How to Create a Successful Mindset: The Science of Passion and Perseverance

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:00:08):

If you take to heart what we have discovered, you will have one thing, which is the possibility of glimpsing excellence in your own life.

 

Mel Robbins (00:00:19):

Today on the Mel Robbins podcast, how to Create a successful Mindset with world-renowned researcher Dr. Angela Duckworth. Dr. Angela Duckworth is a pioneering researcher, a bestselling author, and a total powerhouse in the field of human performance. Get ready to learn the science of grit, perseverance, and passion.

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:00:39):

Grit is passion and perseverance for long-term goals. It is correlated zero with any measure of innate talent. Grit is working hard at something that you love, doing something that you love, and doing it at your greatest effort every single day. That is what grit is.

 

Mel Robbins (00:01:00):

If you're listening and there's an area of your life where you have basically said, I've missed the window, or I'm too late, or I'm not capable of that, professor Duckworth is going to tell you you're wrong.

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:01:10):

It is the nature of human nature to grow. It is the nature of human nature to make mistakes royally screw up, have a lot of regrets, and be smarter and stronger for the experience. Hope is the belief that the future can be better than the past, and it is the belief that you can in some way make that come to pass.

 

Mel Robbins (00:01:30):

Hey, it's friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. Hey, it's Mel. My team was showing me that 57% of you who watch here on YouTube are not subscribed yet. Could you do me a quick favor, hit subscribe. It's free, and that way you don't miss any of the episodes that I post here on YouTube. It also lets me know that you're enjoying the guests and you love the content that I'm bringing you because I want to make sure you don't miss anything. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you for hitting subscribe. Alright, you're ready? I bet you are. So let's dive in. Angela Duckworth, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for being here. I'm so excited to meet you,

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:02:15):

Mel. I think I might be more excited than you actually. No, I'm really thrilled. I feel like we have a similar mission, like a little bit of wisdom. Make your life a lot better.

 

Mel Robbins (00:02:25):

Yes.

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:02:25):

Yeah.

 

Mel Robbins (00:02:26):

Yes. Well, your research has had a huge impact on my life and your work has as well. So here's how I want to start. Could you speak directly to the person who's listening right now who has found the time and made the time to spend it together with you and me today to learn from you what could change about their life or the life of somebody that they care about if they take to heart everything that you're about to share with us today?

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:02:50):

If you take to heart what we have discovered as a science about motivation and achievement, you will have one thing, which is the possibility of glimping excellence in your own life to achieve what you are capable of achieving.

 

Mel Robbins (00:03:11):

That's a big promise.

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:03:12):

It is. Hunt the big game. Yeah. I really truly believe it. I think that when I first started as a psychologist, the question was am I only going to study this tiny little sliver of the population who would self-identify as super ambitious? And I discovered very quickly that everybody is ambitious. I mean, who doesn't want to be as great as they can be? So I study. I thank everyone.

 

Mel Robbins (00:03:40):

I love that answer. I love that answer because I choose to believe that everybody wants to do well, that everybody wants to thrive. So Dr. Duckworth, your research is so fascinating because you have discovered this thing that all high achievers have in common. What is it?

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:04:01):

The common denominator of high achievers, no matter what they're achieving, is this special combination of passion and perseverance for really long-term goals. And in a word, it's grit.

 

Mel Robbins (00:04:15):

And how do you define grit?

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:04:17):

It's exactly that. It's these two parts, right? Passion for long-term goals, like loving something and staying in love with it, not kind of wandering off and doing something else and then something else again, and then something else again. But having a kind of north star sort of a devotion over years, that's the passion part. And then the perseverance part is, well, partly it's hard work, right? Partly it's practicing what you can't yet do and partly it's resilience. So part of perseverance is on the really bad days, do you get up again? So if you marry passion for long-term goals with perseverance for long-term goals, well then you have this quality that I find to be the common denominator of elite achievers in every field that I've studied.

 

Mel Robbins (00:05:00):

So is this just something you're born with or is this an actual trait that anybody can develop?

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:05:05):

I think that absolutely anything that any psychologist tells you is a good thing to have is partly under control. I am not saying there aren't genes that are at play because every psychologist will tell you that that's also part of the story for everything and grit included. But absolutely how gritty we are is very much a function of what we know, who we're around and the places we go.

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:06:18):

Growth mindset is a theory.

 

(00:06:21):

It's a theory that you have. You don't have to be a philosopher or professor to have a theory because guess what? All of us have theories, theories about people. Growth mindset is a theory about human ability. If you have a growth mindset, your theory is that human ability fundamentally is changeable. If you have a fixed mindset, you have a different theory. It is a belief that fundamentally human ability is fixed. It is something that you can't change with effort and experience. If you believe fundamentally that human ability can change and grow, you look at that failure, you look at that setback and you say, what can I learn here? How can I get smarter? And then you move on. If you have a fixed mindset, fundamentally you think that the nature of human nature is that you can't change or grow, well, then you avoid failure. You shove things under the rug and you live your whole life actually contracting rather than expanding.

 

Mel Robbins (00:07:21):

Wow. So for the person listening, because I think when you hear growth mindset and you hear fixed mindset, so I either have this fixed belief that I am who I am and there's nothing I can do to change. If I'm terrible with money, I'm always going to be terrible.

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:07:34):

I'm a math person hiding me in the closet. I'm a terrible singer.

 

Mel Robbins (00:07:38):

Yes,

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:07:39):

I'm not a natural Athlete.

 

Mel Robbins (00:07:40):

Yeah, I'm not a natural athlete. I'm unlucky in love. I have a slow metabolism

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:07:45):

All I have a hot temper. It's just who I am.

 

Mel Robbins (00:07:47):

Correct?

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:07:48):

Yeah.

 

Mel Robbins (00:07:48):

When you say those kinds of blanket statements, it develops this fixed mindset that you're just stuck as you are. And what you're here to say is no, no, no, no, no. That you are capable of changing. And a lot of what can help you change are the things that we're going to talk about today that you've discovered in your research. But first, you have to entertain the possibility that change is possible for you. Even though you may have a lot of evidence when you look in the rear view mirror and say, well, based on my life history, that's not true for me. So what do you want to say to that person who's like, well, I don't think I can change. It's too late.

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:08:27):

You can find the evidence that you look for. It's what psychologists call self-fulfilling prophecy. And mindsets are absolutely this sort of thing. If you are looking for evidence that you can't change, if you are looking for evidence that you're unlucky in love, that you will always be flying off the handle, trust me, you'll find that evidence. But if you are looking for evidence that you can change if you're looking for evidence that you can grow, sure enough, you will also find that evidence. And I think this idea that the mindset that you have is a self-fulfilling prophecy is the beginning of understanding how you might get out of one mindset and into another and something that we share with ninth graders. But honestly, I think it's useful if you're in ninth grade or if you're 99, when we are trying to open a mind to this idea that human nature is malleable, we show them evidence from neuroscience that the brain is growing. In fact, there's not an era in your life. Doesn't matter how old you are, where you're not literally creating new brain cells, and even more importantly, the connections between your brain cells, between your neurons are remodeling, right? So when I was in college, I went to college from 1988 to 1992, my major was neurobiology. What I learned was that the brain is very, very much a work in progress when you are in preschool and maybe a little bit in elementary school, and then things start to slow down after adolescence. Like now, you are who you are, who you are, who you are, who you will always be. That is completely outdated. Now, we teach students in neurobiology and neuroscience that plasticity is the name of the game. What makes human beings so special is not that we're born smart, it's just that we become smarter and smarter throughout our whole lives.

 

Mel Robbins (00:10:18):

If you're intentional about it,

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:10:20):

If you're intentional, I mean, I think this kind of virtuous cycle where you wake up every day and you ask, how can I get smarter about this? Right? Wouldn't that be an amazing thing? And if you sort of pick your favorite achiever, and it depends on what you love, a three star Michelin chef or a singer or a mathematician or a CEO, if you start to notice how they speak of themselves, they always talk about themselves as lifelong learners. They say like, Satya Nadella at Microsoft, I'm not a know-it-all. I'm LearniT all. I mean, it's there. It's baked into the language, and it's in the way they approach life and it's accessible. It's really to all of us.

 

Mel Robbins (00:11:03):

Well, I just want to take a minute. As you're spending time with us, and you're listening to Professor Duckworth right now and just compliment you for hitting play, because the fact that you chose to find time and spend time listening to something that you know can learn from and that might make your life a little bit better, proves to me that you are a lifelong learner, proves to me that you have the capacity to tap into everything that we're about to talk about and leverage it to learn anything you want or to perform better or be happier, whatever it is that your goals are. So Professor Duckworth, in your research, you study elite performers. I mean, we're talking West Point candidates, spelling B finalists, athletes. Was there anything about these high performers that surprised you?

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:11:52):

I think the thing that surprised me most was that when I began to dig into what it really meant to have passion and perseverance for long-term goals,

 

(00:12:01):

It wasn't the way I thought it would look. I thought it would look like intensity, and it turned out to be consistency. So instead of somebody who has the kind of outsized personality always and the kind of like, oh my gosh, I'm 11 out of 10, this is amazing. And even imagine an athlete, you go down to some aquatic center like Bob Bowman, the coach from Michael Phelps, and more recently Leon Marchand. So two of the best swimmers who have ever lived. And if you ask a coach like Bob, what is special about a Michael Phelps or a Leon Marshan? Do they give you a 10 out of 10? Oh my gosh, maybe they give you 11 out of 10 at practice. I want to watch, right? He has said, they don't give me a 10 out of 10, they give me eight out of 10. But if you rack up a lot of eight out of tens, if you don't miss any eight out of tens, if you come every day and you do your eight out 10, wow, you can become really special. So when I began to study gritty individuals and I expected them to be 11 out of 10 on enthusiasm or 11 out of 10 on effort at all times, that's not what I found. Like Bob Bowman, I found that they are consistent. They don't take days off, and they don't, well, they do fall off the horse sometimes, and by the way, they do cry and they get disappointed and they doubt themselves, but they get back on. And I think consistency is really the heart aned soul of grit.

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:13:42):

You got to figure it out. Okay. Okay. So Michael Phelps did actually spend apparently 10 years with 365 days a year without taking a day off for Christmas without taking a day off for his birthday or New Year's or New Year's Eve. That's unusual. And I think any athletic trainer would tell you that days off are a good thing. So I don't want to say that there's anything magic about seven out of seven or 365 out of 365, but most of us can look at the project that we're trying to do

 

(00:14:13):

And tell ourselves this is what consistency is. Maybe it's five days a week. I mean, let's take physical therapy. Something I do a lot of, because I have scoliosis and I've got lots of orthopedic issues, so I get to experience behavior change, which is what I study as a scientist through my own just personal life and trying to get, so I have to do my physical therapy, and there's different exercises that I have to do, but not all of them are seven days a week exercises. There is a routine, whatever it is that you want to do, whatever consistency means to you, write it down and aim for that, and that's what the goal is. But what I mean by it not being intensity is it's not like I'm going to go do my physical therapy and I'm going to do 11 out of 10 on intensity, like I'm going to kill it. I'm like, no, just do your physical therapy the way your physical therapist said you should do it, and then do it again the next day as your physical therapist, and then do it again, and then do it again. That's consistency.

 

Mel Robbins (00:15:12):

This conversation reminds me a bit of that famous Jay-Z quote. The genius thing we did is we didn't quit.

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:15:17):

Oh, I didn't know that. Wait, what? I have not heard that quote.

 

Mel Robbins (00:15:20):

Yes. And I do really believe it's you against you, and that you started talking about talent, and I want to come back to talent because so many people believe that success comes down to talent, and your work really proves otherwise that there's a different component that is really important. Can you unpack talent versus hard work?

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:15:47):

I'm going to define talent because it's this word. Oh, good. We use it in so many ways, and this is how I think we are really defining it. Even if we don't have a dictionary at our side, talent is the rate at which you improve at something when you try. You're a really talented person. You improve a lot for every hour of practice. If you are a less talented person, you improve only a very little bit with every hour of practice. There is no shame or fear, I think, in acknowledging that we may be more talented at some things than others. I am pretty talented at psychology. When I started my PhD at age 32, I was pregnant with my second daughter. I was still in nursing the first, and when I would read a psychology article, I of course knew nothing. I didn't know the vocabulary, I didn't know where to start. But when I would read about motivation, about beliefs, about mindsets, about practice, I ascended a learning curve relatively steeply.

 

(00:16:48):

But I'm very, very untalented when it comes to history, when it comes to politics, current events, terrible. I mean, I teach the Wharton School of Business, and every year I have to ask my students again. I'm like, wait, remind me what a hedge fund is. Just one more time. Tell me what and how's it different from private equity? I'll write it down this time. Then the next year, I have to ask again. I'm not very good at learning some things, but I am very agile at learning others. I think that's really the heart of what we mean when we say somebody's innately talented, that somebody's gifted at basketball or gifted at soccer or gifted at math or anything else,

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:17:30):

I think that's what it, to me, that's the gist of what we really mean.

 

Mel Robbins (00:17:35):

Well, that's a nice thing. I normally would define it as something deficient in me. You know what I'm saying? I would see talent whatcha you talking at? Well, I dunno that somebody can step on a stage and sing a perfect, and that in relation to me, that somebody can shoot

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:17:52):

Because you shoot somebody else and you're like, I'm

 

Mel Robbins (00:17:54):

Born that way. Well, and of course you got better, but what do you think the greatest talents are though? Me? Yeah. I think my greatest talent is probably taking a massive amount of information and distilling it down like that into something super simple

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:18:08):

And being able to communicate it too, right? Yes. And I bet when you started, you didn't know everything you know now, but my guess is that you learned fast.

 

Mel Robbins (00:18:17):

Yeah. I also am really talented at cooking. I'm talented at arranging flower, but I realized I had a very limited definition of talent. And oftentimes I think that we look at other people that are wildly talented, whether it's in sports or it's in art or music or business, and we sort of shrug our shoulders and go, oh, well, they were born with that gift, but I'm not, but I'm not, and I could never be, and therefore I'm just not going to try. And so I love that there is a relationship in your definition between also working, because you said it's about the rate of improving.

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:19:01):

Yes. Say your rate is not what you would love it to be, but it's not that bad. You're like, I'm not the smartest kid in this room. I'm not the fastest learner in this room. But you can say, as so many people that I have studied so many women, so many men, you will not outwork me. Give me a chance. I am going to stay on this treadmill. I mean, very appropriately. The Harvard University study of, there's this longitudinal study. I know you've had Robert Walger on Broadly. It's part of that work. They literally put their participants, they were all men. This was an old study, and at the time, they decided that only men were worthy of study, but they would literally put them on a treadmill. They called it the treadmill test, and they get off when you want to, but see how long you can stay on. And of course, they make it really fast. And so it's really hard and it's really challenging. So there are a lot of people who are like, okay, I may not be the most talented, but put me on that treadmill and watch what I can do because I will not give up because I will try harder. So I do think there is this separation that you don't have to have a PhD to understand between talent, the rate at which you get better at something when you try and effort, which is okay, how hard and how long are you going to try?

 

Mel Robbins (00:20:26):

So what do you think the mix is? So when you look at somebody who's successful who has both the talent, so there's a level to which they get better at something or they were naturally predisposed to something versus the effort and hard work put in, what do you think?

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:20:41):

So I think effort counts twice. Sure, talent counts, but I think effort counts twice. To me, skill is kind of barren unless you apply it, right? So what are you going to do with your skill? Well, you need effort to sort of unlock your skill and turn it into actual achievement. And so when you write us all down, and if you want, there's math behind it, but to me, of course, talent figures into the equation, but effort counts twice because one, it unlocks that talent and turns it into skill, and two, it unlocks that skill and turns it into actual tangible achievements.

 

Mel Robbins (00:21:11):

Dr. Duckworth, you say that based on the research that there are four things that make up grit, and I want to take 'em one by one and really unpack them. And let's start with the first one, which is interest. What does that mean?

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:21:24):

So when you look at people who are great at what they do, and it actually doesn't have to be that they're a physicist, this is true of athletes, this is true of musicians, chefs, anybody who becomes great at what they do, there is curiosity, right? Their mind comes to this subject and wants to stay there. And when you look at children and you ask yourself whatever age you are, you could see where is this mind going? I mean, there are people who say, oh, I'm not intellectual, or I'm not really smart. When you start talking about something that you really care about, you are a genius because that is where your mind lives.

 

(00:22:01):

So that is the first psychological asset, and it happens usually, well, we hope in childhood, meaning you do have to be exposed to things. I think great parenting, a lot of it is noticing what your young person is thinking about. When my daughter Lucy was growing up, I will tell you that this child was not obviously a hard worker. She was easily discouraged. She really hated doing homework or practicing her viola. But when I would get the iPad after she had run off with it, all of the tabs were open to baking videos like unicorn cookies and chocolate, chocolate cupcakes. And on Monday, Lucy would be telling me what she was going to bake on Saturday. She would pull my cookbooks off the shelf and start reading them well before you usually do that kind of thing. And one day I said to her, I was like, Lucy, I think you're interested in cooking. And she looked at me like I was from planet Mars. She's like, oh, what do you mean? I was like, what do you mean? What do I mean? So I will say the first stage of grit is interest, and you don't always even know that you're interested in something until a passerby or a loved one says, Hey, by the way, you spend a lot of time thinking about X, Y, or Z. So that is the first psychological asset of grit. I don't believe that you can grow passion without the seed of interest,

Mel Robbins (00:23:57):

I'm so glad we're starting with interest because if you're listening right now and you're not really sure what you're interested in, which I think a lot of people have that experience. In fact, in your book you address this, you write about a Reddit post, and I want to read this because I personally think if you don't relate to this what this person wrote on Reddit, you are related to somebody who is living this. Right now. I'm in my early thirties and I have no idea what to do with myself career wise. All my life I've been one of those people who has been told how smart I am, how much potential I have. I'm interested in so much stuff that I'm paralyzed to try anything. It seems like every job requires a specialized certificate or designation that requires long-term time and financial investment before you can even try the job, which is a bit of a drag. What do I do? I don't know what I'm interested in. Dr. Duckworth, what do I do?

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:24:59):

I have collected data on, I don't know, tens of thousands, maybe a hundred thousand people. I can tell you, Mel, that when I study passion and perseverance for long-term goals, and I can give you a sub score on my questionnaire for passion, which is this consistency of interest over time, it really an abiding kind of love and perseverance, which is resilience. I want to do the practice. I want to do the hard work. Reliably people score higher in perseverance than they do for passion. I think discovering and developing interest is a lot harder than it sounds, right? It sounds like the hard part is the work. No, no, no. Figuring out the direction is for most people, including myself, the real torturous part. So one of the things that you should know about interests is that it is in some ways voluntary, but it is in some ways involuntary. You cannot force yourself to be interested in things.

 

Mel Robbins (00:25:53):

Well, anyone who's a parent knows you can't force, and every, you might try, but well, anyone who's a human being has had a parent try to force them to

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:26:01):

Absolutely

 

Mel Robbins (00:26:02):

Do something you're not interested in

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:26:03):

All those little kids playing piano and violin, how many of them are actually interested in it?

 

Mel Robbins (00:26:07):

It's true.

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:26:07):

Very few, right? It's true, and it's really foolish.

 

Mel Robbins (00:26:11):

But what questions should you ask yourself if you are not sure what you're interested in?

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:26:18):

I want to say something really provocative. I think maybe instead of asking yourself another question, you should just go and do something, right? My Pilates teacher would say, don't think it, just do it. Don't think it, just do it. Stop writing in a journal. Stop asking yourself questions. Literally go out and do something. Interests are like food. You got to taste it to know whether you like it or not. And that to me is the number one mistake I see people making. They think about it and they think about it, and then they want to talk to their friends about it, or, okay, there's a limited amount of good that that does. But one of the things about interest is they really do emerge from experience, and you can't predict. I remember teaching these three triplets, these adorable boys, and they were all very fine students and so many young adults, they were thinking about what they were wanting to do with their career, but all it took was one summer internship to be sitting behind a desk in a terminal and to realize, I am going to go crazy. Why? Because I don't like sitting down this much. Well, you probably can rule out the job that you just interned for. And now that person became a fitness instructor. So how would he know that? No amount of journaling, no amount of reflecting, and no amount of conversing with friends is going to substitute for one hour of actual experience. So in science, the science of interest, the science of motivation, we call this sampling.

 

(00:27:47):

So before you specialize in being an author or a podcast host or a psychologist like me, you have to sample broadly. So the paradox of specialization is that it's proceeded by a breadth of sampling. So before you become a jack of one trade, to some extent, you have to try a lot of trades. And so with children, what you see very wise and certainly very privileged parents, right? Because it sometimes costs money to do this, they're cycling their kids through a variety of pursuits so they can sample, so they can taste things and spit 'em out if they don't like them. My daughter, Lucy, the one who I mentioned with great fondness was not prodigious gritty when she was growing up. We cycled her through ballet, through pottery. She did track one year she played the viola. I mean, one thing after the other, we had in our family the hard thing rule.

 

(00:28:50):

Families have the rules. We in the Duckworth family raised our kids by the hard thing rule. It had three parts, and it was all really about the philosophy of interest and sampling. So the first part was, well, it has to be something that requires your hard thing. Everyone has to do the hard thing because you can choose a hard thing, but the hard thing has to have an element of deliberate practice. So it has to have goals and effort and feedback. So viola counted, right? But that little studio down the street where you basically just ate goldfish, crackers and hung out, that doesn't count. There are no goals, there's no effort, there's no feedback. Okay? That was rule part one. The second part was you were not allowed to quit in the middle.

 

(00:29:34):

So when Lucy came home from her very first track meet, she actually came up to the bleachers and she was like, mom, I don't run track anymore. And I was like, okay, you don't have to run track anymore. You only have eight more weeks to go. So we did not let our kids quit in the middle of commitment. I love that rule, love that rule. You are Duckworth. We finish what we begin. But the third part was all about sampling. The third part said that nobody gets to choose your hard thing but you. And we never chose any of the hard things for our two daughters, Jason and I said, life is a multiple choice. It's not quite film. She wanted to do horseback riding, and we were like, we are not that rich and we don't live near horses. So there was some reality to the childhoods that they lived, but we really tried to let them sample as many things as possible. And I knew as a psychologist at the time, getting my PhD and so forth, I knew that that was our only prayer for this girl to be gritty, is that we absolutely had to find something that interested her.

 

Mel Robbins (00:30:33):

If you're an adult listening to this and you're recognizing that you've spent decades of your life grinding away at things that you're not interested in, is there advice that you have Dr. Duck work on? How you internally figure out and lean into what you're actually authentically interested in? Because I always heard the word grit and immediately assume suffering and grinding it out and

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:30:58):

Doing things that are hard and terrible,

 

Mel Robbins (00:31:01):

And instead, the first thing begins with things that you're actually interested in, because if you're interested in it, you're going to lean into it more.

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:31:08):

When I teach, I teach a class at University of Pennsylvania as a little Ivy League school in Philadelphia. And the first section of this class, which is called Grit Lab, the whole class is called Grit Lab. The first section of the course, it's on the flow state. It's on interest. It's on values. It's called Choose Easy. And I tell my students, you'll never be great in life at something where it is the hardest thing. Of all the things in the life menu that you could pick, choose the easiest one. Choose the one that you want to think about. Choose the one that you're good at, choose easy. And then the second part of the course is work hard. Sometimes I call it work smart. So fine, choose easy is the entree. Yes, there is a second section where you have to work, but my goodness, you're never this Mel. People make this mistake all the time. They don't take into account what their interests and their energy and their be at a place where you are at your best. Start there.

 

Mel Robbins (00:32:12):

Why do you think we stacked the deck so hard against our, what I'm saying?

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:32:16):

That is such a good question. Yeah.

 

Mel Robbins (00:32:17):

I love that you're starting a course at UPenn on grit by teaching people to choose something that comes easy,

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:32:26):

Not intuitive, right? Not intuitive, but why is it intuitive? It's a good question. I think perhaps we have confused the two stages. So there is this stage in which you are in the middle of practice. I mean, you've written, I've written, is there anything harder than writing? No. It's like obviously you could just go and watch a cooking show on YouTube. That would be, to me, a lot more fun in the moment that really working on this paragraph or figuring out the structure of a chapter. So there is an element of hard work that is part and parcel of excellence, but I think we get confused because we're like, oh, I guess that's the whole thing. No, no, no. The first thing to do is choose easy, then work as hard as you can. But I think we just push them together. I think that to me is my best guess. I mean, don't have any data on this, but it's just my instinct that we, or my intuition, that we get a little confused to us. It's all one thing when it's really two stages.

 

Mel Robbins (00:33:33):

I agree. I actually agree. It's such an interest.

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:33:37):

I have to figure out how we could study that.

 

Mel Robbins (00:33:37):

Well, it's a really interesting insight because I think there's probably a lot of people that chose the wrong thing by mistake and then spend decades.

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:33:46):

They chose suffering. Yes. I got a call from a McKinsey S, I'll never forget this. This is, oh my gosh, Mel, at least 10 years ago, 15 could be 20. This McKinsey consultant from San Francisco calls me, and I guess it was at a time where I wasn't getting that many calls. I was answered. He said, I am very successful. I've been promoted. Everybody thinks I'm great. I don't know what to do next. And we get into this conversation, and it's very clear to me as he basically summarizes later in the conversation, that he has never made a decision in his life based on what was easy for him, what was enjoyable for him, what gave him energy, what made him feel alive. He said, I had a rule more suffering, better, harder, better. And so I did tell him the same thing that I tell to my students. I'm like, oh, two stages. Yeah, work hard, but first, choose easy.

 

Mel Robbins (00:34:43):

I think if you were to dig into this as a research project, you would probably trace it back to the pressure that kids feel to do what their parents want them to do, because conforming in the moment feels easier. And if that's all that you've ever done, then that becomes the default.

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:35:01):

Well, there is, I'm sure many people have heard, and I know a lot about this intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation distinction. And one of the things that has emerged, it's a really, I think it's a very important research literature. It goes back at least 50 years. One of the stages in which our motivation evolves to be intrinsic is a stage where you are internalizing the motivations of others around you. So if you have parents who play a lot of tennis, you may start playing tennis, and at some point it becomes internal to you, and then you're 45 years old and you want to go play tennis. And that is actually a healthy thing that many intrinsic motivations begin outside of us.

 

(00:35:46):

But when they get stuck in between, it's called introjections, fancy little whatever. It's just jargon. But when it gets stuck, it's like your parents want you to go to medical school, but it doesn't become fully internalized and you never really want to go to medical school. And it gets stuck at the should stage. It's like, I should go to medical school. I should take organic chemistry. I should go for a run. I should lose five pounds. I should eat a salad. That is not a good stage because it's kind of got one foot in intrinsic, one foot in extrinsic, and we're driven forward in a way that is extremely exhausting and feels untrue to our authentic selves.

 

Mel Robbins (00:36:28):

I think that's where most people are. So if you are somebody who the second you said, make the easier choice.

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:36:36):

Yeah, you viscerally were like, no. Or you're like, how do we even do that? Yeah, I don't have that muscle.

 

Mel Robbins (00:36:41):

Because I'm constantly thinking about the choice that would please my parents or that would please my partner. My partners going to say that look good for my friends. Yeah. Is there anything that you would say about what does that even mean? I think that's a completely different way to go about life.

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:36:58):

I mean, if I can only share from my personal experience, I found it a struggle of my own. And I don't know whether it's because I was raised by a wonderful mother, but a Chinese mother who herself was born and raised in China,

 

(00:37:12):

And she was raised to submit all of her own desires and dreams to her husbands. Her mother laid her hands on her shoulders one day and said, you are ready to be a wife. And when I graduated from Harvard the day of my graduation, my mother laid her hands on my shoulders and she said, I'm so proud of you. You are ready to be a wife. So what did I then progress to do? Well, by the way, I have a growth mindset and so does my mom. And that was now 33 years ago. And we have both grown a lot. I have developed into a woman who believes that if I only do things for other people, I will never do things well enough for those people.

 

(00:38:00):

I took so long to learn this. I have a therapist named Dee and in a conversation that is not older than seven days, Mel. So this is a constant journey or it's a constant practice of mine to just try to remind myself because it goes so deep with me. She said, Angela, I think we should ban the word should. I said, what do you mean? She said, I think whenever, because I was telling her about a particular task that I was about to shoulder, and I was using the word should. I was like, I should take care of this problem. And she said, I wonder whether you can answer the question why you're doing that without the word should. So of course, the academic in me comes out and I'm like, well, we have all these should emotions like shame and embarrassment for a reason, Dee, otherwise we wouldn't have morals and ethics should is a good word.

 

(00:38:52):

You'd be a pain in the ass as a client for a therapist, she thinks, I think too much. I think she's like, oh, there you go again. And when I came to think about it over the next few days after that conversation with Dee, I tried to answer every question where I was about to say, well, I should do it right because I should go to Pilates because I should go buy the groceries on the way home. I should have a conversation with this student. I just asked myself a different question. I said, can I talk about this without this word?

 

(00:39:21):

And to my amazement, words came out in almost every case, I want to help this young person. I see myself in this young person. I can see a future that this person doesn't yet see. I want to is entirely different than I should. And I wrote Dee an email, not more than a few days, I think three days ago. I said, Dee, I just wanted to let you know, I think you're right about the word should. I don't think living our lives in service to other people's desires in that way. Does anybody a service that's not, by the way, what scientists mean by beyond the self purpose, like shouldering all of these burdens and adopting other people's goals in a way that feels inauthentic to ourselves. So yeah, let's see how many minutes or hours we can go in our next 24 hours without saying the word should even once.

 

Mel Robbins (00:40:20):

I love that. Did you hear that? I want to make sure you heard the assignment from Dr. Duckworth classes in session. Let's talk about the second part of grit, which is practice.

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:40:30):

Now you're interested of course, but you have a second motivation on top of that, and that is the desire to improve. So it's usually not until you are in adolescent, sometimes late adolescents and sometimes early adulthood that you want to get better at something in a skill development kind of way. And so that's when you need usually a coach. That's when you need to do, you've heard of 10,000 hours of deliberate practice

 

Mel Robbins (00:40:56):

I have. But for the person who's listening who doesn't know the 10,000 hour rule, just explain it. Back of the hand here.

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:41:02):

I cannot tell you how excited I am to tell you about deliberate practice, the 10,000 hour rule, because I think so many people have heard it. Very few people have heard it correctly. So what is the 10,000 hour rule? Anders Erickson was a truly great cognitive scientist. He studied Sudoku players who were at the top of their game. He studied chess masters, grand master chess players. He studied prima ballerinas. He studied World Cup soccer players. He was the world expert on world. And in one of his early studies, he found that the very best violinists at a music academy in Germany had about 10,000 hours of a certain high quality practice that he later called deliberate practice. The next group at this music academy, they weren't as good. They had something like 7,500 hours and then maybe the next group was like 5,000 hours. There were differences in the quantity of practice, and it became this very popular term that you got to do 10,000 hours of practice if you want to become great at what you do.

 

(00:42:07):

But Anders, who passed away five years ago to his dying day, wanted the world to know that it's not just the quantity of practice, it was the quality of what those musicians were doing. Not just quantity, but quality. So when I talk about this second stage in the evolution of paragon of grit, and by the way, Anders and I did a lot of research together, what we found was that this kind of high quality practice where you have a goal, usually something that you're weak at, you completely concentrate on trying to get better at it. You have a mental picture of what you want to do, but you can't do it yet. And then you try really hard mentally or physically, depending on what you are trying to do, and then you get feedback on what you did well, maybe what you didn't do quite as well as you need to.

 

Mel Robbins (00:42:53):

I hate that part.

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:42:54):

That's the part that stings, that's the hard part, right? The really hard because your ego is screaming and then you do it over and over again. That's the high quality practice. When you look at the thousands of hours of practice that a lot of us do, including myself, when I met Anders, I was like, wait, I dunno if I believe this because I've been running, if I tabulate all the hours I had jogged in my life, I was like, I should be Usain Bolt. And he was like, well, do you have a goal? And I was like, never. He was like, do you practice with complete effort and concentration? I'm like, when I'm running, no, I'm listening to podcasts. And then he said, do you get immediate feedback on things that you could improve before you go out for your next run? And I was like, are you kidding? Who would give me that? So I was doing low quality practice. So the 10,000 hour rule is this, if you want to become great at what you do, you have to do thousands of hours. Maybe not the exact number, 10,000, but yes, thousands of hours of the highest quality practice that you can do. And what Anders and I found together is that when you are really passionate and persevering about a long-term goal, you are the sort of person who puts in more of those high quality hours.

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:44:30):

Exactly. Right. I mean, it's so simple, isn't it? Like Mel, it's free. It sounds painful, honestly. Okay, it's painful. It's painful, but there's no patent. You don't have to pay anybody, right? I mean,

 

Mel Robbins (00:44:41):

I'm joking.

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:44:42):

It's psychologically costly, but it's financially available to all of us.

 

Mel Robbins (00:44:46):

Well, I love how honest you are when you basically said, I've basically jogged for 10,000 hours, so why am I not winning the Olympics? And you also admit it. Well, I don't really have a goal. I'm out there doing this thing. And maybe the goal is

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:45:00):

I'm not trying that hard

 

Mel Robbins (00:45:01):

And I'm not trying that hard, and then I don't really take any feedback at all. Not for my watch zero. I'm not wearing a watch. But if you really look at it, if you want to get better at something, there's the three part formula. You got to put in the hours. You got to have a goal one,

 

(00:45:17):

You got to put in the effort and then ask for feedback. And if you do that, you're now applying the research. And if you look at anybody that's amazing at anything, that's what they're doing. In fact, when we were preparing for this episode, professor Duckworth, as we were talking about the 10,000 hour rule and deliberate practice, we all kind of looked at each other and said, that's kind of how we approach this podcast. Because we're constantly asking ourselves, how do we make this better? How do we make this better? As soon as this interview's done, we all go into a room and we give each other feedback about what just happened.

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:45:49):

I spoke to Aire on your team before we had this conversation. He said, oh, I know you may prefer to be addressed as Angela or Angie. That's what my husband calls me. That's what my mom called. I'm like, we are going to call you Dr. Duckworth. I said, sure, you can call me anything you want. Why is that? He said, well, we learn, right? And we have learned that we don't want to have that pattern where women are addressed by their first name. Men are addressed by their salutation. I was like, amazing. So, exactly right. I think this three-part formula is true if you're an individual, but it's also true if you're an organization, right? Got to have a goal, got to try, and you got to learn from feedback.

 

Mel Robbins (00:46:32):

I would love to talk a little bit about the importance of being able to do something that you're bad at. There's a lot of people that are very interested in starting a YouTube channel or writing a book or marketing their business online, or they're interested in something that is going to require them to go through that really cringey period and the embarrassment and the shame. And I'd love to have you share a little bit about how we can learn how to do that. And I want to read to you from your mega bestseller Grit. This is on page 141. It's in the section on practice. And you're writing about these psychologists who devoted their careers to studying how children learn and agree that learning from mistakes is something that babies and toddlers don't mind at all. You watch a baby struggle to sit up or a toddler learn to walk, you'll see one error after another, failure after failure, a lot of challenge, exceeding skill, a lot of concentration, a lot of feedback, a lot of learning emotionally. Well, they're too young to ask. It's true. You never see a toddler fall over and go, well, just lay here. For the rest of my life, I've failed.

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:47:45):

And they don't feel shame. It's pretty obvious they're not embarrassed.

 

Mel Robbins (00:47:48):

But then something changes

 

(00:47:52):

Around the time children enter kindergarten, they begin to notice that their mistakes inspire certain reactions. In grownups, what do we do? We frown our cheeks flush a bit. We rush over to our little ones to point out that they've done something wrong. And what's the lesson we're teaching? Embarrassment, fear, and shame. What I got from this section of the book is that we're actually wired to try and to learn and to grow and not judge ourselves. But this kind of cringe, embarrassment, shame thing that we do to ourselves is something that we've been taught. Can you unpack that for us?

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:48:31):

Those two psychologists are two wonderful women, Elena and Deborah, and they were disciples of a psychologist that I don't think a lot of people have heard of, but it's a real shame. Vygotsky, he was a Russian psychologist and one of the great developmental psychologists in history, and Lev spent a lot of time observing young children. And he found that, for example, young children learn in play. They try things that they can't do. They pretend to do things like be a doctor or to be a mom or to do things that they are not. And then they of course can't do them. And they do them very awkwardly and clumsily, and they fall down and they spill things and they break things. And I think this insight that this native desire to learn, this native desire to experiment, this complete lack of self-consciousness when it comes to screwing up missing the mark, is it isn't in all of us because we were all babies.

 

(00:49:35):

I mean, you were that young, innocent, hopeful child. And when you ask Elena and Deborah about this hypothesis that maybe when you're five and you start to go to school and you see the facial expressions of your teachers and the disappointment, and of course your classmates and so forth, they will tell you that this is a little bit more of their speculation than mountains of hard data. But clearly, self-consciousness is something that you are not born with, but you acquire. So is it kindergarten? Is it something else that's happening around the same time? Whatever it is, I think the lesson for us is to try to recover something of that. The beginner's mind. It's sometimes called, it's like the gift of just being a complete rookie and to be unselfconscious. And I speak as somebody who wishes. She had that all the time. I think I've gotten better at it.

 

(00:50:36):

But I remember going to a hip hop class, Mel, I was in my twenties. I was living in New York City, and it was like the brief chapter in my life when I was a management consultant. And one of my coworkers, Linda said, let's go to this hip hop class after work. And I was like, sure, what's that? And so we show up, and maybe this is a New York thing, but oh my gosh, everybody there was from the Joffrey Ballet. I mean, the teacher would call out these moves, like 16 moves. She was like, go. And then you would all go individually from one corner of the room to the next. And I was like, what is happening? I felt so self-conscious, so embarrassed, so awkward, so clumsy, and I never went to another hip hop class. And if I had really tried to, I guess, channel the little kid that I used to be like, who cares? Of course you don't know how to do hip hop. It's not something you ever learned before. There's no embarrassment. So I do try to remember that. I try to model that because I do think it is something that though acquired is now our second nature.

 

(00:51:47):

Who among us wants to have the spinach in their teeth? We all want things to be great. And so that is an impediment to learning if we will not take those risks and not be awkward and not go through the cringe period.

 

Mel Robbins (00:52:02):

In our family, we talk a lot about putting in the reps just going and showing up every day and doing the boring, grueling stuff consistently and giving up your timeline. But we've talked about deliberate practice. Is there some tough love you can give yourself? If you're doing the reps stuff's not progressing, you're starting to get frustrated. You have been consistent, but by God, this isn't working. Professor Duckworth, how do I have an honest conversation with myself and potentially call myself out because there's that work. That is the work that's easy. You know what I'm saying? How many of us really love the preparation work? Like the buying the new journal, the getting ready to do the thing, the organizing ahead, the new pen, all that stuff, the new baskets. B

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:52:54):

ut now you're like day 179 and you're like, Ugh,

 

Mel Robbins (00:52:58):

I haven't written a word. Yes. So how do you call yourself out? Because I do think that there's a lot of people, myself included, that show up that are zero to 10 a three in terms of the effort putting in. How do you have that honest conversation with yourself so that we can tap into this research around deliver practice?

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:53:19):

Three is not as much of a problem as zero. I really do think, I mean, if it's physical therapy, if it's becoming a novelist, I really think if you put in anything, what happens to most people is that whatever their number is, they're putting in a 10, they're putting in an eight, whatever their numbers is, it goes to zero. And that is the real problem. They're out of the game. And I really mean that. When Bob Bowman, I'm a little bit obsessed with Bob Bowman and his coaching, who's Bob Bowman for the first position he was of, Bob Bowman was the coach of Michael Phelps. And Leon Marshan, when he talks to his swimmers, he says, every swim practice is putting a deposit in the bank. Sometimes you get to put in a dollar, sometimes you get to 10, maybe rarely you get a hundred dollars, sometimes it's 10 cents. But guess what? Every deposit you make, you get to withdraw when it comes to competition. And I do think that, Mel, even if you're like, well, I only put in a three today. Alright, but it wasn't a zero, right? Truly. So that is one thing I would just say that people have this misunderstanding that has to be a 10. It has to be an look. If Michael Phelps is putting in an eight and he is Michael Phelps, then give yourself a break. If you're putting in a three, maybe you're tired.

 

Mel Robbins (00:54:29):

Yes. Well, what's that famous quote that if all you have to give is 30%, you give 30%. Today you just gave a hundred percent of what you had to give.

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:54:37):

Oh, I love that. I have not heard that quote, but now I have. Okay, so first of all, I would give ourselves permission to say, you know what I could do today? The second thing I would say is rather than having a conversation with yourself, I would've a conversation with another person. And I really mean that. Here's what I mean. So much of the sort of footage of high achievers, and even when you look at them behind the scenes and you like the hours that they practice, they look like they're doing it on their own. And to some extent that's true. In fact, when you do that high quality deliberate practice, it is more typically done alone than it is in the presence of another person, including a coach. It's not like your coach stands there, the whole time where you're concentrating and trying to achieve your goals.

 

(00:55:19):

But what I mean by talk to another person is this, whether it is a teammate or a mentor or a coach, rather than having the conversation with yourself about your plateau and your lack of motivation, and are you on the wrong track? And maybe you're going in the wrong direction, have the conversation with another human being, A teammate can say to you, well, what I've noticed is a mentor or a coach can say, in my experience, what I've found is it is something that, and I know you have spoken to the psychologist, Ethan Cross, and he is one of my favorite humans and a very good friend. This idea of psychological distance, right? You are trying to have a little distance on your problem, so you can think about it objectively. I mean, maybe you are in a rut and maybe you should be doing something differently or maybe over-training, or maybe there's something you could try that you haven't tried.

 

(00:56:08):

If you tried to create some psychological distance yourself, you can partially succeed. You can say, Mel, what's the problem to yourself in the mirror, I can say to myself in the mirror, Angela, what do I think is going on right now? How can this problem be solved? But wouldn't it be better if I went to my husband Jason, or my colleague Katie, or my friend Ethan, or my mentor or Carol, because they have actual psychological distance because they are not me. So I think one of the mistakes people make when they're feeling exhausted when they are on the verge of burnout is they dig deeper and they look inward. And almost always you are much better off looking outward.

 

Mel Robbins (00:56:54):

I love that. So that's the second assignment from Dr. Duckworth. There's a lot of homework here that you should go talk to somebody you know who you shouldn't talk to is your mother. Because when you're in that psychological state, no matter what your mother says, even if she's right, even if it's the best thing you could hear, it's going to be annoying to you.

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:57:14):

You can talk to somebody else's mother.

 

Mel Robbins (00:57:15):

Yes,

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:57:17):

That works.

 

Mel Robbins (00:57:17):

Yes. As two moms we know.

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:57:20):

Yes, I've been told that everything I'm saying is extremely unhelpful.

 

Mel Robbins (00:57:24):

Yes, exactly. In your research, the third part of grit is purpose. How do you define purpose?

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:57:31):

When we say that, we mean that you feel like you are part of and in service to something that is larger than yourself. I think all of us want to be helpful. I think we would rather help than be helped. Honestly. We have lost our connection and our responsibility to others, and I think that's what's happening today. I think we want to, but it's not obvious to us. And so that to me is something not only to remind ourselves of, but to try to get some traction on, because I don't think people need preaching. I think they just need to find little things that they can do to get started. My husband said the other day, go get me a bag, one of those little shopping bags, because he had five extra minutes and he just picked up the trash on our block. I mean, that was just, is it great for the block? Sure. But it was even better for Jason Duckworth, right? So just these little things of I am a small part, this is a big part. What can I do to be helpful?

 

Mel Robbins (00:58:36):

So if purpose is having this sense of responsibility and the acting with the intention of helping others, right?

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:58:44):

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

 

Mel Robbins (00:58:47):

What's one question that someone can ask themselves to help them start to see a sense of purpose? This is one of the pillars of being somebody with grit.

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (00:58:58):

There is a research study that asked this question in the form of an intervention, and it was run by David Yeager, who David Yeager at UT Austin is actually a protege of his mentor, Carol Dweck. So it's all full circle. And the question that he posed to teenagers in the study is, what's something that really annoys you? What is a problem in the world that really makes you mad write about it? And that was the treatment condition. And there was a control condition where you wrote about something else, and it was a purpose intervention because that is an opening question to a problem that maybe you want to work on because we can't all work on everything. So one person might really care about the environment. Another person might be really angry at the litter they see in their neighborhood. That would be my husband. Another person might think of they don't like the way women are treated and they've experienced something in their own lives that really motivates them. I think everybody can answer that question. What is a thing that really irritates you, angers you, outrages, you write about it. I think that is not the obvious entree into purpose, but I think it is a wonderful doorway into what is in your heart that hurts? What do you think ought to be different? It's the first step to saying, Hey, maybe I can make that difference.

 

Mel Robbins (01:00:30):

I want to give a quick example and then I want to dig deeper into purpose in your job because so many people don't feel connected to what they're doing. But so many, something that brings me a lot of energy and that I'm super interested in is gardening flowers in particular. And I had heard

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (01:00:46):

There are many beautiful flowers here, by the way, is that not coincidence?

 

Mel Robbins (01:00:49):

I always have fresh flowers in the studio.

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (01:00:52):

I asked you if it was a special occasion and you said, no,

 

Mel Robbins (01:00:54):

you're here. You're here.

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (01:00:56):

Well, yes,

 

Mel Robbins (01:00:56):

You're here, Dr. Duckworth

 

Dr. Angela Duckworth (01:00:58):

Life.