Best of Series: The Power of Passion and Perseverance With Angela Duckworth

In this week's episode of The Psychology Podcast, we continue the "Best of Series" with Angela Duckworth. Angela Duckworth researches self-control and grit, which is defined as passion and perseverance for long term goals. Her research has demonstrated that there are factors that can be more predictive of success than IQ. In this episode we cover some of her findings on grit, including academic and popular misconceptions of this work. We also discuss research on standardized testing, self-control and more.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today's episode is
part of the best of series, where we highlight some
of the most exciting and enthralling and enlightening episodes from
the archives of the Psychology Podcast.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Enjoy. I'm very excited to have Angela Duckworth on the podcast.
Angel is a professor of psychology at the University of
Pennsylvania and the founder and scientific director of The Character Lab,
a nonprofit whose mission is to develop, disseminate, and support
research based practices that improve student achievement and well being.
Angel studies grit and self control, as well as other

(00:33):
attributes that predict success in life. A twenty thirteen MacArthur
Genius Fellow, Angel has advised the White House, the World Bank,
NBA and NFL teams, and Fortune five hundred CEOs. Angela
has received numerous awards for her contributions to K twelve education,
including a Beyond Z Award from the Kit Foundation. Her
first book, Grit, The Power of Passion and Perseverance, will

(00:54):
be published May third, and I can honestly say that
it is wonderful. Thank you for being on the podcast, Angla.

Speaker 3 (01:00):
Thanks Scott, it's great to be here.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
S Angela. Prior to your career research, you actually done
quite a few things in your life. You're involved in
educational initiatives, you studied neuroscience. How would you say some
of those things contributed to your interest in psychology and
great in particular, I had.

Speaker 3 (01:17):
Always been interested, I think, in doing something that would
be useful since I was very young, and I think
I found my way from running, you know, Red Cross
blood drives and selling daffodils for the American Cancer Society
to education. By the time I was in college, I
think I realized two things. Like one is just I
really liked kids. I mean I just I enjoyed being

(01:38):
with kids and tutoring them, and I was a big sister.
And the second thing I realized, maybe a little more
at an intellectual level, was that if you're really going
to try to help people in a meaningful way, kids
are great because they are at the beginning of their
life with just the math of it right like that,
you could potentially have a greater impact on kids' lives.
And by the time that I was ready to graduate

(01:59):
from college, I knew that I wanted to start a
summer school for kids who wouldn't be able to Afford
Academic and Richmond otherwise. And I modeled the program after
a program that used to be called summer Bridge and
is now called Breakthrough Collaborative. There's now many of these
programs throughout the world. I think, actually I was going
to say the United States, but I think it's international now.
So I did that, and I, as you mentioned, you know,

(02:20):
did a bunch of other things. I think at the
time that most people go to graduate school, it's around
twenty two to twenty four. But for me, I spent
those years in my twenties teaching, I was management consultant.
I did a degree in neuroscience at Oxford. I mean,
I don't know that this was all planned. In fact,
I know that it wasn't planned. But through those experiences
I came to the realization by the time I was

(02:43):
thirty two, which is when I did enter a PhD
in psychology, that there was a problem that needed to
be solved with kids and education that I didn't think
would be solved without actually a benefit of psychological science,
and that is to understand why it is that children
are sometimes able to bring forth great effort and concentration

(03:03):
to learning and to doing well. You know, when I
say learning, I mean, you know, both inside and outside
the classroom, right, Learning is also something that happens when
you're you know, doing a sport, or learning to get
along with people in your family, or you know, really
learning broadly construed that we needed to understand the origins
of effort toward learning, and that if we could understand that,
we would be able to make a huge difference in kids' lives.

(03:25):
And I felt that by going into psychology as an
academic as you are as well, that we would be
able to make greater strides than the kind of you know,
the wisdom that got handed down to us from generation
to general. We should work hard, you know, discipline is
really important, but I felt like we need to go
beyond that.

Speaker 2 (03:40):
Sure, and what resonated with Martin Seligman when you were
looking at psychology website at University of Pennsylvania.

Speaker 3 (03:46):
Well, to be completely honest, when I was thirty two,
I just had one child with my husband. We moved
back to Philadelphia for the sake of his career, which
is that he wanted to you know, join his father
in a business in real estate. And it's here in
Philadelphia where you know, my parents were living in the
area as well. I grew up around here, So it
wasn't that I, you know, flew across the country in

(04:07):
order to become a graduate student of Marty Seligman because
I knew he'd be the perfect fit. It was actually
that I happened to be in Philadelphia when I realized
that I want to do a PhD in psychology, and
I looked around at the programs it would be very
easily commutable, and there aren't that many, And then I
went to the faculty list in alphabetical order, and when
I got to s on the University of Pennsylvania Psychology

(04:29):
website and I started clicking around and reading things that
Marty had written, I felt like he would be a
good match for me in terms of his well he
had done research on helplessness, which in a way is
the opposite of sustaining effort on things that are hard,
and that also that he clearly had a pragmatic or
practical bent. I think he's one of the psychologists, and

(04:50):
he's not the only one, but it's a bit more
of an exception than a rule that really thinks about
on a daily kind of like, how is this going
to actually change people's lives and not just be interesting
from a kind of purely you know, scholarly perspective.

Speaker 2 (05:05):
Yeah, and that's something I resonate with both you and
him for that. So you did, You started to study
grit and it emerged from a lot of conversations you
had Mari, and a lot of conversations you had with
high level CEOs, with athletes, et cetera. I mean, you
started this research, it kind of emerged. It's not like
you started saying I have this new theory. It's kind
of you let the data create it in a way.

(05:25):
Could you talk a little bit about that.

Speaker 3 (05:27):
Yeah, my first and second years of graduate school, I
was trying to figure out what exactly I wanted to study.
So I knew that I wanted to unpack the psychology
of effort and achievement. And I had some intuitions from
you know, my observations of my own life, as every
psychologist brings to their work, and then that's sort of
you know what we do. It's very William james Ian

(05:47):
and I had the observations from the classroom and you know,
everything else that I had seen. But I didn't come
into graduate school saying I'm going to study grit, which
I watch I define as passion and perseverance for long
term goals. Really, that idea emerged from interviewing people who
are really high achieving and as many domains as I
could think of. And that's a technique, a sort of like, well, okay,

(06:09):
let's look at high achievement, and let's look at achievement
across as many domains as possible. That's a time honored technique.
You know. The logic of it is that if you
only study world class soccer players, you might figure out
something that's just very particular to soccer, you know, like
having really good calves or something. You know, so you
try to look for what's common across different domains. And
many other psychologists had done that before me, and I'm

(06:30):
sure many will do it afterwards as well, because it's
just common sense that that would give you a clue
to sort of what the active ingredients might be. And
so when I talked to high achievers, I asked them,
I asked them about themselves. But I quickly found out
that it's hard for people to talk about themselves, you know,
we're all programmed to be self effacing, and so I
started asking them about the people they most admired. So
even if they were a MacArthur fellow, I might ask them,

(06:51):
you know, who they most admired in their field other
than themselves, and to just tell me about them. And
I think, in addition to luck, which came up a lot,
you know, this person's just really lucky to have this
happen at this time. In addition to talent, you know,
this person has an ability to you know, to get better,
to you know, see things that other people don't necessarily

(07:12):
see or learn as well. That there were these descriptions
that eventually became the Grit scale, and the two dimensions
that emerge in those interviews are the same two dimensions
that are in the Grit scale, which is to say
that people who are very high achieving tend to bring
forth great effort in a consistent and enduring way toward
a goal. And the second thing is that the goal
does itself doesn't change. This kind of thing that that

(07:35):
people are working on doesn't morph and change much over time.
That doesn't mean that their tactics aren't different, but the
sort of like the big thing that they're working on
tends to be the same, not different over time.

Speaker 2 (07:47):
Right, That makes a lot of sense. So you know,
I've seen different definitions of grit, even in your own literature.
I want to quote the latest definition I've read, and
I thought we could unpack some of the elements of
this definition, because I think what you've done over the years,
you've gotten more or precise about exactly what grit is.
Some people might not be aware of the evolution of that.
So your latest definition is greatest sustained self regulation in

(08:07):
the service of superordinate goals. So say that ten times
real quick.

Speaker 3 (08:13):
I don't know if I could do that, but I
can tell you a little bit what about why that
isn't what we're trying to say. I mean, it's not
the most beautifully written phrase, that's for sure. And I'll
also say how for sure like anybody else, I mean,
I'm trying to or if I were saying the same
thing in two thousand and seven, then I am saying now,
then that would say very little about how much I'd
progress as somebod who's trying to understand grit. But I

(08:35):
think in important ways, this jargoning definition that was recently.
You know something that I've written in an article, in
very meaningful ways like the same thing as what I
started out, you know, those intuitions from those interviews. So first,
let me just say what I mean by a superordinate goal.
One thing that is clear to me about GRIT is
that it's not just that your interests are consistent in

(08:56):
some like very trivial way, like oh, I still like
doubt nad be, you know, like, oh, it's you know,
I really enjoy the New York Times Sunday magazine. And yep,
sure enough, four or five years later, I still enjoy
the New York Times Sunday magazine. Those are sort of
lower level interests or goals that I don't think that
that's the locus of consistency that really matters for GRIT.

(09:18):
What really is striking about people who are gritty is
that their interests at the most abstract and general level
are consistent. So, for example, I would expect that ten
twenty thirty years from now, Scott Kaufman and Angela Duckworth
will still be deeply interested in human behavior, human motivation,

(09:39):
you know, psychology, right, and that I would still be
interested in kids, which has been you know, as you
pointed out, like a very true of me since I
was a teenager. So it's at that level that I
find consistency in really gritty individuals, not at these sort
of lower level, more tactical kinds of things. And I
think by invoking this kind of superordinate thing, what I'm

(10:00):
also suggesting is that it's certainly not my own you
know work, it's really building upon decades of research and psychology,
is that human beings are goal directed. And furthermore, we
can say that we have a hierarchy of sorts where
there's certain goals that we have, like have a cup
of coffee this morning, that are really really low level,
specific concrete.

Speaker 2 (10:20):
Regretting that I didn't do that one right now?

Speaker 3 (10:22):
Yeah I could do that. I actually just had two.
I highly recommend that low level goal. But you know,
why do I have that level goal? It's it's sort
of this for a second, you know, sort of the
if you go one tier up, it's like, well, why
do you care about that? Every time you ask why
about a goal? You sort of go up in the hierarchy.
It's like, well, I you know, really want to well,
you know, first I might enjoy it, but you know,
another why is that, like I want to actually be
alert for like the next six hours while I'm doing

(10:45):
something like writing a manuscript, It's like, well, why do
you care about that? Well, you know, this manuscript actually
matters to me because it's you know, part of you
know project that of like trying to understand the measures
of grit. Okay, well why does that matter? So I
think that human beings not only are goal directed, we
have goals that are nested in these hierarchies where every
time you ask why why do you have that goal?

(11:05):
You shoort of go up a level at the very
very top of this like Christmas tree like hierarchy, you
have this you know, superordinate goal. And for me, it
is to help kids thrive using insights from psychological science.
And that's what I you know, what I find, you know,
most interesting about the consistency of interest in gritty peoples
that at this abstract level, you know, there's a lot

(11:27):
of stability, there's a lot of stubbornness, and there's also
not just having that goal, because human beings are very
capable of having goals that they don't actually do anything about,
but there's also this you know, active effort toward accomplishing
that goal. So yes, it is perseverance and passion for
long term goals. But it's particularly long term goals that
are superordinate in nature. And you know that passion and

(11:49):
perseverance is really you know that it's describing the active
pursuit of those super goals more than it's describing you know,
these very very low level tactical objectives, right, And I.

Speaker 2 (11:59):
Really like that model.

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Speaker 2 (13:13):
We have lots of things, We have lots of goals
that are not harmoniously integrated into into the superorderic goal,
and we do well to apply self control mechanisms to
inhibit those things. To just get nerdy for a second.
You've argued that individuals who do persist over obstacles over
a long period of time generate larger equal finality sets.
Could you tell me a little bit what what an

(13:34):
equal finality I don't even know how to pronounce it
ecofinality set is and how that relates to Over time,
you start to substitute things that are not going towards
your superordentical they're kind of getting the way with you,
kind of maybe get more coherence in the structure. Is
that one way of looking at it.

Speaker 3 (13:49):
Well, you know, again like the idea of equif I
don't know how to pronounce it, I personality, right, So
it's an idea that actually, like if I describe it
without jargon, I think will be more intuitive. And again
this comes from you know, research scholarship on goals that
would not mine So I'm kind of borrowing from other academics.
But the idea is that you know, if you have
a relatively abstract, high level goal, that there could be

(14:12):
many ways, certainly more than one, that you could reach that. So,
for example, you know, you might have the academic ambition
to you know, publish research and be a professor, right,
that might not be your superordinate goal because that sort
of it could be you know that there's an even
more like why you could ask a why question, you
could go up even more level, like you know, I

(14:32):
want to be somebody who contributes to knowledge, you know.
But you know still this professor goal is not the
lowest level goal either, right, because there are definitely if
every time you ask how, you go down a level,
every time you ask why, you go up a level.

Speaker 2 (14:43):
In these hierarchies, if you're only, in fact, if your
only goal, if your superordinent goal is be a professor,
You're probably live a very unhappy life.

Speaker 3 (14:49):
Absolutely absolutely, And I think it is, you know, the
prescriptive recommendation here, the sort of like, well, what would
be a good way to do all this? I think
it is to have a pretty fully developed hierarchy where
at the very top it is a you know, pretty
abstract a thing where there are multiple ways that you
could get there, right, multiple hows. Right. So, for example,

(15:11):
if you really want to contribute to knowledge, and you know,
time after time the professor things not working out, there
are other ways to contribute to knowledge. You know, you
could be part of an education technology startup, or you
could become a writer. I mean, there's lots of things
that you could do to contribute to knowledge, not just
being a professor. And that exactly is the heart of
the idea of equifinality. That the idea is that you

(15:31):
know there are substitute paths, you know that would get
you to the same destination. And in fact, you know,
and I won't pretend that the grid scale does a
great job of distinguishing between these lower level paths that
are interchangeable to some extent, substitutable and then these higher
level things like the farther you go up in the
goal tree, the more you should be stubborn and sticky

(15:52):
and kind of, you know, unwilling to substitute. The grid
scale itself doesn't do a great job of that. But
what I do find, particularly when you interview gritty individuals,
that they're really able to distinguish between the higher and
the lower level goals that they have, and at the
lower level goals, they're extraordinarily flexible and creative. You know,
I'm like anybody else. Just to use this personal example,
like I get rejected a lot, right, you know, from journals,

(16:15):
and you know, you get the twelve page, single space
rejection letter telling you in excruciating detail why your article
is bad. And then you know, what do you do. Well,
it's a lower level goal to get this particular article
into this particular journal this particular year. So you know,
if you're gritty, you know you're not. It doesn't mean

(16:37):
that you're stubborn about this like low level thing. It's like, oh,
I'm just going to keep rewriting this article and you know,
stalking the editor. That would be not grit. That would
be a kind of a stubborness that I would not
call grit, And I think a gritty person would say like, okay, well,
how else can I achieve the higher level goal, which
is to get this finding out? Okay, I'll submit to
another journal or you know, I'll revise it and you know,

(16:57):
split it up into two articles, and you know, I'll
peel to the editor. There are all kinds of things
that you would do that would be I mean that's
the idea of equifinality, all kinds of things that you
would do to get to some higher level goal about
which you're a little more stubborn than the lower level ones.
And when you get to the very top, you know,
that's where I find that really greedy people are at
the most abstract level, the kind of the life organizing

(17:19):
ultimate concern, as Bob Emmons would say, as sort of
the life organizing goal like that, you know, there's almost
nothing that could make them give up on that. Right.

Speaker 2 (17:27):
So this adds some good nuanced because I think there's
a lot of misconception. Well, and I don't think there
are a lot of misconceptions of your work, And it
also is misapplied and education a lot and a lot
of sometimes applied is kind of duty. Grit is just
being like a robot and just doing what other people say,
and they're missing the passion part of your definition passion.
It's passion and perseverance. And the superner goal is kind

(17:48):
of like a super passion right in a lot of ways,
it's like your organizing passion. So what is the difference then,
between self control and grit?

Speaker 3 (17:54):
Self control is something I also study and it's highly
correlated with grit. Find self control as the ability to
adjudicate between two conflicting impulses, one which is more immediately
rewarding and the other which is probably you think more

(18:16):
enduringly good for you or rewarding, but not immediately so.
So at the heart of this definition is that you
have a conflict between something which is going to feel
good right away and is easy in some sense, and
another thing which you think you'll actually find more satisfaction
out of, but not easily and not right away. So,

(18:38):
for example, if you're sitting in a lecture and you
think you know if you upon reflection, you think, if
I really paid attention for the next hour and twenty minutes,
I think I'd overall be better off. It's just better
for Angela if she does that. Alternatively, you know, I
could click around on my Facebook page during this lecture
and that would bemediately more pleasurable. That's the kind of

(19:00):
conflict that human beings of all ages face all the time,
and so that kind of asymmetric conflict good for me
in the long run versus good for me Now, I
think that's at the heart of it. The second part
of my definition. When I said, you know, your ability
to adjudicate between those two choices, what I mean is
that your ability as a person to make those choices
in your own best interest and to carry those out.

(19:21):
So I don't mean compliance, right, which is to say
that somebody, for you know, and your parents take away
your cell phone because they want you to do your homework.
That's not self control. That's rental control. But if you say,
as my fourteen year old said to my husband last week, Dad,
I want you to take away my cell phone because
I have a big test coming up and I need

(19:42):
to study for it, that is self initiated. You know.
That was you know, her having some insight into this
conflict and her asking somebody else to like help her
get through it. That's the sort of self initiated part
of self control is really important. Now, that's what self
control is. Like, how is that different from grit? My
perspective on this is that, you know, anytime you have

(20:03):
any kind of conflict between two goals, when one of
which is you know, better for me, even if it's
only a little bit better for you versus something that's
going to be more immediately awarding, you know, you have
to use self control. And that happens all the time.
You know, It's like I don't really feel like working
on my taxes, but I really should because I don't
want to be there on April fourteenth, like you know,
scrambling around. You know, I shouldn't have a second cup

(20:25):
of coffee. I should really just have one because tonight
I'm going to like not sleep well. I mean, all
the time people are trying to deal with these conflicts.
It's like the nature of you know, human existence. I
think where grit is different is the following. Yes, you know,
grit often entails, you know, choosing to do something versus
something else, something that's hard versus something that's easy. So

(20:47):
there's some overlap there, But grit only pertains to those
goals that are in that hierarchy that you would say like,
oh yeah, but that's part of my goal hierarchy for
my life defining these are all goals I have to
do with that superordinate thing that really makes me tick
and gives my life meaning. So you know, unless that
that's how you feel about your taxes or that's how
you feel about your weight, you know, those would be like,

(21:08):
oh yeah, that's a self control conflict, but it's not
really grit related. So for me, if I have to,
you know, work hard on a manuscript because this manuscript
is part of a research program that I really think
is going to ultimately help kids thrive, well then that's
about grit. But if it's just me, you know, trying
to manage other goals that I have that are not
part of that subordinate hierarchy, then it's not right.

Speaker 2 (21:30):
And self control and grit they're both part of the
Big five domain conscientiousness, right.

Speaker 3 (21:36):
Yeah, I would say is that I don't know how
much the listeners know about Big five theory of personality,
but they're certainly correlated with they'd load on the factor
of personality, which usually called conscientiousness. It's not that they're
not related to any of the other four aspects of
you know, dimensions of personality, but they certainly are most
clearly loading on that. And I would say that, like,

(21:57):
if you consider conscientious to be this like really broad
you know family of personality traits that also includes orderliness
and traditionalism and respect for other people's you know, interests. Yeah, absolutely,
I think that that's definitely what we see empirically. And
also it makes sense when you think about it.

Speaker 2 (22:15):
I've never seen you deny that either, even from your
first paper. What do you say to people that, you know, what,
if someone kept you those like angel I think you're
just rebranding conscientiousness as grit because it has more sex appeal.
What would you say to that sort of thing?

Speaker 3 (22:27):
Well, first, I would be really sympathetic to the idea that,
you know, psychologists have a very bad habit of, you know,
just like creating another word to label something that has
already been studied under a long history of that. Yeah,
I mean, you know, I think that's actually a really
fair point to you know, just a good caution. And
here's what I would say. I guess I would say
two things. One is that because of these high correlations

(22:50):
with you know, the bigger family of conscientiousness. You know,
for sure, I would like you said, you know, say, look,
you know, you can understand grit and self control as
being facets of this bigger, bigger family, right, like family
members of this bigger family. They could be a little
bit related to other families of personality, but maybe that's
a nuance that's not important. So absolutely, and so as

(23:10):
you would expect to find, you know, there's been a
lot of research on facets versus like these big you know,
very general personality domains like conscientiousness. And what's often found,
as we find for grit as well, is that for
certain outcomes that are more aligned to the facet, you know,
you find stronger or incremental correlations. So we try to

(23:32):
say that in English. So for example, with grit, you know,
maybe you don't find that grit is like the single
best predictor of you know, all goals that are related
to being a conscientious person, Like, it may not be
you know, as related to well and I said this
in an article of Jamscros, like it may not be
you know, the single best conscientiousness facet predicting grade point

(23:53):
average or weight gain. Right, so those are better predicted
actually by self control or the lack thereof right weight loss,
I guess would be the way that phrase it. So
it's not that you would expect this one facet to
outpredict every other facet for every other outcome, but for
the outcomes that really make sense when you think about
that facet, and for GRIT, I think about, you know,

(24:13):
where the whole research program got started, which is, you know,
GRIT should predict outcomes that are really you know, really
challenging and that really do you know, chief and outcomes
that really do require a kind of stick to itdinous
or endurance, and not all chief and outcomes are equally
you know, described by that. So yes, you know, like
graduating from something like college when a lot of other
people are not graduating in your coport, or you know,

(24:35):
finishing West Point, showing up the spelling bee again even
though you lost again last year. Those are the kinds
of things that I would expect and have found GRIT
to be very predictive of. So yeah, it's part of
this bigger family. I think if I have felt that
conscientious was identical to GRIT, I wouldn't have gone and
you know, labeled it this way and I think the
other thing that makes me think it's you know, not

(24:58):
the same thing as you know, being orderly, being organized,
being self controlled, is that in conscientiousness, you don't really
have a lot of the sort of like I'm passionate
about a lot of conscientiousness facets are about volition, like
being able to carry out things that you really, you know,
want to do at some level, but they don't describe
this kind of passion to do. So you wouldn't say,

(25:19):
like somebody who's really conscientious is necessarily somebody who's like
super passionate about something, thinks about it all the time.
It gives their life meaning and purpose, and that's the
you know, as you mentioned the passion side of grit,
which I think is an important part of it.

Speaker 2 (25:31):
Well, you don't measure that on your grit scale, the
passion aspect exactly those kinds of items like I have
a passion that, et cetera. However, research that we've done
does show that harmonious passion and other kinds of items
that do relate to that are strongly correlated with grit.
So I think that's important to mention that, even though
it's not directly measured by your scale.

Speaker 3 (25:50):
It's correct, Yeah, I mean there are no it's you know,
it's a notable that the passion scale doesn't actually have
any passion words, right, So that's in part because I
didn't find that language too. So when you ask people
who are really accomplished in their field to describe the
individuals that they admire most, you know, they won't say, think, well,
they didn't to me anyway, that like, it wasn't striking

(26:12):
that they would say, like, oh, this person has a
kind of fireworks passion about what they do. It's not
that they didn't, But what was more remarkable about the
individuals they most admired was the consistency of that passion
over time. And as somebody who's taught undergraduates for you know,
some time, I have to say that the kind of
you know, the ability to get just really excited about something,

(26:33):
I mean kind of like swept up and in love
with something that is of course a wonderful thing. And
I won't say that there aren't high achievers who you know,
who don't have that quality. But it's more remarkable to
me when you know two years later that kid is
still really engaged in the same general project that's the rarity, right,
So yeah, yeah, that's right, And so I think there

(26:56):
is you know, it depends on how you use the
word passion. And I'm not here to tell people how
the should or shouldn't use the word passion, but at
least the way I'm using the word passion, I really
do mean that remarkable endurance of you know, when Darwin
wrote his autobiography towards the end of his life and
the end of his scientific career, you know, and he
talked about, you know, his abiding love for the topics
that he studied. I think it really was the kind

(27:18):
of you know, fact that it was a constant occupation
for not necessarily that on any given day, you know,
he had more intense love than another person. But you know,
ten twenty thirty years later, you know, the other scientists
might be onto different things or off of science altogether.
And what struck Darwin as remarkable about himself was that
he really did have an abiding interest in what he

(27:40):
was studying.

Speaker 2 (27:41):
And can one have multiple superordenticals or is like life
too short sort of thing to really?

Speaker 3 (27:47):
Now, I think it's hard to have many super Let's
start with the easy thing, which is that I don't
think you can, by you know, the fact that the
day is only twenty four hours long, have many like
a you know, big plural, like you can't have ten
or fifth team supordinate goals, right, Like I'm trying to
become an NFL football player, but I'm also trying to
become NBA.

Speaker 2 (28:05):
Michael Jordan tried to do that.

Speaker 3 (28:07):
Yeah, well, no, he's also tried. He did try to
do them in sequence, though, I think, right, I mean,
at least like for most of his Like, I think
there was a time where you're so let's just take
the easy case, which is that it's hard for me
to imagine having many superordic goals all the same time,
right because the day is not that long. I do
think that you can then ask the case, well, like, well,
can you have just two or three? Right? Not many? Okay,

(28:28):
so that's a little bit harder. I think that that
would absolutely be the exception and not the rule of
the people that I have studied. Sometimes I find people
who have a vocational supordinate goal, like this is what
I do for a living and for a profession, and
it's a very stable supordinate goal, like I'm a venture
capitalist or i am an education, technology entrepreneur, and like

(28:49):
I want to help kids learn through better technology. I
mean that kind of thing, and that's their supordinate professional goal,
and that occasionally I'll find that people have an avocational
goal that is a lot like I'm also a you know,
fourth degree black belt in a kido and I you know,
that's the way I pursue. And it's not like I
have nine hobbies. I have that one. Or Will Schwartz,
the New York Times Crossword puzzle editor, for whom puzzles

(29:11):
are his vocational subordinate goal, which is a goal that
he developed I guess you could easily say by twelve
or thirteen, because I think he was already asking other
puzzle makers how he could become a professional puzzle maker
in middle school. But even before that. I think he
submitted his first puzzle for publication when he was younger
than that. So that's his vocational goal. But then he

(29:31):
has an avocational subordinate goal which has been abiding for
his whole life, when that's table tennis. So I think
you occasionally will find that kind of a vocational and
an avocational pursuit. I mean, for me, my vocational pursuit
is psychology, and I have this like much less important
avocational thing that I've been interested in for a long time,
which is cooking and food. So you know, when I
go to bed, you know, and I read books, it's

(29:53):
like about you know, chefs and food and I, you know,
read recipe books and so forth. I think that's often
the case, right, But it's also clear to me that,
you know, my avocation is my avocation, right, like it's
you know, it's it's something that I do that's I
enjoy and I want to get better at it, but
it's not as important to me as my vocational goal.
And I don't really believe in poly maths, I think,

(30:13):
especially nowadays. Like I was just talking to an economist who's,
you know, very prominent in his field, and he said
to me that it took him thirty five years of
working you know, really actively, right, like eighty hour weeks
and economics to understand what he wanted to study. And
I said, why did it take you so long? He's like, well,
it takes a really long time to know what's known

(30:34):
and then be able to say what's not known, and
further to say why it is that what remains to
be known remains to be known, like why it hasn't
been solved already, And he just can't imagine that as
a young economist as smart as he was, and he
probably he thinks he's probably you know, less smart than
he used to be because he's getting older. That it
just took a really long And that's why I don't
believe in poly maths. It's just really hard to kind

(30:55):
of like pick up basketball and you know, outperform Kobe
Bryant or you know, pick up painting and kind of
like do much that's like meaningfully valuable compared to the
other people who've been working on it for much longer,
you know, in very short amounts of time. So I
don't think you can have a lot of things simultaneously.
It is possible, I think, to have them in sequence,
but then again, you know, you just run up into
the constraint of, like people don't live that long. So

(31:17):
maybe you could do, you know, two things in sequence
in your lifetime or three things in sequence, but I
can't imagine. And it's rarely the case that people do many,
many things in sequence and become world class in all
of them.

Speaker 2 (31:29):
Right, And that's a great segue into the question about
the determinants of becoming world class world class expertise, you
have a formula for achievement, could you just say what
that is and why does effort count twice in that formula?

Speaker 3 (31:41):
So the formula for achievement that I find to be compelling,
though I would also admit that we don't have evidence
for it, you know, we don't have data yet to
say like it's absolutely true. Is the following, which is
that achievement is the multiplicative product of your skill and
your effort. So if you have high skill applied, you know,
with a lot of effort over time cumulative effort, right,

(32:04):
that you will achieve a lot. Right. This is holding
things like luck and opportunity constant. Of course those things matter,
but like, assuming you're in the same situation you have
the same amount of luck, then it's the people who
have really high skill and really high cumulative effort that
are going to actually produce the most, you know, the
most beautiful and the best and the highest number of pots.

(32:26):
You know, if you're a potter, that kind of thing.
Now that only has effort in the equation once. So
you think, like, okay, well, what do you mean by
effort counting twice. Here's what I mean. You can then
ask the question like, okay, that's an interesting thing about skill.
You know, we're not all equally skilled. Where does skill
come from? I think skill is developed and where skill
is developed is, you know, with effort. So I have

(32:46):
a second equation, which is say like, well, if you
really want to know what skill is, skill is equal
to talent times effort. So if you ask the question, well,
who's going to become the most skilled person here, it's
going to be the person who has the highest amount
of talent and who puts the most cumulative effort toward it. Right,
So something who works really hard for a long time
but has a high rate of learning, which is how
I define talent. So if you just use a little algebra,

(33:08):
you find that achievement is therefore talent times effort times effort,
so talent times effort squared. And then it's just a
little thought experiment if you change, if you wiggle effort
a little bit, and you say, well, what happens if
you increase effort by just a little bit, what happens
to achievement versus increasing talent a little bit? And what
happens to achievement. It's only by virtue of the fact

(33:30):
that the effort variable happens twice in the equation that
you get a bigger return on that increase in effort
because it does count twice. It helps you build skill,
but it also helps make that skill productive.

Speaker 2 (33:42):
Could you say that's only given that you've passed a
certain threshold of talent? Like what I mean, I could
put in as much effort and practice into becoming a
world class swimmer as I could, and I wouldn't get
much return on my investment, right.

Speaker 3 (33:56):
Yeah, I mean it just falls out of the equation
that like, if you multiply anything by a very small
number by zero, right, that you still get zero. So
let's just take the extreme example, which is, you know,
not really plausible, but you like literally have zero to
talent in swimming for no matter what effort you put in,
there's no gain in skill and there's no gain in
you know, productivity. So then you know, absolutely, you know,

(34:18):
then you would sort of like, you know, it doesn't
matter how much effort you would put in, And so
I think that's true. I mean, one position that I
would like to clarify not that everybody has to worry
about like Angela Duckworth and what she thinks about things.
But I think the research that I've done by focusing
on the psychology of effort and the psychology of like
sticking with things, you know, I think there's an easy
mistake to be made, which is to think that I

(34:38):
don't believe that human beings differ much in their ability
to improve in skill that I don't believe in talent.
I do believe in talent. I think that we differ
in all kinds of ways, including the rate at which
we improve in things. And I would further say that
grit and talent and everything else about human beings is partly,
although not entirely, a function of our gene.

Speaker 2 (35:00):
So did you just use the g word, Angela doction word? No,
I'm just cooking. It's not that scary as people think.
I don't think genes is as scary as people make
it out to be if they really understand the mechanisms
of genes.

Speaker 3 (35:10):
Right, I agree, And I think it's really hard to
talk about. You know, it's not the fault of people
who you know, don't like immerse themselves in the research literature,
like you know, I don't fault human beings for sort
of like having a kind of sometimes a misunderstanding of genes,
like why should they I have misunderstandings of lots of
things that I don't spend time thinking about, but I
do think it's really important to acknowledge that really every

(35:32):
aspect of human behavior, including your intelligence, including your preference
for broccoli or you know, your likelihood to vote for
you know, one presidential candidate this fall versus another. You know,
they all have some genetic influence. It's not like there's
a single grit gene. I think it's really really well
established that even for very simple characteristics like eye color
or height, there's not an a gene. There are many genes,

(35:56):
dozens hundreds that interact with each other in mind bogglingly
complex ways, and that there's nothing that has been studied
where you could say there's really no influence of environment
at all, in the sense that like the genes are
just your destiny, right height, yeah, yeah, and even height
right right. So you know, human beings have been getting

(36:17):
taller and taller. When you go to museums and you
look at these costumes from like the sixteenth century, and
they're really small and You're like, oh, why are these
systems because people are bigger, And that is not because
our genes have changed in that very short time period historically,
it's because our environments have become you know, we eat
a lot more, right, you know, we're also fatter. By
the way, the gene thing doesn't scare me. I mean,
I was a neurobioso my you know, I think my

(36:38):
undergraduate degree is technically biology with a neurobiology concentration, and
then you know, I have a degree in neuroscience. I'm like,
I'm not afraid of biology, and I'm not afraid of genetics.
I think that these things seem to people to be like,
oh well, then therefore it's not malleable, like oh therefore
we shouldn't have, you know, schools devote attention to like
I think that that's the wrong question even, you know,

(36:59):
if you think about like eyesight, like myopia, right, like
you could be near sighted. Of course, that's very much
a function of your genes, right, that really runs in families.
But you know that doesn't mean that like we couldn't
have invented eyeglasses and contact ones is to change, you know,
effectively people's visions. So I find it a very understandable
but it's a very misguided kind of way of thinking

(37:22):
about all of this. You know, does grit matter? I
think so, does talent matter? I think so.

Speaker 2 (37:26):
Right, just because one thing matters doesn't mean nothing else matters.
And that's you know, the media loves, you know, saying
this is the thing you know that matters.

Speaker 3 (37:34):
Yeah, And I can't control what journalists, right, And I
try to make these views clear. But sometimes when I
read things, I think to myself, like, that's not what
I meant. And I don't even know if that's what
I said. So, you know, I don't want to become
some like cranky academic which is like mad at everyone
all the time or not like you're not You're not,
but I do. I think that's a really good point
to make that you're pointing out.

Speaker 2 (37:55):
Thanks. Yeah, And another the potential role of genes. I
mean there, you know, there's this recent study that came
out Pom Robert Pullman and colleagues showing that grid has
a strong heritability. Well, no, duh. I mean I think
we've kind of the point in the sense that every
psychological trait has a substantial heritability coefficient and you said,
that doesn't mean it can't change, but could mean something.
It could mean that people differ in how naturally gritty

(38:19):
they are. That could be true as well. You know,
there's both sides of that coin.

Speaker 3 (38:22):
It's true, isn't it true? Of everything? Right? I mean,
that's the thing the hereticgbility COVID. So Robert Pluman sent
me the manuscript, so I ran into him. We were
on a panel together, and the manuscript is still being reviewed,
and you know, he emailed me afterwards and said like, oh, well,
you know, I have this manuscript that's under review, and
I read it and I emailed him back and I said,

(38:43):
of course, I'm not surprised, right that you're getting heritability
estimates of between twenty and thirty seven percent for GRIT,
depending on which facet you're looking at, like which aspect
of great you know, perseverance being thirty seven percent heritable,
twenty percent heritable for consistency of interest. Because that is
in line with like every other study that's ever been
done on personality traits. There's a second part of that

(39:04):
article where he says in the article he and his
co authors he's not the first author that GRIT is
like shockingly like, yes, it predicts outcomes, particularly perseverance, you know,
predicting changes in test scores over or just standardized test scores,
I think for this British sample, but not as well
as conscientiousness, which we were talking about a few minutes ago.

(39:26):
And I said in my email back to him, you know,
I'm not surprised about that either, because I've published and
you know, here's the link to the article that I
don't think that grit should predict like all aspects of
achievement equally, and in fact, in my own work, I mean,
I've said that, like, for example, self control should predict
your grades better than your grit, because grit is about
like really personally meaningful, hard to achieve long term goals,

(39:49):
and self control is just about anything that you and
anyone who's ever taught a kid knows that like doing
their homework at night and doing well on the test
on Fridays, less about their personally meaningful, passion driven goals
than just sort of like not watching TV, which is
a little bit more fun than studying for history. So
I was a little disappointed to find that like none
of my comments made into the you know, helped you know,

(40:11):
inform the final article, but you know that's science and
they have the right to write whatever they want to write.
But my own feeling and for my own other research,
standardized test scores are you know, they're used in that
article to just be like, oh, standwri's test scores equals
turnemic achievement, and I think there are many other things.
Santai's testcores are not perfectly correlated with your grades. They're
not perfectly correlated with your school tendents. They're absolutely not

(40:33):
perfectly correlated with graduations. Standarized test scores are a weaker
predictor of whether you will graduate from college, for example,
than your GPA.

Speaker 2 (40:43):
They're almost perfectly correlated with IQ.

Speaker 3 (40:45):
By the way, exactly what I found, and I think
you've also found in your research is that if you
take measures of IQ and you look at you know,
how that correlates with US standardized test scores or and
work that I've done, like looking at changes in standardized
test scores, right, you find really remarkable correlations between IQ
and test scores. But if you look at grade point average, right,

(41:06):
which you know we we I mean as a former teacher,
I'll tell you it's like, if you have our kid
who really tries hard to learn in your class, they're
going to move their grades more than they're going to
move their test scores, in part because they are given
the opportunity to learn the things that are going into
their grades, whereas test scores are not, you know, they're
not perfectly aligned with what you're doing in school. So
there's always an amount of kind of like, all right,

(41:27):
I'm going to give you this problem you've never seen before,
Like go to it, and it's a longer conversation and
maybe one we don't have time for this podcast. But
you know what these intelligence tests are really assessing. I mean,
because people just take it as m as like, oh, well,
they're assessing intelligence. I don't know that people are stopping
to ask themselves like, well what is that? And you know,
if the general public could actually look at these IQ tests,

(41:48):
you know, like if they would actually ever be printed,
which they so often aren't because you know, the publisher
doesn't want to keep them secret because they don't want
anyone to be able to cheat on them. Or but
if you actually look at a lot of IQ tests,
they are strikingly similar or to standardized tests. So it
sort of like you look at the question and it's like,
you know, what is an armadillo? And armadillo is a
you know kind of animal, and armadillo is a kind

(42:08):
of you know, army, and you're like, Okay, now I
have to guess whether that is from an IQ test
or from a standardized achievement test. You often can't even
tell the difference.

Speaker 2 (42:18):
Absolutely, So you know, the correlation between the SAT and
IQ is as high as the reliability of the SAT itself.

Speaker 3 (42:25):
Yeah, that that article that was published I think now
more than a decade ago, right in psych science. I mean,
you know, I'm not saying that IQ doesn't exist, right,
I do think there's absolutely something about you know, the
aptitude to learn new things. And I would further say
that we likely differ in that. I would a further
say that, you know, part of our differences must be
accounted for by the DNA that we inherited from our

(42:47):
mom and dad, and that we're not going to do
a whole lot to change, right epigenetics socide. So I'm
not saying any of these things aren't true. Like I'm
not saying IQ.

Speaker 2 (42:55):
Is that's not important. You're also not saying it's not important,
and I.

Speaker 3 (42:58):
Also not yeah exactly, you know, I think, you know,
if you asked me, like Angela, would you like to
have ten more IQ points, I would say yes, please,
like I'd love to have ten more iq ps, I.

Speaker 2 (43:06):
Think that's possible for you.

Speaker 3 (43:08):
No, it's absolutely trust me, it is absolutely. So it's just,
you know, these things are complicated. I think oversimplifying, you know,
is never in anyone's interest. But you know, anyway, my
own view of this recent finding is I'm not surprised
that grit is partly hertable at the same level of
genetic contribution has been found with other traits. I'm also
not surprised that on test scores alone, yes it predicts,

(43:29):
but maybe not as well as you know Big five
conscientiousness as a whole, which is the major, second major
finding of that publication. What I don't want readers to
come away from, at least what I don't come with
is that, like a human beings, achievement in academics can
be perfectly summarized and completely summarized by how they do
on a standardized achievement test that takes a few hours.

Speaker 2 (43:51):
Right on, right on last part of this interview, let's
leave on a positive note here talking about interventions, some
exciting new interventions. You and your colleagues are working on
some new potentially objective measures of grit. Just to throw
something out there, I thought, really cool, you're developing some
novel role playing interventions. Is that right?

Speaker 3 (44:08):
So the graduate student that I have who has been
working on grit and how to change you know, either
grit or some of the things that we think gritty
people do, right, And that's a you know, maybe it's
a nuanced distinction. But sometimes when we do things like
get people to work a little harder and do more
deliberate practice, which is one of the things I'll tell
you about in a moment. You know, we don't know
whether we want to say, oh, this person is definitely grittier,

(44:29):
but we do want to say that, you know, when
we measure deliberate practice, we can get people to do
a little more of it over a certain you know,
short time period, which is about as far as we've gotten.
So this student is named Lauren s Chris Winkler. She
came to me. She was a very very serious pianist
during her whole childhood and adolescence, and she really had
a very strong interest in the kind of hard practice

(44:49):
that she had to do to become a skill that
she did because she's really, really good. I think she's
considered actually becoming a professional musician, but then decided to go,
you know, the liberal arts route. And you know, she
had this observation that after recitals, for example, people would
you know, invariably come up to her and say, gosh, Lauren,
you're so talented. You're just you have such a gift
for music, and she tried to explain to them that

(45:11):
she's practiced hours a day at the very limit of
her ability. That's what deliberate practice is. To practice beyond
where your current skills are, to get feedback on it,
on what you've done, on what you've done wrong of course, right,
how you've deviated from what you really want to do,
and then to like reflect on that and experiment a
little bit, and then you know, try practicing that whole
piece over again, or just that passage, and then you're

(45:33):
doing it over and over and over again for hours
a day when you're really at the peak of your training,
and to do that every day, and I mean, it's
almost hard to explain in words like what that means
it's like, you know, really imagine for yourself, sitting at
the piano bend for hours a day doing what you
cannot do, struggling with complete concentration, and then doing it again,
you know, on Tuesday, and then doing it again on Wednesday,

(45:54):
and for years. And that's what she did, and so
she was really interested in that. Her intervention research, which
she gets, you know, really the credit for not me
is one of the studies that she going to publish
very soon in JPSP is showing that if you teach
non experts, in this case, you know, middle school kids,
and she has some other samples too, but they're not selective,
they're not like Olympic athletes. If you just teach them

(46:14):
like what deliberate practice is and give them the evidence
that you know, most people who do deliberate practice don't
find it fun. They find that it's actually very frustrating
because they're doing things and getting a lot of failure feedback.
If they just knew that that, they might actually do
more of it right, because it might make them feel
that when they're confused and the way I think is
really hard, well, that that's normal, not a sign that
they can't learn, And so she's found in random assignment,

(46:37):
placebo controlled longitudinal studies that she's able to increase the
amount of deliberate practice and actually objective measures of achievement,
especially among those who are sort of below the median,
below average in their achievement or their skill coming into
the experiment. Now she finds this effect, you know, is there,
it's visible, it's reliable. You know, a month later, you know,

(46:58):
if you go out and ask yourself, four months later,
do these middle school kids continue to you know, work harder?
The effect is now no longer reliable, So it's in
the right direction, but it's not statistically significant. That makes
us think that, like, yes, there's some psychological slack in
the system, that you can get kids to work harder
than they did and do better than they've done, But
it's naive to think that a little intervention is going

(47:19):
to change their beliefs and change the way they work forever.
So we're not selling this as kind of like a
thirty minute cure for a low grit personality, but we
are saying that, like, wow, there might be potential in
people that they're not realizing, and that if we had
you know, a lot of reinforcement of these beliefs and practices,
like if teachers knew this and you know, regularly reinforced

(47:40):
it in the language that they used when they assigned,
you know, homework, when they gave back pests to kids,
that maybe that that effect would actually be able to
be sustained. So that's one thing she's doing. And you
had mentioned some other things that you know she's like
about identity and so forth. Those are other directions that
you know, we're also taking a happiness say more about those.

Speaker 2 (47:58):
Yeah, And I'll link to some of your articles on
the podcast show notes page so people can read that.
And you know a lot of people have been using
the character report card to measure so many things, and
there's some other options for measuring grit. I know you're
working on an academic diligence task, right, and so I'll
put up, you know, as many resources I can so
that people can get a better picture. So I want

(48:19):
to thank you so much for talking to me today, Angela,
and I consider you a friend as well as a colleague,
and I really value the work you do. And I
think you know you're going to be on book tour
soon and you're going to blow up even more than
you already have. I hope this was helpful as practice
a little bit as well for the kind of criticisms
you might get. And I hope I highlighted that your
work does show a level of nuance that people might
not be aware of.

Speaker 3 (48:40):
Well, thanks, Scott, I really create You're also a dear
friend and a terrific thought partner. And I guess maybe
in closing, let me say that, you know, I'm sure
I'm wrong about a lot of things. That's what science
is all about. I hope to be less wrong over time.
But you know, the criticism is great, right. Criticism you
know is not always correct, but sometimes is invariably makes

(49:00):
you think about things a little more carefully and makes
you learn more wonderful.

Speaker 2 (49:03):
I love that.

Speaker 3 (49:04):
Thank you all right, Thankscott, Thanks.

Speaker 1 (49:13):
For listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If
you'd like to react in some way to something you heard,
I encourage you to join in the discussion at thus
psychologypodcast dot com or on our YouTube page The Psychology Podcast.
We also put up some videos of some episodes on
our YouTube page as well, so you'll want to check
that out. Thanks for being such a great supporter of

(49:33):
the show and tune in next time for more on
the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.