Angela Duckworth

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. This episode's remarkable guest is Angela Duckworth.
She is a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, she is also the founder and CEO of Character Lab. Duckworth has a BA in neurobiology from Harvard, a masters in neuroscience from The University of Oxford, and a PhD in psychology from The University of Pennsylvania.
She has written a book called Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, it was a New York Times bestseller for twenty-one weeks. Oh yeah, she also won a MacArthur Award in 2013 for her work on the role of grit and self-control in educational achievement.
In this episode, you'll hear one of the most insightful pieces of advice ever on this podcast: when to quit something. If that's not enough, she provides two powerful ways to change your behavior.
This podcast is brought to you by reMarkable, the paper tablet company, focus more and goof off less using the reMarkable tablet.
I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People, and now, here is the remarkable Angela Duckworth.

Guy Kawasaki:
I finished Grit and about one fourth of the way through, I said to myself, "Oh God. I would have accomplished more in my life if I had read Grit earlier."
Angela Duckworth:
You seem to have done just fine all by yourself. My husband is at his office but he was like, "Oh my God, I'm going to fan boy," and I was like, "Can't do it unless you're in the room."
Guy Kawasaki:
So that was my first thought, and then my second thought is, "Oh my God, I'm a terrible parent."
Angela Duckworth:
How old are your kids? How many kids do you have?
Guy Kawasaki:
I have twenty-seven, twenty-five, nineteen and sixteen.
Angela Duckworth:
That's like a super family.
Guy Kawasaki:
There's still hope that I can use some of the grit theories on my sixteen-year-old. The other ones, they're beyond control.
Angela Duckworth:
The ship has sailed? Why do I also suspect that those kids are also fine?
Guy Kawasaki:
First question, is Lucy baking or playing the viola these days?
Angela Duckworth:
Currently she's baking. I would say that there's been a pivot even from baking, but she is still baking. She works for a restaurant and every Saturday she bakes for the restaurant. But she's definitely not playing the viola, and just recently, we were talking about how great it is that she is not playing the viola anymore.
Guy Kawasaki:
So this burst a few tiger mom stereotypes here, so maybe you could explain the two rules that you have effectuated in your family that is the hard thing rule and the fun thing rule.
Angela Duckworth:
Yeah. The hard thing rule sounds like tiger parenting, but it's not, that's why I had to make up the fun thing rule, just to make it entirely clear. So the hard thing rule in my family I developed when I was a young mom and also a young graduate student in psychology, and I said to my kids - my husband and I - said to our kids, "Okay. Everybody in the Duckworth family has to do a hard thing." There is three parts of this rule, one is that a hard thing by definition requires practice. We wanted them to, even at a very early age, know the feeling of improving on something and trying again, and improving maybe a little less next time but still improving, and then doing it again. That's one part.
The second part was, you're not allowed to quit your hard thing in the middle. So we also wanted them to learn to stick with something to the end of a commitment which, by the way, was eight weeks if you signed up for track, or six weeks if you signed up for session two of ballet.
The third thing, and this is why it's not tiger parenting, I think, it's that nobody could pick your hard thing other than you, and I thought it was so important that my kids had choice. I thought the third part of the hard thing rule would insure intrinsic motivation in what my two girls did, but I realized about - oh gosh - my kids were in maybe middle school, maybe the beginning of high school, that they had not quite gotten that third part.
That the third part is means you have to enjoy it, right? You have to want to do it because younger daughter Lucy was slogging through viola. She loved her teacher but she didn't really love viola and so I never heard her listening to classical music, she didn't talk about it in her spare time, she just muscled her way through these practices.
The fun thing rule is a second rule that we had to add on in our family, and that is that everybody in the Duckworth family has to do something because it's fun; something that you enjoy. I told my daughters, and I think they understand now, they're older now, they're seventeen and nineteen, I think they understand that the game of life is really one when your hard thing and your fun thing are the same thing.
Guy Kawasaki:
Mm-hmm. What is the new pivoted fun, hard thing?
Angela Duckworth:
Well the younger daughter Lucy is only seventeen, as I said viola was a hard thing but it wasn't fun. Baking for her was fun but it wasn't hard. I think she's discovered both that some people think viola is fun, also she's discovered that some people, like Dorie Greenspan, who writes the baking column for The New York Times, for some people, their fun thing is hard, so she understands that it's not that these things are absolute but they're very personal. I think she's still trying to figure out something that's both hard and fun for her.
If I had to guess where she's trending, it's actually writing. So I think for her writing essays and writing in her journal is becoming more and more where she wants to improve and also not quit, and also, choose what she does, and also, find energy in doing it and pleasure.
Guy Kawasaki:
I have found, and this is a recently discovered fun, hard thing - podcasting. So podcasting is an extreme amount of work, it's very difficult, but it is the most satisfying thing I probably have done in my career.
Angela Duckworth:
So I would love to know more about both why it's fun for you, but also, I bet a lot of people listen to you and don't understand how it could be hard. So can we start with how it's hard? Why is it hard?
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. It's hard because I have to do a lot of background research, so I do hours of background research about the person. Then, I want my podcast to be ninety-five percent Angela, five percent me, and so, in effect, that makes it harder because if I could just take fifty percent of the conversation I could just go mile for long, right? But I have to ask you questions that lead you on to great discussions, I can't just-
Angela Duckworth:
Can't wing it. You can't just say what's on your mind.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. I just can't show up. I always try to ask questions, especially the initial ones, where Angela, or Katie, or Jane, or whoever immediately says, "This guy has done his research." When I ask you if Lucy is baking, that's not because I read the Wikipedia entry and it says, "Lucy, her daughter, is a baker," I had to slog through a lot of... Well not slog, but I had to go through a lot of stuff to figure that out.
Angela Duckworth:
That's a really good tip, by the way, because that means the first question is sending a signal too-
Guy Kawasaki:
Exactly!
Angela Duckworth:
-saying, "I respect you and I admire you, I came prepared, this is not going to be a waste of your time." I'm going to steal that trick. Katie probably told you, Katie Milton probably told you that we like to copy each other and we like to copy other people; I'm going to copy you, that's pretty great.
Guy Kawasaki:
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Angela Duckworth:
Yes. Exactly.
Guy Kawasaki:
So those are two hard things and then, unlike other podcasters who record raw, some of them just play it, whatever it is. Others turn it over to a sound designer who does the editing - I do the editing, not the sound design-
Angela Duckworth:
You do the editing? What?
Guy Kawasaki:
So I'm going to take this forty-five or sixty minutes and I'm going to go through every second of it by myself, then I'm going to give it to the sound designer who takes another pass at it. You cite examples in Grit about how... Oh, I forget who it was, but you said, "The writer looks at what he wrote the previous day and makes it better and makes it better."
Angela Duckworth:
Ta-Nehisi Coates, the incomparable, poetic, dream-like, Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Guy Kawasaki:
Just in case you couldn't quite make out the name, she said Ta-Nehisi Coates.
What do you think would have happened if your father had told you, "Angela, you are a genius, you are highly gifted and talented.”? Would the arc of your life have changed?
Angela Duckworth:
It most certainly would have, but one could say that about so many things, right? So that's the trivial answer, I guess the question is, how do I speculate it would have changed?
It's a great blessing to always feel like an underdog. I'm a very confident underdog, so I don't feel inferior when I talk to a Nobel laureate economist and ask questions that are surely, in some ways, actually stupid. I have a confidence that is not because I know what I'm doing, but that it's okay to not know. So I'm a very confident underdog.
I never think that I'm smarter than the Nobel prize winner, I never think I'm smarter than most people that I work with, but I feel like if my dad had given me an identity of someone who was going to have things come easily, then I don't know that I would have grown up into this very hardworking, persistent, confident person that she will eventually figure things out but not confident that she already has kind of person.
Guy Kawasaki:
Then all the work of Carol Dweck would have gone down the drain.
Angela Duckworth:
Who knows? I could have been oblivious to it or maybe like so many people, I would have picked up her book and then realized that I had a fixed mindset and then maybe Carol would have fixed me into somebody who was different. I think there are a lot of very, very smart people who feel like, in a way, it was a curse to be selected into the gifted and talented program, to be told by everyone that they were the smartest kid in the class. There's a tremendous fragility in trying to protect this identity that you're always going to have things come easily to you.
Guy Kawasaki:
I think one of the most powerful conclusions of Carol Dweck's work is that, if you have that fragility, if you have that self-image of, “I'm a genius, I'm highly talented, I cannot fail,” it means that you don't try things that you might fail because you don't want to ruin that self-image.
Angela Duckworth:
If you have a fixed mindset it's actually fine if you're winning, you've got a fixed mindset and you had a 4.0 summa cum laude, varsity captain, prom queen, prom king - who cares what mindset you have about your abilities? I think it's when you are not winning, right?
The thing about the people that I study... Olympic skiers like Lindsey Vonn, or actors like Will Smith, I think what I most admire about them is not that they have won awards, it's that they have this desire to put themselves in situations where they're not winning because they're at the edge of what they can do. That's so admirable to me.
They could coast, they could do things the easy way, but they just crave those situations where they don't know what they're doing and they're likely to partially lose and then grow. That's when you really do need I think a growth mindset about what you can change about yourself.
Guy Kawasaki:
This is a convoluted and complex question. I hope I can properly explain it, but let's say that you see someone, and you don't know what that person's background is - it's a surfer, a musician, a programmer, and clearly very good at what he or she does. What about the issue that years of hard work and grit can now be mistaken for innate talent and genius. How do you know how the person got there? It seems like the lot of the literature, they create a dichotomy of it's either innate and genius and talent, or it's grit. Why can't grit be considered part of the innate genius talent? Why is it always separate, in opposition?
Angela Duckworth:
How do you define the word “talent”? I think this is a great question to ask you because I'm sure at some level you've asked yourself, you've probably asked your guests. What would you say talent means? If I were seven years old and I didn't know what the word meant, what would you tell me?
Guy Kawasaki:
I've been so indoctrinated, I'm such a believer in your work and Carol Dweck's work that I would say that talent is the willingness to work hard and-
Angela Duckworth:
Wow. You really have drunk the Kool-Aid. I didn't even make that Kool-Aid. But actually, you know what? Somebody else didn't ask, they told me that. So I was interviewing Rowdy Gaines, the Olympic gold medalist swimmer for my book and I asked him this question because just the way he was using the word talent was a little bit puzzling to me, and then I asked him, "Wait, what do you mean by talent?" He actually said that in so many words that it included real heart and ambition and desire to work.
The word talent actually goes all the way back to biblical times, and as you may know, it was a currency. It was a weight of silver or maybe gold and so it had this idea of what is valuable, and then of course it became a parable in the Bible, and now, when we use that word, I think it can mean many things to many people. It has this sense of your potential but also it has a sense of what you do that is different from other people, that makes you special.
I think that you could define it any way you want to, but the reason I define it in opposition to grit is because when we study the connotations that are evoked by this work talent, overwhelmingly, people think it's innate. They think, “Oh, it's innate, it can't be learned,” and therefore I think it goes with this sense of natural ability and that which is not practiced or coached, so that's just a way of me saying that I think my research is all about the things that you can change that aren't entirely outside of your reach.
My definition of talent is very narrow and I don't think most people share it; it's just the rate at which you get better at something if you try. So if you're very talented at podcasting, each successive episode should be better at a rate that is faster than somebody who is lower in talent. I think you can change your talent too, but I'm just saying it's, to me, a rate variable. Effort is more of a time variable, if you think of rate times time.
Guy Kawasaki:
If it's a rate variable, I could be getting better and better at podcasting but still nowhere close to Freakonomics, so don't we also need an absolute value?
Angela Duckworth:
It could be like there's an asymptote, you mean? Maybe you'll never be as good as Steven Dubner is the idea of that... Well first of all, I also don't think that everybody is equally able to do everything, right? It would be nice to be able to say any kid anywhere could learn to ski like Lindsey Vonn; any kid anywhere can learn to run like Usain Bolt; any kid anywhere can learn to do physics like Albert Einstein. I don't think that's true. I know that it would make for a good sound bite, but I don't think it's true.
I think it's okay, the reason why I think it's okay is, in the early 20th century, over 100 years ago, William James wrote these essays when he was in the psychology department at Harvard, and the series of essays were all called Energies of Ben so he obviously believed in practice too, because he published the same essay in slightly different and improved forms, in multiple outlets over a span of years.
The project was about what we could be as people and our potential, and the reason I don't worry too much about asymptotes is that, like William James, I think we are all so far away from any kind of sealing imposed upon us. I can't run like Usain Bolt, right? That's silly.
So yeah, we're not all the same. We are changeable, but there must be limits, you don't live your life that way, you're not like, "Well, since I can't be Steven Dubner I'm just going to not even try to make this next episode." That's not the way I don't think you live your life.
Guy Kawasaki:
Not at all. I want Steven Dubner to want to be Guy Kawasaki, but that's a different…
Angela Duckworth:
Exactly! “I’ve got a message for Steven. Listen carefully because I want you to deliver it right!”
Guy Kawasaki:
Can I tell you, Asian to Asian, a funny Jackie Chan story that will-?
Angela Duckworth:
100%. Yes please.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Okay. This will give you some insights into me.
So one day I was in a Porsche, I happened to own a Porsche back then, and I was at this stop light and I look over and I see these four teenage girls in this car and they're laughing, they're smiling, they're making eye contact with me, they're giggling and all that. So I'm thinking, "Guy, you have truly arrived. Everybody knows who you are because of your writing, Apple, your speech, your Hot.com start-up." I'm happier than a pig in shit.
So the girl in the front seat says, "Roll down the window." I roll down my window, she sticks her head out and says, "Are you Jackie Chan?!" That's a funny story, but there's a punchline to this.
I have to tell you, Angela, ever since that day, one of my goals in life is that Jackie Chan is in Hong Kong, or Beijing, or wherever the hell he lives, and he's in his Bentley, or his S-Class, or his whatever, and he pulls up to a stop light, four girls in a car next to him, ask him to roll down his window, and they stick their head out and say, "Are you Guy Kawasaki?" So one must have goals.
Angela Duckworth:
Yes. One must. People like you, if I might venture, you just always are looking for something which is going to be a challenge, right? You don't like being comfortable. I don't think you probably enjoy feeling like you have a… I certainly don't feel like that.
Guy Kawasaki:
Having said that, if I ever get a MacArthur Award that's it, I'm quitting, that's it, I'm out, the game is over.
Angela Duckworth:
All right, good. Can you email me when that happens? We'll go and celebrate.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. You'll be the second person to know.
Angela Duckworth:
Okay.
Guy Kawasaki:
By the way, I am friends with Steven Wolfram and we were talking about not everyone is created equal, so I can have a conversation with Steven Wolfram once every ten years or so because his brain is so fast and so different. I'm exhausted for a decade after I talk to him, he's... There is a different chip set in him than me.
Angela Duckworth:
When you talk to people like that, how does it affect your motivation? Does it leave it the same? Does it make it less? Does it make it more?
Guy Kawasaki:
I have to say that I think that when you are secure in your own skin, it's not like you envy him, I am in awe of him, don't get me wrong, but it's not like I go away depressed and think, "Oh, if only I could be as smart as he."
I also have come to believe - I'm sixty-six years old - I have come to believe that just about everyone you meet is better at something than you are. You might feel superior to the plumber because you don't have to clean toilets and fix toilets all day, but that plumber is a much better surfer than you could ever be, Guy.
Angela Duckworth:
Not to mention a much better plumber.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. That too. I've come to really appreciate that everybody I meet it probably better than... Maybe this person can make better tamales than ever I could. Anyway, I don't know how we got on that tangent.
Angela Duckworth:
I don't know. I think that's a good... We can get off of that but before we do I'll just say I think it's a great way to live life, because then it makes you always hunting for that thing.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. It also makes you treat waiters and waitresses and flight attendants better because, quite frankly, they're probably better at something than you are.
Angela Duckworth:
Yeah. Probably more than we know.
Guy Kawasaki:
So what is your top goal right now?
Angela Duckworth:
I think all human beings by the way have hierarchies of goals, whatever it is you're trying to do, if someone asks you why you're trying to do it, right? Like, "Oh I want to lose weight," why? "Oh, I want to have more energy," that's already a hierarchy because losing weight is a way to achieve a higher-level goal which is to have more energy, right?
We all have hierarchies of goals, but I have a very tall pyramid of goals, so it's many layered. My top-level goal really gives definition and purpose to everything I do professionally; I don't know that I could say that my goal to be a good mom is in this hierarchy, but as a professional, my top-level goal is to use psychological science to help kids thrive, and everything including this conversation has to fit into that hierarchy or I shouldn't be doing it.
I make mistakes and I say yes to things that I shouldn't and I misallocate my time sometimes, but just having the definition of a top-level mission statement is actually very helpful for me and I feel like I am not as conflicted as I was in my forties or my thirties when I didn't have this structure, this blueprint of what I was trying to do.
Guy Kawasaki:
A couple of weeks ago, I contacted you and I did do this episode about the psychology of vaccination in which I got nine people like Phil Zimbardo, David Aacker, Bob Cialdini, Katie Milkman, Gretchen Chapman, and yet, one of the most interesting things that happened in that process is that I asked you, and you declined because you said I had Katie Milkman. So I want to know why you declined.
Is it because declining was not one of the lower middle goals that got you to your top goal? Or was it because you had to go to a viola recital? Was it because…
Angela Duckworth:
Is she baking? What was it? What was I doing? Well, I declined in part because I don't think that my value is that great when you add it to what Katie has to say about vaccines, so Katie and I do a lot of our research together.
Getting back to my goal pyramid and her goal pyramid, I said to Katie, "My heart is with kids." So if we're talking about teenagers, we're talking about who gets through college, increasing equity for... Okay. That's where my heart is; I'll do all of that part of the partnership.
When it comes to vaccines, and emergency savings, and getting people to exercise more, I will be your sidekick and we will do everything together, but you'll lead and I'll follow. If you had to pick between the two of us for someone to talk about behavior change and vaccines, the better person to pick is Katie. We call it “Hashtag: divide and conquer.” Oftentimes when we're texting each other and we're dividing who's going to do this, who's going... It's our little code for, “You do the thing that you're good at and that you care about, and I'll do the thing that I'm good at, and it will come together.”
Guy Kawasaki:
By the way, I loved your forward for her book.
Angela Duckworth:
Thank you. I think her book is fantastic, I'm really excited. Yay!
Guy Kawasaki:
It could be, and I say this in the highest praise, it could be the next Grit or it could also be the next Influence, as in Bob Cialdini. I love-
Angela Duckworth:
I love Bob Cialdini and I love Influence and he's writing his next book. The thing with present company excepted, everybody who wrote a great book is probably writing another great book.
Guy Kawasaki:
Present company excepted on my side.
Going back to podcasting, I have decided, but I've said this fourteen times, I don't think I'll ever write another book because I think podcasting is so much more powerful and timely. Imagine if you had written a book that was just finished as the pandemic started, you would have to throw that book away in business.
Angela Duckworth:
Do you think that people change because they're listening to this conversation or your other conversations? The reason that I wouldn't necessarily... I don't want to cast shade on books, but I have been wondering whether there is another technology for helping people change in ways that they want to, and so far, I have literally not heard a single person tell me, "Oh, you could do it this way, you could do it that way." I'm not confident that most people who read my book have materially improved their lives in a way that they wanted to.
Guy Kawasaki:
Are you saying you think that podcasting could be more effective?
Angela Duckworth:
I’m asking what you think, I wonder whether you think people change more because it's more immediate or it's personal or it's...
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, from an author's perspective or a podcaster's perspective, I find podcasting both easier and harder, as well as more effective than writing because writing - the delays are so long.
Angela Duckworth:
That's true.
Guy Kawasaki:
I know as soon as the book gets published I know there's stuff I want to fix, so there's that. I also think if a million people buy your book, how many do you think actually finish the damn thing?
Angela Duckworth:
Not a million.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. Not a million. Then you could say, “Well, if a podcast lasts sixty minutes, how many listened to the whole podcast?” But that's also a point. But I just-
Angela Duckworth:
Let's take the number of people... Whatever the fraction is, who actually finished the whole podcast or finished the whole book. There's also the question of, so what? Again, I'm taking a bit of an extreme contrary position only to push a little bit, I have wondered, “Is that all? How good is it? How effective is it to deliver information in a form of a book or a podcast?”
Even if people did listen to the whole thing carefully, do you think that it's enough? Or is there something else we should be doing?
When Julia Child wanted to teach people to cook, she wrote a cook book and then she had a TV show, I guess her version of a podcast. Was that enough? Maybe that is enough. I learned a lot from Julia Child through those media, but I just wondered whether you thought there was another entirely different way in which people could teach people.
Guy Kawasaki:
That is beyond my pay grade, but I think Julia Child is a difficult example because there is a sequence to cooking, right? You have to dice this and you have to sauté this and it's step by step.
I think if people are on a hike and they listen to Angela and they hear Angela say, "What we did with our kids is we had a hard task and we had a fun task and we want our kids to find something that's hard and fun."
Angela Duckworth:
Then what happens? Do you think anybody would actually do that with their own kids though?
Guy Kawasaki:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Now, and maybe this shoots my argument in the foot, but when I read Mindset, it changed my life. I really...
Angela Duckworth:
So tell me, when did you read it and what were you like before it? What happened?
Guy Kawasaki:
I read it before there was such a thing as podcasting, but it was just as... My kids were very young still or just being born. One of her key messages was: don't tell your kids that they're smart, and they're geniuses, and they're talented, and all that. Instead, praise their hard work.
Angela Duckworth:
Right. Right.
Guy Kawasaki:
That absolutely changed how I talked to my kids.
Angela Duckworth:
It stuck. You didn't do it for a day and then you went back to the way you were before; You were changed.
Guy Kawasaki:
When I read that it was like the waters parted. I said, "She's right. You should tell kids that it's about hard work and praise their hard work,” as opposed to, “You're just a gifted child, having my DNA.”
Angela Duckworth:
Okay. That's actually a great story and maybe I'm creating a problem that doesn't really exist, because for me after I wrote my book I was... I wasn't disappointed with how many books it sold, I guess I was wondering whether it really made any difference. Is that just a supply driven thing? Like authors want to write books so they do, is it really demand-driven? Is it meeting a true need?
Guy Kawasaki:
Do people ever come up to you and say, "Angela, your two by two matrix where you have to be supportive and demanding, that has changed how I parent”?
Angela Duckworth:
They have. So I guess maybe I should listen to that and be encouraged, but I'm very eager to do better, right? It just seems to me - let's see… the genre of the self-help book has been around for, I think, 100 plus years and you've experienced, and some people might tell me they literally help themselves just by reading this book, and thinking about it and doing whatever the book tells them to do.
I'm very eager to help a larger number of people in a more substantive way in something that's must be beyond the technology of a book. Maybe I'm missing all the value of the book itself, and maybe just all we need is more great books. I don't know, I just have been skeptical that... I think for some people they read the book and they feel good when they're reading it, and they get energized when they're reading it, and then they put it down and they don't even finish it, but even if they did, they... I don't know. I guess it's cynical sometimes that it's enough.
Guy Kawasaki:
I could make the case that knowing my kids' generation, if you really wanted to reach my kids, it's at one level: YouTube, but maybe even TikTok, so the Angela Duckworth TikTok about grit might reach more kids than your book.
Angela Duckworth:
By the way, my kids have taught me this, about TikTok. They were like, "Literally any sentence with a subject and a verb that has TikTok in it, you're doing it wrong." Just anything you say, like maybe we could... So I've learned not to use the word TikTok because no matter how I use it, I'm apparently not getting it right, but yeah and maybe.
Look, the world does know how to cook - let's just go back to Julia Child - the world does cook better, legit. We cook better, our coffee is better; there is progress. So human beings are effectively teaching other human beings, and maybe it is just books, and podcasts, and YouTube videos, and eventually, the knowledge of the thing.
I've been thinking about whether we could make the whole world psychologically literate, so 500 years ago, most people could not read and write, now everybody can read and write, everyone has the expectation of reading and writing, everybody learns it. It's a matter of growing up and a matter of actual formal education, so then that happened with numeracy too, right?
So at some level, you could complain, but at some level, we've all become much more numerate. We've become somewhat scientifically literate, people know what an experiment is, they ask, "Is this vaccine effective? Was there a control group?" Whatever.
I wonder about psychological literacy, I wonder if the next revolution will be that people would have the kind of appreciation of human nature that Carol Dweck has, or some of your guests like Rob Cialdini, and wouldn't it be amazing if everybody were as psychologically literate as Rob Cialdini, Carol Dweck and Katie Milkman? So I was thinking, if that's a possibility, does it happen through self-help books? Or does it happen in some other way?
Guy Kawasaki:
You're talking to an addict about a drug, I love behavioral science, I love behavioral economics, and social psychology, right? So you're talking to the absolute wrong-
Angela Duckworth:
Yeah. You're a junkie.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. I am a junkie. Cialdini's book changed my life. Brenda Ueland's book If You Want to Write changed my life. I'm a believer. I think the irony of course is that the Trump administration is going to bring to light how important these concepts are for good or bad.
Angela Duckworth:
Yeah. By omission. Hold on, let's start talking about character since there seems to be a profound absence of it. Wow, that's really terrible.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. Yeah.
Angela Duckworth:
Yeah. Maybe what's really important is that if you put books, and there are so many wonderful ones, together with this openness that you had. Maybe you would argue that you used to have a fixed mindset or whatever, but you seem to have had a self – Actually, there's a term for this. There's a school in South Africa called The African Leadership Academy, and the founders of this little school have this ambition of creating these entrepreneurial leaders of... I think you go there for your last two years of high school. It's a fantastic school.
If you ask educators, really, who know - they all know about African Leadership Academy - and the term that they use for this posture that you seem to have is being an autodidact. Somebody who is going to try to teach themselves, and you will find the books and find the podcasts.
You will read the books instead of leaving them on the coffee table, and then you will ask yourself, "What can I do differently?" Maybe what's needed is not a new technology, like a new platform or a multimedia whatever, maybe we just need to figure out how to... I get more people to have an autodidact identity. I love that. That was their term, and when they told me about it, and they were like, "And this is our whole educational philosophy, because if we can take these seventeen and eighteen-year-old women and men and make them into autodidacts, and then that's all you need to do for them for the rest of their life because then the rest of it, they're in charge."
Guy Kawasaki:
Isn't that basically a growth mindset?
Angela Duckworth:
Yeah. I think that at the core of that is a belief that your abilities can change. I think it's not only that, right? There's curiosity, there are other things that people need also, but yeah, I think a big part of it is a growth mindset is a great place to start.
Guy Kawasaki:
My last thought about books, and podcasting, and YouTube, and TikTok, it seems to me that the reason why Kodak and Polaroid aren't around is because they defined their business as chemicals on film or chemicals on paper, but the business they were really in was the preservation of memories so, to me, one shouldn't define I'm a publisher of books, I'm a podcaster, I'm a video creator, I am in the business of transferring knowledge.
It used to be stories around a campfire, and then it was books on papyrus, and then it was Gutenberg had a big breakthrough, and then there was desktop publishing, and then there's websites, and then there's podcasts. All of those things were transferring knowledge, so how we transfer knowledge is not as important as realizing that the business we are in is the transfer of knowledge.
Angela Duckworth:
If Kodak or Polaroid has said, "Our top-level goal is preservation of memories or helping people tell visual stories," whatever it is, this abstract purpose, then they would have had the flexibility and the ingenuity to be able to say, "Oh, digital is here,” because that's just a tactic, that's just a means to the end.
I think that's why for me, having a fairly abstract goal, use psychological science to help kids thrive, that doesn't say that I should be on Guy's podcast or not, or I should be a professor, I could do a startup. Most people, in my experience, cannot say in ten words or fewer, "This is what my life is about. I have a mission statement and it's unlikely to change and my dying breath with be taken in service of this."
I can tell you, Guy, my dying breath will be taken in service of this and I'm not changing my top-level goal, as much as I might change the tactics of how I'm desperately and in very imperfect ways trying to achieve it.
Guy Kawasaki:
So I will tell you, therefore, my top-level goal, and I like to use mantras instead of mission statement because mission statements are always fifty words long. My mantra is two words: empower people.
I want to empower people with my podcasting, my writing, my speaking, my investing, my advising.
Angela Duckworth:
When did that become conscious for you? When did you say, "I can say it and I can say it in two words, and I understand how it's the through-line of everything I do."
Guy Kawasaki:
When I was fifty.
Angela Duckworth:
That's pretty good. That's pretty good, and isn't it great? It's a great thing.
I teach this undergraduate class and I tell them, "You're not fifty," which is my age, by the way, “it's unlikely that you're going to be able to summarize your whole purpose professionally, but it's good to try, and it's good to always be thinking that at some point I'm going to build myself a compass, and the compass is going to tell me true north." So I just think the intentionality is a big part of it.
Guy Kawasaki:
Man, I have never in all the interviews of Remarkable People, I have never gone so off-script.
Angela Duckworth:
Sorry. I know, you did all the preparation and then I ruined it.
Guy Kawasaki:
No, no, no, no. So okay, my next question, back on script, so if people do enough work, they'll figure out that grit is a good thing; it's perceived as good. Carol thinks it's good, the Harvard admissions director thinks it's good.
If you see someone who, to use a metaphor that you use, stays on the treadmill for a long time, how do you know if that person is gritty or just knows that staying on the treadmill makes me look gritty and Harvard will admit me?
Angela Duckworth:
Oh, like faking grit, which, actually, having a seventeen and a nineteen-year-old, both of whom went through the college admissions process, this has happened three times for you I think, right? There is a lot of that, there is a lot of trying to look good rather than trying to be good, which I hate by the way.
I raised my girls with a daily lecture of not doing things like that, I was like that was not... First of all, I never had to do that and everything worked out fine for me. Second of all, you lose your integrity. I think I felt like I was shouting into the wind because their peer group and the school that they go to, it was just this prevailing obsession with looking good for your college application. Of course this applies to other parts of life too, like later on.
I, first of all, think that it's very hard to fake authentic commitment for very long, and even if you could, I think it would be corrosive. For me, actually, if I think of what true happiness is, it's when you are aligned, your goals go together, not against each other.
When I wake up in the morning, I don't feel ambivalence; I just want to run downstairs, and I sometimes literally run downstairs and get my coffee and get back to work. There's no conflict like, “Oh, I should do this, but I want to do that. This is what other people think I should do. This is what I want to do.” It's all of a piece.
I hope that we do a better job with our young people so that they can learn that it is so much better to be who you are and to be as good as you can be, and to really not worry about what it looks like. The universe will take care of you if you do. If you work really hard and you do things for the right reason, the universe will take care of you and you can spend your energy the way it should be spent, which is on what you're doing.
Guy Kawasaki:
Which is to say that you're essentially positive about pursuing passion and pursuing your interests as opposed to becoming a doctor, lawyer, or dentist because that's what's lucrative.
Angela Duckworth:
There's really not being driven entirely by external, extrinsic motives, okay, that's one thing not to do, but I will say this: the reason I hesitated there, I stuttered a little bit, is that kids are kids, right? They don't actually have a defining mantra or top-level goal because they're kids and they don't know what they're doing, and they haven't even experienced very much yet.
I think I don't want to prematurely pressure young people into having the kind of passion that a fifty-year-old or a sixty-six-year-old might have. I think when you are fifteen, sixteen, twenty-one, you're exploring, and I think you're dating, you're not married yet, right? So it's okay to go on a couple of dates and then never see the person again, and it's okay to do somethings and not feel like, "Oh, it has to be my passion."
A very wise person once said, "A butterfly is a butterfly, but a young butterfly is a caterpillar, and we shouldn't make the mistake of trying to get our caterpillars to be butterflies until it's time." So I think that young people should be given a little bit of practice in doing hard things. I think they should begin to explore their interests, they should learn to do things that eventually they'll do better, but I don't think they should prematurely feel like, "Oh my God, I'm sixteen and I don't have a lifelong passion." That's the wrong message, and I really hope that doesn't happen because my seventeen-year-old told me that now, maybe because of my work, maybe not, in college admissions now, kids are like, "Oh my God, I have to show that I've done one thing for many years." Yes, I want kids to learn dedication, but I don't want them to feel this premature pressure to be things that they aren't yet.
Guy Kawasaki:
So when is it okay to quit?
Angela Duckworth:
I think it's okay to quit if you are quitting on a good day. So that's my rule.
If you're having a good day, nothing terrible happened, there wasn't a rejection letter, you didn't trip and fall and embarrass yourself. If it's a good day, it's just a good day and you don't think that what you're doing is as good as something else that you could be doing, then you should absolutely 100% quit.
What I worry about is that most people when they have that emotional charge, “That's it, I quit.” I said that to my husband several times when I was writing the book Grit, I literally said out loud, "I quit. I can't do this anymore! This is stupid and I can't believe you convinced me that this was a good idea!" That was all quitting on a bad day which he didn't let me do. He was like, "I love you too much to let you quit on a bad day."
I think people can use that as a rule of thumb - if you want to quit something on a good day, you're probably right. If you want to quit something on a bad day, I would wait until it's not a bad day and then make that decision.
Guy Kawasaki:
That is truly, from the bottom of my heart, that is a fantastic piece of advice. I have never heard something. Okay. Angela, no shit, I will tell you that in the sixty interviews I've done, that may be the most insightful thing ever said.
Angela Duckworth:
Well that's what you get for going off-track with me.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's more insightful than anything Steven Wolfram said.
Angela Duckworth:
Tell Steven that next time you see him!
Guy Kawasaki:
I will. I will. Yeah. When I see him in nine years.
Angela Duckworth:
Okay. Good.
Guy Kawasaki:
Now tell me, why is lasting behavioral change so difficult?
Angela Duckworth:
I think it is in part the fact that whatever we are today, whatever our habits are, when you bite your nails, you interrupt people, you drink three cups of coffee in the morning. Good things too, you go for a run, whatever it is, there are forces that are in your life that are impelling you to do that. It's like a physics diagram. You remember all those little arrows we used to draw when you were doing physics? What's going to happen to this ball if this force goes that way?
Whatever you're doing right now in your life, there's lots of forces, lots of momentum, lots of reasons for doing that and to stay doing that. Now one day you wake up and you say, "I don't want to drink coffee anymore, I don't want to interrupt people, I don't want to bite my nails, I want to do things a different way." So you have another little arrow going the opposite way; that's you deciding not to do it, you're like, "Great." You read a book, you listen to a podcaster. The reason why it's very hard to sustain that is because all those arrows that were pointing in the direction that they were already are still pointing in that way.
I don't think it's impossible to change your behavior, but I think you have to recognize that there are so many forces that carry you in the direction that you used to be going that it's very hard to change course. That is why when I think about behavior change now, I think that the greatest hope that most of us have for changing our behavior is to do it with other people.
If you want to speak French, move to France, right? If you want to be in a healthy lifestyle, hang out with people and join clubs and do things with lots of other healthy people, right? Because then you put yourself into a different force diagram where now you've got more arrows pushing in the direction that you want. Being the only arrow pushing against is just very, very hard work and, eventually, I think most people stop pushing.
Guy Kawasaki:
So this is the power of culture.
Angela Duckworth:
This is the power of culture. I'm a psychologist and I'm not supposed to study culture. I will just say psychologists are not trained to study culture, but I think, eventually, every psychologist wants to study culture because if you want to know why we are the way we are and how to change the way we are, you absolutely have to start understanding culture.
In addition to culture, the one thing that I think could be in a way the foundation for all personal growth, is self-awareness. It's being able to take yourself as an object of inquiry and to look down in a way on your own self; having some outside perspective.
Just the moment that you realize that you talk too much in meetings, the moment that you realize that you have a bad temper, the moment that you realize that you can be really impulsive when it's late at night or whatever. That, to me, is the key to unlocking everything. Without that, you can't unlock any growth that I can see, but with that, you have the possibility of changing almost anything.
I think that self-awareness and culture are, to me, two of the things that, personally, as a scientist, I want to study more so that I can... I have a very similar top-level goal to you with just more words and maybe a little more specific, but yeah, I hope that empowers people.
Guy Kawasaki:
So you heard it straight from the MacArthur Award winner's mouth - If you want to change your behavior, put yourself in an environment where there are other people who have the desired behavior, and increase your self-awareness, get outside of yourself. If you combine these two factors and you embody the quality of grit, you will be remarkable.
I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. The Remarkable People podcast is sponsored by the reMarkable Tablet Company. If you need a tablet that feels like a pencil on paper and has battery life of weeks, not hours, the reMarkable Tablet should be on the top of your wish list.
My thanks to Taylor Bledsoe of the Aiming for The Moon podcast. Without her help, I may have never gotten to Angela.
My thanks to Peg Fitzpatrick and Jeff Seih, two extremely gritty people who make this podcast remarkable. Speaking of grit, vaccines are on the way, but we still have to be gritty in our determination to avoid infection so wash your hands, don't go into crowded places, wear a mask, and get vaccinated as soon as you can.

Mahalo and aloha.