October 13, 2020 • 46 mins
2020 has been a challenging year by any measure. In this episode, comedian Sarah Cooper ( famous for her lip-sync parodies of President Trump); Grit author Angela Duckworth; and long distance swimmer Diana Nyad share with Hillary their stories of summoning strength, motivation, and humor in the face of obstacles.
Sarah Cooper is a standup comedian and author of How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings and 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings. Her Netflix comedy special “Sarah Cooper: Everything’s Fine” comes out on October 27.
Angela Duckworth is a research psychologist and author. Her 2016 book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance was a #1 New York Times bestseller.
Diana Nyad is a long-distance swimmer who in 2013, at age 64, succeeded on her fifth attempt to swim over one hundred miles from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage — the first person to have done so. She chronicles that swim in her book Find a Way. You can find more information on her walking and clean water initiatives here.
A full transcript is here.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
You and Me Both is a production of I Heart Radio.
I want to fail. I'd rather choose very very difficult
things and have to be resilient. If I don't make
it right, then choose mediocre goals. So it wasn't always
about swimming. It was about living the biggest life I
can live. I'm Hillary Clinton, and this is You and
(00:23):
Me Both, where I get into some of today's biggest
questions with people that I admire. You know, I'm always
interested in where people get their resilience, because look, everybody
gets knocked down in life. You know, some get knocked
down more than once. And the question really is, as
my mother used to tell me on a regular basis,
(00:44):
it's not whether you get knocked down, is whether you
get back up. Today, I'm talking to three resilient guests,
Diana and Naiad, who you just heard, you know, in
she became the first person ever to swim from Cuba
to Florida without a shark cage. She swam for fifty
(01:06):
three hours. She faced incredible dangers like lethal box jellyfish attacks,
gulf stream currents, exhaustion, delirium, and she did it all
when she was sixty four years old. I'm also going
to be talking to Angela Duckworth. Angela is a psychologist
(01:27):
and the writer of a terrific book, a New York
Times bestseller called Grit, The Power of Passion and Perseverance.
And she's going to explain to us where she got
her passion for studying grit and resilience. But first, writer
and comedian Sarah Cooper. Now, if this were any other comedian,
(01:48):
I'd want to play a clip of their work for you,
But I don't think that's going to help us here,
because Sarah Cooper is famous not for what she does
with her own words, but what she does with the
words of Donald Trump. She appears in videos where she
is lip sinking the exact words that came out of
(02:09):
Donald Trump's mouse in his public statements. She became an
Internet sensation, and I was just totally blown away by
how in her words his words could be understood as
even more incoherent and frankly unbelievable. Now, before she started
(02:31):
doing that, she wrote two books based on her time
working in corporate America. In she wrote one Hundred Tricks
to Appear Smart in Meetings and two years later, How
to Be Successful Without Hurting Men's feelings, non threatening leadership
strategies for women, and you know, obviously I wish that
(02:53):
had come out sooner. She has a Netflix comedy special
that will be out later this fall, and she's working
on a television series for CBS. Why include Sarah Cooper
in an episode about resilience? Well, for starters, it takes
a lot of resilience to listen to Donald Trump over
and over and over, and more importantly, her videos make
(03:17):
us laugh and help us all to stay resilient during
an incredibly tough time. I am delighted to have her
on the podcast. I have to say, Sarah that you
and your humor has gotten me through some tough days.
So I have to start by thinking you. You know,
(03:40):
you came to my attention, as you did I think
to the rest of the world initially by your videos
that were lip sinking art President, and it was so brilliant,
so extraordinarily on point, and I'm interested, how did you
get started doing that? I mean, where did that idea
(04:02):
even come from? Sarah? You know, it really came from
a combination of being on TikTok and seeing people doing
lip sinking, and then also just watching our president sort
of fumble his way through all of these press briefings
and these Coronavirus Task Force meetings, and I was immediately
(04:23):
reminded of being in corporate America and just watching usually
men kind of you know, talk their way through situations
when they actually haven't said anything at all. And so
I was just really fascinated by the words because the
words meant nothing, and yet people were nodding and agreeing.
(04:43):
And so it was really out of a little bit
of jealousy because I would love to be able to
get away with just saying nothing and having people think
that I'm brilliant. You know, that would just be amazing. Um.
And so I really didn't set out to to be
at an impersonator of this guy. I didn't. I was
really more like, could I get away with that? In
(05:06):
One way to figure out if I could get away
with it is to just take exactly what he's saying,
the exact audio clip hasn't been changed at all, and
see what it feels like to have those words come
out of my mouth. How would Sarah Cooper act if
she could just be in a meeting and uh, saying
absolutely nothing? And um? It really I think for a
(05:28):
lot of people brought to the forefront what everyone's been feeling.
But we've been gaslighted into thinking that we're the crazy
ones because everyone thinks this is fine. And once you
take away that suit and the podium and the presidential
seal and all the people agreeing with him, and you're
just left with me in my sweatshirt being, you know,
saying I'm going to form a committee and the committee
(05:49):
is going to be really great. Um you realize okay, yeah, no,
he's not saying anything. And that's really where it started.
I am curious. Did you expect the overwhelming tsunami of
a response once you got started? I didn't. I mean
I made a few of them, really short clips at first,
(06:10):
and people thought they were fine and good, but really,
I mean when I made the first one that went viral,
I didn't realize that it would go so viral. But
then beyond that, I just kept getting good material and
I just kept making more videos and it just became
this sort of unstoppable thing that changed my life and
changed my career. And you know, I'm literally in l
(06:34):
A right now, sitting in Maya Rudolph's office because I'm
on the set basically of my Netflix special. Because of
all of this, it really just took off in a
way that I had no idea. I had sort of
given up my entertainment dreams, to be honest with you,
because I wrote these books, they didn't really do that well.
I would I would say, you know, The Hunt, my
first book, came out a month before the election, and
(06:58):
you know, any chance for any press that I was
ever going to get was just completely overshadowed. But you know,
I would say it was probably a hard election for
your election for me because in my book, I mean
for many reasons. But yeah, So just just to have
this resurgence of interest in the books and this idea
(07:20):
that oh wow, maybe I actually will have an entertainment
career has just been amazing. Does this identification that you
now have with lip syncing Trump, does it make you
feel different at all when you're speaking in your own voice?
Are you still, you know, in your worst nightmares, still
hearing his voice? In some way? I get this asked
(07:40):
us a lot because I do have to listen to
him over and over again, so you would think his
voice would get stuck in my head, but it just doesn't.
Images get stuck in my head. Images and feelings. You know,
those things will bring me back and they will get stuck.
But audio sound goes in one ear and out the other.
So thankfully that doesn't happen to me. My husband, on
the other hand, gets very very very annoyed having to
(08:02):
hear this over and over again. So I don't blame him.
I mean I don't either. The only thing that worries
me sometimes is is people will send me clips and
they're like, you have to do this, when you have
to do this when, And sometimes I'll listen and I'll
be like, oh, I see what he was trying to say.
So I'm like, wait, wait now, now I understand you
(08:23):
know what wait stop, you know you can't do this anymore.
This is infecting you. But I want to go back
to before you started lip syncing Trump, before you put
that on TikTok. You know you were using your comedy
even before that to talk about social issues. Give our
(08:43):
listeners a little bit of a bio here. I mean, what,
as you said earlier, made you feel passionate about entertaining
and acting and comedy and what is it you wanted
to do with that? Well? I always just love making
people laugh, and I think that just comes from I'm
the youngest child. I kind of was the one who,
(09:05):
you know, if there was ever any tension in our family,
I was the one who sort of diffused it with
some humor or jokes or whatever. And it was just like,
if I could make people feel calm again and feel happy,
it just made me feel I think useful, you know,
I think it just made me. It just gave me
a purpose, like I can make people feel comfortable, and
for better or worse, I will say that. You know,
it can backfire in terms of if your goal is
(09:27):
always just to make people feel comfortable, you can forget
about yourself and you can forget about hey, well maybe
you're not happy right now, you know, and maybe that's
not your role right now. And so it's I think
making people laugh has sort of been the number one thing.
And then just realizing I have a lot of things
I want to share my opinion on is kind of
the second thing that is exciting about entertainment and satire
(09:49):
in particular. I love just because you can have a
message without feeling preachy, you know, like with non threatening
leadership strategies for women, I wasn't telling women, hey, you're
doing something wrong, or you're saying something wrong, or you
should do this or do this. I was simply holding
up a mirror and saying, this is what happens, this
is what I do. Sometimes I minimize myself in rooms.
(10:12):
Sometimes I add way too many exclamation points in my
emails just because I want to feel, you know, like
I'm being real nice um And and it's just like
holding a mirror up and and people write me and
they'll say, you know what, I realized I do that.
I kind of ask a question when I want to
make a statement, you know, I do that, and I
realized I don't want to do that anymore. And they
were able to realize that on their own without me saying, hey,
(10:34):
don't do this anymore. And so that's what That's kind
of the position that I enjoy being in, is that
I can make people laugh. I can make them think
if they'd like to think. I can make them learn
something and change if they would like to do that.
But other than that, I've given them a moment of
levity that, you know, maybe they wouldn't have had before.
You know, when I think about humor, I often think
(10:54):
about it as being one of the best tools we
have for resilience, I mean, define the human in even
the worst situation. To try to, you know, connect on
that level with people. It must be part of the
motivation that you had and still have that. You know, Look,
we're going through a hard time in our country right now,
(11:15):
and what keeps you laughing despite everything that is, you know,
happening around us. I think I just go through waves
where you know, after the election, I was just so
distraught for months. I couldn't even write this book because
my publisher wanted me to write something about women, but
I was so angry that I was just like, no,
(11:37):
there's nothing funny about this. There's nothing funny about this.
I'm just angry. And I think eventually I was able
to sort of find a way to the humor, just
of like, look at all these rules, Look at all
these these these things we tell each other where this
don't wear this, smile, don't smile, wear your hair like this,
don't do this, don't It's like, you can't follow all
(11:58):
these rules. We can't. It's in possible. And I mean
that was one of the things, you know, with your campaign.
I was so angry that they said you needed to smile.
I was like, why does she need to smile? She
doesn't need to smile, Like, let her smile if she
wants to smile, and she doesn't want to smile, she
doesn't have to smile. How does that sound? You know
what I mean? I was so angry at that, because
(12:20):
that's how they get you. That's how they get this.
Oh she's not authentic. Well maybe it's because you told
her to smile when she didn't want to smile. Maybe
that's why she's not authentic to you, you know. And
it's like this whole idea of authenticity and being true
to yourself, and yet there's this world set up that
you have to fit into. And so wait, how am
I supposed to be true to myself when there's this
world that I have to fit into and play their
(12:42):
games when I don't want to, you know. And so
I was able to find the humor and that of
just thinking about it and realizing, Okay, all of these
rules in a book, realize you can't follow them. That's
the joke, you know what, That's just a joke. Yeah,
we're taking a quick break. Stay with us. You know.
I keep thinking Sarah about you know, how resilience is
(13:05):
such a key part of anybody's life. I mean, we
all get knocked down. We all have to figure out
how to get back up. And when you think about,
you know, the work that you've done and your commitment
despite the setbacks, what got you up in the morning.
You know, you said, well, you tried to be in comedy,
that didn't work, But what kept you going? You know?
(13:27):
I just I feel very blessed to have a father
that just instilled in me gratefulness, and so I just
even when things weren't going well, I'll tell you, like
when how to be successful without hurting men's feelings came out,
I went to a book signing. Two people showed up.
You know, I had situations like that, but I had
my husband there and he was still taking pictures of me,
(13:48):
like it was a big deal. And it wasn't a
big deal at all. No one was there, but it
was just like, no, I still have a book. I
did a book. I made a book. You know, like
just looking at the small things and just being appreciative
of those small things just help me sort of keep
going and just knowing. My favorite quote is from Vanilla Sky,
(14:08):
and it's basically, every passing minute is another chance to
turn it all around. That. I just love that every
minute you can do something different, You can choose to
do something different, you can choose to try something. And
that's what I did with these TikTok's. I was just
trying something. I didn't know if it was gonna work.
And so knowing you have that opportunity to just try something,
it helps me because I never feel like I'm stuck
(14:29):
and I can't do anything. I know there's always something
I can do, There's always something I can try. You know,
I really relate to that. I think that for many people,
your TikTok videos um were lifelines, um, you know, the
kind of hope that things can get better and can change.
You know, you came along and you you kind of
(14:50):
helped to strip it all down and explain without doing
anything other than repeating his words. You gave people the
idea like, well, I don't have to listen to this,
I don't have to leave that. And that was a
huge contribution to resilience, the resilience of individuals, and I
hope the resilience of our country. Not to put to
(15:11):
find a point on it, but I just can't thank
you enough for what you've done, and I'm so in
your corner. I can't wait to see your program and
see what happens to you next. Well, thank you. I'm
I'm eternally grateful for you. Just your commitment and your dedication,
and you're just unwavering focus on what you think is
(15:32):
important and what you know in your heart to be true.
Has always been an inspiration to me and will continue
to be an inspiration to me. So I just want
to say how honored I am and how appreciative I
am of you. Thank you. Since my conversation with Sarah,
(15:53):
President Trump, as we all know, has tested positive for
COVID nineteen, Ben hospitalized return earned. Sarah hasn't put out
any new videos yet, and I wanted to check in
with her to see what she makes of this latest
plot twist. In light of recent events, I wanted to
check in with you again. Your videos do such an
(16:15):
excellent job of highlighting how absurd many of Trump's statements are.
But over the last few weeks, his statements and his
actions around COVID nineteen have not been so much ridiculous
as actually dangerous. He's out there telling people he understands
the virus. Now and it's not something to be afraid
(16:36):
of and refusing to participate remotely in the next presidential debate.
What goes through your mind when you hear him say
these things, Well, it starts to make me reconsider all
of the videos I've been making, just because at this
point it seems like there might be something really wrong
with him. You know, I've always seen him as someone
(16:57):
who is very sinister and calculated, but at this point,
and I think Nancy Pelosi brought up twenty fifth Monument
today too, but it does feel like there's something genuinely
wrong with him, And so I it's almost like, do
you make fun of someone who has some sort of
problem that you don't know what that problem is? But
it is also so dangerous that I don't want to
(17:18):
contribute to the propaganda that you're spreading. So it is
a weird time for my particular kind of satire because
I want to highlight how insane a lot of the
things he's saying. But if he's actually insane, and he's
actually saying things that are are going to genuinely hurt
people and inspire other people to hurt other people, and
(17:39):
I don't want to, you know, spread that message. I
agree with you. We're at a different point now. It
is scary to think that we have still three or
four weeks something like that. I mean, it's it's a
very tense time of just trying to get to that
election and and hopefully see the light at the end
of the tunnel. I agree with you. I mean, the
tension just seems to build. I was talking to a
(18:02):
good friend of mine who's a doctor, and she was
saying she sees so many people now it's just exploded
in terms of you know, her patients saying that they're anxious,
they're agitated, they're depressed, and they link it to this election.
They just are literally overcome by what they're experiencing when
(18:24):
they watch Trump. But I think it is a, you know,
a real sign of resilience that more and more people
are voting early, more and more people are speaking out,
more and more people and the press and elsewhere are
calling him out. So, you know, maybe that's a good
sign that assuming we get through this election and we
(18:48):
know retire him, we can kind of pull together again.
And I'm praying for that, me too, Sarah, me too.
Keep an eye out for Sarah's upcoming comedy special. It's
called Sarah Cooper Everything's Fine, and it comes out on
(19:11):
Netflix October. One of the reasons I'm interested in resilience
is that it's not just something that you're born with
or you aren't. And I've learned a lot about that
from research that is being done about how to cultivate
resilience in ourselves and others. And you know, nothing is
(19:31):
more important than helping kids be more resilient, especially right
now with so much uncertainty in their world. So that's
why I'm looking forward to talking with Angela Duckworth. She's
a psychologist, she's a MacArthur genius. She's the writer of Grit,
the power of passion and perseverance. Grit. Actually, that's one
(19:54):
of my favorite words. You have been called gritty. I've
had a feral streep in other people, pretty gritty moments.
You know, you're very gritty. Um, But I guess I
want to start with having you explain what grit is.
When I talk about grit, I mean this combination of
passion and perseverance for especially long term and personally meaningful goals. Um.
(20:20):
And I say passion and perseverance because it's not just
you know, working hard and being tenacious, I mean that
is part of grit, and I think that's where the
overlap with resilience, you know, the topic of this show.
But grit, unlike resilience, means that you're passionate about it. It
It resonates with your values, it interests you. You feel
like a kid when you're doing it. So perseverance and
(20:40):
passion for long term goals turns out to be not
at all correlated with talent or intelligence, but very predictive
of long term achievement. Tell us a little bit about
your own life and if you can reflect on what
brought you to this particular subject. Well, we may or
may not have this in common. But I was certainly
raised in a family that was dominated by my father's
(21:04):
obsession with achievement. He really was like obsessed with the
outliers in human accomplishment. And and then in our own family,
he would make comparisons of my sister, my brother, and me,
you know, who was doing well in the in the
horse race of achievement. I by the way, I'm not
recommending this, I'm just describing my childhood. Um. And so
when I grew up, I wondered whether there was something
(21:26):
else other than our our maybe our innate talent, that
that might determine, you know, what we might achieve. And
I think that's what led me to the study of
grit um. I was also, by the way, a teacher
classroom teacher in New York City and San Francisco public
schools for several years. And when I saw my students
at the beginning of the year, it was clear that
(21:48):
some of them had, you know, more of a facility
for math, which is what I taught. But I was
very surprised at the end of the year that the
students who had really learned the most, you know, weren't
always the ones who were you know, quite obviously bright
at the beginning. And and so much of it was
a kind of dedication, a stained interest and effort in
spite of setbacks, which is I think the heart of resilience. Well,
(22:10):
I think there are similarities between our fathers. My father
was absolutely set on making sure that I did as
well as I could in school. I would bring home,
you know, straight a's, and he'd say, you must go
to an easy school. It was his way of, I think,
trying to motivate me. And it's the only way he
(22:31):
knew to express his hopes was through this kind of
competitive comparative approach that I believe, you know, fathers like
ours actually thought was a way of showing love and
appreciation to keep pushing their children and luckily for us,
(22:52):
their daughters, not just their sons. Yes, and you know
when you think about those students that you taught, because
I've read about how you began to think through, what
was it that made some kids successful even if they
didn't start with the greatest understanding of math or some
(23:12):
other subject, and other kids maybe fade who looked like
they had potential. What did that then lead you to
decide to do well? First I was frustrated with them, um,
And then, as any halfway decent teacher would be, you
realize that you're the problem, right, So at first I
was like, why aren't they learning my my beautiful lesson plan?
Like how come it's not turning out the way I
(23:34):
wanted to? And quickly my frustration my students turned into
frustration with myself because I realized it was a limitation
of me as a teacher that I wasn't accessing, I
wasn't creating an on ramp to what we were doing,
And when I got frustrated, I eventually decided that my
tactics were incredibly ham fested. Like I mean, I tried
to be nice, but I just like, you know, if
(23:55):
you could just you know, put more effort in, you'll
be successful. I mean, that doesn't work. So what I
decided to do is change my career trajectory a little bit,
um or a lot, I guess, and become a psychological scientist.
It's not until I think we can understand why is
it that when a child gives up like they do,
like what is going on in the millisecond before they
(24:16):
put their pencil down and stop paying attention to what
they're doing? Like what happens? And I realized that we
needed more science on you know, motivation and interests and
effort in order that teachers and parents, um, by the way,
could do more than just the kind of like well
intentioned but usually ineffectual sermonizing UM at least that I
was doing. So when you went back to school, how
(24:39):
did you actually construct a program to look at this
and pursue it as a professional academic interest. So I
was a late bloomer in the sense of coming to
graduate school. UM in my you know whatever, fourth decorade
of life. But I knew what I wanted to study.
I was like, I know exactly what I'm here to
figure out. I wanted to understand the psychology of young
(25:00):
people in moments of frustration and moments of self doubt.
And then I wanted to figure out, you know, what
turns things such that insecurity becomes confidence when the frustration
becomes bearable. And I apprenticed to a very famous psychological scientist,
Marty Seligman, who basically is the leading figure um or
(25:22):
one of at least in resilience. And I'll tell you
maybe one insight that gives you a sense of how
scientists like figure things out like this. You know, when
you study something scientifically, you want to make a comparison.
So if you want to study resilience, you want to
find examples of resilience, but also examples of um, you know,
non resilience right or or giving up during difficulty. And
(25:42):
Marty did exactly that. When he was in graduate school
he studied animals. He studied dogs, for example, and he
discovered that when animals are resilient, it is in part
because they have control. Um. So, if an animal is
experiencing control over their adversity, even if the adversity is
in the case of the dogs he was studying, like
(26:04):
mild electric shocks, I mean really painful. The control makes
all the difference when animals don't have control over adversity.
It's what he coined um as learned helplessness. And so
I think the basic idea of the scientific method when
applied to things like resilience is you know, make systematic comparisons,
fine examples of what you're looking for, fine examples of
(26:25):
the opposite, and then you know, systematically work your way
through to kind of figure out what's going on underneath
the surface. Everything you've said obviously has implications for parenting.
How is your research impacted your own parenting? So, practically speaking,
I think in terms of resilience, the most important thing
(26:47):
I learned in my research was that, you know, left
to their own devices, young people will shy away from
hard things, like it's way more fun to win than
to lose. Um it's way more fun to get the
right answer then the wrong answer. And I could see
my kids like shy away from hard things. So we
made a rule in our family and we call it
the hard thing rule, UM, and we said everybody in
(27:10):
this family, including mom and dad, has to do a
hard thing. UM. We instituted this when the girls are
about kindergarten age. And the hard thing world had three parts.
One is that a hard thing is something that requires practice, UM,
like really trying to get better at something, you know,
with feedback and um, and not all the feedback is
going to be positive. The second thing about the hard
thing is that you can't quit in the middle. So
(27:32):
if you've made a commitment to a track coach or
a piano teacher, and you said you've done you know
you're gonna do something for two months, then then you
have to honor that commitment. And then the third thing,
and I think this is so important. You know, I'm
of Chinese heritage, my parents immigrated UM in the fifties,
and I don't really believe in tiger parenting. I think
the third part is the most important part, which is that, UM,
(27:54):
you get to choose your hard thing yourself. Nobody can
tell you what your hard thing is. And I let
my five year old we I should say my husband
and I. We let them choose even when they were
in kindergarten. I mean it was multiple choice because like
one year Lucy said she wanted to ride horses and
I was like that not on the list. So anyway,
I I think that was all informed by science. I
(28:15):
love that idea, you know, giving them some control over
the hard thing they choose, but then they have to
stick with that hard thing and they have to be
willing to take the ups and the downs that come
from trying something that's hard. And you know, I think
about hard things that I've had to do. I mean
running for office was really hard. Looked like it the object.
(28:35):
It was hard. It was hard the first time I
tried it and never had done it for myself before
and had to practice and practice and learn and learn
and it you know, it was a passion and I
had to persevere, win or lose. And I assume you've
had to do hard things, like what are you know
one or two of the hard things you had to
deal with? You know, I told you that. My dad
(28:57):
was like, you know, how how how smart are is
this person? House? Well, one advantage I will just say
of of never thinking of yourself as the smartest person
in the room is that like, wow, you are, at
least for me, I think the way I interpreted that,
I was like, I'm going to be the hardest working
person here, like like nobody's going to outwork me, is
going to outwork me, right, And you know, I think
(29:19):
that has been a certain kind of confidence. Like, you know,
just the other day, I was in a conversation with
Danny Kneman, who's another hero of mine. You won the
Nobel Prize, and I think he's the best living psychologist
there is today. And we're having this conversation and I
was trying to give him an idea about like the
psychology of attention, and about twenty minutes in, he was
(29:40):
like playing chess with Gary casper Off. He was like
checked me, and I was just he was like, he's
like this idea is like full of holes. It isn't work.
And I remember thinking, wow, like I am not as
smart as any condoman when it comes to psychology. Uh,
And I think I said something like that, but you know,
I wasn't so afraid. I never thought of myself as
that way. So I just said like, well, you know,
(30:01):
I would like to talk about this more, but I
think I gonna need a week to like on it,
to cover gather my wits, make some more notes, read
some more. You were fierce in your desire to you know,
keep going. Maybe take a deep breath and come back.
I have so enjoyed talking to you, and I hope
this will be the first of many conversations because I
(30:23):
am fascinated what you do. Thank you so much for
talking with me, and say a load of your family,
Say a load of those two daughters. Angela's book is
called Grit. She's a co founder of Character Lab, which
helps classrooms across the country create more resilient kids, and
(30:46):
you can learn more about her and her research at
Angela Duckworths dot com. I first heard about Diana and
Naiad really along time ago because she had this amazing
success record of swimming around the island of Manhattan across
(31:08):
Lake Ontario. You know, she really was somebody who was
of my vintage and was doing heroic, difficult things in
the water. She took time out to be a sports broadcaster,
and then I would see her covering sports, including the Olympics,
and it looked like she was, you know, done with
her own competitive swimming until she decided to try again.
(31:32):
She had tried to swim from Cuba to Florida the
first time when she was twenty eight. When she was
sixty one, she decided to try again, and again and again,
and then at age sixty four she wanted to try
once more, and she succeeded on her fifth try. That
(31:52):
should give everybody a kind of boost about what's possible.
As you'll hear her zest for life puts the rest
of us to shame. I think about your amazing career
and how you really took on the challenge of long
distance swimming. What drew you to it, because it's such
(32:15):
a unique sport. You know. There are two layers to
the answer to that question. One is um I was
born in New York City, but by the time I
was in second grade, so you're seven years old, I
was in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with a beautiful, warm ocean
right there, and I was good at swimming. I had
a way of feeling the water and going through the
(32:35):
water in a strong, fast way, So of course I
wanted that. But honestly, way above that. I don't know why, Hillary,
but I got the idea very early before the age
of ten, that this whole thing was gonna go by
very quickly, that I better not waste any time. I
may not be the best at what I do, but
I want to live up to my potential. I want
(32:57):
to help people the best I can. I want to
be the best I am intellectually physically. So I've been
lucky to have a lot of attributes of energy that
helped me get up very early and live a gung
ho pressive kind of life all day long and go
to sleep every night saying who I just couldn't have
done anymore with that day? But I guess I'm getting
(33:20):
around to saying it wasn't and it it's still is
not just about swimming. I wasn't necessarily driven to I've
got to swim this, and I've got to be a swimmer.
I was and I am all that, But it's more
what can I do with this one? As Mary Oliver
put it, wild and precious life of mine? I want
(33:41):
to fail. I'd rather choose very very difficult things and
have to be resilient if I don't make it, and
and have to be humble if I don't make it,
then choose mediocre goals. So it wasn't always about swimming.
It was about living the biggest life I can live. Amen,
And you know, part of what I'm interested in is
(34:03):
there are a lot of people who say to themselves, Wow,
I'm gonna do something that is really big and it's
going to fill me up and I'm going to make
a mark. But then there are those who actually do it.
And you know, I've read your fabulous autobiography and just
reading about the training that you subjected yourself to was exhausting.
(34:25):
Describe that training regimen because it shows so clearly what
it takes to say, Okay, I want to do this,
but hey, here's what I have to make sure I
can do in order to be able to achieve that.
What does that actually look like day to day? Well,
you know, it's it's tough. If you're gonna swim for
let's say, what might be ostensibly fifty four hours across
(34:49):
Cuba to Florida NonStop, never allowed to touch the boat,
what are you gonna do to get ready for that. Well,
you're not gonna go swim fifty four hours. You might
as well go do the real thing. So you start doing.
You're not in shape yet seven and eight hours swims,
And mind you, a swim like Manhattan Island is under
eight hours. Now later in the year, you're gonna be
(35:10):
up to twelve fourteen hours swims. You're lying in the
fetal position at night. You can't get up because you're
so darn exhausted. You can't get dinner. But you do
get up the next day and you do fifteen hours.
Then you're up to eighteen hours. Then you're up to
twenty four hours, and that's a lot of lonely, you know,
(35:31):
isolated time. This sport is a case of sensory deprivation.
You don't see much. You're turning your head fifty five
times a minute. You don't see anything but the side
of the boat over here, and Bonnie, my intrepid you know,
handler you dig down and get your mind disciplined and
strong enough to make it through those lonely hours. So
(35:53):
that's what it's about. Yeah, it's the shoulders, it's the body.
You've got to be a good swimmer, a strong swimmer.
But more than anything is can the mind suffer and
concentrate and refuse to give up for all those hours?
That's what it's about. We'll be back right after this
quick break. Do you have any insights as to whether
(36:17):
that resolved that incredible resilience and grit how do you
evaluate the mix between kind of what's deep down inside
you or just plain hard work that it takes, you know,
as it learned. Is it something you can practice to achieve?
How would you tell young people if there were a
bunch of young people listening and they were wondering, well,
(36:39):
how I don't I don't know that I could ever
do anything that brave or that big, but i'd like to.
How would you tell them to think about it? Yeah,
it's it's always, isn't it. It's the age old nature
nurture conversation. So you know, I don't remember any particular
you know, light bulb that went off to say that's
how I want to be, that's who I want to be.
(37:00):
So I do think there is a lot of a
genetic component, But I do believe that people all the
world around have resolved. Now, it could be that they're
not dreaming of you know, changing there. They're not Nelson
Mandela who wants to you know, change the entire fabric
of the future of the world. And now we we
view equality, um. But it could be that in their
(37:21):
particular community, that's the way they live and that's what
they demand of their neighbors. And their family, And isn't
that equally important. Don't we think the world gets changed
one family and one neighborhood at a time. So I admire,
and I'm sure you do too, all kinds of people
that the world will never hear of. You know, I
have a neighbor here in in my neighborhood in Los
(37:43):
Angeles who lost her husband to cancer, and she was busy, well, um,
somebody else had trouble in the neighborhood. And this woman
who had very few resources, no time at all, three
kids on her hands, mourning her husband. She's the one
who went around all around the ebro to say, we
got to help this other neighbor. She needs our help.
(38:04):
And Naiad, you're the little star of the neighborhood. While
that's just great, but see your name here on the clipboard.
Every other Tuesday, you're gonna get dinner on their back porch, okay,
And it's not going to be Kentucky fried chicken. It's
gonna be a vegetable and a dinner. And if you
can't do it, get somebody else to do it, because
for a year, we're gonna help her out. So I
(38:24):
admire that woman as much as I admire Bill Gates,
but I think that's a really important and very relatable point,
is that not everybody's gonna, you know, swim long distance. Um,
not everybody's going to be a star athlete or whatever
else the comparison might be. But everybody can do something,
and everybody can both overcome their own challenges and then
(38:47):
help others to overcome the challenges that they face. And
you know, how would you describe how your experience in
long distance swimming has actually translated to how you meet
challenge is in your life? Well? You know, I know
that you know the story Hillary that I like. Unfortunately millions,
(39:08):
uh suffered sexual abuse as a young teen. Um My coach,
the person who should have uh you know, put me
up on a pedestal and helped send me out with
character and with confidence into the world. He was an
abuser and he really got a kick out of humiliating.
And now I'm seventy and look at me, you know me,
I'm pretty confident, I'm pretty happy. Uh, I'm I feel
(39:31):
very fortunate at this life I've gotten to live. And
on the other hand, still deep down, if I want
to get real about it, uh, there is an imprint
from that humiliation that is still there, that that little girl,
that young teen still can feel, the low self esteem
and the anger, the anger at myself for not throwing
(39:54):
him up against a wall and saying I'm going to
my mother and I'm going to the principle. Well, I
think that, even though I'm older and wiser now and
deal with it in a in a more holistic way,
I think there was something of a resilience that told
me right away, even while it was happening, I'm going
(40:14):
to survive this. I'm going to thrive through it. This
is not going to ruin my life. I won't let it.
I'm not going to go down. Boy, that's such a message, Diana,
that needs to be heard by so many young people
and not so young people. And the fact that you've
talked about it and you've written about it and you've
(40:35):
made it a part of your overall message and mission,
because so many young people need to hear that. But
this is an important part of you know who you
are and what you've overcome, and what the source of
your resilience is, and just your determination, yes, that grit
to keep going and not look back in a way
(40:59):
that pair lizes you but instead mobilizes you. Yeah, those
are good words, paralyzed and mobilize. You know, I want
to switch gears to the oceans because nobody has spent
more time in them than you have all over the world,
and it's such a critical issue with the environment, with
climate change, and I know that you are really going
(41:22):
to tackle this like you've tackled everything else. You know.
One of the things I've heard that you're really going
to focus on is single use plastics and what they're
doing to the ocean and what they're doing to the
you know, animals that live in the ocean. But talk
a little bit about how, given your personal immersion in
the ocean, this new mission has arisen about what you
(41:47):
want to do to try to use your voice and
use your experience to literally help save our our world oceans. Yeah,
I I guess you could say that I fell madly
in low with planet Earth by being immersed in its oceans.
You know. Carl Sagan spoke about it as that little
(42:08):
magical blue spec that astronauts see from way up there. So, um,
Bonnie and I when we got done with the Cuba swim,
we started a walking initiative and I know you're a
big walker, we want you to come out walking with us.
I would love that. There you go. So ever, Walk
is all about a new vision of lifestyle in America,
(42:29):
and that is that everybody walks a mile every day.
It doesn't matter what the weather is. You just do.
You walk before work, you walk during lunch, you walk
after school with your kids. But you walk a mile
every day of the year, virtually. And now we're going
to sort of drive all that walking towards walking along
the oceans. So next June, we're gonna walk from Daytona
(42:52):
to Miami. Oh wow, that's fabulous. It's two hundred miles.
Some people will walk the whole way, twenty miles a
day for ten days. That's great. Most people will only
want to walk a mile. They want to be part
of it. But we're gonna do a cho hundred mile crusade.
And all the way we're gonna have beach rallies with mayors,
business people, Bill and Hillary Clinton, all kinds of crazy characters.
(43:15):
Are you gonna say? I promise I am going to reduce,
if not eliminate, single use plastics in my home, in
my business, because eight million tons of plastic around the
world are now going into the ears oceans. They're suffocating
the lungs of the planet. I would love to be
part of that. I love walking, I love oceans. You're
(43:36):
bringing them together. I am so happy to talk to
you today. I could not think of anybody better to
talk about this subject of resilience. Stay safe, stay healthy,
and I'm brightened down that I'm gonna see you walk
on the beach uh in Florida next June. There we
go Diana and iyads out to buy aography is called
(44:01):
Find a Way a perfect title, and you can find
more about her new initiative to protect the oceans at
everwalk dot com. You know, when we think about resilience,
I think every one of us can reflect on our
own lives, but certainly the lives of those near us.
Think about the people you know who have shown great resilience.
(44:22):
Who's your hero, who's your example? See what you can
do to help others, especially young people. Understand that to
keep going is really a mantra that everyone on this show,
including myself, believe in you and me both. Is brought
to you by I Heart Radio. We're produced by Julie
(44:44):
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Original music is by Forest Gray and a big thanks
(45:04):
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(45:26):
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(45:48):
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I want to fail. I'd rather choose very very difficult
things and have to be resilient. If I don't make
it right, then choose mediocre goals. So it wasn't always
about swimming. It was about living the biggest life I
can live. I'm Hillary Clinton, and this is You and
(00:23):
Me Both, where I get into some of today's biggest
questions with people that I admire. You know, I'm always
interested in where people get their resilience, because look, everybody
gets knocked down in life. You know, some get knocked
down more than once. And the question really is, as
my mother used to tell me on a regular basis,
(00:44):
it's not whether you get knocked down, is whether you
get back up. Today, I'm talking to three resilient guests,
Diana and Naiad, who you just heard, you know, in
she became the first person ever to swim from Cuba
to Florida without a shark cage. She swam for fifty
(01:06):
three hours. She faced incredible dangers like lethal box jellyfish attacks,
gulf stream currents, exhaustion, delirium, and she did it all
when she was sixty four years old. I'm also going
to be talking to Angela Duckworth. Angela is a psychologist
(01:27):
and the writer of a terrific book, a New York
Times bestseller called Grit, The Power of Passion and Perseverance.
And she's going to explain to us where she got
her passion for studying grit and resilience. But first, writer
and comedian Sarah Cooper. Now, if this were any other comedian,
(01:48):
I'd want to play a clip of their work for you,
But I don't think that's going to help us here,
because Sarah Cooper is famous not for what she does
with her own words, but what she does with the
words of Donald Trump. She appears in videos where she
is lip sinking the exact words that came out of
(02:09):
Donald Trump's mouse in his public statements. She became an
Internet sensation, and I was just totally blown away by
how in her words his words could be understood as
even more incoherent and frankly unbelievable. Now, before she started
(02:31):
doing that, she wrote two books based on her time
working in corporate America. In she wrote one Hundred Tricks
to Appear Smart in Meetings and two years later, How
to Be Successful Without Hurting Men's feelings, non threatening leadership
strategies for women, and you know, obviously I wish that
(02:53):
had come out sooner. She has a Netflix comedy special
that will be out later this fall, and she's working
on a television series for CBS. Why include Sarah Cooper
in an episode about resilience? Well, for starters, it takes
a lot of resilience to listen to Donald Trump over
and over and over, and more importantly, her videos make
(03:17):
us laugh and help us all to stay resilient during
an incredibly tough time. I am delighted to have her
on the podcast. I have to say, Sarah that you
and your humor has gotten me through some tough days.
So I have to start by thinking you. You know,
(03:40):
you came to my attention, as you did I think
to the rest of the world initially by your videos
that were lip sinking art President, and it was so brilliant,
so extraordinarily on point, and I'm interested, how did you
get started doing that? I mean, where did that idea
(04:02):
even come from? Sarah? You know, it really came from
a combination of being on TikTok and seeing people doing
lip sinking, and then also just watching our president sort
of fumble his way through all of these press briefings
and these Coronavirus Task Force meetings, and I was immediately
(04:23):
reminded of being in corporate America and just watching usually
men kind of you know, talk their way through situations
when they actually haven't said anything at all. And so
I was just really fascinated by the words because the
words meant nothing, and yet people were nodding and agreeing.
(04:43):
And so it was really out of a little bit
of jealousy because I would love to be able to
get away with just saying nothing and having people think
that I'm brilliant. You know, that would just be amazing. Um.
And so I really didn't set out to to be
at an impersonator of this guy. I didn't. I was
really more like, could I get away with that? In
(05:06):
One way to figure out if I could get away
with it is to just take exactly what he's saying,
the exact audio clip hasn't been changed at all, and
see what it feels like to have those words come
out of my mouth. How would Sarah Cooper act if
she could just be in a meeting and uh, saying
absolutely nothing? And um? It really I think for a
(05:28):
lot of people brought to the forefront what everyone's been feeling.
But we've been gaslighted into thinking that we're the crazy
ones because everyone thinks this is fine. And once you
take away that suit and the podium and the presidential
seal and all the people agreeing with him, and you're
just left with me in my sweatshirt being, you know,
saying I'm going to form a committee and the committee
(05:49):
is going to be really great. Um you realize okay, yeah, no,
he's not saying anything. And that's really where it started.
I am curious. Did you expect the overwhelming tsunami of
a response once you got started? I didn't. I mean
I made a few of them, really short clips at first,
(06:10):
and people thought they were fine and good, but really,
I mean when I made the first one that went viral,
I didn't realize that it would go so viral. But
then beyond that, I just kept getting good material and
I just kept making more videos and it just became
this sort of unstoppable thing that changed my life and
changed my career. And you know, I'm literally in l
(06:34):
A right now, sitting in Maya Rudolph's office because I'm
on the set basically of my Netflix special. Because of
all of this, it really just took off in a
way that I had no idea. I had sort of
given up my entertainment dreams, to be honest with you,
because I wrote these books, they didn't really do that well.
I would I would say, you know, The Hunt, my
first book, came out a month before the election, and
(06:58):
you know, any chance for any press that I was
ever going to get was just completely overshadowed. But you know,
I would say it was probably a hard election for
your election for me because in my book, I mean
for many reasons. But yeah, So just just to have
this resurgence of interest in the books and this idea
(07:20):
that oh wow, maybe I actually will have an entertainment
career has just been amazing. Does this identification that you
now have with lip syncing Trump, does it make you
feel different at all when you're speaking in your own voice?
Are you still, you know, in your worst nightmares, still
hearing his voice? In some way? I get this asked
(07:40):
us a lot because I do have to listen to
him over and over again, so you would think his
voice would get stuck in my head, but it just doesn't.
Images get stuck in my head. Images and feelings. You know,
those things will bring me back and they will get stuck.
But audio sound goes in one ear and out the other.
So thankfully that doesn't happen to me. My husband, on
the other hand, gets very very very annoyed having to
(08:02):
hear this over and over again. So I don't blame him.
I mean I don't either. The only thing that worries
me sometimes is is people will send me clips and
they're like, you have to do this, when you have
to do this when, And sometimes I'll listen and I'll
be like, oh, I see what he was trying to say.
So I'm like, wait, wait now, now I understand you
(08:23):
know what wait stop, you know you can't do this anymore.
This is infecting you. But I want to go back
to before you started lip syncing Trump, before you put
that on TikTok. You know you were using your comedy
even before that to talk about social issues. Give our
(08:43):
listeners a little bit of a bio here. I mean, what,
as you said earlier, made you feel passionate about entertaining
and acting and comedy and what is it you wanted
to do with that? Well? I always just love making
people laugh, and I think that just comes from I'm
the youngest child. I kind of was the one who,
(09:05):
you know, if there was ever any tension in our family,
I was the one who sort of diffused it with
some humor or jokes or whatever. And it was just like,
if I could make people feel calm again and feel happy,
it just made me feel I think useful, you know,
I think it just made me. It just gave me
a purpose, like I can make people feel comfortable, and
for better or worse, I will say that. You know,
it can backfire in terms of if your goal is
(09:27):
always just to make people feel comfortable, you can forget
about yourself and you can forget about hey, well maybe
you're not happy right now, you know, and maybe that's
not your role right now. And so it's I think
making people laugh has sort of been the number one thing.
And then just realizing I have a lot of things
I want to share my opinion on is kind of
the second thing that is exciting about entertainment and satire
(09:49):
in particular. I love just because you can have a
message without feeling preachy, you know, like with non threatening
leadership strategies for women, I wasn't telling women, hey, you're
doing something wrong, or you're saying something wrong, or you
should do this or do this. I was simply holding
up a mirror and saying, this is what happens, this
is what I do. Sometimes I minimize myself in rooms.
(10:12):
Sometimes I add way too many exclamation points in my
emails just because I want to feel, you know, like
I'm being real nice um And and it's just like
holding a mirror up and and people write me and
they'll say, you know what, I realized I do that.
I kind of ask a question when I want to
make a statement, you know, I do that, and I
realized I don't want to do that anymore. And they
were able to realize that on their own without me saying, hey,
(10:34):
don't do this anymore. And so that's what That's kind
of the position that I enjoy being in, is that
I can make people laugh. I can make them think
if they'd like to think. I can make them learn
something and change if they would like to do that.
But other than that, I've given them a moment of
levity that, you know, maybe they wouldn't have had before.
You know, when I think about humor, I often think
(10:54):
about it as being one of the best tools we
have for resilience, I mean, define the human in even
the worst situation. To try to, you know, connect on
that level with people. It must be part of the
motivation that you had and still have that. You know, Look,
we're going through a hard time in our country right now,
(11:15):
and what keeps you laughing despite everything that is, you know,
happening around us. I think I just go through waves
where you know, after the election, I was just so
distraught for months. I couldn't even write this book because
my publisher wanted me to write something about women, but
I was so angry that I was just like, no,
(11:37):
there's nothing funny about this. There's nothing funny about this.
I'm just angry. And I think eventually I was able
to sort of find a way to the humor, just
of like, look at all these rules, Look at all
these these these things we tell each other where this
don't wear this, smile, don't smile, wear your hair like this,
don't do this, don't It's like, you can't follow all
(11:58):
these rules. We can't. It's in possible. And I mean
that was one of the things, you know, with your campaign.
I was so angry that they said you needed to smile.
I was like, why does she need to smile? She
doesn't need to smile, Like, let her smile if she
wants to smile, and she doesn't want to smile, she
doesn't have to smile. How does that sound? You know
what I mean? I was so angry at that, because
(12:20):
that's how they get you. That's how they get this.
Oh she's not authentic. Well maybe it's because you told
her to smile when she didn't want to smile. Maybe
that's why she's not authentic to you, you know. And
it's like this whole idea of authenticity and being true
to yourself, and yet there's this world set up that
you have to fit into. And so wait, how am
I supposed to be true to myself when there's this
world that I have to fit into and play their
(12:42):
games when I don't want to, you know. And so
I was able to find the humor and that of
just thinking about it and realizing, Okay, all of these
rules in a book, realize you can't follow them. That's
the joke, you know what, That's just a joke. Yeah,
we're taking a quick break. Stay with us. You know.
I keep thinking Sarah about you know, how resilience is
(13:05):
such a key part of anybody's life. I mean, we
all get knocked down. We all have to figure out
how to get back up. And when you think about,
you know, the work that you've done and your commitment
despite the setbacks, what got you up in the morning.
You know, you said, well, you tried to be in comedy,
that didn't work, But what kept you going? You know?
(13:27):
I just I feel very blessed to have a father
that just instilled in me gratefulness, and so I just
even when things weren't going well, I'll tell you, like
when how to be successful without hurting men's feelings came out,
I went to a book signing. Two people showed up.
You know, I had situations like that, but I had
my husband there and he was still taking pictures of me,
(13:48):
like it was a big deal. And it wasn't a
big deal at all. No one was there, but it
was just like, no, I still have a book. I
did a book. I made a book. You know, like
just looking at the small things and just being appreciative
of those small things just help me sort of keep
going and just knowing. My favorite quote is from Vanilla Sky,
(14:08):
and it's basically, every passing minute is another chance to
turn it all around. That. I just love that every
minute you can do something different, You can choose to
do something different, you can choose to try something. And
that's what I did with these TikTok's. I was just
trying something. I didn't know if it was gonna work.
And so knowing you have that opportunity to just try something,
it helps me because I never feel like I'm stuck
(14:29):
and I can't do anything. I know there's always something
I can do, There's always something I can try. You know,
I really relate to that. I think that for many people,
your TikTok videos um were lifelines, um, you know, the
kind of hope that things can get better and can change.
You know, you came along and you you kind of
(14:50):
helped to strip it all down and explain without doing
anything other than repeating his words. You gave people the
idea like, well, I don't have to listen to this,
I don't have to leave that. And that was a
huge contribution to resilience, the resilience of individuals, and I
hope the resilience of our country. Not to put to
(15:11):
find a point on it, but I just can't thank
you enough for what you've done, and I'm so in
your corner. I can't wait to see your program and
see what happens to you next. Well, thank you. I'm
I'm eternally grateful for you. Just your commitment and your dedication,
and you're just unwavering focus on what you think is
(15:32):
important and what you know in your heart to be true.
Has always been an inspiration to me and will continue
to be an inspiration to me. So I just want
to say how honored I am and how appreciative I
am of you. Thank you. Since my conversation with Sarah,
(15:53):
President Trump, as we all know, has tested positive for
COVID nineteen, Ben hospitalized return earned. Sarah hasn't put out
any new videos yet, and I wanted to check in
with her to see what she makes of this latest
plot twist. In light of recent events, I wanted to
check in with you again. Your videos do such an
(16:15):
excellent job of highlighting how absurd many of Trump's statements are.
But over the last few weeks, his statements and his
actions around COVID nineteen have not been so much ridiculous
as actually dangerous. He's out there telling people he understands
the virus. Now and it's not something to be afraid
(16:36):
of and refusing to participate remotely in the next presidential debate.
What goes through your mind when you hear him say
these things, Well, it starts to make me reconsider all
of the videos I've been making, just because at this
point it seems like there might be something really wrong
with him. You know, I've always seen him as someone
(16:57):
who is very sinister and calculated, but at this point,
and I think Nancy Pelosi brought up twenty fifth Monument
today too, but it does feel like there's something genuinely
wrong with him, And so I it's almost like, do
you make fun of someone who has some sort of
problem that you don't know what that problem is? But
it is also so dangerous that I don't want to
(17:18):
contribute to the propaganda that you're spreading. So it is
a weird time for my particular kind of satire because
I want to highlight how insane a lot of the
things he's saying. But if he's actually insane, and he's
actually saying things that are are going to genuinely hurt
people and inspire other people to hurt other people, and
(17:39):
I don't want to, you know, spread that message. I
agree with you. We're at a different point now. It
is scary to think that we have still three or
four weeks something like that. I mean, it's it's a
very tense time of just trying to get to that
election and and hopefully see the light at the end
of the tunnel. I agree with you. I mean, the
tension just seems to build. I was talking to a
(18:02):
good friend of mine who's a doctor, and she was
saying she sees so many people now it's just exploded
in terms of you know, her patients saying that they're anxious,
they're agitated, they're depressed, and they link it to this election.
They just are literally overcome by what they're experiencing when
(18:24):
they watch Trump. But I think it is a, you know,
a real sign of resilience that more and more people
are voting early, more and more people are speaking out,
more and more people and the press and elsewhere are
calling him out. So, you know, maybe that's a good
sign that assuming we get through this election and we
(18:48):
know retire him, we can kind of pull together again.
And I'm praying for that, me too, Sarah, me too.
Keep an eye out for Sarah's upcoming comedy special. It's
called Sarah Cooper Everything's Fine, and it comes out on
(19:11):
Netflix October. One of the reasons I'm interested in resilience
is that it's not just something that you're born with
or you aren't. And I've learned a lot about that
from research that is being done about how to cultivate
resilience in ourselves and others. And you know, nothing is
(19:31):
more important than helping kids be more resilient, especially right
now with so much uncertainty in their world. So that's
why I'm looking forward to talking with Angela Duckworth. She's
a psychologist, she's a MacArthur genius. She's the writer of Grit,
the power of passion and perseverance. Grit. Actually, that's one
(19:54):
of my favorite words. You have been called gritty. I've
had a feral streep in other people, pretty gritty moments.
You know, you're very gritty. Um, But I guess I
want to start with having you explain what grit is.
When I talk about grit, I mean this combination of
passion and perseverance for especially long term and personally meaningful goals. Um.
(20:20):
And I say passion and perseverance because it's not just
you know, working hard and being tenacious, I mean that
is part of grit, and I think that's where the
overlap with resilience, you know, the topic of this show.
But grit, unlike resilience, means that you're passionate about it. It
It resonates with your values, it interests you. You feel
like a kid when you're doing it. So perseverance and
(20:40):
passion for long term goals turns out to be not
at all correlated with talent or intelligence, but very predictive
of long term achievement. Tell us a little bit about
your own life and if you can reflect on what
brought you to this particular subject. Well, we may or
may not have this in common. But I was certainly
raised in a family that was dominated by my father's
(21:04):
obsession with achievement. He really was like obsessed with the
outliers in human accomplishment. And and then in our own family,
he would make comparisons of my sister, my brother, and me,
you know, who was doing well in the in the
horse race of achievement. I by the way, I'm not
recommending this, I'm just describing my childhood. Um. And so
when I grew up, I wondered whether there was something
(21:26):
else other than our our maybe our innate talent, that
that might determine, you know, what we might achieve. And
I think that's what led me to the study of
grit um. I was also, by the way, a teacher
classroom teacher in New York City and San Francisco public
schools for several years. And when I saw my students
at the beginning of the year, it was clear that
(21:48):
some of them had, you know, more of a facility
for math, which is what I taught. But I was
very surprised at the end of the year that the
students who had really learned the most, you know, weren't
always the ones who were you know, quite obviously bright
at the beginning. And and so much of it was
a kind of dedication, a stained interest and effort in
spite of setbacks, which is I think the heart of resilience. Well,
(22:10):
I think there are similarities between our fathers. My father
was absolutely set on making sure that I did as
well as I could in school. I would bring home,
you know, straight a's, and he'd say, you must go
to an easy school. It was his way of, I think,
trying to motivate me. And it's the only way he
(22:31):
knew to express his hopes was through this kind of
competitive comparative approach that I believe, you know, fathers like
ours actually thought was a way of showing love and
appreciation to keep pushing their children and luckily for us,
(22:52):
their daughters, not just their sons. Yes, and you know
when you think about those students that you taught, because
I've read about how you began to think through, what
was it that made some kids successful even if they
didn't start with the greatest understanding of math or some
(23:12):
other subject, and other kids maybe fade who looked like
they had potential. What did that then lead you to
decide to do well? First I was frustrated with them, um,
And then, as any halfway decent teacher would be, you
realize that you're the problem, right, So at first I
was like, why aren't they learning my my beautiful lesson plan?
Like how come it's not turning out the way I
(23:34):
wanted to? And quickly my frustration my students turned into
frustration with myself because I realized it was a limitation
of me as a teacher that I wasn't accessing, I
wasn't creating an on ramp to what we were doing,
And when I got frustrated, I eventually decided that my
tactics were incredibly ham fested. Like I mean, I tried
to be nice, but I just like, you know, if
(23:55):
you could just you know, put more effort in, you'll
be successful. I mean, that doesn't work. So what I
decided to do is change my career trajectory a little bit,
um or a lot, I guess, and become a psychological scientist.
It's not until I think we can understand why is
it that when a child gives up like they do,
like what is going on in the millisecond before they
(24:16):
put their pencil down and stop paying attention to what
they're doing? Like what happens? And I realized that we
needed more science on you know, motivation and interests and
effort in order that teachers and parents, um, by the way,
could do more than just the kind of like well
intentioned but usually ineffectual sermonizing UM at least that I
was doing. So when you went back to school, how
(24:39):
did you actually construct a program to look at this
and pursue it as a professional academic interest. So I
was a late bloomer in the sense of coming to
graduate school. UM in my you know whatever, fourth decorade
of life. But I knew what I wanted to study.
I was like, I know exactly what I'm here to
figure out. I wanted to understand the psychology of young
(25:00):
people in moments of frustration and moments of self doubt.
And then I wanted to figure out, you know, what
turns things such that insecurity becomes confidence when the frustration
becomes bearable. And I apprenticed to a very famous psychological scientist,
Marty Seligman, who basically is the leading figure um or
(25:22):
one of at least in resilience. And I'll tell you
maybe one insight that gives you a sense of how
scientists like figure things out like this. You know, when
you study something scientifically, you want to make a comparison.
So if you want to study resilience, you want to
find examples of resilience, but also examples of um, you know,
non resilience right or or giving up during difficulty. And
(25:42):
Marty did exactly that. When he was in graduate school
he studied animals. He studied dogs, for example, and he
discovered that when animals are resilient, it is in part
because they have control. Um. So, if an animal is
experiencing control over their adversity, even if the adversity is
in the case of the dogs he was studying, like
(26:04):
mild electric shocks, I mean really painful. The control makes
all the difference when animals don't have control over adversity.
It's what he coined um as learned helplessness. And so
I think the basic idea of the scientific method when
applied to things like resilience is you know, make systematic comparisons,
fine examples of what you're looking for, fine examples of
(26:25):
the opposite, and then you know, systematically work your way
through to kind of figure out what's going on underneath
the surface. Everything you've said obviously has implications for parenting.
How is your research impacted your own parenting? So, practically speaking,
I think in terms of resilience, the most important thing
(26:47):
I learned in my research was that, you know, left
to their own devices, young people will shy away from
hard things, like it's way more fun to win than
to lose. Um it's way more fun to get the
right answer then the wrong answer. And I could see
my kids like shy away from hard things. So we
made a rule in our family and we call it
the hard thing rule, UM, and we said everybody in
(27:10):
this family, including mom and dad, has to do a
hard thing. UM. We instituted this when the girls are
about kindergarten age. And the hard thing world had three parts.
One is that a hard thing is something that requires practice, UM,
like really trying to get better at something, you know,
with feedback and um, and not all the feedback is
going to be positive. The second thing about the hard
thing is that you can't quit in the middle. So
(27:32):
if you've made a commitment to a track coach or
a piano teacher, and you said you've done you know
you're gonna do something for two months, then then you
have to honor that commitment. And then the third thing,
and I think this is so important. You know, I'm
of Chinese heritage, my parents immigrated UM in the fifties,
and I don't really believe in tiger parenting. I think
the third part is the most important part, which is that, UM,
(27:54):
you get to choose your hard thing yourself. Nobody can
tell you what your hard thing is. And I let
my five year old we I should say my husband
and I. We let them choose even when they were
in kindergarten. I mean it was multiple choice because like
one year Lucy said she wanted to ride horses and
I was like that not on the list. So anyway,
I I think that was all informed by science. I
(28:15):
love that idea, you know, giving them some control over
the hard thing they choose, but then they have to
stick with that hard thing and they have to be
willing to take the ups and the downs that come
from trying something that's hard. And you know, I think
about hard things that I've had to do. I mean
running for office was really hard. Looked like it the object.
(28:35):
It was hard. It was hard the first time I
tried it and never had done it for myself before
and had to practice and practice and learn and learn
and it you know, it was a passion and I
had to persevere, win or lose. And I assume you've
had to do hard things, like what are you know
one or two of the hard things you had to
deal with? You know, I told you that. My dad
(28:57):
was like, you know, how how how smart are is
this person? House? Well, one advantage I will just say
of of never thinking of yourself as the smartest person
in the room is that like, wow, you are, at
least for me, I think the way I interpreted that,
I was like, I'm going to be the hardest working
person here, like like nobody's going to outwork me, is
going to outwork me, right, And you know, I think
(29:19):
that has been a certain kind of confidence. Like, you know,
just the other day, I was in a conversation with
Danny Kneman, who's another hero of mine. You won the
Nobel Prize, and I think he's the best living psychologist
there is today. And we're having this conversation and I
was trying to give him an idea about like the
psychology of attention, and about twenty minutes in, he was
(29:40):
like playing chess with Gary casper Off. He was like
checked me, and I was just he was like, he's
like this idea is like full of holes. It isn't work.
And I remember thinking, wow, like I am not as
smart as any condoman when it comes to psychology. Uh,
And I think I said something like that, but you know,
I wasn't so afraid. I never thought of myself as
that way. So I just said like, well, you know,
(30:01):
I would like to talk about this more, but I
think I gonna need a week to like on it,
to cover gather my wits, make some more notes, read
some more. You were fierce in your desire to you know,
keep going. Maybe take a deep breath and come back.
I have so enjoyed talking to you, and I hope
this will be the first of many conversations because I
(30:23):
am fascinated what you do. Thank you so much for
talking with me, and say a load of your family,
Say a load of those two daughters. Angela's book is
called Grit. She's a co founder of Character Lab, which
helps classrooms across the country create more resilient kids, and
(30:46):
you can learn more about her and her research at
Angela Duckworths dot com. I first heard about Diana and
Naiad really along time ago because she had this amazing
success record of swimming around the island of Manhattan across
(31:08):
Lake Ontario. You know, she really was somebody who was
of my vintage and was doing heroic, difficult things in
the water. She took time out to be a sports broadcaster,
and then I would see her covering sports, including the Olympics,
and it looked like she was, you know, done with
her own competitive swimming until she decided to try again.
(31:32):
She had tried to swim from Cuba to Florida the
first time when she was twenty eight. When she was
sixty one, she decided to try again, and again and again,
and then at age sixty four she wanted to try
once more, and she succeeded on her fifth try. That
(31:52):
should give everybody a kind of boost about what's possible.
As you'll hear her zest for life puts the rest
of us to shame. I think about your amazing career
and how you really took on the challenge of long
distance swimming. What drew you to it, because it's such
(32:15):
a unique sport. You know. There are two layers to
the answer to that question. One is um I was
born in New York City, but by the time I
was in second grade, so you're seven years old, I
was in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with a beautiful, warm ocean
right there, and I was good at swimming. I had
a way of feeling the water and going through the
(32:35):
water in a strong, fast way, So of course I
wanted that. But honestly, way above that. I don't know why, Hillary,
but I got the idea very early before the age
of ten, that this whole thing was gonna go by
very quickly, that I better not waste any time. I
may not be the best at what I do, but
I want to live up to my potential. I want
(32:57):
to help people the best I can. I want to
be the best I am intellectually physically. So I've been
lucky to have a lot of attributes of energy that
helped me get up very early and live a gung
ho pressive kind of life all day long and go
to sleep every night saying who I just couldn't have
done anymore with that day? But I guess I'm getting
(33:20):
around to saying it wasn't and it it's still is
not just about swimming. I wasn't necessarily driven to I've
got to swim this, and I've got to be a swimmer.
I was and I am all that, But it's more
what can I do with this one? As Mary Oliver
put it, wild and precious life of mine? I want
(33:41):
to fail. I'd rather choose very very difficult things and
have to be resilient if I don't make it, and
and have to be humble if I don't make it,
then choose mediocre goals. So it wasn't always about swimming.
It was about living the biggest life I can live. Amen,
And you know, part of what I'm interested in is
(34:03):
there are a lot of people who say to themselves, Wow,
I'm gonna do something that is really big and it's
going to fill me up and I'm going to make
a mark. But then there are those who actually do it.
And you know, I've read your fabulous autobiography and just
reading about the training that you subjected yourself to was exhausting.
(34:25):
Describe that training regimen because it shows so clearly what
it takes to say, Okay, I want to do this,
but hey, here's what I have to make sure I
can do in order to be able to achieve that.
What does that actually look like day to day? Well,
you know, it's it's tough. If you're gonna swim for
let's say, what might be ostensibly fifty four hours across
(34:49):
Cuba to Florida NonStop, never allowed to touch the boat,
what are you gonna do to get ready for that. Well,
you're not gonna go swim fifty four hours. You might
as well go do the real thing. So you start doing.
You're not in shape yet seven and eight hours swims,
And mind you, a swim like Manhattan Island is under
eight hours. Now later in the year, you're gonna be
(35:10):
up to twelve fourteen hours swims. You're lying in the
fetal position at night. You can't get up because you're
so darn exhausted. You can't get dinner. But you do
get up the next day and you do fifteen hours.
Then you're up to eighteen hours. Then you're up to
twenty four hours, and that's a lot of lonely, you know,
(35:31):
isolated time. This sport is a case of sensory deprivation.
You don't see much. You're turning your head fifty five
times a minute. You don't see anything but the side
of the boat over here, and Bonnie, my intrepid you know,
handler you dig down and get your mind disciplined and
strong enough to make it through those lonely hours. So
(35:53):
that's what it's about. Yeah, it's the shoulders, it's the body.
You've got to be a good swimmer, a strong swimmer.
But more than anything is can the mind suffer and
concentrate and refuse to give up for all those hours?
That's what it's about. We'll be back right after this
quick break. Do you have any insights as to whether
(36:17):
that resolved that incredible resilience and grit how do you
evaluate the mix between kind of what's deep down inside
you or just plain hard work that it takes, you know,
as it learned. Is it something you can practice to achieve?
How would you tell young people if there were a
bunch of young people listening and they were wondering, well,
(36:39):
how I don't I don't know that I could ever
do anything that brave or that big, but i'd like to.
How would you tell them to think about it? Yeah,
it's it's always, isn't it. It's the age old nature
nurture conversation. So you know, I don't remember any particular
you know, light bulb that went off to say that's
how I want to be, that's who I want to be.
(37:00):
So I do think there is a lot of a
genetic component, But I do believe that people all the
world around have resolved. Now, it could be that they're
not dreaming of you know, changing there. They're not Nelson
Mandela who wants to you know, change the entire fabric
of the future of the world. And now we we
view equality, um. But it could be that in their
(37:21):
particular community, that's the way they live and that's what
they demand of their neighbors. And their family, And isn't
that equally important. Don't we think the world gets changed
one family and one neighborhood at a time. So I admire,
and I'm sure you do too, all kinds of people
that the world will never hear of. You know, I
have a neighbor here in in my neighborhood in Los
(37:43):
Angeles who lost her husband to cancer, and she was busy, well, um,
somebody else had trouble in the neighborhood. And this woman
who had very few resources, no time at all, three
kids on her hands, mourning her husband. She's the one
who went around all around the ebro to say, we
got to help this other neighbor. She needs our help.
(38:04):
And Naiad, you're the little star of the neighborhood. While
that's just great, but see your name here on the clipboard.
Every other Tuesday, you're gonna get dinner on their back porch, okay,
And it's not going to be Kentucky fried chicken. It's
gonna be a vegetable and a dinner. And if you
can't do it, get somebody else to do it, because
for a year, we're gonna help her out. So I
(38:24):
admire that woman as much as I admire Bill Gates,
but I think that's a really important and very relatable point,
is that not everybody's gonna, you know, swim long distance. Um,
not everybody's going to be a star athlete or whatever
else the comparison might be. But everybody can do something,
and everybody can both overcome their own challenges and then
(38:47):
help others to overcome the challenges that they face. And
you know, how would you describe how your experience in
long distance swimming has actually translated to how you meet
challenge is in your life? Well? You know, I know
that you know the story Hillary that I like. Unfortunately millions,
(39:08):
uh suffered sexual abuse as a young teen. Um My coach,
the person who should have uh you know, put me
up on a pedestal and helped send me out with
character and with confidence into the world. He was an
abuser and he really got a kick out of humiliating.
And now I'm seventy and look at me, you know me,
I'm pretty confident, I'm pretty happy. Uh, I'm I feel
(39:31):
very fortunate at this life I've gotten to live. And
on the other hand, still deep down, if I want
to get real about it, uh, there is an imprint
from that humiliation that is still there, that that little girl,
that young teen still can feel, the low self esteem
and the anger, the anger at myself for not throwing
(39:54):
him up against a wall and saying I'm going to
my mother and I'm going to the principle. Well, I
think that, even though I'm older and wiser now and
deal with it in a in a more holistic way,
I think there was something of a resilience that told
me right away, even while it was happening, I'm going
(40:14):
to survive this. I'm going to thrive through it. This
is not going to ruin my life. I won't let it.
I'm not going to go down. Boy, that's such a message, Diana,
that needs to be heard by so many young people
and not so young people. And the fact that you've
talked about it and you've written about it and you've
(40:35):
made it a part of your overall message and mission,
because so many young people need to hear that. But
this is an important part of you know who you
are and what you've overcome, and what the source of
your resilience is, and just your determination, yes, that grit
to keep going and not look back in a way
(40:59):
that pair lizes you but instead mobilizes you. Yeah, those
are good words, paralyzed and mobilize. You know, I want
to switch gears to the oceans because nobody has spent
more time in them than you have all over the world,
and it's such a critical issue with the environment, with
climate change, and I know that you are really going
(41:22):
to tackle this like you've tackled everything else. You know.
One of the things I've heard that you're really going
to focus on is single use plastics and what they're
doing to the ocean and what they're doing to the
you know, animals that live in the ocean. But talk
a little bit about how, given your personal immersion in
the ocean, this new mission has arisen about what you
(41:47):
want to do to try to use your voice and
use your experience to literally help save our our world oceans. Yeah,
I I guess you could say that I fell madly
in low with planet Earth by being immersed in its oceans.
You know. Carl Sagan spoke about it as that little
(42:08):
magical blue spec that astronauts see from way up there. So, um,
Bonnie and I when we got done with the Cuba swim,
we started a walking initiative and I know you're a
big walker, we want you to come out walking with us.
I would love that. There you go. So ever, Walk
is all about a new vision of lifestyle in America,
(42:29):
and that is that everybody walks a mile every day.
It doesn't matter what the weather is. You just do.
You walk before work, you walk during lunch, you walk
after school with your kids. But you walk a mile
every day of the year, virtually. And now we're going
to sort of drive all that walking towards walking along
the oceans. So next June, we're gonna walk from Daytona
(42:52):
to Miami. Oh wow, that's fabulous. It's two hundred miles.
Some people will walk the whole way, twenty miles a
day for ten days. That's great. Most people will only
want to walk a mile. They want to be part
of it. But we're gonna do a cho hundred mile crusade.
And all the way we're gonna have beach rallies with mayors,
business people, Bill and Hillary Clinton, all kinds of crazy characters.
(43:15):
Are you gonna say? I promise I am going to reduce,
if not eliminate, single use plastics in my home, in
my business, because eight million tons of plastic around the
world are now going into the ears oceans. They're suffocating
the lungs of the planet. I would love to be
part of that. I love walking, I love oceans. You're
(43:36):
bringing them together. I am so happy to talk to
you today. I could not think of anybody better to
talk about this subject of resilience. Stay safe, stay healthy,
and I'm brightened down that I'm gonna see you walk
on the beach uh in Florida next June. There we
go Diana and iyads out to buy aography is called
(44:01):
Find a Way a perfect title, and you can find
more about her new initiative to protect the oceans at
everwalk dot com. You know, when we think about resilience,
I think every one of us can reflect on our
own lives, but certainly the lives of those near us.
Think about the people you know who have shown great resilience.
(44:22):
Who's your hero, who's your example? See what you can
do to help others, especially young people. Understand that to
keep going is really a mantra that everyone on this show,
including myself, believe in you and me both. Is brought
to you by I Heart Radio. We're produced by Julie
(44:44):
Subran and Kathleen Russo. With help from Huma Aberdeen, Nikki
e Tour, Oscar Flores, Brianna Johnson, Nick Merrill, Lauren Peterson,
Rob Russo, and Lona valmro Our engineer is Zack mc niece.
Original music is by Forest Gray and a big thanks
(45:04):
to Riverside FM. Just imagine we needed a recording platform
that could help us make a podcast during a pandemic
and voided they step up. If you like you and
me both, spread the word, don't keep it to yourself.
You can subscribe to you and me both on the
I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
(45:26):
your podcasts, and while you're there, leave us a review.
It's a great way to help other people discover us
and we'd love to hear from you, So send us
your questions, your comments, your ideas or suggestions for future
shows to you and me both pod at gmail dot com.
Come back next week when I'm talking about turning Grief
(45:48):
into Action with comedian patent Oswald and Sabrina Fulton, Trayvon
Martin's mom and a powerful advocate. Hope you'll join me
Host
Hillary Clinton
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