ANGELA DUCKWORTH: I was a science major. I thought it would be, you know, really cool to teach kids how to like learn about solar energy by making like a hot dog cooker out of like tinfoil and cardboard.

And I go around to the school’s classrooms, and I’m knocking one by one on the doors of, I think it was like fifth or sixth grade classroom. And I went into one classroom. I remember the teacher’s name, Mr. Z, and he lets me do my little three minute commercial at the front of the classroom.

And one little boy puts up his hand and is asking questions about it. You know, he’s sort of leaning forward in his seat. He’s got a big smile on his face. 

And Mr. Z interrupts him, and he says, “Oh, not you. This is not for you. This is for the smart kids.”

And I nearly took a baseball bat to that man. I was like, “That kid will never forget what you said. And God knows what you’ve been saying the rest of the school year.” You know, I can’t get that classroom teacher fired. I couldn’t make decisions at a level of policy that would directly change that kid’s life.

But I knew I would never forget that story, and I never have. And it taught me a lesson, which is that, yeah, for sure we have genetic endowments. You know, I am probably lucky to have gotten certain genetic cards from my dad and certain from my mom. I don’t want to deny that, but holy smokes, the environment you’re in, the people who you’re with, the opportunities that you have.

I think we vastly overestimate talent that’s natural and vastly underestimates the power of our environments.

JEFF BERMAN: That’s Angela Duckworth, author of the best-seller “Grit” and creator of one of the most-watched TED talks of all time. She’s dedicated her life to understanding learning, motivation, and achievement. She’s a professor of psychology at University of Pennsylvania and Wharton and winner of the MacArthur “genius” grant. She also hosts the Freakonomics podcast “No Stupid Questions,” and she has a new book brewing. More on that later in this episode.

Angela’s writing and research have profoundly impacted the way we think about perseverance, success, how we find our purpose, and how we reach our potential. She’s a thought-leader whose work has helped everyone from first-time founders to first grade teachers. She has helped business leaders understand not only how to cultivate grit in themselves, but the grit they need across organizations as they scale.

I’m Jeff Berman, your host. 

Angela Duckworth’s book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance became an instant success. Already a respected scholar, the book introduced a broad, global audience to her research and insights on grit as a predictor of achievement. 

Angela’s own journey as an academic, an author, and a public intellectual has been anything but linear. Her work has helped so many business leaders persist, scale, and succeed. But it took several major pivots for Angela herself to find a career fit, one that suited her strengths and met her deep desire to understand and help children.

Pivot #1: A career dedicated to kids

We’ll start with Angela as an undergrad at Harvard, when she took her personal passion to heart. To pursue childhood education, she had to step off the path that had been laid out for her.

DUCKWORTH: Well, not to stereotype, but I am the daughter of Chinese immigrants who grew up in suburban South Jersey, so it was a bit of cultural destiny to be pre-med, but along the way, I found kids. So, I started tutoring, actually back in high school, but as I got into my extracurriculars, in college, you know, I just found like more and more hours on the side of the ledger being outside of the lecture hall, even outside of the lab, and in schools and in homes in, the Cambridge, Massachusetts community.

And at one point I did tally up, and there were more hours on the side of the ledger of being in the community versus in the lab or in the lecture hall. And I made this discovery that kids are amazing. And just sitting next to kids who are like 11 years old. I was like, whoa, you’re wicked smart. Relative to me anyway, and then, the epiphany of like, oh, I think I need to change my life was just that I at the same time had this dawning recognition that the education that these kids were getting was not at all like the education that I got growing up in my home and in the schools I had attended.

So I made a hard pivot, and I decided to not take the MCAT. My dad refused to talk to me for six months, I think, after I made that choice. And I decided to dedicate my career to kids and to initially, education, teaching non profit stuff and now as a psychologist who studies human development.

BERMAN: This pivot from pre-med to education is more than a narrative twist that took Angela  in a new direction. It’s perhaps the first example of a framework that she’s applied time and time again. You could sum it up with a simple maxim: take your own curiosity seriously. 

When she felt the tug to work with kids, Angela didn’t set it aside as an inconvenient truth. She didn’t try to get rid of it. She didn’t allow herself to be frozen by the consequences it could bring, as she migrated away from the career in medicine she had been pursuing. Instead, she investigated her own curiosity. She trusted her instincts and followed the path where her energy and interest were naturally flowing. 

But, pursuing her passion wasn’t without personal consequence.

BERMAN: Did it make you rethink the decision to pivot to kids?

DUCKWORTH: Okay, I was a little bit of a rebel. My dad and I had this incredibly close and affectionate relationship. I was the apple of my father’s eye.

We had this dynamic where, if he said no, I said yes, and if he said yes, I said no, and, you know, I have this “I’ll show you” response that the moment someone says, oh, that’s impossible.

You curl your fists into a ball. There’s a fire in your belly. You lean forward, and you say to yourself, and sometimes out loud, I’ll show you. So when my dad told me not to go into education, yeah, I said back to myself, because he wasn’t picking up the phone, I’ll show you.

BERMAN: In her senior year at Harvard, Angela started a not-for-profit summer school for under-served kids. That helped set her up to pursue her life’s work after graduating college.

DUCKWORTH: I rode around on my bike all senior year. I think I got almost every business in Cambridge, Massachusetts to donate photocopies or free ice cream.

I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t have a business bone in my body, but I incorporated a 501c3 nonprofit. We had a board of directors. We opened our doors. And then, you know, we ran and actually, it ended up being profiled as a Harvard Kennedy School case study and won the Better Government award and celebrated its 30th anniversary recently. So it ended up becoming, I guess you would call that a successful start-up that, you know, in some ways scaled. I think at last count they served 10 percent of the children in the Boston, Cambridge area. 

BERMAN: What exactly were you seeing back then that inspired you that may not be obvious to most of us?

DUCKWORTH: So when I was sitting next to a kid trying to help them do their homework, it was clear to me that they were very often extremely bored. And when they were bored, they couldn’t learn anything, right? It was just like, you know, trying to pour water on a concrete surface, but when they were interested, so this would often happen not when we were doing the homework problem that they were begrudgingly trying to solve, but more like, let’s take a break and like, talk about music or like, talk about anything that you care about. Skateboarding, you know, whatever. They could memorize facts, they could make connections like abstract, general truths from disparate set of facts. I mean, all the things that we would call intelligence.

And it was hard to ignore the gap between the obvious intellectual potential that these kids had, especially when they were interested and encouraged.

And on the other side of this chasm, you know, their failing grades, their trajectory of not graduating from college, and, it was, in a way obvious.

BERMAN: Angela ran the not-for-profit tutoring program for two years. Then, she got a Marshall Scholarship to attend Oxford. Furthering her interest in learning, she earned a masters in neuroscience, and planned to work in U.S. schools. But she graduated in October, missing the start of the academic year. So she needed a gig to tide her over. The global consulting firm McKinsey came calling.

DUCKWORTH: Basically McKinsey hovers over Oxford like vultures waiting for a stag to fall over. So they just pounce on you. So I do my best, bumble through this interview, and I’m made an offer, and I accept it under one condition. I said, “I don’t really care about increasing the productivity and the revenue and the profits of these companies that pay you obscene fees.

But I really care about public education. If I come and work for McKinsey, can I do pro bono work for most of my time?” “Sure. That’s fine. Just come.” And I get there to New York. And of course, looking at my resume, neurobiology undergraduate from Harvard, master’s of neuroscience from Oxford, I’m immediately put on all the pharma teams and all the medical devices teams.

What Angela learned working in NYC public schools

And I did do a little bit of pro bono work. But I only lasted 11 months. And I only lasted 11 months because that got me to September of the next school year. And I went immediately to work in the New York City public schools.

BERMAN: It doesn’t sound like this was a tough choice for Angela. She knew she was biding her time. But that wasn’t a given. Prestige is alluring. Big firms can be flattering. They also often come with life-changing paychecks. And for many, they’re a great fit. 

With her personal passion propelling her, it was easy for Angela to decide to swap consulting for teaching. But the change in environment was startling. Imagine stepping from a massive company boardroom straight into a seventh grade classroom.

DUCKWORTH: I mean, you know, you walk in, there are bars on the window, I couldn’t tell whether they’re trying to keep people out or keep people in, but it did have the feeling of a jail cell. There was like one  terrible bathroom that everybody in the school had to share.

Like, literally one, like, one stall. So all the teachers, all the kids, you can imagine what that was like by the end of the day. 

BERMAN: But what truly surprised Angela was the increased challenge of the work itself. As a high-paid corporate consultant, she was bolstered by vast resources and legions of high-achieving colleagues. Compare that to sitting with a middle schooler, one-on-one, tackling word problems.

DUCKWORTH: Teaching seventh grade math, it was just so much harder.

I mean, it was like, wow, I thought, figuring out what to do with your 7 billion of excess cash revenue was a pro, like, this is hard, right? What do I do with this kid who, you know, is sitting in front of me and has umpteen problems, and I have 45 minutes to like change their life per day?

So it was humbling, and I don’t think I was a great teacher. I tried really hard, but I think the things I failed to do, as a teacher, probably were the inspiration for like everything I’ve done since then. 

BERMAN: Why were you not a great teacher?

DUCKWORTH: Well, I mean, I did try, right? So I was like, I will, triple the amount of time these kids get math. When you’re talking to somebody who’s in 7th grade, and they only have 2nd grade skills, I mean, some of these kids were barely adding. So the most obvious thing to do is just increase the time on task. I don’t think that was wrong, but I think one of the things I have since learned is that learning is not just about quantity of time on task. It’s about quality of time on task. There was so much I had yet to understand about how to make learning efficient.

And I think the other major mistake was a failure to understand human motivation. So I thought just by kind of like exhorting children, try harder. If you try hard, you can make a life for yourself. If you try hard, you can go to college. You can get out of this hellhole where you live. And I thought these sermons I would give on just like trying hard were going to motivate them.

And I think, for the vast majority of my students, it was not at all effective. And, that’s why I discovered many better ways to motivate ourselves and others today as a psychologist.

Pivot #2: From teacher to psychologist

BERMAN: So talk about the decision to pivot out of teaching. What was that next phase of the journey like for you?

DUCKWORTH: Well, Jeff, I first want to say it was tear-filled. I mean, we got this old couch from my parents. I ended up marrying my classmate from Oxford and then my McKinsey consultant colleague, Jason Duckworth, and that’s where I get my very white sounding last name. And, we got this old couch secondhand from my parents.

It was really ugly, but super comfortable. And it had these, like, huge overstuffed pillows. And Jason joked that, if we could get all the salt out of that couch because I cried so much into it, we could just have enough salt for like, New York City for the rest of the century.

I cried so much because it was so uncertain for me, you know, and I didn’t want to be a classroom teacher forever. I think that was very clear to me. It’s not that I disrespected the profession, but it wasn’t fulfilling all of my needs. 

There was a moment in time where I thought maybe I would start a charter school. I thought, oh, that’s how to scale, right? I’ve got this classroom with 30 kids. I had this urge to scale my impact. But then I was like looking at these other principles and leaders. I didn’t have that leadership desire, actually, and I still don’t. So I was really stuck. I was really angst ridden. 

You know, I was like, maybe I should get an MBA.

Oh my God, that sounds horrible. Like, what is human resources? Should I go into that? And like, then I looked into it, and I was like, no, please God. 

BERMAN: It took an important type of grit for Angela to let in this realization: that no matter how much she kept at it, teaching wasn’t for her. It meant stepping away from her life plan, starting over — yet again. She was no longer an undergrad. Radical professional change can feel wildly different depending on your phase of life. Angela chose to embrace the unknown as a mid-career professional, married, and settled in Philadelphia. She dug deeper into her own curiosity. What was it, exactly, that she wanted to know? She trusted that question to lead her.

DUCKWORTH: And then finally, I kind of put two and two together and I was like, I love kids. And I’m pretty good at science, and I think maybe I should go and get a PhD in psychology and figure out how to help kids not as a classroom teacher, but as a psychologist who unearths their motivational learning processes.

I only applied to one graduate school because it was the only one within commuting distance, and that was University of Pennsylvania. And I was 32, I think, and I was accepted.

And so my classmates were like a decade younger than me, but I knew what I was in graduate school for. To unpack the potential of kids and to understand what motivates them, what enables them to be brilliant, and what does the opposite. 

And I started studying it in various ways. One of them ended up being the grit research that I’ve done on high achievers. But everything I did from the very first day of graduate school to where I am today was motivated by those kids that I was sometimes not helping as much as I wanted to earlier in my life.

BERMAN: More on how Grit led the way for Angela Duckworth to become a global thought leader, after the break.

[AD BREAK]

BERMAN: We’re back with University of Pennsylvania and Wharton professor of psychology, podcaster, and bestselling author, Angela Duckworth. To watch our extended interview with Angela, visit the Masters of Scale YouTube channel. 

Angela Duckworth on choosing to study grit

Let’s talk about grit because when you do a Google search for Angela Duckworth, if we were to graph it, it would be a hockey stick, starting in 2016. So how, how did you land on grit? How did you isolate that variable? It’s really quite an extraordinary branding as well that you’ve done here around, around this word.

It’s a really powerful word. 

DUCKWORTH: It’s a good word, one syllable, onomatopoetic.

Yeah, well, okay, so I did inherit something from my father. I don’t say this, in the genetic sense, but being incubated in a household that talked about high achievement every single day, I think I was bequeathed, as it were, an obsession with excellence.

I love the Olympics. I love three star Michelin chefs, I mean, if you’re a world class plumber, I want to watch you work. Right? It’s there’s nothing more beautiful to me than the ballet of, you know, human performance at its best.

So I did the kind of straightforward. I don’t know. I just didn’t have anything else to do other than to talk to these people who were Nobel laureates or who won a Grammy Award or, you know, you fill in the blank. And what I was looking for is not what made them different from each other.

What I was looking for was the common denominator. You know, what makes a prima ballerina the same as a Nobel Prize winning physicist? I found that they had this common trait, they had this combination of passion for what they did, unfakeable, 24/7 love of what they did, and they had perseverance.

And I think in both dimensions, passion and perseverance, the thing that was most striking was not the intensity, but the stamina. And so I found this common denominator emerging, and I thought to myself, how do I get kids to begin to develop on this trajectory? And then I also just wanted to reverse engineer those high-achievers and ask the question, how close can we get to that kind of excellence in our own lives?

BERMAN: So, you embark on this research journey, you identify this common denominator, it’s then a leap to become really a public intellectual, right?

DUCKWORTH: That was a total accident, by the way. I started being asked to do interviews, even when I was in graduate school, which I thought was kind of ridiculous. You know, I remember being asked to be on the local news because I had published research. And now we have Angela Duckworth, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, here to talk about the science of success.

BERMAN: News interviews led to more speaking invitations. Chris Wink, co-founder of the Blue Man Group, asked Angela to present at a TEDx event about creativity. Her reply?

DUCKWORTH: I don’t study creativity. I study grit. Right. And he said, “Anybody who’s creative knows it takes a hell of a lot of grit for one moment of inspiration.”

I was like, yeah, that’s so true.

BERMAN: Angela may have found the media attention unpleasant, even off-putting at first. But it was in service of her larger mission. And it led to a worldwide audience for her work — through another TED event.

DUCKWORTH: It was like this collab with a public broadcasting service. So Bill Gates and others who are really passionate about education were all asked to give TED talks.

I was one of them. John Legend was our emcee and host.

So I gave this talk, and I then went home from New York City back to Philadelphia, and I just didn’t think about it.

I was just like, okay, check. I did my job. I did my best. 

And then, the talk ended up taking on a life of its own. I think, like, coaches and moms and dads and managers everywhere started forcing people to watch my talk. 

And I think maybe there was a message there that was hopeful to those of us who don’t feel as I do. Like, you know, we’re not the most talented and most innately gifted people. I’ll say that that was probably the one event in my life that put me into the spotlight.

But as I said, it was accidental, it was not intentional.

BERMAN: Angela’s book, Grit: The power of passion and perseverance was published in 2016. The book perched atop the best-seller list and became a global clarion call.

The success of her book and her talks on-stage added up to something new for Angela. Writing and speaking were not just a byproduct of her research and passion. They were a dynamic factor to lean into, a whole other dimension of impact to explore.

Simplifying her career in order to scale

DUCKWORTH: There was the more gradually dawning realization that I loved words.

I loved using them. I loved speaking them. I loved writing them. I sure as hell loved reading them, and I think one of the things that people who become successful, and people who scale, as you say, what they do at some point is figure out not only one thing that they do well, but a constellation of things that they do well.

So, I could bring that love of words with me in my work as a psychologist, and if I could use that, then maybe I could do something that would be really special.

BERMAN: Yes to helping kids. No to being a manager of people. Yes to science. No to leaning away from her way with words. 

Get clear about your mission, which of your strengths can serve it, and — equally importantly — the roles to rule out. This is what helped Angela Duckworth forge a unique path to impact.

She pared down her career to a few essential components. She also has applied this principle to her writing. Her work is so wildly successful, in part, thanks to a hard-won commitment to simplicity.

DUCKWORTH: And to me, and I know that writers have different philosophies about the words that they string together and what they’re trying to accomplish, but my literary agent, a wonderful minch named Richard Pine, he said to me, “Angela, you are a teacher.” And, I think that’s how I write. You know, I’m trying to do the same thing I was trying to do with my seventh graders, like teaching them algebra.

I’m like, how do I take this hierarchal linear model with the set of time varying covariates and explain to a smart but non-social scientist-person what the bottom line is for their lives? And it’s precarious work because I don’t want to mislead by simplifying, but I will, you know, stand up in front of you and say that I think it’s honorable work.

I think a lot of my academic friends think it’s tawdry, and possibly worse than tawdry, you know, dangerous. You know, like they don’t like the kind of TED talk. They don’t like this that we’re having this conversation. Oh!

BERMAN: Because it’s impure, because it’s not academically peer-reviewed? 

DUCKWORTH: It’s not nuanced enough. It doesn’t embrace the full complexity, right? There aren’t the caveats and the footnotes. You know, it’s not just the form, I think, that bothers them. I think it really, in a meaningful way, disturbs them that people would leave out some of the things that they think are important.

And I understand that. And they’re right, but also I think they’re wrong.

BERMAN: What are they wrong about?

DUCKWORTH: Okay, here I’m going to call on William James. You know, there’s a kind of a joke in psychology that a psychologist isn’t a real psychologist until they’ve invoked the great William James. So William James was the chair of Harvard’s psychology department, almost exactly a century ago, maybe a little more.

And William James actually I wish he had lived to see TED Talks because he was, very much, engaged in the project of sharing what he had learned. I mean, he was a master of scale. He delivered a series of lectures that he called Talks to Teachers. And you can actually just download Talks to Teachers for free. It’s everywhere on the internet. He says: What I have learned from giving these lectures to school teachers is that I would learn to take out more and more of this like abstruse academic detail and leave in the practical implications and the most basic principles. And I have taken that to heart. William James knew that if he could deliver a short lecture on the nature of memory, on the nature of attention, on habit formation, on love, on faith, that he would do more good than giving an 1,800 hour, you know, exposition that nobody would listen to.

BERMAN: Yeah. We’ll link to William James’ “Talks to Teachers” in the show notes.

DUCKWORTH: Please, yes, that would be a great service

BERMAN: What’s the most important one-liner of your career?

Angela Duckworth on her new book: Easier, A Better Way to Be Your Best

DUCKWORTH: Probably the most well known is that grit is at least as important as talent in predicting achievement. I think that’s the one I’m known for, but I’m hoping, you know, to live a little longer and to do better than that.

What I have been occupied since writing Grit and, certainly for the last few years in earnest, is a second book and a second line of work. And it is on the power of the situation. So, in a few words, grit is not enough. Right. And if you give me more words, you’re like, Oh, Angela, your one liner can be a little longer.

You can even have a semicolon. I would say, okay, Jeff, how about this: grit is not enough, you must have your situation as your ally. And what I’m obsessed about is something that psychologists in a way, it’s like telling a chef that, you know, you need to make sure you have to put enough salt and fat into a dish.

It’s like the chefs are like, yeah, we know that it’s elementary. But I feel like that about how this power of the situation narrative is, is blindingly obvious to psychological scientists, but maybe not to those of us who are just navigating our everyday lives. And even in my own marriage, I thought to myself, wow, you know, my husband was a young real estate developer in 2008, right?

And, it was a very, very stressful time. He was working some weeks, a hundred hours a week. I was on tenure track at an Ivy league institution. We had two young children who had to be taken care of. Like there was so much stress. And the only trick I knew was try harder. The only trick I knew was grit. I was like, you know, I’m going to wake up earlier.

I’m going to stay up later. I am going to use every ounce of my will to make the life that I need to make for my children and my husband and my career. And I’ll tell you that that led to a real crisis. It almost broke our marriage. There were just an unbelievable number of therapy hours that we logged, trying to rescue ourselves from the precipice.

And what has struck me now, and what I’m writing about is that grit is not enough. You need a situation. We needed therapy. 

We needed to reach out to our friends and actually be vulnerable and not just have small talk but actually tell them that we were in crisis. He needed to change his work situation. He has an advisory board now of mentors who help him prioritize in ways that he would never be able to do on his own.

I reached out to mentors to help me figure out my research program and help me accomplish it in more effective ways. And so to me, you know, grit is great. But grit is not enough, and you absolutely need to make your situation your ally if you’re ever going to run the marathon of success.

BERMAN: Does the new book have a one word title?

DUCKWORTH: It does. It is Easier. And it has a subtitle. Can I cheat and give you the subtitle?

BERMAN: I’d love it. Yeah.

DUCKWORTH: The one word title is Easier, and the subtitle is: A Better Way to Be Your Best. And it’s a quote from Maya Angelou, who said “Do your best, and then when you know better, do better.”

Advice to founders: Find a community of other founders & a set of mentors

BERMAN: What’s the action item or the set of action steps for someone who has got the grit, they know that they’re going to work hard enough to give themselves the best chance, but, the situation isn’t yet right. How do we assess that and what do we do about it?

DUCKWORTH: One of the mistakes that I see founders make is because they’ve had this trick that has gotten them really far in life. Like, try harder and be independent, to not be a slacker, right?

I think the double-edged sword of that is they don’t ask for help. And what I would say is a number one action step is like you should be in a formal community of other founders.

There’s a power in the solidarity, the accountability, and the peer learning of a group. You know, you want to be in a flotilla, not like off sailing on your own. So that’s number one. And when I look back at the mistakes that I’ve made in advising young leaders, it was to not tell them that first.

And the second one is related, which is, I think you need to make mentors. When you listen to people talk about their mentors, it’s like a thing that falls out of heaven.

You know, like, oh, I’m so grateful that this person came into my life and they put me on the straight and narrow and right. But they’re not just falling out of heaven. You have to proactively make them. It’s a relationship and you need to start at the beginning and cultivate and so forth.

So those would be my two pieces of advice to founders, you know, go find another founder. It doesn’t have to be your co founder for your startup, it could be somebody who’s doing something totally different, but you should be meeting regularly, trading stories, crying on each other’s shoulders, and then you should go and very proactively cultivate mentoring relationships.  

BERMAN: There’s almost the myth of the lone entrepreneur working late into the night, whether it’s coding or solving a supply chain issue or whatever it is, and it’s almost part of the hero’s mythical journey. Yet what I’m hearing you say is that myth should be actually a myth.

The reality is the highest achievers have that grit, have that work ethic, but they’re building a community to help them get wherever they’re going. Is that the right way to think about it? 

DUCKWORTH: It is, I mean, remember, even Luke Skywalker needed Obi Wan Kenobi, right? The modern day Luke Skywalker for me is Diana Nyad, right? This is the amazing woman who swam from Cuba to the shores of Florida, you know, a feat that had never been done, without a shark cage, I mean, amazing and completely a story of grit.

And at the same time, on her last and successful attempt that she had made, you know, after decades of trying and failing to do this, she heaves herself onto shore and she says this, and I’m going to quote you. I’m going to read it to you so I don’t get it wrong. She says, “I have three messages. One is, we should never give up. Two is, you’re never too old to chase your dreams. And three is, it looks like a solitary sport, but it takes a team.”

BERMAN: Angela Duckworth’s journey has been shaped by pivots and hard-won realizations. She seen and studied the power of grit. And not being one to believe her own hype, she’s gone on to explore the limits of grit alone.

In this next chapter, Angela embraces a nuanced, sustainable approach to achievement. One that helps us understand the power of community, mentorship, and of systems that nurture. Her commitment to rigorous research, coupled with her gift for turning complex ideas into accessible wisdom, make her a beacon for anyone striving to reach their full potential. 

I’m Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening.