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

Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast. Have you ever looked at someone who's wildly successful and thought, They just must have been born with something I'm never going to have? Or maybe you look at your own life, your job, your goals, your relationship, and you just keep asking yourself, Why can't I stick with this? Why am I not consistent? Why do I not have willpower? Well, if you've ever felt like that, First of all, you're not lazy, you're not broken. You're just missing one thing. See, talent doesn't make people great. Grit does. Hard work beats talent every time, especially when that work is driven by a purpose that won't let you quit. And that's what you and I are going to talk about today. We're going to talk about the mindset of high achievers and the psychology of perseverance. And we're going to dig into the real science of success. You're going to learn it's not luck, it's not IQ, it's not being born with some rare gift. It's something way more powerful and way more honest. It's about grit, that mix of passion and perseverance for your long-term goals, the mental toughness to keep showing up when things suck, the self-belief to keep going when it's boring or hard or it's discouraging as hell.

And the best news, grit It's not something you're born with. It's something you build. And today, you're going to get the tools from the woman who wrote the book, Did the Research, teaches the Ivy League course on the science of success and grit. It's not too late, but it is up to you. So if you're sitting there telling yourself, I'm just not cut out for success. I don't have the discipline, or I've just failed too many times. I need you to listen anyway because you're wrong. And if you have someone in your life who feels that way, I want you to listen for them because by the time you and I are done, you're going to think differently about talent, about success, and most importantly, about yourself. Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast. I am so excited that you're here. I'm excited for the conversation today. It is such an honor to be together. I love spending this time with you. If you're a new listener or you're here because someone shared this episode with you, well, I just wanted to take a moment and personally welcome you to the Mel Robbins podcast family.

I cannot wait for you to meet Dr. Angela Duckworth and learn about the science and secrets of success. Dr. Angela Duckworth is a pioneering researcher, a best-selling author, and a total powerhouse in the field of human performance. She is a MacArthur genius grant recipient, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, founder and CEO of Character Lab, a nonprofit advancing the science of character development, and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. This is a book that's been translated into over 40 languages. It has changed the way that millions of people think about success. Her TED Talk has been viewed over 30 million times. Here's what's really cool. Her research on grit, self-control, and high achievement is used everywhere, from West Point to the NBA to the NFL, Fortune 500 companies, public schools, and beyond. So if you care about motivation, mental toughness, focus, or building something meaningful with your life, you are in the right place, and you're going to love absolutely everything she is going to teach you and me today. So please help me welcome the extraordinary Dr. Angela Duckworth to the Mel Robbins podcast.

Angela Duckworth, thank you, thank you, thank you for being here. I'm so excited to meet you.

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

Yes. Well, your research has had a huge impact on my life and your work has as well. 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?

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 glimpsing excellence in your own life to achieve what you are capable of achieving.

That's a big promise.

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? 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 think everyone.

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

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. In a word, it's grit.

How do you define grit?

It's exactly that. It's these two parts, passion for long-term goals, loving something and staying in love with it, not wandering off and doing something else and then something else again and then something else again. But having a North Star, a devotion over years, that's the passion part. 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.

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

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 Absolutely. How gritty we are is very much a function of what we know, who we're around, and the places we go.

I love that you already taught us something right out of the gate. I knew you would. There's going to be a bazillion takeaways, but just this sense that it's something that you actually really enjoy doing, and that even that aspect of grit is something that you have a lot to teach us about, that even those of us that feel like we haven't found our thing, that we're not quite sure what we should be doing with our lives, that there's very clear ways to figure it out, and that's part of the equation that we're going to learn today. Also in your work, you talk a lot about, and I'm sure we're going to hear the term growth mind mindset. In case the person who's listening right now has never heard that term or they're going to share this episode with somebody who's never heard that term, what is it and why does it matter?

Growth mindset is a theory. 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.

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.

I'm not a math person. Yes. Hide me in the closet. I'm a terrible singer. I'm not a natural athlete.

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

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

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, 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. What do you want to say to that person who's like, Well, I don't think I can change. It's too late.

You can find the evidence that you look for. It's what psychologists call a self-fulfilling prophecy, and mindsets are absolutely this thing. If you are looking for evidence 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 will find that evidence. But if you are looking for evidence that you can change, if you are looking for evidence that you can grow, sure enough, you will also find that evidence. 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. Something that we share with ninth graders, but honestly, I think it's useful if you're a 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.

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. Then things start to slow down after adolescence. 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.

If you're intentional about it.

If you're intentional, right. I think this virtuous cycle where you wake up every day and you ask, How can I get smarter about this? Wouldn't that be an amazing thing? If you pick your favorite achiever, and it depends on what you love, a three-star Michelin chef or a 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 a learn-it 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.

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 you 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 Canada, spelling bee, finalists, athletes. Was there anything about these high performers that surprised you?

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, 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 outsized personality always and the like, Oh, my gosh, I'm 11 out of 10. This is amazing. And even imagine an athlete, right? You go down to some aquatic center like Bob Bowman, the coach from Michael Phelps, and more recently, Leon Marshawn, right? 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 Marshawn? Do they give you a 10 out of Oh, my gosh. Maybe they give you 11 out of 10 at practice. I want to watch. 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 10s, if you don't miss any eight out of 10s, if you come every day and you do your eight out of 10, wow, you can become really special.

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 women, 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 and soul of grit.

And when you use the word consistency, what I'm now hearing, based on what you just said, is that consistency is not doing it every day in a row. Consistency is doing it more days than not, or at least doing it the day after you didn't do it. You got to figure out.

Okay. 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. I think any athletic trainer would tell you that days off are a good thing. I don't want to say that there's anything magic about seven out of seven or 365 out of 365. But most of can look at the project that we're trying to do 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. I get to experience behavior change, which is what I study as a scientist through my own just personal life and trying to get... 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 get to my physical therapy and I'm going to do 11 out of 10 on intensity. I'm going to kill it. 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.

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

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

Yes. I do really believe it's you against you. I love 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 lose otherwise, that there's a different component that is really important. Can you unpack talent versus hard work?

I'm going to define talent because it's this word. 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'm pretty talented at psychology. When I started my PhD at age 32, I was pregnant with my second daughter. I was still nursing the first. 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 I would read about motivation, about beliefs, about mindsets, about practice, I ascended a learning curve relatively steeply. But I'm very, very untalented when it comes to history, when it comes to politics, current events. I'm terrible. 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, and how is 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.

And that it's the rate you improve at something.

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

That's a nice thing because I normally would define it as something deficient of me. You know what I'm saying? I would see talent as somebody- What are you talented at? I don't know. That somebody can step on a stage and sing a perfect tune in relation to me.

That somebody can shoot- Because you see somebody else and you're like, Oh, my God, they're more talented.

I was born that way. And of course, I got better.

What do you think your 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.

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

Yeah. I also am really talented at cooking. I'm talented at arranging flowers. 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 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.

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 this is longitudinal study. I know you've had Robert Wendiger on this. Broadly, it's part of that work. They literally put their participants. They were all men. This was an old study. At the time, they decided that only men were worthy of study, but they would literally put them on a treadmill. They call it the treadmill test. 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?

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?

So I think effort counts twice. Sure, talent counts, but I think effort counts twice. To me, skill is barren unless you apply it, right? So what are you going to do with your skill? Well, you need effort to unlock your skill and turn it into actual achievement. And so when you write this 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 and turns it into actual tangible achievements.

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

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's curiosity. Their mind comes to this subject and wants to stay there. When you look at children and you ask yourself, whatever age you are, you could see, where is this mind going? There are people who say, Oh, I'm not intellectual. Oh, 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. That is the first psychological asset. 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 the tabs were open to baking videos, like unicorn cookies and like chocolate, chocolate cupcakes.

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 thing. 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. I I was like, Oh, what do you mean? I was like, What do you mean? What do I mean? 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. That is the first psychological asset of grit. I don't believe that you can grow passion without the seed of interest. I genuinely believe that though we may not all be equal in IQ, though we may have different talents, that when we begin to notice where our mind lives, when we begin to notice what attracts our attention spontaneously, that is the beginning of discovering the interests that can make us something of a genius about what we do.

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 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 30s, 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?

I have collected data on, I don't know, tens of thousands, maybe 100,000 people. I can tell you, Mel, that when I study passion and perseverance for long term goals, and I can I can give you a subscore on my questionnaire for passion, which is this consistency of interest over time, a really unabiding 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. It sounds like the hard part is the work. No, no, no. Figuring out the direction is for most including myself, the real torturous part. So one of the things that you should know about interest is that it is in some ways voluntary, but it is in some ways involuntary. You cannot force yourself to be interested in things.

Well, anyone who's a parent knows you can't force You might try. Well, anyone who's a human being has had a parent try to force them to do something you're not interested in. Absolutely.

All those little kids playing piano and violin, how many of them are actually interested in it? It's true. Very few, right? It's true. It's really foolish.

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

I want to say something really provocative. I think maybe instead of asking yourself another question, you should just go and do something. My Pilates teacher would They're like, Don't think it, just do it. Don't think it, just do it. Stop writing in your journal. Stop asking yourself questions. Like, 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. 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. You can't predict. I remember teaching these three triplets, these adorable boys, and they were all very fine students. Like so many young adults, they were thinking about what they were wanting to do with their career. But all it took was one summer 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 can roll out the job that you just interned for, right? Now that person became a fitness instructor. 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. In science, the science of interest, the science of motivation, we call this sampling. Before you specialize in being an author or a podcast host or a psychologist like me, you have to sample broadly. The paradox of specialization is that it's preceded by a breadth of sampling. Before you become a Jack of one trade, to some extent, you have to try a lot of trades. With children, what you see very and certainly very privileged parents, 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 spin them out if they don't like them. My daughter Lucy, the one who I mentioned with great fondness, was not 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. Families have their 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. The first part was, well, it has to be something that requires your hard thing because everyone has to do the hard thing. You can choose a hard thing, but the hard thing has to have an element of deliberate practice. It has to have goals and effort and feedback. Okay. 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 because 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. 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 want to 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 a commitment.

I love that rule. We were like, 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. 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.

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 Is there advice that you have 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.

Doing things that are hard and terrible.

Yes. 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.

When I teach a class at University of Pennsylvania, it's a little Ivy League school in Philadelphia. And the first section of this class, which is called GritLab, the whole class is called GritLab, 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 will 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 know 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.

Why do you think we stacked it so hard against her? You know what I'm saying? That is such a good question. Because I love that you're starting a course at UPenn on grit by teaching people to choose something that comes easy.

Yeah, not intuitive, right? Not intuitive at all. But why isn't intuitive? It's such a good question. I think perhaps we have confused the two stages. 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 than 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 don't have any data on this, but it's just my instinct or my intuition that we get a little confused because to us, it's all one thing when it's really two stages. I agree.

I actually agree. I think it's such an interesting- We should study that.

I have to figure out how we could study that.

It's a really interesting insight because I think there's probably a lot of people that chose the wrong thing by mistake. Yes. And then spend decades- They chose suffering. Yes.

I got a call from a McKinsey consultant. 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 just answered. He said, I am very successful. I've been promoted. Everybody thinks I'm great. I don't know what to do next. 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. 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.

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.

Well, there is, I'm sure many people have heard, and I know you know a lot about this intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation distinction. And one of the things that has emerged is a really, I think it's a very 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. 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. That is actually a healthy thing that many intrinsic motivations begin outside of us. Yes. But when they get stuck in between, it's called introjection. It's 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 5 pounds. I should eat a salad. That is not a good stage because it's We've 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.

I think that's where most people are. If you're somebody who The second you said make the easier choice.

Yeah. You viscerally were like, no.

Or you're like, how do you even do that?

Yeah, I don't have that muscle.

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

I mean, if I can only share from my personal experience because I found it a struggle of my own. 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. She was raised to submit all of her own desires and dreams to her husband's. Her mother laid her hands on her shoulders one day and said, You are ready to be a wife. 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. What did I then progress to do? Well, by the way, I have a growth mindset, and so does my mom. That was now 33 years ago, and we have both grown a lot. I 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. 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.

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, because I should do it, right? Because I should go to Pilates because I should go buy the groceries on the way home because 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? 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. I wrote D in 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 I showed even once.

I love that. Did you hear that? I want to make sure you heard the assignment from Dr. Duffler, Classes in Session. What you're saying, it is basically flipping everything I thought I knew about willpower and grit and motivation on its head. I'm so glad that you're here. I also think that this is the perfect time to take a quick pause because I want to give you a chance to really let what she's teaching you sink in. I also want you to hear from our sponsors. While you're listening to our amazing sponsors, share Dr. Duckworth's wisdom with everybody that you care about. And don't go anywhere because we've got even more jaw-dropping research from Professor Duckworth on its way. So stay with us. Welcome back. It's your friend Mel. And today, you and I have the absolute honor of sitting down and learning from world-renowned psychologist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Angela Duckworth. Who says, Grit is the most important determinant of success. And though some people are born with a little more grit than others, you and I, we can develop it at any age based on these four factors she's teaching us about today.

Let's talk about the second part of grit, which is practice.

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 adolescence, sometimes late adolescence, and sometimes early adulthood, that you want to get better at something in a skill development way. 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?

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.

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 Erichson 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 experts. In one of his early studies, he found that the very best violinists at a music academy in Germany had 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. Then maybe the next group was like 5,000 hours. There were differences in the quantity of practice. 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. 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. When I talk about this second stage in the evolution of Paragon of Grit, and by the way, Andres and I did a lot of research together. What we found was that this 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. Then you try really hard, mentally or physically, depending on what you are trying to do. Then you get feedback on what you did well, maybe what you didn't do quite as well as you need to. I hate that part. That's the part that stings? That's the hard part, right? Because your ego is screaming. 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 I was like, Wait, I don't know if I believe this. Because I've been running like... 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 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 person who puts in more of those high quality hours.

And in listening to you, it also sounds like there are three things that determine what makes up high quality hours. And in the words, you use the words deliberate practice, that you're doing the thing with a goal in mind, that you are giving it your all, and that you get immediate feedback afterwards.

Exactly right. I mean, it's so simple, isn't it? Like Mel, it's free.

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

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 And you also admit, Well, I don't really have a goal. I'm not there doing this thing. And maybe the goal is- I'm not trying that hard. I'm not trying that hard. And then I don't really take any feedback at all. Not for my watch. Zero. Not yet, zero, because I'm not wearing a watch. But if you really look at it, if 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, 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 looked at each other and said, That's 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 is done, we all go into a room and we give each other feedback about what just happened.

I spoke to Baudelaire 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 calls me. We're 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 I 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.

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 cringy 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 best seller, Grit. This is on page 141. It's in the section on Practice. 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. That's true because you never see a toddler fall over and go, Well, I'll just lay here for the rest of my life.

I've failed.

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

Right. But then something changes. 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, 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 cringe, embarrassment, shame thing that we do to ourselves is something that we've been taught. Can you unpack that for us?

Those two psychologists are two wonderful women, Elaina 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 Lev 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, right? 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, they spill things, and they break things. 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 is in all of us because we were all babies. I mean, you were that young, innocent, hopeful child. When you ask Elaina 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 a 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, right? It's like the gift of just being a complete rookie and to be unself-conscious. I speak as somebody who wishes she had that all the time. I think I've gotten better at it, but I remember going to a hip hop class. I was in my 20s. I was living in New York City, and I was It was the brief chapter in my life when I was a management consultant. One of my coworkers, Linda, said, Let's go to this hip hop class after work. I was like, Sure, what's that? We show up, and maybe this is a New York thing, but like, 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. I was like, What 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, who cares? Of course, you don't know how to do hip hop. It's not something you've learned before. There's no embarrassment. 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 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.

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 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 the new journal, the getting ready to do the thing, the organizing ahead, the new pen, all that stuff, the new baskets.

But now you're day 179 and you're like...

I haven't written a word. 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?

First of all, 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, right, What happens to most people is that whatever their number is, they're putting in a 10, they're putting in a 8, whatever their number is, it goes to zero. And that is the real problem. They're out of the game. I really mean that when Bob Bowman, I'm a little bit obsessed with Bob Bowman and his coaching. Who's Bob Bowman? He was the coach of... Bob Bowman was the coach of Michael Phelps and Leon Marshawn. When he talks to his swimmer, he says, Every swim practice is like putting a deposit in the bank. Sometimes you get to put in a dollar, sometimes you get to put in 10, maybe rarely you get $100. Sometimes it's 10 cents. But guess what? Every deposit you make, you get to withdraw when it comes to competition. I do think that Mel, even if you're like, Well, I only put in a three today. All right, but it wasn't a zero Ruro, right? Like, 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 a... 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.

What's that famous quote that if all you have to give is 30% and you give 30 % today, you just gave 100 % of what you had to give.

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? That's what I could do today. The second thing I would say is rather having a conversation with yourself, I would have a conversation with another person, and I really mean that. Here's what I mean. So much of the footage of high achievers, and even when you look at them behind the scenes and 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 where you're concentrating and trying to achieve your goals. 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, 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 I 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. 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 you're overtraining, or maybe there's something you could try that you haven't tried. If you try 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, Carol, because they have actual psychological distance because they are not me. I think one of the mistakes people make when they are feeling exhausted, when they are on the verge of burnout, is they dig deeper and look inward.

Almost always, you are much better off looking outward.

I love that. That's the second assignment from Dr. Ducourt. There's a lot of homework here. 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.

You can talk to somebody else's mother. That works.

Yes, as two moms, we know.

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

Yes, exactly. I could listen to you all day, and I'm so grateful that you're here, but I need to take a quick break for a couple of reasons. First of all, I got to give our sponsors a chance to share a few words. But second, there is someone in your life that is struggling with motivation right now. This is the gift that they need. Send this episode to them. Let Dr. Duckworth teach them about the science of motivation, success, and these four pillars of grit. Do not go anywhere because she has so much more to teach you when we return. So stay with me. Welcome back. It's your buddy Mel Robbins. Today, you and I are getting to learn from world-renowned psychologist, professor, and expert on grit, Dr. Angela Duckworth. So let's get back into it. Dr. Duckworth, here's my next question. In research, the third part of grit is purpose. How do you define purpose?

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. I think that's what's happening today. I think we want to, but it's not obvious to us. 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 It's even better for Jason Duckworth. So just these little things of, I'm a small part. This is a big part, what can I do to be helpful?

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

Yeah, exactly.

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

There is a research study that asked this question in the form of an intervention, and it was run by David Yeager. David Yeager at UT Austin is actually a protege of his mentor, Carol Dweck. So it's all full circle. 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, right? That was the treatment condition, and there was a control condition where you wrote about something else. 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. 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.

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. So many. But something that brings me a lot of energy and that I'm super interested in is is gardening flowers in particular. Okay. I had heard- There are many beautiful flowers here, by the way.

Yeah.

Is that not a coincidence? I always have fresh flowers in the studio.

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

You're here.

You're here, Dr. Life.

But so it just naturally brings me alive. My kids tease me because we can walk through a city park. I can name every flower, I can talk about it. I'm just super interested in it. There we go.

Yeah, there you go.

I heard about a woman in our community who had gotten very sick, and she's a flower farmer. I organized a bunch of friends to go help her while she was in the hospital. It gave me a deep sense of meaning and purpose. And so that's an example, not in career, of how you can infuse day to day life with things that you're interested in, and then also find ways to make it part of purposeful living. Just like your husband who's like, Wait a minute, I It bothers me that there's trash on my walk. And I'm glad you shared that, because the last time I walked the loop by my house, I noticed an uptick in trash, and I thought, I need- There's a lot of trash going on. But I immediately thought, this will probably make me look like a bad person I literally was like, Why haven't they cleaned this up?

Someone's really got to get on with it.

Then now you're making me realize, wait a minute. Why don't I do it?

Why don't you do it? But let me also give you permission to not take every problem in the world on your shoulders. One of the things, I don't want to generalize to all women, but I will speak as a woman. I will just say as a confession that a lot of my life, I did a lot of public service. When I was in high school and especially in I mean, there was a point in college that I literally spent more hours doing public service than I was in the lecture hall or the lab because I was a neurobiology major. So many, many, many hours. I will tell you that I think I had one thing very wrong. I felt like the more tired you were, the better. The more ought and should drove your motivation, the better. In some ways, the less happy you were, the better the act, the more virtuous. Now, in my 50s, I can say, No, no, no, no, no, so that you're not only fulfilling a sense of personal purpose and doing the right thing, but my goodness, if you love flowers, can't you find a way to make the world a better place that also allows you to enjoy this very serious hobby that you have?

Why do you have to always go in the direction that is against the green? I will tell you, Mel, it took me a long time to fully internalize that. Now, to me, this conversation, to me, is part of my purpose. I want to make the world a psychologically wiser place. If I can do that with one person, then I will have lived a good life. But I did not choose history. I did not choose current events. I would be a terrible elected politician. I can barely name all 50 states in the Union. But psychology is interesting to me. Why not marry my purpose to my interests? When you have that marriage, that to me creates passion. I hope people listening are able to say, It's not too late. Whenever you come to this realization, you can begin that very day to look for the intersection.

I am so glad you said that because I believe that so many people feel that there's so many things going on that nothing's going to make a difference. Or that if you are spending your time volunteering in an area that interests you, that somehow that's not big enough, there is a story about purpose in your book related to brick layers that I want to read to you. This is on page 149 of your blockbuster bestseller, Grit, in the section on purpose. Fortunate indeed, are those who have a top-level goal so consequential to the world that it imbues everything they do, no matter how small or tedious with significance. Consider the parable of the brick layers. Three brick layers are asked, What are you doing? The first says, I'm laying bricks. The second says, I'm building a church. And the third says, I'm building the house of God. The first brick layer has a job. The second has a career. The third has a calling. How can we apply that to our lives, to our marriage, to our career?

There is actually a science of calling. So there are parables, but there's actually modern science. And it's true. Some people, they go to work and it's a job. It pays the bills. As soon as it's five o'clock, their brain shuts off from their work and they get to do what they really want to do. Some people have a career, they see progression, so this is better, right? By the way. It's like, Oh, I can see that I'm getting ahead. There's some fulfillment in that. Mel, we talked about the gratification of getting better at something, and that's built into human DNA, so that's a wonderful thing to have a career compared to a job. But a calling, I think, is something that marries our intrinsic interests with our deepest personal values. The science of this shows that when you have a calling, absolutely you're happier and you are a better performer. I think one of the things that is surprising about this research is that it's not like physicians have a calling and nurses have a career and the guy who has to roll the girney down the hallway, well, he has a job. No, if you actually look at people's relationships with their work, it has nothing to do with the job It has more to do with how they feel about their work, how they see it and how they feel it.

You don't have to switch your job necessarily to have a relationship with it, which is qualitatively different. The last thing I'll say is that this word calling, actually, you read from the Bible, essentially. It actually originally was not a term of modern psychology. It originally did have a religious connotation of being called by God, of being called to do something by a higher power. I would say that what scientists who study calling today, the real contemporary science of it, is actually returning in a way to that because it's something in addition, perhaps, to like, Wow, this is and whoa, this is very resonant with my values. When you are truly called, you do feel like there is a task that has been laid at your door that you are interested in and you do find important, but that it needs to be you, that you are needed. One of the things that I think is true for young people today, but really all of us, is that I think this deep need to be needed, to be truly useful, to be given a task, and to feel like, again, if we can do that without the word should, which I know that seems counterintuitive, but to really feel that sense of being part of something bigger than your own personal concerns.

I think that is what so many of us are looking for. I think we should be encouraged because the research also shows that if you say to yourself, I'm the first brick layer, or even I'm the second brick layer, it doesn't mean that you can't be the third brick layer. Absolutely. Callings evolve.

Well, it's very clear that you have one.

I do. I feel like it's a calling. I feel, of course, very blessed to have it. I can't tell you, Mel, well, what if you hadn't been a psychologist. Could you feel that way about becoming a... You said you love food. I love food, too. Maybe I could have been maybe a chef. That's another road not taken. Maybe. Maybe I could have been a pediatrician. I love children. But I feel like I have a calling. I feel like this is my way of making the world a better place.

For somebody who wants a calling, is there anything in the research that helps you dig deeper into this pillar of purpose to really start to think think about how to anchor what you're doing and why you're doing it into something that's bigger than you?

When I talk to leaders, and though I am not very good at finance and other things that they teach at the Wharton School of Business, I am a very passionate student of leadership, and I love studying world-class leaders the way I love studying world-class athletes. When you ask a world-class leader, how often does a typical person, even a very high-ranking executive in your organization, need to be reminded of the big picture, like reminded of the greater purpose of the work? When you ask that question, you might think annually because that's how often they have annual meetings, like the retreats. Or maybe you think quarterly because that's often how frequently a CEO has a town hall. Daily, sometimes these CEOs are saying hourly, minutially. It's very easy to lose a sense of the big picture. I think if you ask the question, who benefits if I do my job well, you naturally get the answer. I live a half block from an elementary school, and there is a crossing guard there who lights up the world with his smile and his presence. I remember thinking to myself like, Wow, what an unusual person. My husband said, Oh, I know that person, right?

He actually used to coach track, and I guess now he's retired. I thought to myself, if he has a connection to every child that he crosses across that busy intersection, A, gets to school safely, B, starts the day with someone looking at them with genuine affection and fondness Hey, how are you doing? Good to see you. What a beautiful thing. I don't think you have to be a priest or a social worker to have a calling. I mean, You can ask yourself, who benefits when I do my job well? And you have your answer.

That was beautiful.

He's great. You got to come and see me so that we can cross the street together. You're great. You got to come on a weekday around eight.

You I would love to. I would love to. Let's hit the final one, hope. So you say that grit depends on a different hope. It rests on the expectation that our own efforts can improve our future. I have a feeling tomorrow will be better is different from, I resolve to make tomorrow better.

Hope is something that doesn't have a chapter because I think you need hope, whether you're four or 104. And we spoke about growth mindset, Mel. When you ask me, what is hope really? 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. When you think about your life, when you think about your happiness, when you think about your health, when you think about your weight, when you think about your retirement savings, when you think about your children and what you can do in their lives, a hopeful person says, I think the future can be better than the past, and I think there's something, even a small thing, that I can do to make it so. At the core of hope, I think, is that belief of, Well, why would I believe that? Well, because it is the nature 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. When I see people who are gritty at any age, they have this durable sense that because they are learners, because it is in their nature to develop and not to stagnate, that is what drives their optimism and their hope for getting something done the next day as opposed to staying in bed.

I love that definition. I love that you unpack that. Can you just share with us the research around believing in your capacity to improve your life or the life of somebody else?

Sometimes scientists use the term agency, and that, I think, maybe makes the point that this is not wishful thinking. It's not just positive thinking in some generic sense, but feeling agency is a sense of control over your future, not the naive sense that you can determine everything about the future, which you obviously cannot. Al Bindura, he no longer lie, but he was at Stanford University, and he identified four drivers of agency. He called it self-efficacy. But really, when you look at what he was talking about, if you look at the questionnaire that Al Bender used, I can do this if I try. That sense of agency, I can do this if I try. Four drivers of it. He said, Well, one is, and I think this is not very obvious to people, but I think it's very important. I know you've spoken a lot about physical health, taking care of yourself. Al Bender has said that one of the drivers of agency is being in a physiological state of wellness. You can't have agency when you're exhausted. You can't have agency when you're sick. When you feel out of breath. So one thing is take care of your body so that you can have that sense of energy and agency.

Second was what you call verbal persuasion, but I always think like pep talks, right? You're down, you're thinking like, Oh, I don't think I can do this. And someone comes along, maybe somebody who cares about you and says, No, you can do it. I've seen you do it before. And Al Bender didn't want to dismiss that. He said, That is a very powerful source of agency. But not as good as a third thing, which is that a person comes along and they don't give you a pep talk. They give you a model. They show you what's possible by example. So he would run these studies, and little girls and boys would watch an adult do something like play with a toy, and they would watch behind this plate glass divider. And then when you let them into the room and they could do whatever they want, they just did exactly the same thing with the toy as the grown up did. We learn through modeling. When we're not confident that we can do something and we see a model who maybe looks like us, maybe doesn't look like us, but we vibe with in some other way we identify with them, that creates agency in us.

I've heard that from my own students. They'll tell me like, Oh, you're an Asian female, and I have found you to be an example for me. I say to them like, Wow, I don't even think about being an Asian female. But clearly, they could see what was possible through that. But what I really want to dwell on is the fourth thing. The fourth thing was the most important thing, more important than your physiological state, more important than pep talks, and even more important than having a model. That was what he called a mastery experience. I call it a small win. You want someone to have agency, they need a small win. Every Olympic coach knows this. You have an athlete that loses a race and then another race, and all of a sudden they're in a rut. You know what they need? They need a small win. They need in some way. They are trying to do something in practice, and they did it in practice. They tried to adjust their elbow by a little... They did it. I think that when we find a person in our lives, maybe ourselves, there's a real lack of hope.

To me, the most important thing is to find something that can be that little victory that gives you hard evidence that you can do something if you try. And that's what I try to remember, but don't always enact with myself and, of course, with my children.

I'm so glad that we're talking about this because I've come to believe that the single biggest thing standing in people's way is not ability, it's a lack of hope. It's this sense of discouragement that no matter what I do, it's not going to work.

It's not going to get better.

Or it's not going to get better. And so for the person that feels that sense of discouragement, I'm too old, it's too far gone. There's no fixing this. I'm hopeless, blah, blah, blah. What would you say to them, Dr. Duckworth?

I'm writing a book. It's the hardest thing I've ever done. Many, many tears, months and years of struggle, insomnia. I mean, I've been through all of it with this book. When I'm really discouraged, I take my pen and I get it out and I put a to-do list together that is so ridiculously simple. Like, open Google Doc, and then I open the Google Doc and I check it off. Small win. I could say to myself, spend five minutes looking at this paper that I printed out that I don't understand. Write it down, check it off, small win. And so you can be your own Olympic coach if you break down these things that are feeling discouraging to you. When you feel that feeling of discouragement, you should just think to yourself, too big Too big. Too big. That's what it is. Not impossible. Too big. You need to eat in spoonfuls. You can't swallow too much. So be your own Olympic coach.

I love that. It's too big. Yeah. It's too big. Too big.

Do a smaller thing. Can't do 10 minutes of physical therapy. Do one.

Well, here's another thing I'm in love with. I love that quote where you say, In order to be a great swimmer, you got to join a great team. What does that mean?

So many people are I'm going to be great at this thing. And they have this little movie of themselves being great at that thing. And that movie really stars themselves, right? And so if you go out and try to start a company or build an organization or anything, honestly, like anything, you are so much better off with the team. I mean, here is the mental picture that I love. So at the last Olympics, I love these cheesy commercials. Honestly, I love the commercials as much as I love the events. And Toyota had this commercial called No Journey is Taken Alone. It opens with this female track athlete, and she's on the blocks, and the British announcing comes over. It's like, Ready, set, go. What happens is all these people rush on to the track, her parents and the coaches and her teammates and her friends, and they're all shouting and cheering her on. And then they go through different sports. And the commercial, this parable really, is like, no journey is taken alone. Understanding that, like literally go out and join a team. For example, founders are less successful, statistically on average, than cofounders. The very best incubators who are looking for the next big, the next big, like OpenAI or whatever, they typically only fund teams.

They're like, Come back when you have somebody else. And when you ask those venture capitalists, why would you only fund a co founder. Why not take this? They're like, It's too hard. Who could do it? I think one of the lessons in life is don't take the journey alone. And if that means running and joining a running club, I recently discovered there's something like 30 running clubs in Philadelphia. Now, when I look around, I notice them. I'm like, Oh, yeah, there are people who are running together. That's so much more fun and sustainable than getting your own sneakers on just for yourself on a Saturday morning.

Well, one of the other things that you've been doing a lot of research on right now is the power that our cell phones have over us.

Yes, that is an important part of the situation that didn't exist when I was growing up, but now does.

Talk to me about what you're finding and what you think we need to know.

I'm running this study. It's the first national study of school cell phone policies. So think your local elementary school, your local middle school, or your local high school. Well, chances are they have a policy, right? How are students allowed to keep their phones and when are they allowed to use them? And what my collaborators are not, because I believe in teams, never do anything like this on my own. There's a big team of scientists, including me. What we're doing is we're trying to get literally every teacher in the country to answer a five-minute survey. I know that sounds like a moonshot, Mel, and it is. But if a teacher comes to phonesandfocus. Org, what they will find is a questionnaire written by and for teachers. It asks you, what is your school's cell phone policy? Are you a bell-to-bell school? Are you a school that allows kids to use it during breaks? Tell us where students are allowed to use their phones. Do they have to keep them in their hallway locker. Do you use Yonder pouches? Do you do nothing? Then we ask you just a few questions about, in your school, what do you see as an educator?

How many kids, from zero % to 100 %, are on their phone during were in class when they shouldn't be on their phone during class? The survey is very quick. What we find in our data, we have over 20,000, I think maybe close to 30,000 teachers have already taken it. What we find is that they hardly ever drop out in the survey. Once they start it, they What we're discovering is that they want to tell us what is going on because the educators have been left out of the conversation on cell phones. If I could give you just a peak, Mel, with the data you're telling us the stricter the policy, the happier the educator, the stricter the policy, the more on task kids are academically. In particular, what I'm finding interesting is the farther the phone physically, so some schools allow kids to keep them in their pockets or in their backpacks. They might say you're not allowed to use it all day, but you can physically keep it wherever you want, even if it's directly on your person. Half of the schools in our sample are saying, no show. So keep it wherever you want.

I just don't want to see it. Don't ask, don't tell. Those schools don't do very well. The schools that say, We want you to physically put this somewhere which is far from you, they're having better outcomes. I say, as a psychologist who's been studying self-control and grit for 20-some years, the farther the phone, the higher the GPA in my research. That is because physical distance from temptation creates psychological distance from temptation. If you are a parent or you are a teacher and you think there's a temptation in the life of a young person or yourself that's not doing you any good, literally keep it away. I appreciate being asked that question because I think this is one small way. We're just talking about purpose. This is one small way that I think any educator can actually make a huge difference in the life of children through policy, because we are going to take those findings, we're going to take them to every governor, and we're going to take them to every school district superintendent. And whatever happens in the data, which, again, we're seeing an emerging picture, we're going to share that as widely as we can, because I think this is a sea change in the life of young people that if we don't get this right, I think we're going to be in a lot of trouble, and I think we already are.

I would love to... You talk also about how you can change your environment in order to protect your focus. What are the top things that you want us to be doing related to the phone?

I think if you want anything to be in your life more, if you want it to be top of mind, by the way, about half of the things that we don't do, it's simply because we forget. So the things that you want to be reminded of, literally put them front and center. I tell my students, put out your arms. I was like, see that? That's your personal space. That is how psychologists measure your personal space. It's about three feet in every direction. You can do it. Well, see, that's your personal space.

I got big wings fan here.

If it's here, it's within reach and it's within sight.

So if I want to do something, it needs to be within my arm span. Exactly. And if not, it's not happening.

Farther away, right? Especially with menopause. Yeah, I mean, exactly. How many times have I thought to myself, Oh, I should go get that book and it's up the stairs? I mean, come on, really? That would take, what, five seconds to walk up this? I can't be bothered. So what you want in your life, put it within your personal space. What you want out of your life, hide it. I mean, you could eliminate it altogether. I think physical distance equaling psychological distance is an enormously powerful tool, and you can literally exercise it immediately.

Yes. Speaking directly to the person who is with us right now, if they take just one action out of everything that you have poured into us today? What do you think the most important thing to do?

I think if you could think of everything we talked about today, because there was so much homework, really, honestly. I will tell you one more pro tip from the science of high achievement. When elite performers practice, they try to practice just one thing, actually not three things. You can pick your homework assignment. You could say, I want to do a curiosity conversation, or I'm going to push something that I don't want out of my personal space, and I'm going to put a reminder in my...

Whatever you want. Stop saying should.

You could say, I'm going to do the should homework. I'm going to banish should for 24 hours and see what happens. You could take the homework of joining a team. You can say, Look, you know what? Running is fun, but I'll just try Running Club. I could always not go anymore if it's not my thing. But I don't think you should try to do everything. I think you should try to do one thing. Because, again, Mel, if there's one lesson from grit that really surprised me, it's the consistency. Try to have an eight out of 10, like Michael Phelps. Try to have a seven out of 10. Frankly, try to have a 10 out of 10. But if you are one out of 10, and then another one out of 10, and then maybe someday a two out of 10, and back to one out of 10, and then three out of 10, but it's never zero out of 10, then you will glimpse excellence in your own life. I truly believe that, Mel, no matter how talented you were born, no matter what it is that you want to do, if you want to glimpse your own potential, consistency is the way.

Dr. Duckworth, what are your parting words?

My daughter Amanda was getting tucked into bed by her mother. Many years ago, I think she was in kindergarten, and it was one of those days. I did not want to swear, and I tucked her into bed after this very long day when she had been really a handful. I said, Amanda, you have been trying. She looked at me with these big eyes and she said, mommy, we're all trying. I nearly cried, and I thought to myself, She's right. I mean, we are all good inside. We are all ambitious. Every single one of us is trying. I think if there's anything I can do to help us try more wisely, then it will be a life well-lived.

Well, all I can say, Dr. Duckworth, is I am grateful that you are answering the call.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for teaching us so much today. It just makes the things that you're trying to teach us in terms of being wiser psychologically that much more accessible. And I just want to tell you, I am so happy to know you. Thank you for not only showing- Thank you. So it feels like we're friends now.

Well, we are friends.

Let's do it. We are friends because I really have always admired your work, but I really admire you as a person now, too. So thank you. And you know what? You and I are friends, too. And I also love the fact that when you hit play and you find the time and make the time to listen to this episode or watch it on YouTube, you're trying to create a better life. And so here's what I want to tell you. I want to tell you in case no one else tells you that I love you as your friend, and I believe in you, and I believe in your ability to create a better life. And there is no doubt in my mind that all of the research that Dr. Angela Duckworth just shared with you and me, all of the takeaways and the assignments that she gave us will absolutely help you do that. I can't wait to hear how you use this in your life. Thank you for watching and listening all the way to the end. Thank you for being generous with this episode and sharing it with people that you care about. I cannot wait to see you in the very next episode.

I'll be waiting to welcome you in the moment you hit play. I'll see you there. I'm really excited that you're here, and I'm super excited to dig into your research, but I'm also excited to get the coffee that Ben has. I think we talked the door. The third was Purpose. You're not only... I blew it. Okay, here we go. You can start it, and then you have someone in your life. Okay. Our best-selling author and a total powerhouse in the field of human performance. Oh, my God. I've got dry mouth. Hold on. Let me go up to the top again. This is Dr. Angela Duckworth, and you're... Wait, hold on. Hold on a second. She'll help me walk them, right? Yeah. Oh, and one more thing. And no, this is not a blooper. This is the legal language. You know what the lawyers write and what I need to read to you. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend. I am not a licensed therapist, and this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional. Got it?

Good. I'll see you in the next episode. Serious XM Podcasts.