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Coming up next on Passion Strike.
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I m wearing this vest that says character lab and I ll just say they started it with me when I was already a psychological scientist.
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I think the idea of character is everything, everything about you that s good for you and equally good for other people.
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I think that includes grit.
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I honestly do think that when you have passion and perseverance for long term goals, it is good for you.
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And I think it s good for other people.
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But character also includes honesty and kindness and generosity and humility and creativity.
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And the list goes on.
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So character is plural.
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And when people say, oh, grit, character, I want to say grit, which is one aspect of character.
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And when you talk about intentionality and integrity, honesty, to me, that is a great illustrative example, if you will, to explain the point.
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Welcome to Passion Struck.
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Hi, I m your host, John R. Miles.
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And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips and guidance of the world s most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you.
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Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself.
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If you re new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays.
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We have long form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes.
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Now, let s go out there and become passion struck.
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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to episode 412 of Passion Struck, consistently ranked by Apple as the number one alternative health podcast in the world.
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A heartfelt thank you to each and every one of you who return to the show every week, eager to listen, learn and discover new ways to live better, be better and make a meaningful impact in the world.
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I have a special invitation for you.
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I m excited to introduce our new Passion Struck quiz, which comes out of my new book.
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It s a unique opportunity for you to discover where you stand on the Passion Struck continuum.
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Take the quiz at passionstruck.com.
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It s 20 questions long and will take you about 10 minutes to complete.
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If you re new to the show, thank you so much for joining us, or you simply want to introduce this to a friend or a family member, and we so appreciate it when you do that.
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We have episode starter packs, which are collections of our fans  favorite episodes that we organize into convenient playlists that give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show.
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Either go to Spotify or passionstruck.com slash starter packs to get started.
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In case you missed it, last week I had three phenomenal interviews.
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First, I welcomed Dr. Jud Brewer back to the show to discuss his new book, The Hunger Habit, which is based on his deeply researched plan proven to help us understand
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what s going on in our brains so that we can heal the guilt and frustration we experience around eating.
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I also interviewed Bob Sutton, a distinguished Stanford professor and best-selling author, recognized as one of the top 10 B-School all-stars by Businessweek.
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Sutton s influence extends far beyond the academic realm, reshaping contemporary business thinking as well.
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In our interview, we delve into his revolutionary new book, The Friction Project, which is about the friction that exists in every organization.
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Our interview guides listeners to becoming adept friction fixers, enhancing workplace efficiency without exasperating the problems.
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And lastly, I interviewed Dr. Marie-Hélène Pelletier, an award-winning mental health expert.
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Drawing on her extensive experience in clinical psychology, she challenges the common misperceptions around resilience.
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Her book, The Resilience Plan, A Strategic Approach to Optimizing Your Work Performance and Mental Health,
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offers a transformative roadmap for professionals.
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And if you loved today s episode or any of those three previous ones, we would so appreciate you giving it a five star rating and review.
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They go such a long way in strengthening the Passion Star community where we can help more people achieve lasting happiness and success in their lives.
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And I know we and our guests love to hear your feedback.
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Today marks a landmark day for us.
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We re not only celebrating the launch of my new book, Passionstruck, 12 Powerful Principles to Unlock Your Purpose and Ignite Your Most Intentional Life, but we also have the privilege of hosting an extraordinary special guest, Angela Duckworth.
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Angela is a renowned psychologist, the Rosa Lee and Edgar Chang Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Falcuti, co-director of the Penn Wharton Behavior Change for Good Initiative and the author of the number one New York Times bestseller, Grit, The Power of Passion and Perseverance.
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Her work on grit and self-control has been instrumental in shaping our understanding of what drives achievement and success in life.
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In our conversation today, we re going to delve into Angela s fascinating journey from founding a nonprofit summer school and being an inner city teacher to becoming a world-class researcher.
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We ll explore the pivotal moments that led her to study psychology,
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at the age of 32 and how her background influenced her groundbreaking research.
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Angela s insights into the role of grit and self-control in achieving long-term goals are particularly resonant with the themes of Passionstruck.
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We will discuss the nuances of these traits and their interplay with intentionality.
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Additionally, we ll dive into Angela s exciting new book project, which focuses on the power of situational factors in shaping behavior and decision-making.
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Her new book promises to offer fresh perspectives on how we can make our situations work for us in pursuit of our goals.
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So join us on this special episode as we unpack these thought-provoking ideas and discuss how they relate to living a life fueled by passion, perseverance, and intentionality.
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Get ready for an inspiring and enlightening conversation that will challenge and invigorate your approach to personal growth and success.
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Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life.
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Now, let that journey begin.
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I am absolutely thrilled today to have one of my favorite authors in the whole world, Angela Duckworth on PassionStruck.
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Welcome, Angela.
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Hi, John.
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I m so excited to be talking to you.
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Well, I ve wanted to have you on this show for so long, as I told you beforehand.
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You are requested so often by our audience that it s just amazing we could make this happen.
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Well, I m really happy to be talking about whatever.
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You re in charge, so let s do it.
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You are very well-known by many people, but I still like to give them some context on how you got to where you are today.
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So to me, it s pretty intriguing that you went from this transition from founding a nonprofit summer school and being an inner city teacher to now becoming a renowned psychologist, New York Times bestselling author.
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It s quite remarkable.
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I wanted to ask at what point did you realize that psychology was your calling and how did your earlier experiences shape your research focus?
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I got to graduate school when I was 32 years old.
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I was pregnant with my second daughter, and I was still nursing the first daughter.
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These were circumstances that I had not anticipated.
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And in fact, when I looked to my left and I looked to my right, all the other PhD students were like, well, a decade younger than me or almost a decade younger, and they were not nursing or gestating children.
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I will say, in a way, I got to psychology late.
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There was a decade between graduating from college and deciding I want to train as a psychological scientist.
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And what happened during that decade, I think, is that, as you mentioned, I taught in public school classrooms.
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I was a math teacher for high school students in New York City and in San Francisco, and then
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I ended up teaching a little science in Philadelphia.
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And I think along the way, I also did some other things like I was a management consultant.
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I was trying to figure out what my calling was.
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And like many people, not having that direction was so much
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more difficult for me than just working hard in a direction.
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I had no problem with work ethic or even resilience, but I didn t know where to go.
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And I think that finally brought me to this, I don t know, you want to call it an epiphany or just this kind of maybe growing awareness.
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I should be a psychological scientist, was those years in the classroom where I was working with kids.
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I got to see how smart they were.
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I was like, oh, wait, young people are really smart.
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I remember going to bed one night and thinking, of course they re smart.
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Their brains are like their bodies.
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They re new and shiny and unbroken.
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So I guess I became a psychologist because the contrast between how smart these kids were
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And what they were able to do in my classroom, the gap, frankly, I was like, wait, if you re so smart, why are you not learning algebra or geometry or calculus?
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I think that made me wonder about motivation and emotion and all the things that I now study as a psychologist.
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And I have to ask, it had to be an incredible experience having Marty Seligman as your advisor.
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Can you talk a little bit about how he might have shaped your path?
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So as I mentioned, John, I m not only pregnant, I m nursing daughter number one, whose name is Amanda.
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As any mom knows, nursing happens sometimes during the day and sometimes it happens at night.
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One late night, with Amanda in my arms, I m scrolling through the website of the psychology departments that were in Philadelphia.
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So my husband, Jason, and I
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had moved to Philadelphia for his job.
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He s a real estate developer.
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And I had this very recent awareness that I should become a psychological scientist.
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So I m looking through website Bryn Mawr College.
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Well, that s commutable.
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I think there s a regional rail line I could take.
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What about Temple?
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What about University of Pennsylvania, which was
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and is Marty Seligman s university.
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So I find the psychology website and I m going through in alphabetical order, get to S and Seligman.
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Of course, I m an outsider to psychology.
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My major in college was neurobiology and then I had done some graduate work in neuroscience, but I had not actually studied psychology formally.
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So I m reading about Marty Seligman, having never heard of the guy, and there s an email address.
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And I sent him an email, late night email, probably early morning email, frankly.
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And email comes right back to me.
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And it s from Marty, who turns out to be an insomniac and also somebody who likes to play a lot of online bridge.
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And at the moment, he s doing both, playing bridge on his computer and not sleeping.
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And he asked me to come to his house the very next day.
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And I did.
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And that s the beginning of his mentorship.
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And I have to tell you, John, that you asked me, has he shaped you?
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I think people who do anything worthwhile are almost always and perhaps always benefited by a true mentor.
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And that s what Marty has been to me.
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He is my second father, I like to say, and he knows it.
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And I have to say that
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It wasn t just this epiphany that I should become a psychologist and that could be my calling.
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It was the good fortune of having a mentor like Marty, and I ve had others subsequently, who made everything that I do possible.
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Thank you for sharing that.
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For me, positive psychology and behavior science has become foundational to everything that I do because I have spent years trying to understand why people do the things that they do.
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Why do they become stuck and how do you help them to change?
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Behavior science and psychology are really the foundational basis for everything that I talk about on the podcast and in my upcoming book.
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And one of the things that I found so intriguing was the behavior change for good initiative that you and Katie Milkman co-founded.
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And of course, Katie introduced us.
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Yes, and of course, Katie introduced us.
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And I ve had such an amazing experience with so many of the authors and scientists who are part of your community.
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And I wanted to give it some airplay because I think what you re doing is just incredible.
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Can you share a little bit more about the initiative and what you and Katie, as well as the other scientists, are hoping to accomplish with it?
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Well, John, I think you would blush if you could hear the things that Katie said.
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You have to meet John.
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You have to go on his podcast.
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It s amazing.
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I take Katie at her word.
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Katie and I met, now it s over six years ago.
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I want to say maybe close to 10.
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It was because both of us were professors here at the same university, University of Pennsylvania.
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Each of us had this interest in how people make changes in their lives to eat better, to stop procrastinating, to save more, to take some risks maybe in their romantic life.
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We were just interested in how people make changes in their own lives that leave them and others better off.
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And we had been trained very differently.
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I think that s why we hadn t met.
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We had been at the same university for some time.
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not forever, but for some time before meeting.
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And the reason is that she s really trained, I would say, more as a behavioral scientist.
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I think her PhD is in computer science, but she s in the group of economists and behavioral economists, many of whom you know.
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I had been trained as a psychologist, and so those are really two different tribes.
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And so when we got together and we discovered each other, we re like, wait, we re writing about the same topics.
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Maybe we should be collaborators.
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It was in a dentist office, actually.
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My daughters had gotten old enough that they need to go to the dentist.
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And there was this one day, it was like the only 45 minutes that could possibly be shoehorned in to schedules.
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And it was Katie Milkman and Adam Grant, another psychologist that shares passion for this work.
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And then me, and we were like waiting in the waiting room, but also in the corner, instead of reading People magazine, we were having a scientific meeting.
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And I think what would describe this behavior change for good initiative that Katie and I later went on to co-found and that she directs, or she s the number one, I m her, I don t know, lieutenant or something, is really
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the idea that all of us have goals and all of us struggle, and maybe science, whether it s from behavioral economics or neuroscience or sociology or psychology, can help.
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What we do together in that project is we find other scientists who share that passion, and we run these huge studies, which I m sure Katie s already described to you, these mega studies, where many scientists are testing ideas all at once, all trying to change some outcome, saving more,
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staying in college, doing better in classes if you re a student, being healthier, exercising more, getting vaccinated.
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All of these studies have some outcome that we think is for good.
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But we re also helping people, we hope, change for good in the sense of making lasting change.
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So there s a little double entendre for us.
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Behavior change for good means those two things.
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I love it because I have listened to so many podcasts where people are giving self-improvement advice.
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When I created passion struck, I really wanted it to be different from every other show that was out there.
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So it was so important for me that the very foundation of the show was teaching people the science behind behavior change.
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So that not only can we be teaching them different aspects of how to change their life.
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but showing them that it s all actually based on science and psychology and so many well-researched and documented findings.
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So my relationship with the Behavior Change for Good initiative has been so instrumental.
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And I m so thankful that Katie was able to work with me and that now we ve been able to showcase over 40 different scientists on this program.
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I think you have the record, John.
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I think you should get a belt and start putting notches in it because yeah, I think you ve
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Well, we re over 160 scientists, so we could keep you busy for a long time, but I m really impressed.
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It s one of the things I like best about this podcast, that you really have a dialogue that s both practical, but it s rooted in the latest research.
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Thank you for that, Angela.
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And in addition to my podcast, you and Katie both also have amazing podcasts.
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Yours is called No Stupid Questions.
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And I wanted to share some of the recent episodes with listeners in case they wanted to tune in.
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One of my favorite ones was a recent episode that you did around, can you manifest success through positive visualization?
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Another one was on, do kids need more independence?
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Another one was on what does success really look like?
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How contagious is behavior?
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And can you share a little bit more with the audience about your podcast?
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Well, some years ago, I met Stephen Dubner.
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And Stephen Dubner is not a scientist, but he hangs around them a lot.
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And he co-wrote Freakonomics with the economist Steve Levitt.
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And I met Stephen Dubner because he was interviewing me.
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And not interviewing me like this, where we re having a long conversation, but just, oh, Professor Duckworth, do you have five minutes to be interviewed?
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Because we re doing a study on, I don t even remember what it was on.
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Maybe it was on failure or something like that.
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And he wanted a soundbite.
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So I say yes, I m a fan of Freakonomics, and I end up talking to him for an hour.
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And man, he is a great journalist.
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He was like getting me to say these things that I really thought, you know, that weren t the kind of carefully crafted soundbites.
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I was like, all right, well, you really want me to tell you what I think about motivation or human nature?
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TBH, it s this.
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And so that conversation led to a friendship.
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I mean, I would say a professional friendship, obviously, because it was just call me with increasing frequency about topics that were relevant to stories that he was doing on his radio network.
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And then he said, hey, do you want to have a podcast?
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and you want it to be a conversational podcast.
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So not a new person every week like you have, but just the same two people every week talking about one question that s curious or a source of curiosity for at least the two of them and maybe for more people.
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So we decided to start that together and we ran it for three years, Stephen and me.
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We then transitioned to a new
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co-host.
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Candidly, because Stephen was like, you know, running all of Freakonomics and having this podcast with you, my separate work as a journalist, it s like, it s too much.
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So I went hunting for a new partner and that new partner is Mike Maughan, who is this tech executive.
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And so we have a conversation, like the ones that you just mentioned,
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And I try to bring a behavioral scientist or psychology lens.
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And then he often brings, I think, a sort of business person, but also a person who s trying to, as I think many of your listeners are, like improve his life kind of lens.
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And yeah, it s been a lot of fun and it continues to be.
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So that s the status.
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You re very kind to ask about it.
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One of the reasons I love it is because of him.
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I used to be a software CEO myself.
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Kindred spirit.
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Yes.
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There s some things in your background though he hasn t done, I ll just say.
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He d be the first to admit.
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Well, to entice the listener to keep listening to us today, I m going to put a teaser out there that you have a new book that you re working on, but I don t want to discuss it yet.
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So we re going to leave it for about 20 minutes from now.
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We should discuss your book because you ve actually finished it.
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But yeah, we can talk a little bit about that.
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And speaking about my book, today s episode is actually coming out on the day that my book releases, because your book, which I have right here in my hand really served as the foundation for everything that I built the concepts of passion struck around.
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I ve really leveraged your work about high achievers, and it s been so instrumental in my own personal journey.
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And I have to tell you, Angela, this is my third copy of grit because the other two I highlighted all over, and then I gave them to my
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two kids who are now 25 and 20, because I think it is so fundamental for them to understand what s in your book.
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And something I wanted to get to right off the bat in grid is your research that you did at West point.
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And it really provided profound revelations into what success looks like in high pressure environments.
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You originally did the research in the early 2000s, but I ve seen more recent research where it was updated in 2019, if I have my research correct.
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So it s not only covering Plebe Summer, which you originally did in your research, but now it s covering over 11,000 cadets through all four years at West Point.
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Can you explain how GRIT is exhibited in military academy settings and its overall impact on cadet success?
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I am sure many, if not all, of your listeners know about West Point.
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But for those who do not, it is the oldest military academy in the United States.
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And like the other military academies, it s very hard to get into.
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And what drew me to this very special place was a problem actually that West Point has had for decades.
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I mean, I know this because I had another mentor before Marty, who was a very famous psychologist.
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He s now passed.
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His name was Jerry Kagan.
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And one of the first things that he did, he was a professor at Harvard, very well-known psychologist.
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But before he was well-known, he was asked by West Point to help them with the very same problem that I came to West Point to study.
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And that is this.
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So it s so hard to get into West Point in terms of test scores and objective measures of physical fitness and academic achievement and demonstrated leadership and so on and so forth.
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It s so hard that the leadership, the generals at West Point,
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are certain that if you got through that process, you can make it through West Point.
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You can make it through the first hard summer, which they call Beast Barracks.
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You can make it through all four years of training, and you can do what West Point has its mission of accomplishing, which is to send young women and men into the Army for five years of service post-graduation as officers.
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So they re convinced that you have what it takes to be an officer in the U.S.
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Army if you get through the selection process.
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And the problem that they ve had for a long time was, why are people dropping out of West Point, especially at the very beginning, where you haven t even actually started, really?
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And you could do it.
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You really can finish if you try.
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And so that s what brought me there.
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That s what had brought Jerry Kagan there years ago.
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And what I wanted to do was see whether this quality that you know a lot about, John,
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know that it s a common interest for us.
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This combination of passion and perseverance for long-term goals that I had been studying in high achievers, could that be something that would determine whether someone would stay in, as opposed to talent, as opposed to being smart enough to make it?
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at West Point, as opposed to being physically gifted enough to make it.
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And you mentioned this 2019 very recent study.
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To sum up what we have found at West Point, I say we because nobody ever does anything on their own.
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So there was a team of researchers, including myself.
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What we found at West Point is that indeed, grit as measured by the grit scale, something we could talk more about, but this questionnaire assessing passion and perseverance for long-term goals,
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is administered on the second day of West Point, you know, the day you get your crew cut if you re a guy.
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And that ends up being a very reliable predictor of making it through the first summer, the first four years, and indeed, actually, of your military service for the five years subsequently.
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So we looked at talent as well, and what we found is the following.
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In terms of the periods at West Point where it s just really hard and a lot of people are dropping out, especially at the very beginning, talent ends up hardly being a predictor at all.
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It s not true that talent doesn t matter, period, because if you follow the cadets who stay in, then talent is a predictor.
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Physical talent predicts how well you do in terms of your physical achievements at West Point, and your SAT score predicts how
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high your GPA is going to be academically.
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But I think to us, the moral of the story was that West Point taught us that talent and grit are not the same thing.
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At West Point, they re either not correlated or sometimes they re negatively correlated.
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In other words, the more talented cadets have a little less grit and the more gritty cadets have a little less talent in most cohorts.
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And the talent is not enough.
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Talent does not keep you in a game that gets very hard and discouraging.
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And it s not to say that talent doesn t matter at all.
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And I wanted to probe on this just a little bit further because reflecting upon my time at the Naval Academy.
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I didn t want to say go Army.
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You could say go Navy.
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Go on.
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I definitely could.
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And I recognize that.
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And in accordance with your research, passion and perseverance are vital.
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I personally couldn t have gotten through the academy without them.
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The other thing I wanted to talk about is another critical dimension that I call intentionality.
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And I wanted to explain it this way when I was at the academy and you and I are about the same exact age, but at that time at the academy, I was on the honor staff dealing
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with the largest cheating scandal that had ever occurred in the institution s history.
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And to put this in perspective, it was somewhere between a third to a half of the midshipmen in their junior class who were instigated in this cheating scandal.
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I mean, that s hundreds of midshipmen.
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Wow, I can t believe I didn t know about this.
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What?
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It really showed me a lapse in ethical judgment, despite having the apparent grit.
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Using that as a lens, how does it make you see intentionality?
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And how do you think intentionality interacts with grit to help form long-term success?
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I m wearing this vest that says Character Lab, and I ll just say, you know, it s a nonprofit that some educator and my classroom educators and I started.
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They started it with me when I was already a psychological scientist.
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And the reason I like the word character, which I think some people don t like, I like it.
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I think the idea of character is everything, everything about you that s good for you and equally good for other people.
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I think that includes grit.
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I honestly do think that when you have passion and perseverance for long-term goals, it is good for you.
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And I think it s good for other people.
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But character also includes honesty and kindness and generosity and humility.
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and creativity, and the list goes on.
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Character is plural.
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And when people say, oh, grit, character, I want to say grit, which is one aspect of character.
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And when you talk about intentionality and integrity, honesty, to me, that is great
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illustrative example, if you will, to explain the point.
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And when we think of our children, I m a mom.
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I also have two children.
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My daughters are, well, one s little.
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They re in between yours, so one s 22 and one s 20.
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And when my husband and I were raising them, we didn t just care about grit.
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Of course we didn t.
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Of course we wanted them to be honest.
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And we talked about honesty and we gave examples and we dealt with it.
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I told them about the time I stole, I think it was a $20 bill from my mom s purse.
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And I was probably telling them on a day where they needed to hear that story for a reason, telling them about how I felt afterwards and what it meant to come clean.
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So I think character to me, as Aristotle said, and as Martin Luther King
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Jr.
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said.
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Character is a very broad idea, and I think one of the misconceptions of the work on grit is that it s the only thing that matters, or that it s even the most important thing that matters.
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And I will tell you as a mother, and also as a scientist, that neither of those are true.
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And I wanted to probe this a little bit more because in addition to grit, you re known for studying self-control as well.
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How do you view the relationship between self-control and being intentional?
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Are they one in the same, or do you see self-control as being a facet of being intentional?
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Well, I m going to ask you, John, first, because one of the things about being a student of human nature is we have words for things.
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But I think it s always important to ask somebody what they mean.
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What do you mean by passion?
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What do you mean by grit?
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What do you mean by intentionality?
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And it s only because sometimes people are using those words differently.
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So let me ask you a little bit about intentionality and how you re using that term.
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And then I ll come to your question about how it relates to self-control.
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So one of the things I talk about in my new book, passion stroke, is that if we want to create this ideal life that we re all shooting for, if you examine self discrepancy theory, you really have to go from your actual self, which is who we are in the exact moment today to becoming our ideal self, which is who we could become.
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And in order to do that, I think the alignment of actions, ambition, and aspiration are absolutely critical.
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And people think that they re interdependent, but they re actually very closely related to each other and work off of one another.
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And I think it s the intentional choices that you make something that I often refer to as micro choices that help you to align your actions or your choices that you re making on a daily basis.
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So that they re done in concert with your ambitions and your long-term aspirations.
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And the way that I like to explain this is we all have the opportunity to make choices every single day.
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Oftentimes we get into this repetitive motion of being unintentional.
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It s almost like we re living our lives as a pinball instead of being really intentional about the deliberate actions that we re taking.
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So that s in a nutshell, how I think about intentionality.
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And in the scenario I was just describing about the Naval Academy, those midshipmen who made the decision to cheat on that exam weren t really
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being intentional about what that choice was going to amount to if it counteracted with their ambition and aspiration of graduating from the Naval Academy and becoming an officer.
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But in some ways you could say it was unintentional because we all got what was considered to be the gouge.
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But if they were truly being intentional about graduating, then they wouldn t have even used the gouge in the first place.
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That s really helpful, John, and I really resonate.
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It s funny that you use the word alignment because I will say that there s a paper that I haven t written yet.
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I have to write this book, and also I d love to write this paper, and both of them are unfinished, but I will finish both of them.
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The paper that I m talking about is on really what the good life is, right, which every philosopher, every religious tradition, and all of us have grappled with.
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What is the good life?
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What are we doing here?
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What am I supposed to be doing?
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What is that ideal self?
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What is an ideal life?
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The reason why alignment has become like the center of gravity for this paper, and this is a paper with me and other psychologists and philosophers as well.
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Maybe that s why the paper isn t written yet.
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There s too many of us.
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But what we ve all agreed upon is that in every religious and philosophical tradition, and certainly supported by modern science, that what the good life is, it must at its core be some kind of alignment.
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And just as you say, do my actions align with my ambitions and goals?
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Do those ambitions and goals align with my long-term aspirations, my core personal values?
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What will be true of me and what I honor in myself until my dying day?
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Is there alignment or is there misalignment?
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And is there alignment between my goals, aspirations, and actions and what you re trying to do, the person next to you, society at large?
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So I think alignment is a very special word.
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And it gives me a sense of what you mean by intentionality.
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I think this idea of waking up to that thing that you just did does or doesn t align with those ambitions and aspirations, like being conscious and being aware.
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I think that is the first step toward making alignment where there isn t.
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And when you talk about this kind of awareness and intentionality, just this morning I was reading an article that was published in the 1950s, so a long time ago, and before either of us was born.
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And it s written by Solomon Ash, who of course is one of the great psychologists and very well known for studying the effect of the group.
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on the individual.
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So I m thinking about the Naval Academy and kids cheating.
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And what Solomon Asch did was this pioneering work with an experiment, like a little play, and you don t know that everybody else is an actor because you just signed up for an experiment.
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You walk into a room and you re said, oh, this is like a vision task.
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We re studying vision, and we re going to show you these lines, and they re different lengths.
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Your job is to say, is this line the same as which line?
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Choice A, B, or C.
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And you re sitting there in this group, and you think everybody else is a volunteer, but they re not.
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They re actors, and they have a script.
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And the script says that on the first question, and these are very simple, oh, it s B. Clearly it s B. Oh, this one, it s C. Clearly it s C. So the script says that on the first couple of questions, the actors are all told to give the correct answer.
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The real volunteer goes last.
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So it s going, and the volunteer is probably thinking, wow, this is going to be a really boring hour.
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And then on the third or fourth question, the other people who you think are volunteers but they re actors following a script, they give the wrong answer.
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But they say it with total conviction.
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Oh, B, and you re looking at this line and you re thinking,
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B?
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What?
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Wait, you rub your eyes and you re like, B?
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And you re like, no, wait, it s got to be C. The question is, what do you do?
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And what Solomon Asch discovered, and one of the most important discoveries that s ever been made in science, is that the power of the group is enormous.
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And healthy, honest volunteers will give the wrong answer when the rest of the group gives the wrong answer.
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And in the introduction to this article,
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in Scientific American, written in the 1950s.
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Solomon Asch says, in life, it s like we can be sleepwalking.
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In life, it s like we re just automatically doing what the people around us are doing that we re not even aware.
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And we have to wake up to what s really going, we have to wake up to the influence that other people have, so that we can really have anything like true freedom.
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So in other words, I think that when you talk to me about intentionality and then I try to bring it all the way back to self-control, etc.
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I do think one thing to think about when we think about intentionality, it is like a kind of waking up to what am I doing?
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What was the last thing I ate?
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Like, when did I go to bed?
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What did I just say in that argument?
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Well, how did I write that email?
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And then asking, OK, hold on, does that align with the goals that I wrote into my journal at the end of yesterday?
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And what about my true values, which I know well?
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And I think that is, to me, where intentionality and self-control overlap, because the definition of self-control of scientists like me who study it is the alignment of your actions with your long-term
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values and interests as opposed to your short-term impulsive desires that you will later regret.
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Angela, thank you so much for saying that because it really correlates to a conversation that I had with Hal Hirschfeld, who s a professor at the Anderson School of Business at UCLA about life crafting, which is something that I really looked at.
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The thing is, John, you re friends with all my friends and I m like, oh gosh, I love that.
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I love Hal too.
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And Hal is like the nicest guy.
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He s the nicest guy.
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And guess what?
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His grandmother, who s 100, I think, lives in the same senior living facility as my mom and their friends.
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Wow.
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That s incredible.
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Who would have thought?
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Yeah.
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Coincidence.
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Along these same lines, something that I truly believe in is that we all have personal agency.
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Although it s something that I think a lot of people debate, but how do you think personal agency relates to what we ve been talking about in this idea of intentionality?
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Because I believe personal agency is absolutely critical for making the choices that end up shaping our lives.
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I m a big fan of personal agency, as you will not be surprised.
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Somebody who studies grit and self-control and only went into psychology to help kids develop these skill sets and mindsets that allow them to have true agency over their lives.
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So I m a big fan.
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I want to say that I understand a little bit about why it s so controversial.
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I think on the political left,
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There are a lot of people who are like, wait a second, I don t want to talk about agency.
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I want to talk about structural problems and obstacles in society that make it difficult, if not impossible, for many people to lead the kind of lives they deserve.
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I hear that a lot on the left.
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And frankly, I am toward that end of the spectrum.
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On the right, I hear, wait a second, what happened to personal agency and responsibility and doing things in your own life to take care of yourself and your own problems?
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And I see this tension, this chasm, this disagreement, if you will.
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And I think it comes down to a misunderstanding.
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And the misunderstanding is this.
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I think when a lot of people think of personal agency, they only think about it as the stuff inside you, your attitude, your willpower.
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Personal agency is just between your ears.
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It s not the things outside of you.
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Objective
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reality that you live in, the neighborhood that you live in, the people around you.
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Well, that s the world.
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But personal agency is inside you.
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And I think that s why maybe if you re on the political right, you re like, oh, we should pay attention to what s inside you because you can change your attitude.
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You can change your actions because of your own willpower.
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And on the left, they re like, wait, you re missing this bigger picture.
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I think the misunderstanding is this.
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I think it s true.
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There are some things outside you that you can t change.
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But there are some things outside you that you can change.
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In other words, I think personal agency extends to things outside of your head.
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I have a choice with my cell phone, right?
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How many people have a cell phone that they feel like they don t have a healthy relationship with?
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Or food?
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Those are things outside me.
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I think personal agency extends to changing the settings on my cell phone.
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I recently downloaded this app.
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It s called OneSec.
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And it changed my life.
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It s this app that when you set it up, you identify a problem in the way that you re using your phone.
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I said, I know this is really nerdy, John, but I was like, OK, my thing is not TikTok.
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It s not Instagram.
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It s Gmail, because I just am compulsively on my Gmail when I should be paying attention to what my husband just said to me, or it s really so many times a day.
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It turns out I ve been checking Gmail hundreds of times a day.
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And I was like, what?
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So I installed this app called OneSec.
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And when you install it, you get this red screen every time you click on the problematic app.
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So for me, Gmail, for other people, probably TikTok or whatever.
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The red screen has this slow moving gradient and it s like, breathe in.
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Breathe in.
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Breathe out.
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And then after that, it says, do you still want to go on?
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And for me, it ll say, do you still want to go on Gmail?
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And then there s a bigger button that says, well, I changed my mind.
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I don t want to.
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And I got to tell you, just that little bit of friction, it s like, I got to wait on my red screen.
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I got to breathe in.
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I got to breathe out.
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It cured me of this unhealthy relationship with my phone and with checking Gmail on my phone all the time.
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So that was to me an act of personal agency.
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I enacted personal agency by changing something not in my head, not my attitude, not my willpower, but just a setting on my phone.
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What I want to say about personal agency is I do believe in it, but I think we need to become a little more sophisticated about what it really is.
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I think it would make us realize that there are things we can do.
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We can change what s in our refrigerator.
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Our friends aren t a good influence.
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Guess what?
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You can hang out with different people.
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people, right?
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You hate your job and you feel unmotivated, maybe it s time to change your job and find a different mentor.
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I think those are some of the things that will come out of this new understanding of what personal agency is.
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And in terms of the political divide, I hope that it would bring us closer together, because I do think that there are structural problems in society that are going to require a lot of collective personal agency to change.
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And I don t think that means that you re on the left, and I don t think that means that you disagree with the right.
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It just means that both and, both the situation matters and our personal agency matters, and we sometimes put them into categories that are false.
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Angela, I completely agree with you.
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And if the audience wants a good book to read, I highly recommend the one
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that Marianne Lewis and Wendy Smith wrote called Both Anne Thinking.
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Angela, in the course of researching my book and researching you, I ve determined that you and I have an absolute tremendous amount in common.
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We both love to study high achievers, and I ve studied the traits of over 700 of them over the past nine years.
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And one of the lenses that I did it through was the big five psychological traits.
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Extroversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability for those who are listening who don t know what they are.
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But when I started to look at some examples like Jeff Bezos, Hilary Swank, Oprah Winfrey, Tom Brady, I started to notice a pattern.
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While most people seem content with just satisfying outcomes, it seems like these outstanding individuals, who I refer to as being passion struck, are always striving for more.
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They re never settling.
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Is this something that you have found in your own research as well?
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Yeah, I sometimes think what high achievers really are at their core are people who are, in a way, weirdly, satisfied with being unsatisfied, meaning that s the steady state for them.
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They want to be unsatisfied all the time.
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And I couldn t agree more.
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I sometimes think that if you ask most people, well, if you had one Nobel Prize, like, how many more would you need or want?
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And they would be like,
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I had a Nobel Prize, I guess I d be done.
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I know Nobel laureates who want their second Nobel Prize and they are working for it.
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So I really couldn t agree more with you about that observation, about that pattern.
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I m actually interviewing Cass next week.
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I cannot wait for that discussion, especially since he wrote the book with a Nobel Prize winner.
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Well, Cass doesn t have a Nobel Prize, Cass Sunstein.
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Richard Thaler has a Nobel Prize, and that was his co-author on Nudge.
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Yeah, Cass, who maybe deserves a Nobel Prize, but no, Cass, who co-wrote Nudge, does not yet have a Nobel Prize.
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And probably because he s not a scientist, he s not an economist, probably won t get one.
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But if there were a Nobel Prize for being a great human and a prolific author, then definitely Cass Sunstein would be the first to get it.
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So I wanted to use this to introduce something that I m extremely excited about your new book.
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In the realm of psychology, the person versus situation debate centers around what primarily influences a person s behavior and behavior is something that s at the core of everything I like to look at and research.
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And it really gets down to, is it their personality or the situation that they find themselves involved in?
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And this whole debate, if I understand it correctly.
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It was really reinvigorated about 50 years ago by Walter Mischel, who challenged the prevailing belief that personality is the primary determinant of one s behavior.
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I was hoping you might be able to introduce your new book through this lens.
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And I wanted to ask, do you believe that our actions are more heavily influenced by our inherent personality traits or the situations that we find ourselves in?
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So you re right to name Walter Mischel, who, by the way, talking about mentors and second fathers, Walter was a very generous mentor of mine.
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So I got to talk to him about grit and self-control and the person versus the situation.
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He was, by the way, the most energetic.
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90-something year old in the world, and I would literally have to sprint to keep up with him as he would traverse the campus of Columbia University because he was that quick.
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And I ll tell you what I think.
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So this old debate, which is just a classic question that all human beings have had, not just psychological scientists, what is the reason I do what I do?
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Is it because of the forces situation, like the other people around me?
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What was available to me?
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Or was it really me, my personality, my will?
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Which is it?
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And what Walter wanted to say in a book that became very widely known among psychological scientists, he wanted to say the situation is so much more powerful than you think, and probably a lot more powerful than anything that we could call a personality trait.
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That kind of set off a war because all the people who studied personality were like,
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Actually, we have the opposite view.
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I ll tell you what I think Walter would agree with at the end of his life and what I think.
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I think both, Anne, a title that you just mentioned as a book, I think really where modern psychologists are today is that we fully recognize that it s both.
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And if you ask me to put numbers on it, because some scientists have tried, if you did put a number on it and they re
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all kinds of problems with trying to, 50-50 would not be a terrible estimate.
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For example, 50%-ish of the variability in a pool of people doing different things in different situations, about half of that variability you can attribute to those people, and about half of the variability you can attribute to the situations that they re in.
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So I won t get too technical, but I ll just say it s both and.
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I think to me, what the really important thing to recognize is that it s a little more complicated than just, okay, it s 50-50, got it.
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I think if you re trying to lead a better life, you should ask yourself, what situations can I put myself in that bring out my best?
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And I ll mention one other mentor and great psychologist, Tim Beck, who is the founder of Modern Psychotherapy.
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As we know it, he lived to 100, and he lived just a few blocks away from me.
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So just by luck, I got to hang out with him sometime toward the end of his life.
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And I ll tell you what he would say as somebody who spent his entire life counseling people about how to live a healthier, happier life.
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which is that you need to both think about your thoughts and the stuff inside your head, but you really do need to think about the situations you re in.
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And he would tell the story of this very seriously ill schizophrenic named David that he wrote about.
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So I m not disclosing anything that he didn t already put into print.
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And he wrote about it in an academic journal, so I don t think a lot of people know about it.
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But this patient was so severely ill that he was just practically catatonic.
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He couldn t even participate in any kind of therapeutic activities in the hospital where he was living permanently.
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And then one day, the psychiatrist who was working with him started talking to him about the sorts of things that David was interested in.
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And it turns out David really liked to have a nice hamburger.
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And the psychiatrist said, instead of sitting here in this office, why don t we go down to the cafeteria?
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It was something that this schizophrenic patient had not done in a very long time.
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The very idea of being able to walk down the hall and transact to buy a hamburger and money and getting the change.
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They go to the cafeteria, and this young man is like a different person.
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It s like a flower blooming.
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He s standing in line.
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He s waiting patiently.
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He buys his hamburger.
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He makes a little small talk with the cashier.
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He takes a hamburger.
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He eats.
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And what the epiphany was for Tim Beck and those who were working with him is that in a situation that brings out your best,
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it brings out what Tim Beck would call the best mode that you have.
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You re capable of being nasty.
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You re capable of being hot-tempered.
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You re capable of being delusional in the case of this schizomer.
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But you re also capable of being kind.
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You re capable of being patient.
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You re capable of being empathic.
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And so where I think the person versus situation debate has brought us very recently as a field in psychological science is the realization that it really in a very deep way is both and.
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And if you fully own that, you can ask yourself,
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In what situations do I want to be?
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What situations bring out the kind Angela, the patient Angela, the gritty Angela?
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And what situations bring out the nasty Angela, the vindictive Angela, the lazy Angela?
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And then it s Angela s decision which of those situations she can be in.
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And of course, it s society s responsibility to make those positive situations possible.
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I love your explanation and it ties into a chapter that I wrote called the perspective harnesser.
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And in that chapter, I describe how so often in life, we see things through the lens of being linear.
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And I really try to tell people that you need to start experiencing the world as both and, and not linear meaning mind and body.
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I m not going to get a tattoo.
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But if I did, both and would be right at the top of my list for things that I fall seven rise eight both.
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There are a few things I would consider getting tattooed, which I m not.
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But if I were maybe a temporary tattoo, but both and would be a good one.
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As a teaser for the audience, can you talk a little bit more about what you re thinking about writing in your new book and how you can make your situation work for you?
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The book that I have not yet written and not yet even titled, but I was thinking about calling it EASIER, will be about what we ve been talking about, John, and that is how can you, in this full understanding of how your situation is so influential, so powerful, like gravity, visible, but like, wow, it s working.
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How can you take that knowledge and use it to make a better life?
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I said I don t really know the title, but I ve been thinking about something like EASIER because in my work on grit,
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and self-control.
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The misunderstanding I see in a lot of people is that they think that gritty people and self-control people just have this incredible will.
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And they re just fighting the situation.
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And because of their will, you know, they are the captain of the ship, they are the master of their soul, they re just going to overcome anything and everything.
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But
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The people that I study are not that dumb.
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They also try to make their situation work for them.
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They ask themselves, how do I get a great mentor?
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Somebody who s going to guide me on this journey and help me avoid some of the kind of silly mistakes that are needless.
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How do I find a peer group of like-minded strivers so that it s not just me trying to force my way forward with every headwind against me, but actually now I have the tailwind of a whole group of people who are trying to build a company or quit drinking or run a marathon.
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How can I arrange my physical space?
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What do I want my cell phone settings to be?
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What do I want my refrigerator to look like?
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Do I want a flat screen TV in my bedroom or do I not want a flat screen TV in my bedroom?
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These are all changes to your physical and social situation that you can make that I think make it easier for you to achieve your goals.
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And so for me, I m very motivated by the discovery that people are misunderstanding what gritty people, what self-control people, what the high achievers that you and I are so obsessed with.
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They are not leading their lives with their teeth clenched and just relying on inner will to do things.
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They are not that dumb.
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They re very smart.
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And they re using, as Pete Carroll, the football coach said, and we re having a conversation about this sometime recently, and I was talking about the situation.
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He was like, oh, you mean just trying to get every advantage there possibly could be?
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to bring your performance to another level.
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He s like every high performer knows that and they do that.
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That s what the book is supposed to be like.
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And unlike you, I have not finished it and it s been very hard going, but I m pretty gritty.
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So I m sure at some point I ll be able to come back on Passionstruck and talk about it more.
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I would love that because I can t wait to see where Pete Carroll shows up because he was phenomenal.
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He is.
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He s the Ted Lasso in real life.
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And then Angela, we re almost out of time.
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I can t believe this has gone so fast.
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I wanted to ask you one more question.
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I ve been really trying to explore this whole idea of mattering because I feel so many people right now feel they don t feel significant in life.
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I went out and I tried to find research on mattering and it was really difficult to do.
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I went to professors at all the major universities that you can think of.
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And there really wasn t any other person that I found until Thomas Curran, a professor in London, turned me onto the work that Gordon Flett is doing on matter.
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And he teaches at the university of York in Canada.
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And as I was reaching out to people, I happened to reach out to Ethan Cross, who s a psychologist at the university of Michigan, who told me that the closest concept he can think of to matter is self-determination theory, which is really about how.
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autonomy, competence, and relatedness form intrinsic motivation or human motivation.
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I wanted to ask you, given the work and research that you re doing, if people don t feel like they re mattering in their life, what are some things that they can do about it?
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But John, I don t think you knew this, but literally 10 seconds before I left my house to come have this conversation, I was on the phone with Ethan Cross, who is one of my very closest friends and collaborators.
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We were not talking about mattering, but I was talking to Ethan Cross.
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And somebody I have discussed mattering with a lot is Marty Seligman, whom you mentioned earlier, because Marty thinks it s one of the most powerful things there is in terms of motivation.
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And he would say, now in his 80s, that this is all he wants.
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is to pursue mattering.
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And if you ask me to define mattering, I completely agree, by the way, I have looked into it.
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And you re right, there s wait, where s all the research on mattering?
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I think the closest maybe is on purpose and belonging.
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But I think what mattering is feeling like you are needed, that if you weren t there, if you could imagine a world where you were erased, where you were deleted,
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then something would be worse, that someone else would be worse, that maybe many people would be worse off.
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That s what it means, I think, to matter, to be needed, to be necessary.
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And if you ask me what are some practical suggestions for this, I would say this.
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First of all, the next time you walk down the street and you just start to observe people and what they do,
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You ll soon notice that so much of our motivation is mattering.
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When I see somebody feeding pigeons in the park or walking a dog, I think, oh, well, that person matters.
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They matter to even a pigeon or certainly to their pet.
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But if you ask yourself, well, how do I want to matter?
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Usually the best thing to do is to think about what are the things in the world that to you cause you the most pain?
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For me, when I was with those children as a teacher,
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it was like watching a tragedy happen in slow motion and not being able to change it.
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I could just see their lives unfolding and I could predict what would happen to them when they left the womb of my classroom.
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And it just made me not angry.
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I think there was a kind of grief.
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And to me, I thought to myself, if I could live a life where I could help one child not enter
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a lifetime of poverty and chaos and under confidence, then that will be one life well lived.
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One life well lived to me would be a life well lived for me if I could be part of that.
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That s how I want it to matter.
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So my practical suggestion is start noticing why people do what they do.
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You will find that so much of what we do is because we want to matter.
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And then when it comes to your own mattering,
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Ask yourself, what grieves you?
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What angers you?
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What irks you?
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And then perhaps ask, what could I do in a very small way, perhaps, change that for the better?
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And I think you ll be well on your way to mattering.
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Great.
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And Angela, thank you so much.
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It was such an incredible honor to have you here today.
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And I thank you so much for the incredible work that you have done that s influenced millions globally.
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John, thank you.
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It s an honor.
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It s an honor to be with you for the debut of Passion Struck.
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And I want to say that it s remarkable what you ve done.
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And I m so glad you re doing it.
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And you re doing it in a way that I couldn t do.
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So for the message that you re delivering to the people that you re delivering it, thank you.
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Thank you, Angela, man.
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That means the world to me.
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Thank you so very much.
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What an incredible interview that was with Angela Dutworth.
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And I was so honored that she could come here today to help launch PassionStruck.
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I wanted to thank Angela, my friend, Katie Milkman and Freakonomics Radio for the honor and privilege of having her appear on today s show.
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Links to all things Angela will be in the show notes at PassionStruck.com.
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Please use our website links to purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show.
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You can also check out all my book recommendations on the website by going to PassionStruck.com forward slash books.
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Videos are on YouTube at both our main channel at John R. Miles and also our Clips channel at PassionStruckClips.
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Please go subscribe and tune in to our videos as well.
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Advertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at PassionStruck.com slash deals.
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And in case you didn t know, we also have a Passion Struck challenge underway.
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Every week throughout 2024, we will be delivering a new challenge in our weekly newsletter, all aimed to help you take boundary expanding actions that get you closer on your path to becoming Passion Struck.
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Lastly, you can find me at Jon R. Miles on all the social platforms and sign up for our work-related newsletter on LinkedIn called Work Intentionally.
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You re about to hear a preview of the Passion Struck Podcast interview I did with a remarkable guest who truly emulates what it means to live a passion-struck life.
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Forrest Galante is reshaping our understanding of the natural world.
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Known as the modern-day Charles Darwin, Forrest s dedication to wildlife conservation biology is not just about the adventures that you see him pursue on TV.
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It s about making a significant and global impact in conservation efforts and changing the way we view the entire natural world.
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I think you hear a lot of entrepreneurs talk about this, but I think so much of it s fear-based.
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People are just scared to take risks.
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They re scared of the what if.
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What if I don t make money?
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What if I don t make it?
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What if I can t get a job?
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What if, what if, what if, what if?
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And for me, I m not fearless.
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The definition of bravery is not being fearless.
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I d say the definition of stupidity is being fearless.
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The definition of bravery is being scared of something, but doing it anyway, being willing to take that risk.
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When it comes to being entrepreneurial, just like when it comes to
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tagging a great white shark, catching a cobra, darting a lion, all the things that I do for work now that I love doing, you have to take a calculated risk and you have to be laser focused and you have to be willing to give it your everything.
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It sounds like a very grandiose message, but I think for me, if you aren t willing to focus 100% of your time and energy and effort on this thing that you want to do, you will end up doing something that you don t want to do for your life.
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Remember that we rise by lifting others.
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And if you found today s episode with Angela Duckworth inspirational, then definitely share it with those that you love and care about.
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In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen.
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Until next time, go out there and become passion struck.