to so many people. But you now have this new book coming out that I'm holding right here for those who Speaker 1 (4:54) are Speaker 3 (4:54) watching called... You Speaker 1 (4:55) are holding a dance copy. Speaker 3 (4:58) Situated, find the people and places that bring out your best. What made you realize that grit was necessary but not sufficient? Speaker 1 (5:06) Well, I will say, I know people watch TED Talks and people get on stage and they're like, I had an epiphany and my whole world is different. What was white is black and what was black is white. I mean, that makes for a really tidy narrative. It's not quite that. It's not, oh, I thought success was entirely an inside game. I now realize it's also an outside game, not just what's inside your head, but the people and places that surround you. That's not quite. true because when I was in graduate school, I was a TA for social psychology. And one of the most important discoveries, you could argue like the whole foundation of the field of social psychology is the importance of the situation. And there's this really famous book among nerdy academics called The Person and the Situation by Dick Nisbet and Lee Ross. It's not a bestseller. I don't think a lot of people have heard about it outside of academia, but it's all about how the person is one thing and their situation is another. So John, I think you and I both believe in grit, in passion and perseverance, but I think increasingly it's urgent to remind people or to explain how the outside situation changes that whole inner landscape. And whether you are optimistic. or discouraged, whether you think your work is interesting and that you matter, or you think the opposite, is not just a function of what's inside you. It's also a function of where you are. Speaker 3 (6:38) I think it's easy to believe that success comes entirely from internal strength, rather than acknowledge how profound the environments around us influence us. And I think we don't realize that influence Speaker 3 (6:55) enough and how we go about our days. Speaker 1 (6:58) You're supposed to be asking me the questions and I know we just got started, but you have been thinking about the very same topic as I have been thinking about for a very long time. Why do you think it is, like in your opinion, John, why is it that we turn our eyes away from our circumstances and look within when we're trying to do better? Speaker 3 (7:21) Thank you for asking me that. I really want to know. Speaker 1 (7:24) Turn the tables on you right away. Speaker 3 (7:27) I think it's actually a few different things. I was actually interviewing Dr. Daniel Amen yesterday, and he and I were talking about this very question. As I was writing my first book, I was starting to think about what is the biggest roadblock from getting us from where we are in our life to where we want to be. And yes, fear is up there, and us being what I call a visionary. arsonist is up there because we tend to arson the very things that we want in life. But I introduced this concept of the mosquito auditor in the book. And to me, a mosquito is one of two different things. I called them, in case you've never heard me discuss it, I call them the bloodsucker, the invisible suffocator, and the pain in the ass. And I use the mosquitoes in two contexts. One, they're the people in your life. who you need to put boundaries around. And two, they're the environments that hinder you from going to where you want to go in life. And the way I like to think about this is throughout most of my career, I practiced what I would consider to be situational leadership. And to me, situations... are really important when you're talking to different people. One, because we have different personalities and different motivations. So you can't use the same leadership style with one person than you can with the other. But two, the situations that you're in also determine how you have to carry forth those conversations. So if you're in the middle of a project that's going well, you talk to people in one way. If you're in the middle of a project that's going extremely poorly, you have to use a different type of communication technique. And so that whole concept is something that I've really been trying to understand. And of course, the signals that we get back to us on how we're seen, valued, et cetera, also play a very important part in that situation. Speaker 1 (9:32) Yeah, I think some professors, including myself, talk about situational awareness, right? Just to... Develop that muscle of paying attention to the situational factors. A mistake I've made as a still developing situational leader. I mean, I'm hardly a leader, right? I run a little lab. I'm not running a company or an organization of any real size, but there's still young people who work for me. And a situational mistake I make as a leader, but I'm working on it, is when a young person shows up late, isn't taking notes, maybe goes on their phone in a meeting, I call them out right there. I'm like, you were late. Where's the agenda? What are you doing on your phone? And I know that the situational leadership move there. is to be aware that in public, people are not likely to be open-minded about criticism. They're going to be crushed, defensive, humiliated. Why didn't I just wait 10 minutes until the meeting was over and then just pull that young person aside? And then the privacy of my office with the door closed, say, look, why were you late? I almost could say the same things verbatim. So sometimes... I'm blind to the situation and just not aware, not sensitive to how important context is. I think it can make a world of difference and it's intellectually easy to acknowledge, but it's very hard to put into practice. Speaker 3 (10:55) It is so hard to put in practice. And I wanted to add one thing to your question. I'm sure you're familiar with the work of Jim Ilzaki. Speaker 1 (11:02) Oh, yes, at Stanford. At Speaker 3 (11:04) Stanford. So he studies a lot on cynicism, but... As I was interviewing people for my upcoming book, he and I had a conversation and we were talking about the environments around us. And he came up with this idea that what we're really in right now is a marketplace of mattering, meaning we're having to prove our worth in pretty much every environment that we're in, whether that's in a social environment. a school environment, a work environment, even our family environments. And when I started to unpack that, his conclusion was really profound. Because when you think about it, when you're constantly having to prove yourself instead of just being able to be yourself, a little part of you is getting taken away with every single interaction. And so that's why I think when people feel like they're not enough. or many of the circumstances where they feel like they're growing more invisible in their life or more numb, it's because they're experiencing of these many experiences that are diminishing their worth in their environments. What's your thought on that? I Speaker 1 (12:15) am a huge fan of Jamil Zaki's work. I think he's a great psychologist. He's a great writer, and he's a really great... person. My daughter was lucky enough to be on Stanford's campus for four years and Jamil has an outsized influence there. But I think the questions that he's bringing up in this perspective is they couldn't be more important right now. There's a very old concept of unconditional positive regard in humanist psychology, which is no longer a term that people use these days, but on the sixties, There were these humanist psychologists who felt strongly from their clinical practice, seeing people who were depressed, seeing people who were anxious, seeing people who were suicidal. They felt like one of the things that is so critical to every person's well-being is a sense that unconditionally they have worth, that they matter, not because of what they did, not because of some meritocratic race. And this is not to say that... They were against a meritocracy in terms of society, but they just felt like the kind of unconditional positive regard that some of us had when we were growing up from our parents. Some of us felt in our religious faith that God loved us, no matter whether we did well that day or we didn't do that well. And I think they were right. I actually think this age-old idea, maybe partly from psychological science, but partly from... religious traditions and other philosophical traditions that human beings stand on their own. When I was growing up, John, I had this aunt and uncle. I never really learned to speak Chinese. So I called my aunt Shawaii, which is a terrible pronunciation of what it should be in Chinese, which is little auntie. And then her husband, who is my uncle, for some reason, when I was little, I called him big man because he was, well, he was big to me. I later realized he's not that big of a man, but Shawaii and big man. gave me the one thing that I think has been the source of my confidence for the rest of my life, unconditional positive regard. When I walked into the room, they lit up. I was like, you made my day. I was sometimes a brat. I was sometimes selfish. I'm sure I made a huge mess. It didn't matter. They didn't say it's okay to make a mess. It's okay to be a brat. It's not okay to be a brat. It's not okay to make a mess. But my love is not contingent. And I do think that in today's