Why grit isn’t enough

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ANGELA DUCKWORTH: When human beings think about what determines behavior, they think intentions determine behavior. That’s not wrong, but what social psychologists will point out is that we make an error when we forget how powerful the situation is. I was astonished. I have never seen, in all of my years of studying companies, a culture where unvarnished negative feedback was taken with such maturity and even enthusiasm. I’m sure a lot of people hate me for saying so many negative things about working in your home office all day, and I know there are upsides, but I have to say, I have so many misgivings about it. The NFL may be the last bipartisan community builder we have. Whether you’re red or blue, E-A-G-L-E-S, go Eagles.

JEFF BERMAN: Oh, Angela, please no. That’s where we got to cut it.

DUCKWORTH: Blasphemy.

BERMAN: We can’t have that.

DUCKWORTH: You’re like, “Okay, we’re going to edit that out.” Fly, Eagles, fly. I’m a Philly girl.

BERMAN: This is Masters of Scale. I’m Jeff Berman, your host. I am thrilled to be joined today by Angela Duckworth. Angela is a brilliant psychology professor and co-director of the Penn Wharton Behavior Change for Good Institute. With millions of copies sold, it’s a good bet that her first book, Grit, is already on your shelf. She’s now back with a fascinating follow-up. Angela, welcome back to Masters of Scale.

DUCKWORTH: It is good to be back, and it’s good to be talking to you again, Jeff.

Copy LinkWhy grit needs the right environment

BERMAN: It is great to be talking to you. It occurred to me that maybe you perceived that the market overcorrected toward Grit, and Situated almost reads as a response to that overcorrection. Is that a fair way to talk about why Situated is such an important follow-up to Grit?

DUCKWORTH: Jeff, I think the idea of the second book is maybe not a correction of Grit, but a completion. I’m a psychologist who will always be obsessed with achievement. I think the completion of the story of Grit says that, for all the things we need to work on so that the inside game — our mental game, our mindset, our attitudes, our assumptions, our goals, the way we think about our goals — is always going to be important. If there’s a message of Grit, it’s that effort matters, and effort matters arguably more than natural talent. If there’s a message of this second book — you can call it a sequel; in some ways, as we’ll discuss, it may be a prequel — it’s that the outside game matters, too, because all of that effort pays off more, and is more rational, in some ecosystems, in some environments, in some cultures, in some places, with some people, and less so in others. And I think if you’re going to achieve your potential, you need to master both the inside game and the outside game. But I don’t think either negates the other.

BERMAN: There’s the story in the book of Cody Coleman, and I’m going to ask you to share a little bit about Cody.

DUCKWORTH: I met Cody Coleman through an email that he sent over the transom on a day in May 2013 that introduced himself as a senior at MIT studying computer science and electrical engineering, and he’d apparently watched my TED Talk. He felt compelled to tell me that the journey he’d taken from being born in a prison near Trenton, New Jersey, to graduating from MIT with a nearly perfect GPA in the hardest majors you can have at MIT, was a story of grit. What happened next? An internship at Google, enrolling in the PhD program in computer science at Stanford, where he successfully earned his PhD, studying with some of the pioneers in artificial intelligence and becoming the third Black recipient of a PhD in computer science in Stanford’s entire history. He is a paragon of grit, but the reason he’s very relevant to this conversation is that he’s more than that. He has very strategically oriented himself to situations that make the most of his grit, and he will tell you that the only way you get exponential growth in your personal development is by leapfrogging from a good situation to a better one, and then a better one, ever improving. Now he’s the CEO of an AI startup called Coactive in San Jose.

BERMAN: Yeah. There’s so much about Cody’s story that stood out for me, but as our regular listeners know, I started my career as a public defender, and one of my very first clients, who I’ll just call Brian here, I was heading out to the juvenile jail to meet with him for the first time. I’m reading through his file, and he’s classified as extremely low IQ. I’m worried that he’s not going to understand what I’m doing, why he’s locked up, what we’re dealing with here. And I’m sitting down with him, and I remember this like it was yesterday. It is almost 30 years ago that this first conversation with Brian happened, and I’m explaining his rights to him, and I’m so worried he doesn’t get it. And he looks at me and goes, “Is this what the Boston Tea Party was about?” And I go, “Oh, interesting. Say more.” And he’s like, “Well, because they didn’t feel like they had their rights, and so they were fighting for their rights.” And I was like, “Actually, yeah. That’s exactly right.”

DUCKWORTH: It took me a beat. I’m like, “Right.”

BERMAN: Right, right. But that’s why I was like, “Wait, say more.” And over my time representing him, I realized this kid is absolutely not low IQ. This is a smart young man who, similar to Cody, was born into just absolutely awful circumstances and wasn’t able to encounter the mentors or the people who could guide him out of it or change his circumstances, and he grew up eight miles from my home, where I grew up.

DUCKWORTH: Wow.

BERMAN: Right? I grew up in a home where, as you talk about in the book, there were two parents, I’ve got a home full of books, I’ve got a dinner table with adults sitting around it talking about world events and national events, and I’m treated as an equal participant in those discussions. I’m in a world-class public school district, all of it. And it was the first time in the context of my public defender work where it just landed how deeply the accident of birth was for me. And so the thing about Cody’s story for me that stood out in this context is it is one thing to be able to change the small things in our lives. It’s another thing to be able to achieve at this level. And I’m curious what you take from Cody’s story that can apply for people who do find themselves in extremely difficult circumstances.

DUCKWORTH: I was walking down a hill recently, and a more experienced hiker passed me by, and he turned around and said, “Small steps, soft knees.” And I thought, “That’s good advice.” And I think it’s good advice when it comes to changing your situation. If you imagine the biggest change you could make, you quickly convince yourself that it’s not possible. Are you going to move where you live? Are you going to change where you work? Those are big decisions, and very few of us can make those decisions on a dime. And the answer might very well be no, it’s not yet possible, actually. But the small-steps, soft-knees advice is: do anything. The soft-knees part, at least the way I’m taking it — I’m sure when you’re downhill hiking on a sandy trail, it literally means just keep your knees soft — but I think there’s this suppleness that we need, especially now. Jeff, you know better than I do: the world is changing under everyone’s feet. And so the suppleness you need, the ability to be agile, to take small steps, but also to adjust, to trajectory-correct as needed. When human beings think about what determines behavior, they think intentions determine behavior, values determine behavior, character determines behavior. That’s not wrong, but what social psychologists will point out is that we make an error when we forget how powerful the situation is. So I think wherever we are, we can ask ourselves not only what can’t I do, which is fine — you can make a very long list of all the things you cannot change about your situation, and I encourage you to do so — but if there is anything on the list of things that you can change, people you can spend more time with, objects that you can place far away or near if you’re trying to remind yourself to do something, I think you should start working down the checklist and seeing how that changes everything.

BERMAN: Yeah. And the other thing that Cody did — not all of us are going to have the opportunity to be PhD students at Stanford — is move to the center of the tech world. And if you’re going to launch an AI company, there’s no better place, literally in the known universe, than the Bay Area to do it. And you talk in the book about a word I’d never heard of that puts a name to a concept I think we understand, called agglomeration, where there are centers of excellence. It also feels like you’ve almost created your own agglomeration at Penn with Katy Milkman there, who’s been on the show, and Adam Grant there, who’s been on the show. The work that you all are doing is helping us understand what motivates us, what creates change, and how we live our best lives.

DUCKWORTH: The way that Katy and Adam and I wrote our first paper together is we all live here, and I was taking one of my daughters to a dentist appointment at Penn Dental, and I had this narrow window that I knew I had to be in the waiting room for some indeterminate time. Literally, Adam Grant, Katy Milkman, and I met in a corner of the Penn Dental office while my daughter got her teeth cleaned or something, and hatched our first study together. That co-location effect — I know there are many things to say about remote work, and that is its own complex topic. One of the things you lose when you are not physically in the same city, in the same room, as other people are those chance encounters, and also those planned encounters where you get together and hatch an idea. And I think that idea of agglomerations and the importance of place is important to emphasize now because sometimes people are like, “I can live anywhere. I can work anywhere.” And in some ways, that’s factually true. It may not be the best thing for you.

Copy LinkThe struggle of working from home

BERMAN: Let’s talk about remote work. Trisha and Masha, who are producing us today, are sick of hearing me talk about this.

DUCKWORTH: I haven’t heard your speech yet on remote work.

BERMAN: Well, I’m struggling with it because, as you know, I’ve jumped from industry to industry. Part of my great good fortune has been the ability to sit in rooms and watch people who are far wiser, far more experienced than I am work, and to pick up what I can to apply to my own approaches to these things, but also to take the walk to grab a coffee or tea after and ask all the dumb questions. Remote just makes that so hard to do, right?

DUCKWORTH: I don’t want to say that every company should be five days in the office. That would be naive. I think remote work, when it does work, is when there’s a very intentional effort to bring people together physically, all in one place, in the same room, breathing the same air, and having a synchronous experience, but also having some leeway for informality, the sort of spontaneous conversation. When you’re on a video call — at least if you’re on a video call with me — there damn well better be an agenda because I don’t want to waste time. But nobody puts on the agenda eight minutes of kibitzing.

BERMAN: Right.

DUCKWORTH: But that’s exactly what you do at a coffee machine.

BERMAN: I also really worry. My kids, I think, are a little younger than yours, but they’re in the same range as they’re entering the work world soon. What this is going to mean for them, what it means for the more junior members of our team here and their own opportunities to grow and learn. And I guess I’m stuck because, on the one hand, I feel almost captive to my own experience and how much I benefited from it, and on the other hand, I’m trying to imagine how this can work in the new world. Maybe it’s a lack of my own imagination for how to make it better. I want to invite in a member of our team who is living the remote-work life. Masha Makutonina is a producer on Masters of Scale and works across the WaitWhat properties. She’s awesome, and I know she has a reaction to this every time we talk about it. So if it’s OK, I’d like to invite Masha in.

DUCKWORTH: I approve. I’d love to hear what Masha has to say about remote work.

MASHA MAKUTONINA: Hi. Thank you so much. What you’ve shared about the worries or the problems that young professionals like me are having really resonated, as I was sitting in my bedroom behind my bed. The only job experience I’ve had so far has been remote. I am working from my bedroom. I am embarrassed by my hair because I just thought I was going to work from home and no one was going to see me today.

DUCKWORTH: Why brush my hair?

MAKUTONINA: Why brush my hair? What is a behavior change that maybe someone like me could try?

DUCKWORTH: First, can I ask, Masha, how is it going? How do you feel about working remotely?

MAKUTONINA: It sucks.

DUCKWORTH: Tell me how it sucks.

MAKUTONINA: I feel like I try to be a good sport and do my small talk on Slack, but it is much easier to choose to be off camera and hop off the call a little earlier. Then, by the end of the day, I somehow feel a little isolated but drained at the same time.

DUCKWORTH: Yeah.

MAKUTONINA: I try to seek those connections out in the wild world, but I just feel like I’ve worked the whole day and I’m like, “Oh, my God, now what do I do? How do I force myself?”

DUCKWORTH: Yeah, it’s interesting that you use the word force. OK, well, I have two ideas, and without knowing a whole lot about your particular situation, you can tell me how these land.

I think physically working in your bedroom all day is awful for most people, in part because there is no transition. There is no cue that now work is over. Oh, wait, now work has started. It’s just one blur. So I think a physical transition to work is one idea. You can tell me whether it’s a good idea or not, but that could mean working in a coffee shop with good Wi-Fi for much of your day or going to a WeWork-type place. So I think a physical separation, where you put on different clothing, for example. You are not old enough to have watched Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, but Mister Rogers would always come in and he would take off his outside shoes and put on his inside shoes, and he would take off his outside jacket and put on his inside jacket. The costumes that we put on to say, “Now I’m at work. Now I’m working out. Now I’m going to bed” — with athleisure, it could be all the same outfit. Physically, that might work, but psychologically, I don’t think it does. So you might consider these physical transitions that you don’t have to make, but you might choose to make. The second option I would have for you is to go visit people. I would say, of these coworkers that you would probably like to have a friendship with, just go. Go and do work in their city for a day, go out to dinner, and then get on a plane and go home. And make Jeff pay for it.

MAKUTONINA: Love this. Thank you so much, Angela. I’m hearing intentionality, which sometimes requires discipline, but sounds great.

DUCKWORTH: Changing your situation takes a little bit of willpower, but that little bit of willpower pays off. So I think if you can take those small steps — in the first case, a bigger step when you get on a plane — sure, it’ll take a little willpower to get it organized, but I think it’ll be worth the investment.

BERMAN: Well, the other note for me as an organizational leader is that offering unlimited WeWork may not be enough, and what are the nudges that we can offer, the incentives that we can offer, that make it easier for you, Masha, to get out of the home and go co-work with team members or with friends or what have you? So I think it’s fair for you also to say, “I could use some help here,” and I appreciate you jumping on and asking Angela for her advice. You and I can work on this together to make things better.

MAKUTONINA: Yeah. Sounds good.

DUCKWORTH: You have to keep me posted. I’ll give you a grade when you’re done.

MAKUTONINA: Please.

DUCKWORTH: We’ll make it pass-fail.

BERMAN: There we go. Thanks, Masha.

DUCKWORTH: Again, I’m sure a lot of people hate me for saying so many negative things about working in your home office all day, and I know there are upsides, but I have to say I have so many misgivings about it. There was very recently a study in Science, which is —

DUCKWORTH: the top journal, arguably, in the field of all of science, not just social science but the hard sciences too. It was a study by economists on remote work. What they did was look at professions that were easily transitioning to remote because they were things that could be done through video calls and Google Docs and so forth, and compare them to professions where it was nearly impossible. It’s just an in-person job. You have to be there physically. When you look at the well-being of people who are employed in these different sectors, those who have been in sectors that are more likely to have gone remote are actually doing much worse than those who, in some ways, are forced to be in person. So that’s the personal decision, but I think understanding how important social connection is is a big part of becoming situationally aware.

Copy LinkHow peer rituals build lasting accountability

BERMAN: You talk in the book about Coach Lad and De La Salle High School, which happens to be about 15 minutes from where I’m sitting today in Orinda, California, having this conversation with you, which had a pretty rough streak of losing seasons for a long time and then went on to rip off a 151-game win streak, which is mind-boggling in any sport. I’d love for you to tell the story of how they built the culture there with commitment cards and the rituals around it because we’ve already had a conversation about implementing it at WaitWhat, the company behind Masters of Scale, because it just struck me as so powerful.

DUCKWORTH: Coach Lad was in his young 20s when he became the coach of the football team at De La Salle High School. It’s a very small, modest Catholic school. I don’t think they had ever had a winning season in their history as a school before Coach Lad joined. How does he turn it into the football team with the longest streak in history? John Madden took time out of his career and his life to make a full documentary on De La Salle High School because he thought the phenomenon was that worthy, and it is all about culture. What Coach Lad did was create a culture of peer accountability. He discovered very early on as a coach and as a mentor that you can tell people what to do, but it doesn’t work very well.

You can try to keep the people who report to you — in this case, his players — accountable by the force of your authority because you are at a higher level than they are, but it’s not very effective. What he discovered was that there is no higher force, there is no higher court, than the court of peer opinion. Therefore, he tried to get a culture going where you play your heart out and you practice your heart out not because the coach told you to, and not even to please the coach, but to please your fellow teammates. He had this commitment card idea. Actually, I think it was an assistant coach at the time who was working for Coach Lad who had this idea. But together they ginned it up. You take a three-by-five blank index card, and you as a player write down your goals for the next week. When you get to the end of writing this down, you end by saying, “I commit to,” and then you name another player and you exchange cards with that other player. For those next seven days, your peer, your teammate, keeps you accountable. They watch you in the weight room, they watch you at practice, and they watch you on game day. The following week, before you write your next commitment card, your partner stands up and reads out your goals to the whole team, who’s watching in reverent silence. They’ll say, “Failed” or “Succeeded.” So you get this report card on how you did last week. When I witnessed this commitment card ceremony, I was astonished. I have never seen in all of my years of studying companies a culture where unvarnished negative feedback was taken with such maturity and even enthusiasm. Nobody that I watched that evening actually got a perfect score. These are hard goals. If you can develop a culture where it’s not only that you’re accountable to your boss or your manager, but you have the esprit de corps and the formal rituals and structures to be accountable to another person who is at your peer level, I think that — and I think this is what Coach Lad would say — is the magic of the De La Salle Spartans.

BERMAN: There’s a beautiful photo in the book because the other thing that Coach Lad did was have the players — the pair who’ve committed to each other — walk out on the field for each game holding hands. It was such a powerful visual to see young men fully suited up in their football gear, walking out holding hands, knowing that they’ve made these commitments to each other. So beautiful.

DUCKWORTH: I know that not everyone can make a field trip to Concord, California, and spend a day with the De La Salle Spartans, but I feel like every leader would be changed if they did. I feel like the challenge of leadership is how to create a culture with rituals — and I think those rituals are elemental — that is not only high standards and high expectations, but also this kind of unconditional support. That magical combination is something that, whenever I see it, I know it. But I am not a leader, and I am always in a kind of astonished admiration of the leaders who are able to achieve that.

BERMAN: We can agree to disagree that you’re not a leader. But I think where we will agree is we’re in a moment where, not just nationally but globally, the leadership that is being lauded doesn’t just lack empathy and lack love, it doesn’t even really have accountability. It’s lionized for its cruelty. When you look at these institutions that have built cultures where the foundation is really the twins of love and empathy and accountability — real accountability — and you see how they flourish, why isn’t that happening more nationally and globally? And why aren’t we lionizing those leaders over those who lead with the lack of that?

DUCKWORTH: I wish I knew. I agree with you, and I don’t have an answer. As a psychological scientist who has studied human nature and individual differences for her whole career, I don’t have an answer. I wonder, Jeff, do you have a pet theory, even if you don’t have evidence for it yet?

BERMAN: Well, some of it, I fear, goes back to the atomization of our society, right? We’re living in these bubbles. We’re watching algorithmically driven media. We don’t have, you know, the monoculture had its problems, right? It was a lot of people who frankly looked a lot like me who were deciding what you watched and what you read and what you engaged with. And so there’s a lot of benefit to a world in which we have far more diverse sources of information and entertainment. But when you’re spending hours a day on TikTok, we’re products of our environment in really meaningful ways. And so I fear that that’s some of it.

DUCKWORTH: I agree with you. I mean, there are downsides to a monoculture. There are freedoms in a culture where everyone’s doing their own thing. Frankly, they’re doing it in different places at different times. We’re not experiencing the same perspectives. But there is a real cost. It’s a dissolution of what Bob Putnam sometimes refers to as bridging capital. He distinguishes between two kinds of social capital. Bonding capital is like you and your kith and kin, the people that you know and really care about, and they’re going to bring you chicken soup when you’re sick. Those are very important, and that’s a big part of social connection. I think it’s what people think of when they think of social connection. They want a best friend. They want a romantic partner. They want to spend more time with their friends.

But there’s another kind of social capital called bridging capital, and that is you and your neighbors, you and the people that you go to mosque, synagogue, or church with, you and the people who happen to frequent the same coffee shop. These are not your kith and kin. They’re not your close friends or family. But bridging capital is very important because that is where America has created the cohesion of, “I don’t look like you. I don’t talk like you. I may not have even voted like you, but I recognize you as a human.”

We can still talk about the game on Monday. We can still smile at each other and share a cup of coffee. And that is one reason why my husband and I go to church. Especially, he has made the argument, because I whine sometimes. I hate to be in the car. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, the whole morning’s gone.” He was like, “Bridging capital. Bob Putnam, bridging capital.” And I think he’s right. And as you know, despite recent trends, attendance at and allegiance to religious institutions, those are among the institutions that are really on the decline.

So I do think some of these macro trends lead me to the conclusion that the default settings of the modern world, the situation if you don’t change it proactively, are not healthy. If you’re not proactive about putting yourself in places and with people that are good for you, the default settings are not necessarily going to be what is best for you.

Copy LinkWhere social connection still crosses divides

BERMAN: Couldn’t agree more on the third places, the religious institutions, the coffee shop where you go work, the office, or whatever it might be. I’ll tell you what gave me some hope earlier this summer: the World Cup. And the experience not just of seeing the abject joy in people coming from outside the U.S. and experiencing our country and seeing them fall in love with Buc-ee’s or Waffle House or whatever it is, but my wife and I were in a bar in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for the Cabo Verde-Argentina game.

And I guarantee you 80 percent of the people in that bar had never heard of Cabo Verde before the World Cup. And yet there we were, all rooting on this little team from this little country in its David-versus-Goliath moment. And we had instant community that night.

DUCKWORTH: Right. Isn’t it amazing?

BERMAN: It’s awesome.

DUCKWORTH: And it happens so fast that you feel like it’s a chemical change. You’re like, “What neuromodulator is going through my brain right now?” I had a similar experience during the World Cup. We did not watch every game, but Philadelphia was a host. And just walking down the sidewalk and seeing people in their jerseys from whatever country, there was this sort of moment where you look at each other, there’s a note of acknowledgment, there’s a smile. I think it is hopeful.

I have a colleague, Todd Rogers. Todd’s a big sports fan, in addition to being a professor and a social scientist at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. And he has lately been studying the NFL. Todd has some empirical evidence suggesting that when people watch NFL games, they experience this kind of social connection. Todd has convinced me that the NFL may be the last bipartisan community builder we have. So whether you’re red or blue, like E-A-G-L-E-S, go Eagles.

BERMAN: Oh, Angela, please. No, no, no. We can’t. That’s where we’ve got to cut it.

DUCKWORTH: Blasphemy.

BERMAN: We can’t have that.

DUCKWORTH: You’re like, “OK, we’re going to edit that out.” Fly, Eagles, Fly. I’m a Philly girl. But also, go Hawks. They are my favorite teams. But anyway, I do think that gives you an example of what can happen.

I also think that live events, when we talk about situations that are electric, there’s almost something chemical that feels like it’s happening. The practice of going to concerts: If you had asked me 15 or 20 years ago, “Is concertgoing going to go up or down?” I probably would have shorted concerts. I would be like, “Oh, you’re kidding. Music’s getting digitized. You can have it whenever you want. The fidelity is better.” But you know what? I think people are craving that feeling of being in the audience with other people.

It’s sometimes called, in sociology, collective effervescence, the phenomenon of joint attention to one thing happening and then this collective emotion. It’s not just that you’re feeling something, but everyone’s feeling something, and you know that everyone’s feeling something. And it really is, to me, one of the things that explains why we are still going to concerts. And I hope it happens more. I hope there are more opportunities for it. The World Cup only comes, what, every four years?

BERMAN: Every four years, and we don’t get to host it every four years.

DUCKWORTH: Oh, yeah. That’s so true.

BERMAN: Unfortunately, yeah.

DUCKWORTH: It’s not going to be back in the United States for a long time, but could we take it as a hopeful example? I think people should do things. I think people should do things together. If you want to get situated, get with other people.

Copy LinkWhy free time still needs meaningful goals

BERMAN: I want to close by asking you, because I think legally I’m required to ask you some question about AI in this moment.

DUCKWORTH: It’s in your contract.

BERMAN: But I want to ask you a specific question about AI. In the more optimistic versions of an AI-driven future, we’re working less and generating even more output. And so I want to focus on one of those more optimistic visions of that future. In the event that we really are able to go down to a four-day workweek or a three-day workweek or a six-hour workday, and we do have that much more free time, how do you envision the use of that time in a way that can actually benefit us and propel our country in a better direction?

DUCKWORTH: I’ll tell you what I hope it isn’t, and then I’ll tell you what I hope it is. I hope it isn’t what we now do with a lot of our free time, which is just fill it with amusements, entertainment, things that make you smile or laugh for a few minutes and then evaporate like the morning dew. I mean, that is how Americans are spending a lot, maybe the majority, of their time: just scrolling, watching, you know. It doesn’t add up to very much.

It is the nature of human nature to work, and that doesn’t mean paid work necessarily. That doesn’t mean that we all should be working 12 hours a day. But when I say it is the nature of human nature to work, what I mean is that it is part and parcel of our DNA to chase goals, to have aims, to try to go from here to there. That’s what a goal is. A goal is the desired state of the world that you are trying to achieve.

And we all know people who’ve retired and become abjectly miserable because now they have everything that they always thought they wanted: no responsibility, no deadlines, no checklists, just leisure. That’s what happened to my own father. He always said to me in the years before retirement, “When I retire, I’m going to do nothing.” That is what my dad did, and he was never more depressed than when he left his 35-year career at DuPont.

So what I hope it is, should this scenario come to pass, is that we fill the time that we have with work of some kind, something that is meaningful to us, a goal that we’re trying to achieve. Maybe that is leisure-related for some people, but it’s not amusement. It’s not nothing. It’s not only that nature abhors a vacuum, it’s that happiness abhors a vacuum.

When the Founding Fathers said that we have a country where there is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, I always thought: life, yep. Liberty, yep. It’s the happiness of pursuit. I think people are happiest when they’re starting a podcast, when they’re trying to become a better writer, when they’re trying to get this charity off the ground, when they’re being a Girl Scout leader. What I hope it does not become is just more relaxation, entertainment, and amusement.

BERMAN: From your lips. Angela, we are not going to wait for you to have your next book out to have you back on. We’re going to twist your arm to have you back soon. You’re the best. So wonderful having you on Masters of Scale, and can’t wait to see you in person.

DUCKWORTH: Jeff, I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for having me.