How far can a person get on talent alone? Angela Duckworth is a researcher, teacher, MacArthur fellow and best-selling author who has dedicated her career to finding out what factors can lead a person to be successful. In her book “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance,” Duckworth draws from a mixture of firsthand experiences, interviews with high performers and academic research to make the case that a person’s ability to overcome setbacks may actually be their most valuable trait. Duckworth and host Cardiff Garcia discuss her personal relationship with the idea of genius, the benefits of mentorship and how life has changed since the publication of “Grit.”
How far can a person get on talent alone? Angela Duckworth is a researcher, teacher, MacArthur fellow and best-selling author who has dedicated her career to finding out what factors can lead a person to be successful. In her book “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance,” Duckworth draws from a mixture of firsthand experiences, interviews with high performers and academic research to make the case that a person’s ability to overcome setbacks may actually be their most valuable trait. Duckworth and host Cardiff Garcia discuss her personal relationship with the idea of genius, the benefits of mentorship and how life has changed since the publication of “Grit.”
The Next Chapter by American Express Business Class
Episode 1 - Angela Duckworth
[Intro Music]
Cardiff: Hello, and welcome to the first episode of The Next Chapter, by American Express Business Class. My name is Cardiff Garcia. I am a journalist and a podcaster, and for fifteen years I’ve covered economics, finance, and topics from all across the business world. I’ll be your host.
On this show, we are going to discuss the kinds of books that offer advice and guidance on things like how to run a business, how to progress in your career, or how to generate new ideas that will help you succeed. –
And hey let’s be honest: The ways that people do business are constantly evolving. They’re not etched in stone or etched in these books, and we want to explore that evolution too. Which is why we are going to ask the authors how the world has changed since their books were published. How has their own thinking evolved? And if they had the chance, what would they write for their next chapter?
Cardiff: For today’s episode, we are speaking with psychologist Angela Duckworth. She argues that one of the single best indicators of success is the ability to stick with long term goals, to not give up – and to keep up the passion and intensity that’s needed to realize these goals. This is an idea known as grit. And that’s also the title of Angela’s book: Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. This book has sold more than a million copies worldwide and Angela has even developed a measure of grit – a “grit scale” – as it’s called and you’re going to hear more about that on today’s show. This scale has been used by Fortune 500 companies, educators, and even pro sports teams...
Angela writes that, historically, people have undervalued grit, and overvalued talent, or the ability to pick up skills quickly, and this, she argues, is mistaken.
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[00:01:52]
Cardiff: Angela Duckworth, welcome to the next chapter podcast.
Angela: It's great to be here.
Cardiff: So I think we should just start by defining grit because there's a lot about grit that I think would be easy for people to misunderstand. And there might even be some misconceptions about what it means. So, grit you write has two components, passion and perseverance in pursuit of long-term goals. So why don't you tell us about each of those two things, passion and perseverance and how they interact.
Angela: So I'm going to define grit my way, but let me use this opportunity to clarify what I mean, when I say that high achievers that I've studied as a psychologist, tend to have passion and perseverance for long-term goals. So, the part of grit that I think is just the obvious part is the perseverance for long-term goals.
Angela: I mean, these remarkable individuals, these Olympic gold medalists, you know, Nobel prize, winning scientists, they have tenacity in the face of setbacks and, you know, in the face of failure, that's truly remarkable. And so that's a kind of perseverance that we all probably have seen and maybe makes a lot of common sense to us, intuitive sense.
Angela: They're also really hardworking, even on good days, you know, they're incredibly dedicated to getting better at what they do. So the perseverance half of grit is, is I think what the word sounds like, but the passion half of grit I think, is every bit as important, I think arguably more so, and that is, is working hard at something that you love.
Angela: So there is this kind of, um, I don't know, voluntary obsession that people who are gritty have about their work, their craft. I mean, they really love what they do. And if you come back to them, you know, a year later, five years later, 10 years later, 15 years later, of course what they're doing in particular may change, but there is this directional devotion that is consistent over long periods of time.
[00:03:46]
Cardiff: Yeah. And that long periods of time component to it, as opposed to just a kind of short-term burst of enthusiasm, or I don't know, pulling an all nighter to cram for your biology final, that's not grit, right? Like grit would be actually becoming a biologist. It requires sustained effort over a long stretch of time, which I think is also a common misconception, right?
Angela: I think that's exactly right, Cardiff. When I first started studying high achievers it wasn’t entirely clear to me whether it would be intensity or consistency that would really make the difference between the very good and the truly great. But I have come to believe after 20 years of studying success that consistency is first of all, more important and second of all, more rare.
Cardiff: Yeah. And there's a kind of formula that you write about in the book of what's necessary for a high achieving individual. And you start by saying that talent obviously does matter, but you have to combine it with effort in order to develop a skill. But once you have that skill, you need more effort to convert the skill into achievement. And so in that sense, effort counts twice. And in fact, that is the subhead for one of the chapters in your book, effort counts twice. What do you mean by that?
[00:05:10]
Angela: When I say talent, I mean the rate at which you get better at something. You know, that's why we call people quick studies, somebody who is less talented, well, they get better, not as fast. So I think talent is, is something that has to be part of the equation when we think about successful people. And I say that explicitly, because sometimes people think like, oh, it's all grit and talent doesn't matter at all. And I certainly don't believe that. When I specifically say that effort counts twice - What I mean is this is that if you think about the rate at which somebody gets better at something, then you can say, well, when you apply effort, you know, that person grows in skill. And if they're really, you know, really talented, then the same amount of effort will make them grow in skill more, less talent, they'll grow less, but likewise, you know, more effort they'll grow more, less effort they'll grow less. There is this second equation that we have to think about, which is skill time's effort equals actual achievements. In other words, you have to apply the skills that you have acquired in life, and you have to do something with them. And, when you look at the truly great achievers, it's not only that they were very good at climbing a learning curve. They actually applied their skills over years and, and created, you know, novels, companies, medical breakthroughs and more.
Angela: So that's what I mean by effort, counting twice that, you know, effort builds skill, but then effort enables you to apply that skill and do things.
Cardiff: Yeah, I got to say there does seem to be a societal imbalance in how much people prioritize or are captivated by talent versus how much they reward effort. And I think you see this in a lot of examples, you know, when, when companies are hiring, a lot of times, they'll hire for potential rather than for a track record of actual achievement, but you can also see it just in pop culture, the way people talk about prodigies and they talk about naturals.
[00:07:10]
Cardiff: And I was really glad to see this addressed in the book. The idea that psychologically, we are almost programmed to more highly prize talent rather than effort. But you say that this is a mistaken approach.
Angela: Well, the lot of the research on, on the kind of natural talent bias, is from my friend and my, now my collaborator, Chia Junge Say, and she's a organizational psychologist so she often studies this in the workplace, but it's also evident in another domain where she used to actually spend a lot of time, which is music. But one thing that really struck her, you know, when she was still a very serious musician before she became an organizational psychologist, is that in these competitions, when people would you know hear and see these amazing musicians, play piano, play violin, the thing that just springs to your lips is like, oh my God, you're such a natural talent. Oh, you're so gifted. Right. And she, as a performer knew how many thousands of hours of practice, really hard, concentrated, you know, at the edge of your ability practice, um, that she had invested and she wondered like what the heck is going on. She considered herself a striver, not a natural. And in her research, she shows that people really do have a bias. One that they don't always explicitly consciously acknowledge or understand. They love naturals. And I thought of this research, where, for example, she shows that people, when they, read, you know, a bio of someone and it emphasizes their natural talent versus, you know, how much work they put in to get to a certain level of achievement, even if the level of achievements the same, they are more willing to pay money for, invest in, and kind of just want to hang out with, or just, you know, want to support the natural versus the striver.
[00:08:59]
Angela: But Cardiff, I will say this, you know, there is almost a, a kind of direct link in our brains or our minds between being a natural and having a lot of potential, you know. In theory, I guess you could say a striver has just as much potential, but when we think about how far somebody will eventually go, what the ceiling is on their accomplishment, we think, oh, well, the naturals have higher ceilings and more potential. Now whether that's true or not is different, but I think that's partly why we have such a bias toward people that we think we're kind of born to be great.
Cardiff: Yeah. And relatedly, there's a story in your book and anecdote, that's actually somewhat heartbreaking, I thought about how, when you were a kid, your father expressed some disappointment that you were not, by his estimates, a genius. Now fast forward, and many decades have passed and you have now won a genius grant from the MacArthur foundation, which I think is like the closest thing that society has to formally declaring somebody a genius.
Cardiff: And yet, even after you won the prize, you write in the book that your conclusion was not that your father was necessarily wrong, but that he was asking the wrong question. That the question is my daughter, a genius is not the right question to ask if you're wondering whether she'll achieve something in life.
Cardiff: I'd love to just hear more about that anecdote and how it kind of guided your own thinking on the topic of genius versus grit, throughout your life and throughout your work.
Angela: You know, my dad had immigrated like my mom had, from China. And, they were both ambitious, but really, especially my dad. So he would talk all the time about, you know, who was the most accomplished person in our nuclear family and our extended family.
[00:10:44]
Angela: And he thought a lot about historically who were the greatest achievers in human history, like, you know, who was the greatest physicist to ever live, who was the greatest chemist to ever live? Who was the greatest painter to ever paint? And growing up in a family like that, you know, you get the message pretty quickly that, that you better do something pretty amazing with your life, or you're gonna fall far short of the expectations of, you know, maybe the person whose love you want more than anyone else's. You know, he said out of the blue for no reason at all, unprovoked like, you know, you're no genius.
And when he was saying these things, I think it was because I didn't seem like a prodigy to him. You know, I wasn't saying like incredibly precocious things.
Angela: I, I guess I was just like a kid, you know, like playing and eating and watching TV. When I grew up to study achievement, I, I think quite, deliberately studied things that were not the same thing as genius or natural talent or IQ. I had a rebellious streak even as a little girl and I always had just you know, sense that what you do in your life, can't be just about this, you know God given early natural talent. And when I ended up finding that, the things that I study, like grit are not correlated at all with talent, like zero correlation. Like you hire somebody and they have amazing intelligence when you meet them, it does not mean that they're going to be a harder worker. The correlation is not there. So you can't promise yourself that you're going to get someone who's dedicated and resilient and so forth.
Angela: It was incredibly ironic, and I think to me, the parable here, you know, has a message, which is, you know, if, if you really care about changing the world, if you have a tremendous amount of ambition, I do think that it's a mistake to, to think that like the way that you're going to do that is necessarily through natural talent.
Angela: And for me, I love what I do. I am everything that I study, and I feel like I've, you know, made a small contribution to the world and absolutely, because of my grit and not because of natural ability.
[00:12:55]
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Cardiff: There is a kind of mini version of a grit test that you have used in some of your research in your book. And I took that test…
Angela: How’d you do?
Cardiff: and I want to share with you my score and get your interpretation of it and sort of see what we can learn from a test like this. So the test has 10 questions. This is again, the shorter simplified version of it.
Cardiff: And it includes statements like, new ideas and projects sometimes distract me from previous ones. Setbacks don't discourage me. I don't give up easily. I finish whatever I began. And you kind of rate yourself on a one to five scale. You tally it up and you get the average. So I took the test and I got a 4.6 out of five, which I felt pretty good about.
Angela: Yeah.
Cardiff: But on the questions that were about passion, I scored lower than the questions that were about perseverance which according to your book is actually quite typical, but I got to say it did surprise me. So when you hear a score like that or any score, what, what should I interpret from this test?
[00:14:06]
Angela: So this test comes from my interviews of high-achievers and just at the very beginning of my research on grit, I asked people who were really at the top of their field. Um, I asked them not only about themselves, but actually a more productive thing is to ask them about the people that they most admired.
Angela: It's fun to ask a Nobel Prize winner, you know, who are the people you most admire and what do you admire about them? Why do you think they're so successful? And so that series of interviews generated these questions, which you can then use for self-reflection like you did Cardiff, or I use it, this longer version of this questionnaire in my research. I'm not surprised that you scored higher on the perseverance items, you know, finishing what you began, being an extremely hard worker and so forth than you did on the passion items, which really indicate the consistency of, of your interests over time. And I'm not surprised in part because, the questions that I wrote for passion are imperfect. I think what I was trying to get at is not that somebody has no new interests or no curiosity, you know, on the contrary, people who are passionate in the sense of grit are deeply curious, interested, people who are voraciously learning all the time.
Angela: I think partly I found it difficult to express in these questions, what it means to have a directional focus. Like let's take me for example, right? I am a psychologist. A lot of what I do is psychology, but if you ask me, Hey, do you ever read any articles that are not about psychology? I'd say, you know, just the other day Cardiff, I was reading a, you know, series of articles on the paramecium.
Angela: And you would say really? And I'd say, yeah. So here's the thing. It occurred to me that the single celled paramecium is a terrific metaphor for what high achievers do at the very beginning of their careers, which is they explore a lot of new interests before they figure out what to specialize in. They sample before they specialize.
Angela: And because I thought this would be a great metaphor. Of course, I needed to know exactly how the paramecium navigates its, you know, brackish water habitat. So I started reading about the paramecium and its motility. I was reading articles that were published over a hundred years ago by this microbiologist named Jennings.
Angela: I found this Parisian microbiology expert named Romeo Brett, and I read his articles and then I called him. And then I talked to him about how he had figured out his interests. So you could say that when you are passionate in the sense of grit, and this is again, what I think the items only imperfectly capture, you have a directional focus. For me, psychology, the psychology of human achievement, and there is a depth there, and there is a specialization there.
Angela: And yet there is this breath in the sense of, you know, when I see something I'm always relating it back to grit and to achievement. And then that does allow me and does encourage me to study things that don't obviously connect in that way. So passion for long-term goals is what I described, but I think these items probably fall short of really getting at what I want to.
Cardiff: I also have a feeling that some of our listeners after hearing this are going to be looking up paramecium to see exactly what it is that you're talking about. We'll see.
Angela: Yes, I recommend that.
[00:17:22]
Cardiff: Okay. And Angela, I want to move on to the second part of our interview, which is all about the specific takeaways for organizations from your work. So it can be big companies, small businesses, nonprofits, anything, and their leaders can take from your work.
Cardiff: And I want to start with this, the nature of mentorship. A lot of companies have mentorship programs, a lot of organizations have mentorship programs where I think they sort of mindlessly pair somebody who's older and experienced at the company with somebody who's younger and newer and they just kind of throw them together.
Cardiff: But you write that actually the kind of mentorship matters a lot. And specifically that the nature of the mentorships should change depending on where somebody is in their stage of skill development. So can you just kind of give us a sense of what organizations should know about mentorship as it relates to grit and how they can maybe implement your lessons on mentorship?
Angela: Human beings learn by modeling other people who already know more than we do. And that's one function of a mentor just to model and to share knowledge that the younger rookie doesn't have, and I think that's an intuition that I would like to amplify. It's like, yeah, if every company had some programming or some, you know, structure that made mentorship easier and more productive, I think that would be a good thing. When Benjamin bloom this great psychologist, he's on my list of people to reincarnate if that ever becomes possible. But Benjamin Bloom was a psychologist. He spent a lot of his time at University of Chicago and, he studied world-class achievers, and, um, he found that there are three phases of development of a person who would eventually make it feel Olympics, you know, eventually become a, you know, world-class, tennis player, a musician, neuroscientists these are some of the kinds of high achievers that he studied. He called these the early years, the middle years and the later years. And in the early years, the kind of mentor that seemed to be most typical of these high achievers was somebody who was just really incredibly supportive and who made things fun and interesting. So what, more recent research shows is that when somebody is a rookie, they really need a lot of praise. I mean, they need a lot of encouragement and I think that's because, you know, they don't know if they belong here. They might have a lot of imposter syndrome. They're unsure of themselves. So
[00:19:53]
Cardiff: So they might quit, right? If the, if the mentorship feedback is, this is all the stuff you're doing wrong, even if they are doing those things wrong, they might just stop.
Angela: I make this mistake all the time as a mentor, even though I know the scientific research, I can't tell you how often it is that I make the mistake of giving people the feedback that I would want. Right? I mean, after we have this conversation Cardiff, you're an expert, I could say, Hey, Cardiff, What are 17 things I could've done better?
Angela: And I bet if you were honest with me, you would have probably at least that many. I mean, you would just know like, oh, we can do this. And you know, your timing, your pacing, you know, the way you structured this response. Now imagine that you give that kind of feedback to somebody, it's their first interview.
Angela: Hey, by the way, I'd like to give you a list of 17 things that you could do better next time. I think that's the mistake that a lot of mentors make. They understand themselves as experts. And so they mentor other people as if they were experts, but they're not experts. They're they're rookies. So one of the things to just be mindful of is I think some mentors are probably better at understanding that a young person needs a lot of praise, a lot of encouragement and, you know, in very careful ways, they also need obviously constructive feedback. But the big thing is to understand that you are not them. And sometimes psychologist called this curse of knowledge. But I think it's also, you know, very difficult generally to have any kind of empathy for somebody who's in a very different position.
Angela: So the first psychologically wise thing I think an organization can do in the realm of mentorship is to not only find mentors who are really positive and encouraging, especially when you're talking about the younger people in the company who you're mentoring, but also to just inform all of your mentors, Hey, by the way, research finds that young people who are the very beginning of their careers need a lot of praise. And as they develop expertise, their appetite for constructive criticism will increase.
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Cardiff: And the next idea that I thought was super interesting was about connecting workers to a higher purpose than just the immediate job description of what they're doing. So this is something that you write can be done for anybody at a company. You don't have to be an executive or a high ranking manager to have a sense of purpose, a sense of higher purpose that connects to the work that you're doing.
Cardiff: And so I'm kind of curious to know, how is it that you think organizations can go about doing that? Not just for the founders and the CEO and the people in the C suite, but for everybody. And how does that help instill a sense of grit into workers throughout the company?
Angela: If I ask somebody, hey, tell me about your work, and they begin to tell me that they, you know, they make money and they know it's got great benefits and they even know they're doing well, but it just doesn't have meaning, you know, I just, I wonder if I'm doing the right thing. I think what they are lacking is a sense of purpose. A sense of what psychologists often call beyond the self or self transcendent purpose. And here's what it is. It's feeling like what you're doing is part of something larger and even more important than yourself.
Angela: And I'm thinking in particular, a Victor Frankl who wrote man's search for meaning, and Abraham Maslow, who's well-known for the, you know, hierarchy of needs, right? Where you have like food and water at the very bottom. And what people think of as at the top of the hierarchy of human needs is being like, you know, the apogee is self actualization, but actually Maslow and Frankl both thought that the true, pinnacle of human existence is to not be concerned with your own self but be concerned with people beyond you, right? But I think that, in a market economy, you know, when people are trading goods and services, uh, with each other, really any of us, or most of us let's say, could ask ourselves if I do my work better today, if I am a little more conscientious, a little more detail oriented.
Angela: If I try to get a little feedback on what can make my work better, will somebody, other than me be better off? Maybe it will be the end-user. Maybe it will be, you know, the client I just got off the phone with. Will their life be a little easier, a little better? And I think most people can say, yeah. If I do my job a little better, somebody else, who's not me their life will be a little better. That's the heart of beyond the self purpose. And I think that's why when you look at very, very motivated people, people who have grit for, you know, really long term goals, it turns out that they're not only motivated by you know a sense of achievement or that they're interested, that they are almost always motivated by some sense of beyond the self purpose. Just as you know, Victor Frankel and Abraham Maslow, I think would have predicted.
[00:24:58]
Cardiff: Yeah. And then finally, there's establishing a culture of grit and you cite a sociologist named Dan Chambliss, uh who studies swimmers and something that he said that you quote in the book is kind of interesting here. He says, “So it seems to me that there's a hard way to get grit in an easy way. The hard way is to do it by yourself. The easy way is to use conformity, the basic human drive to fit in, because if you're around a lot of people who are gritty. You're going to act grittier.” Unquote. So it sounds to me like the best thing an organization can do, if it wants to make its people more gritty is to actually hire gritty people in the first place so that they're all kind of surrounding each other.
Cardiff: So would it be a good idea for companies to, I don't know, administer the grit test that you developed before they hire people or maybe even to administer it to the people who are already working there to see if there's ways that they can enhance grit? Uh, what do you think about this idea of establishing a culture of grit inside of a larger organization?
Angela: I think there's two things that any leader can do to change culture. One is on the selection end, right? Who, the people who are populating this little country of mine that I'm, you know, the leader of, or, am I developing people once they're here? So there's selection and there's development as the two levers that you have to change culture. And in terms of the selection, which is what you asked me about Cardiff, I think there are very few leaders who, wouldn't you know, get their selection mechanism to get, a fair amount of gritty people. I mean, it's not very controversial. Like if I ask a CEO like, hey, do you want incredibly passionate and persevering people to come work with you? Most people who are in leadership positions would say yes, please. Then the question is just how, right?
Angela: So it's not whether, but how. And I would say that, you know, there's not a lot from research to point to, but I think the best way that I know of, and I've studied this in, um, one or two research studies is to look for evidence that somebody has demonstrated grit in their past life before they came to you.
[00:26:58]
Angela: The second thing that you can do, which is like, okay, once people are there, how do you develop that culture? How do you sustain that culture? I would say that my best advice right now is uh, or just one very tangible thing is to have a culture book. So companies like Netflix, and, um, Momofuku, which is David, Chang's a restaurant empire.
Angela: They have a culture book and the culture book states very clearly in actually very, I think like charismatic, um, personal terms, like what the values are. Because what culture is is this, it's the way we do things around here.
Cardiff: You’re listening to The Next Chapter by American Express Business class. We’ll be right back.
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Cardiff: OK, I want to move on to our big topic really, which is also the theme and title of this podcast, The Next Chapter. So a lot has changed since Grit came out in 2016, and you’ve also had some time to reflect and hear reactions to the book. So can you just kind of give us an update Angela? How has your thinking changed on the core messages in the book, and I'd love to ask you about what lessons about grit you've learned, Angela in the time of the pandemic.
Angela: The pandemic has, you know, interesting highs and lows. And now we're in year three, um, which, to many of us is just kind of mind blowing. I think where those highs and lows are for people is different, but I will tell you something that I've noticed very recently. And I kind of, I don't know, I'm surprised because while the pandemic has been around for a while, but to me, I think a lot of people are struggling especially now. Right? And you can imagine that they would have struggled earlier when it first happened or, you know, for various reasons in year two. But, I have like countless text messages, voicemails, and emails from leaders telling me that people that they thought of as the grittiest, people in their organization are burning out right now.
And the question is why? aAd I think that one lesson from the pandemic, which underscores as opposed to changes, you know, what I would believe to be like what's really behind sustained passion and perseverance for long-term goals, is this; so I think when somebody is super, super gritty, it's because they are pursuing something that they really love, that they actually feel like there's hope to make progress on.
Right? And I think one reason why people might be burning out right now is that, you know, for whatever reasons and they differ by individual, there is some erosion of that hope that the future is bright for what they're doing and that makes them want to retire. It makes them want to change jobs. It makes them want to take an easier job or scale back.
And that feeling of burnout they have, I think is real. But to me, every emotion as a psychologist has to be understood as not only real, but like where does it come from? And the prevailing theory in psychology and one I subscribe to is that when we have feelings: joy, ecstasy, fear, loathing, jealousy, and burnout, which is an emotion, a feeling. It comes from some understanding of how your life is going. And the feeling of burnout, I think, comes from some, maybe even unconscious sense that there's not a lot of hope that you can't handle it anymore. That like, you know, you've tried your very best, but there's not a lot of hope that things are going to get better.
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And so to me, the lesson in the pandemic is that if we do want to be grittier, or if we want to understand, you know, how to make other people grittier, there has to be some, you know, valid sense of hope for that person that what they're doing is going to be enough and that, that the future has some reason to believe that it will be brighter.
Cardiff: You said in a very interesting interview with Philadelphia Magazine recently that you'd been kind of rethinking something about grit. That you used to believe that perseverance was the harder thing to get, right. That that was harder to get right than passion. And now it's the reverse. So I'd love to kind of get your thoughts on what has changed your mind and what we should draw from that?
Angela: Cardiff, when you told me about your grit scale score and you said, hey, you scored higher in perseverance than passion. And I said, you know, that's not uncommon. And that's maybe partly because I didn't write passion questions for this scale that were, were, you know, quite what I, you know, was really trying to capture.
Angela: But I think it's not only that I really do believe that for many of us, you know, work ethic, getting feedback, practicing things, we can't yet do, being resilient even, all that is easier than just knowing what to be persevering about. You know, I teach at Wharton and I also teach undergraduates who are getting their liberal arts degrees at University of Pennsylvania.
Angela: And they are, you know, 2 0 1 like hardworking people and many of them, I think you could just say from their own lives, like, of course, like they're incredibly resilient, but ask them like, hey, where are you going? You know, like, what's the plan here? You know, what, what is this thing that you're going to have as you're calling?
Angela: And they're just terrified, right? It's because when we ask the question, where are we going? You know, what am I going to do with all this work ethic and this energy? You know, that is what some scientists call an ill structured problem. In other words, it has many, many different solutions. There are many ways to find those solutions. So not just one way to find the solution, but many different answers to the problem. I think that's a kind of a question that, you know, many high achievers actually, you know, haven't had a lot of experience doing and, it takes a long time, right? For me, I spent 10 years figuring out that I wanted to be a psychologist. And every day of those 10 years, I wish I knew. So I feel like passion is in some ways the harder half of grit, and I do think that that lesson has come home to me you know, in the years since writing the book.
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Cardiff: You said in that same interview with Philadelphia Magazine, that in terms of what's next for you, you wanted to write the kind of like psychology equivalent of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, which is the famous cookbook in which the author essentially said that if you get those four things, right, your food would always come out tasting great.
Cardiff: And you want to do something like that for the good life. That you want to find, like the specific ingredients,that would lead to a good life if you get those things. Right. So I'm kind of curious to know, cause you just mentioned a lot of virtues. have you figured out what those ingredients are to set? You want to give us the table of contents version of your next book?
Angela: Yeah, just succinctly, you know what's the good…
Cardiff: What's the good life?
Angela: In, in six words or fewer?
Angela: Well, I will say this, you know, the cookbook that inspired me was trying to figure out, like, what are the elements if you get this right you know, food's going to taste good. And I will say there is a blueprint for human behavior I think that, you know, fully describes how it is that we end up acting, thinking, or feeling in whatever way we act, think, or feel. And it has a name in psychology. It's called the process model of human behavior. And, just if I had to like, you know, show you the table of contents for that, it would be that the process model says that like all behavior actually starts in the situation. So you have a chapter for like the situation, you know, your objective circumstances.
Angela: Then the next chapter would be attention, because what happens is human beings then pay attention to one feature of the situation that we ignore everything else. So attention is elemental to understanding why people act, think and feel as they do. The third chapter would be what psychologists call appraisal.
Angela: That's when you make meaning of what you've paid attention to, you interpret it, you know, as Cariff, for me or against me, you know, like, is this a place I belong or not? And then the fourth thing is action. Right? You know, you respond then to your interpretation of the situation. And anytime you're really puzzled by someone or exasperated, you're like, why, why didn't you do this?
Angela: I think you should think of these four chapters, you know, like, well, what, what situation were they in? Now what were they paying attention to in that situation now? Now, how did they appraise or make meaning of what was going on? And then finally, then can I understand their action, how they think, feel, um, or, you know, make choices in that situation.
Angela: So that to me is, the salt, fat acid heat of human nature.
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Cardiff: Angela Duckworth, thanks so much for being on the next chapter. Really appreciate it.
Angela: Cardiff, I've loved this conversation. Thank you so much.
Cardiff: You’ve been listening to The Next Chapter by American Express Business Class. A special thanks to Angela Duckworth for coming on the show today. And please tune in to our next episode where I’ll speak with Mori Taheripour, author of Bring Yourself: How to Harness the Power of Connection to Negotiate Fearlessly.
Until then, be sure to follow or subscribe on whatever app you may be using right now. And if you enjoyed today's episode, please leave us a review. Thanks for listening.
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