Transcript
Brett McKay:
Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the AoM Podcast. Professor of Psychology Angela Duckworth is famous for her work on grit, the combination of passion and perseverance that leads to high achievement. But she’s come to an increasing appreciation for the fact that success isn’t just a matter of the qualities inside you. It’s also driven by what’s outside you, your peers, your mentors, and even your zip code. On today’s show, Angela, whose latest book is Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best, shares how our environments play a much bigger role in shaping us than we realize. She explains the three box model of behavior, why relying on willpower is a fallible strategy for altering your habits, and why the most effective way to change yourself is to change what’s around you. We discuss how different situations bring out different versions of ourselves and how to shape your surroundings to encourage good habits, mitigate bad ones, and become who you want to be, whether that means rearranging what’s on your desk or moving across the country.
After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/situated.
All right, Angela Duckworth, welcome back to the show.
Angela Duckworth:
Thank you so much. Looking forward to our conversation.
Brett McKay:
So the last time we had you on was way back in 2016, episode number 210, this is a long time ago, to discuss your book Grit. So you’re the grit lady. I’m sure people who are listening know you because of your work on grit. You got a new book out and it’s all about how our situations can contribute to our success. So Grit was all about how perseverance and passion lead to success. This book, Situated, is all about how the situations we find ourselves in can help that. How did you make that shift from how our internal world, our internal motivations, our internal drives contributes to our success to looking at how our external world contributes to that?
Angela Duckworth:
In a way, I think my career as a scientist obsessed, fair to say, with achievement and human potential, maybe it was the natural thing to look inside the head of high achievers first to ask what are these mindsets that differentiate them from people who don’t work as hard or aren’t as resilient to ask what kind of goals do they set? How do they organize their goals? What habits do they have? And that is a lot of what psychologists do is they look at what is going on mentally. But if you widen the aperture, and I don’t think it’s a contradiction, this new work on the power of your environment to shape your outcomes, I don’t think it’s a contradiction, but it is an expansion because I think if you widen the aperture and now you see this person with all of their positive optimistic thoughts and the mindsets and the habits that lead to those thoughts that lead to their actions, and you ask the question, where do those thoughts come from?
I mean, what influences how we think about what we’re doing and whether we should give up or whether we should keep trying or try something different? And you end up realizing that to a great degree, our thoughts come from our situation. When we’re around certain people, a coach or a mentor, a teacher who really believes in us, we find that our internal thoughts are more positive. They are more confident and optimistic. So the expansion to the common denominators of the situations of high achievers was, I think in some ways it was natural and in many ways inevitable.
Brett McKay:
And you use the story of Michael Phelps as a way to explore this at the very beginning of the book. So Michael Phelps, winningest Olympian in the history of America, and we typically think of this guy, man, this guy is gritty because he would show up to practice every day, even on Christmas, even when he was kind of sick. But you explore like, well, yeah, he had grit, but also his environment that he found himself in helped with that.
Angela Duckworth:
I don’t know if there is a paragon of grit who is grittier than Michael Phelps. And I very intentionally chose him to demonstrate that grit is a lot of achieving greatness, but it is not everything. Michael Phelps had an amazing mom to begin, Debbie Phelps, who might well be grittier than her son Michael. They would be neck and neck, I think, in a competition. She raised Michael and his two sisters for a lot of their childhoods. She was a single mom because she and her husband had split up. She was working as a public school teacher, later a principal, so not a lot of money, but she had this unshakable faith in the potential of her children, including Michael, who was not at the beginning of his life, I think, anyone who the teachers were singling out as like, oh, most likely to succeed. He had a diagnosis of ADHD.
You can imagine what an extremely energetic boy with ADHD, what the letters home from teachers sounded like. And the reason I want to emphasize how important it was to have a situation with a parent like that is that you can imagine a pain in the butt little boy going a completely different way in life, but this very wise mother wrote back to those teachers and said, “You know what? He’s really smart. You may not see it. I do. He’s also extremely disciplined when he is doing something he’s interested in. And by the way, this kid has so much energy, you got to put him in the back of the room and let him stand up and walk around because he’ll learn for you, but maybe not in the conventional seating arrangement.” So that was just one little anecdote to illustrate how important this particular situation was for bringing out Michael’s best.
But the other element I want to raise is that Michael happened to be born in Baltimore, wasn’t complete chance because his older sisters also swam. And when they got competitive, they realized that there was a pool and a coaching system that was a little farther away from their home than was convenient. It was like an hour drive both ways. Debbie Phelps had a motto, “Have minivan, will travel.” And so this long trip became a little bit arduous. They actually moved to be closer to this world-class pool in North Baltimore. And that is actually where Michael started his swimming career. First, just watching his sisters swim up and down this pool when he was too young to get in, and then himself getting into the pool. And why was that so important? Well, it is the premier youth aquatic program in the country, and it had at the time, somebody who I think you could argue is the best swimming coach in history, and that’s Bob Bowman.
And so would Michael Phelps have become Michael Phelps, the Olympic star, the most decorated Olympian of all time, as you said, but I think he’s also the athlete who has broken the most world records. I think he’s broken the world records for breaking world records, if I’m not mistaken. Would that have all happened if he hadn’t had the best swimming coach in history for the 20 years of his career? And if you ask Michael what his answer is, he says, “Without Bob Bowman, my career would be different, a hundred percent different.”
Brett McKay:
Yeah. We had Bob Bowman on the podcast a while back ago to discuss his coaching Michael Phelps, but also just his system that he established with his swim team. It was a system. It was a culture. We’re going to talk about the role of culture it plays in success. So in this book, you introduce a mental model that you call the three box model of personal change. And you note that your longtime podcast co-host, Stephen Dubner of No Stupid Questions fame, one of my favorite podcasts, he said that this is his favorite mental model. So tell us about that. What is the three box model of personal change?
Angela Duckworth:
The three box model is something of a blueprint, not only for understanding effort and excellence, but really I would argue just all of human behavior, all of it. If you ever wonder like, “Why’d they do that? Why do they say that? Why do I feel this way?” You can explain it using three boxes and two arrows. So I want to start with the third box on the far right, if you can imagine this visually. It’s what you do. It is what you say, what you feel. It’s your response to what’s going on. What determines how any of us respond? Well, box two, which precedes this box, so you’re moving now to the left, that is what’s going through your head. These are your thoughts. A lot of psychotherapy in the modern era is about interrogating those thoughts, questioning whether you are unfairly pessimistic, for example, or doubtful in your thoughts.
So that is actually, I think, where a lot of personal development coaching stops. They say, “If you want to work hard, if you want to be resilient, you got to examine your internal thoughts.” And I want to agree with them, but go farther. I say, “Don’t forget the first box, right? I need another arrow and another box. Now I’m on the far left. Now I’m at box one. I’m at the beginning.” Where do our thoughts come from? They are not just internally generated. They’re in a startling way, I think, if you really understand how human nature works. They are bottom up. They are responsive to the situations. When we are around certain people, we have certain thoughts. When you are on Bob Bowman’s team, you have thoughts about the value of effort, about what practice should look like, about what you should be thinking about that are different than if you are being coached by another person and surrounded by different teammates.
Even I would argue being physically at the aquatic center that lucky for him, Michael Phelps grew up around, it was a facility that had a 50 meter pool outside for sunny days and a 50 meter pool inside for all the rest of the year. I think even just physically being in that kind of circumstance is entirely different than, I don’t know, I grew up around a pool that was around the corner. I obviously didn’t become an Olympic swimmer, but the vibe of this world-class training center with its cues of we are here to train the best of the best, to be the best of the best. I think all of those cues change those thoughts in box two. Those thoughts in box two determine our response in box three. So this three box model, I think of as a blueprint for effort, achievement, the things I study, but really happiness, anxiety, I mean, anything that you are trying to understand and the natural conclusion of understanding how our situations lead to our thoughts and our thoughts leading to our behavior, the natural conclusion is that you start at the beginning.
If you want to change yourself, change your situation.
Brett McKay:
And you mentioned that most personal development books or even talk therapy, it focuses on that second box, the thoughts in our head, or even maybe you could say emotions to an extent, because people try to gin up emotions inside of them to get motivated. Why do we typically go there? When we’re trying to make a change or trying to achieve a goal, we focus on willpower and effort and not the situation. Why do we completely ignore our environment?
Angela Duckworth:
Well, I want to talk a little bit about willpower. I want to answer your question directly about willpower. I think it’s a profound question, by the way, and one that philosophers have grappled with some success. And more recently, psychologists have really figured out, I think, what willpower is and why it’s fallible. I also want to say that the three box model of human behavior is a model that was developed by an emotion researcher named James Gross at Stanford. He’s the one I think who really opened my eyes to the power of the situation as an academic researcher. And I think one thing he would just want to say about the folks who, as you mentioned, they try to gin up a certain emotion. They try to get themselves to be, for example, famously Michael Jordan, getting himself to be angry before a game, to get the extra kick.
I think what he would want to say is that when you feel like you’re going to generate an emotion, like I’m going to be psyched, I’m going to be angry, I’m going to be confident, really what you’re doing is you’re ginning up some kind of box two though. There is some thought that engenders that emotion. That’s one of the big discoveries I think of emotion research, just how intimately thoughts and emotions are connected in particular by thought leading to emotions, whether we recognize that or not. But why is this all connected to becoming your best and why do I think willpower is the most fallible, the worst way to change your behavior? Well, willpower is intervening in the process at box three in these three box sequence. It’s waiting until you have an impulse to eat something, to look at something, to say something, all of which you might regret, right?
And we can do it. You can do it. I can do it. And we’ve all done it. We’ve all forced ourselves to not say what we’re thinking. We’ve all forced ourselves not to eat something. And by the way, we’ve all forced ourselves to eat something like medicine. So we’re familiar with using willpower. It has a particular sensation. It feels extremely effortful. It’s fatiguing, but we know we can do it. The reason I don’t suggest relying on it is that research shows not only is it aversive to exercise willpower, it is an incredibly fallible solution. High achieving people rely on raw, brute force willpower, brute force impulse suppression as infrequently as possible. Instead, what they do is they put themselves in situations where they’re not tempted to eat this or to say that or to do this or that. And in terms of productivity and goals, they also put themselves in situations in which doing those things that they want to get done, even if it’s effortful, that it’s marginally easier.
So if you’re a swimmer with ambition, you could force yourself to do a set of drills that you read about on the internet or you watch a YouTube video and you’re like, “This is how Michael Phelps trained. I’m going to copy that program.” And you could get into the pool and try to force yourself to do exactly that protocol. Or you could say, “I wish I had the thoughts that would lead me to want to do this in the first place. What situation can I put myself in?” And I would find my way to as great a coach and as great a team in as great a facility as possible. That’s what it means to use a situational agency approach to changing yourself versus a willpower approach.
Brett McKay:
To your point about the people who look like they’re exerting a lot of self-control and are really disciplined actually aren’t. We had Michael Inzlicht on the podcast a while back ago and he’s done a lot of research on that. And that was the big surprising takeaway that I got from that interview was that these people who look really gritty and they’re just white knuckling it, they’re not usually. They enjoy what they’re doing and so they do it.
Angela Duckworth:
Can I just say, because we all call him Mickey, Mickey Inzlicht. I mean, you have great taste, Mickey Inzlicht, I think has made more progress in really understanding the fallibility of willpower than maybe any other scientist. So I’m glad you had him on the show. I think that is one of the big take homes. I mean, he’s been studying self-control as long, maybe longer than I have. And the persistent myth that to get things done, to be really productive, you have to have this mental muscle to force yourself to do hard things is really misguided.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. I think one of the things he talked about too, the reason why we typically default to willpower is that we moralize it. We think, well, if you’re trying really hard, it means you’re a good person if you had to grit your teeth. And he says, eh, maybe we shouldn’t moralize exercising self-control.
Angela Duckworth:
It’s crazy how much we moralize it, right? There’s some virtue in suffering. And I mean, if you interrogate that, you’re like, why? There’s virtue in honesty, and I think there’s virtue in persistence. I think there’s virtue in doing hard things, but the suffering per se, it has to feel bad. It has to feel bad or it doesn’t count somehow, have to be straining. I think it’s a mistake. I think it’s an understandable mistake because we’ve all experienced the pairing of struggle and eventual victory. So we know that very often the path to excellence has some feeling of suffering. What I want to say is that precisely what that path has is effort. Effort often feels like suffering, but I will give you the counter example of the flow state. When you are in the flow state, performing at your very best, at the highest level of challenge where you can just surf the wave, you are at maximal effort, but you do not feel like you are suffering.
In fact, you feel the opposite. So I think it’s a bit of a red herring to say pain is gain. I think it’s better to say, even if it doesn’t rhyme, that effort is gain. So I need to lead a life of effort, but I don’t want to be chasing suffering or chasing pain per se, because I’m occasionally going to be led in the wrong direction. And I think that’s a lot of what great coaches do. They make sure that the effort you put in the pool for two hours is high return effort. And I don’t think they’re going to tell you it’s going to be fun necessarily or that you’ll even be guaranteed to achieve the flow state, but I don’t think a great coach in particular is looking to increase suffering from nine to 10 to make people feel bad for feeling bad’s sake.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, I agree. So with this three box model is interesting because it opens up the door that maybe we have multiple personalities. And I’m not talking like dissociative disorder, identity disorder. I think all of us notice that we act differently when we find ourselves in different situations and we seem like we take on a different personality. How can the three box model help us explain that? And any examples that you’ve seen in your own life or in the research where people can change whether they’re more extroverted or introverted or more conscientious or less conscientious?
Angela Duckworth:
I had the very good fortune, and I think in this case it wasn’t situational agency, it was just situational luck. I had the very good fortune of living down the street just a few blocks away from Tim Beck who died at 100 and was the founder of modern cognitive therapy. And in addition to pointing out that your box two thoughts lead to your box three responses, which is like the bedrock of cognitive therapy, Tim Beck wrote towards the very end of his life and his career about having different modes, he called them, like work mode, vacation mode, and you could have confident mode and maybe insecure mode and you could have roles like I’m in mom mode and sometimes I’m in professor mode. The multiple selves that we have, I asked him, I’m like, “Is this dissociative identity disorder? This is bad, right?” And he said, “The difference between a pathological state and what he would consider the default adaptive state is really a matter of how much there really is a wall between these different selves.
One just has no idea that the others exist.” And I don’t think that’s what we talk about when we talk about being in vacation mode or work mode. We know we have a vacation mode and a work mode. If you can flexibly switch modes to be appropriate for the situation, that is mental health. And further, if you can spend more time in the situations that bring out the selves, the modes that you admire most in yourself, that is also a sign of mental health. In fact, a sign of mental thriving. Tim said, “This is the sweet spot.” And when you have somebody in therapy and they’re really not responding to traditional cognitive therapy, like let’s examine your thoughts, one productive way to get better is to go even further and say, “What kinds of situations make me interested and empathic and energetic as opposed to detached and lethargic and difficult?
If I can find those sweet spot situations, if I can put myself around those people or in those circumstances, then I will have the kinds of thoughts that I want to have and the kind of response.” So I think this idea of modes or selves is deeply connected to this three box model of human behavior, and it’s very useful. I mean, I don’t mind having a mom mode and a professor mode. In fact, I think it’s entirely appropriate that when I’m with my students, my voice is a half octave lower when I’m talking to you, Brett, or if I’m talking to my students than when I’m home, it’s not intentional, but there’s just a kind of different Angela and I’m much more in charge when I’m doing things professionally. At home, I tend to let my daughters do the talking. I mean, it’s just a different circumstance, all fine.
But what I really want to recommend is that if there is a self that you don’t want to show up so much, and if there were a self that you hoped would show up more often, that you could begin to notice which situations bring out the good self, the bad self for you, according to your judgment, and just spend more time in situations accordingly. Yeah.
Brett McKay:
Erving Goffman, the sociologist, had this idea too, that we all have social masks that we wear. And people have this like, “Oh, mask, you shouldn’t wear a mask.” I think it’s perfectly fine. And he would agree. It’s like, “Well, you have a work mask that you put on. You’re going to behave, like you said, in a certain way at work compared to what you’re at home.” And I think again, it’s healthy, it’s flexible. I noticed with my son when I coached flag football, I was the coach, he was on the team. And it was really interesting how my. I noticed with my son when he was, I mean, he was probably eight. He even picked up on this idea of social mask without me even having to talk to him about it. When we were on the practice field at the game, he just on his own, he called me coach.
He didn’t call me dad. I was coach and he didn’t act like my kid when we were in football mode. And then after the game was over, we went back to dad and son mode. I thought it was interesting how people as young as they just kind of pick this stuff up. I’ve seen this idea that being around different people or different situations can bring out different parts of your personality. I remember this moment when I was a kid, my dad brought some coworkers home for dinner and I knew my dad is dad and then my dad had work people here and it was interesting how I was like, “Man, dad’s acting really weird. This is not dad.” And it might have been he was kind of tipsy, had some beers, but he was just this sort of extroverted making jokes that he normally didn’t make.
And this is weird. There’s a stranger person. But I think it’s because he was in work situation and that was coming out in his interactions.
Angela Duckworth:
I love that story, Brett. I would say two things. One is Goffman, I wish you could have him on. I wish Goffman were alive to be a guest. I think this idea of code switching, which I think is what we’re talking about, right? Mode switching, code switching from one self to another, it often gets a pejorative connotation like somehow that’s oppressive or a sign of low integrity, something bad. I think to your point, even when you’re as young as eight, you begin to see, even if it’s not conscious, the need to put on one mask or one self in one situation versus another. I mean, if all the world’s a stage, as Shakespeare said, that sometimes you are wearing a different costume and playing a different role than others. The other thing I just wanted to say is that I think when I give a talk on stage and a loved one, even my husband, because I don’t love anyone as much as my husband, maybe my daughters, but you would think like, “Oh yeah, sure, you can come.” I remember the first time he asked to come to one of my talks and there was this sense of discomfort and I was like, “Why do I not want him to come to this talk?” And I think it’s because when I am on a stage, I am a different Angela and there’s just this little like, “Wait, which one should I be?” I mean, he has come to the talk and he’s gotten to see that other side of me and that’s great, but I think it just underscores the point.
We’re not one person. We are multiple.
Brett McKay:
You mentioned in the book how you and your husband had a rough patch in your marriage on account of work for both of you, but then you kind of figured out how to use this three box model to save it. So how did you guys use it? Were you intentionally using the three box model or did you kind of pick up on it naturally?
Angela Duckworth:
Well, the story of my marriage with Jason starts out like a total fairytale and then had a nightmare a few years and I hope we’re living happily ever after. But the fairytale part was, wow, head over heels. I think for both of us, maybe me first. But anyway, one of the things that really attracted me to Jason and Jason to me, I think is that we recognized in each other strivers. We were like, “Oh, I know you because I am also that way. Watch me work.” We both had a lot of ambition. We started out our careers. He as a real estate developer working with his dad, me as a tenure track psychologist, and everything was great and all that trying hard was really paying off as it had for all of our lives until that point. Then at the same time, there was the 2008 financial crisis, and for me, there were those rocky years where all of your experiments start failing, none of your studies get accepted to journals, your grants fall through.
I mean, it was a rough patch, as you said. Our response, as is I think the case of so many people, I mean, especially those with grit, is to just try harder, wake up earlier, go to bed later, work on Saturday, work on Sunday, think about your work in the shower. It was, for Jason, like hundred hour work weeks. And for me, I think if you add parenting, because I maybe shouldered a few more of those responsibilities, our daughters were young, I think it may have been a hundred for me. And so one of the things that we had to reckon with during those nightmare years, and you ask, was it very, very conscious that we were like, “Oh, there’s a problem with box one. We can’t just amp up box three effort. We’ve got a fundamental structural problem here, people.” I don’t know that it was that explicit or conscious, but I will say that we did discover the importance, the imperative to change our situations, not just to try harder, but to try differently because, for example, both of us in ways that we had never done before, asked for help.
A moment ago, we were talking about how we’ve moralized effort. I think we also moralize doing things on our own without asking for assistance. And my whole life, I tried to do things without bothering anyone, but wow, did I reach out? I told my parents, I told my closest girlfriends. I got a therapist for the first time in my life. For Jason, it was much the same except for him. It was his guy friends. We both saw a marriage therapist. I mean, I know maybe today and for a lot of people that’s like, “Oh yeah, you went to therapy.” I mean, I was not raised to go to therapy. I talk about moralizing. I feel like something is really wrong with you if you need to go and talk to somebody like that. I think a combination of that help that we got, restructuring our work instead of trying to do all these studies on my own, for example, I decided that I would be smarter with other people and that I didn’t have to have all of the great research insights.
I would be part of a team and together we would figure out things that we couldn’t figure out on our own. I think for Jason, he recruited a bunch of mentors, older and real estate developers from different parts of the country who would help him think through decisions that he needed to make because now he was leading this small company. And these changes, I think, were the solution that not only rescued our careers, they really did rescue our marriage because I was so unhappy. My only imagined route out was that we shouldn’t stay together, that we should end the marriage, and maybe that would fix things. And I don’t think that was the solution. Obviously that would be changing the situation, but I think what we learned was that there does come a time where just trying on your own in a losing situation is only going to make things worse.
Brett McKay:
Okay, so our situation determines our thoughts and our thoughts can lead to action. So the idea is like, okay, if you want better thoughts without having to work too hard and rely on willpower to generate those thoughts to get the action that you want to do, put yourself in a situation that will sort of naturally give you those thoughts and those behaviors. You mentioned this idea of situational agency. A lot of people might be listening, it’s like, “Well, a lot of my situation I find myself in, I don’t have a lot of control over. I didn’t get to choose the family I was born into, and maybe they came from a rough family. You don’t get to choose your background that you have, your race, gender, things like that.” It’s like, “Well, what do I do?
How can I have any control over my situations?” But you say, “Well, no, they’re still there. There’s still agency to exercise.” So let’s talk about how we can do that. You talk about the very first thing, we can change our environments so that we’re more likely to follow through on our goals. What are some examples of changing our situational environment so that we can be more successful?
Angela Duckworth:
I would recommend starting with your personal space, and everyone can do that right now. I mean, wherever you are, wherever you’re listening, just what is right in front of you? What can you reach and what can you see very clearly? I can see a water bottle, I can see my book, got a laptop, stack of post-it notes. I’ll tell you what’s not here, like Diet Coke, which I don’t want to drink anymore, my phone, which I deliberately put far away so that it’s not distracting me. The curation of your personal space gives you the opportunity to friction up the temptations that you don’t want to eat, that you don’t want to touch, that you don’t want to see, and to friction down some things that you do want to do. A lot of people tell me, “I really should read more. I’m on my phone at night, but oh my God, I haven’t read a book in a year.” All right, well friction down reading, put books near you.
So many parents that I know who have especially risen in socioeconomic status within their lifetimes and then raised children and hope for them to go even further, they are so intentional about bookshelves. They’re like, “When I get rich, I’m going to have a house with wall-to-wall bookshelves,” and then they do. So you can curate that personal space, that bubble that is roughly three feet in radius, because that’s about what you can reach and see with high acuity. I would decorate it with reminders after you’ve taken out the temptations. I can’t tell you how many high achievers I know who have a favorite quote that they either get tattooed or made into a bracelet that they can wear around their wrist or made into a plaque that they can hang on the wall or a paperweight that they can put on their desk. These quotes are not 150 words long.
I mean, they are clearly short enough to commit to memory. Why do they do that? Because we are responsive to our situation. They want their eyes to alight on those beautiful words several times during the day and just remind them of who they’re about and what they’re trying to do. So you can absolutely make a long list of things that you can’t change, including all the things that you said, Brett, like your family of origin, your hometown, right? You may love it, you may hate it, but it’s not under your control. What is under your control though is a lot. And I would begin with your physical personal space because you can do it right now.
Brett McKay:
There’s a lot of great stuff in there to the point about using quotes. Montaigne, the famous essayist and philosopher, in his library on the beams on the ceiling, he had quotes written, like inscriptions. I’ve seen pictures.
Angela Duckworth:
They’re in his chateau, I guess
Brett McKay:
Yeah. He had a castle.
Angela Duckworth:
I love this. I mean, he has them everywhere, right? They’re carved into the wood. It’s a beautiful scene. And I am sure that if I could go back and interview the guests that you have interviewed, people like Bob Bowman, these treasured quotes, these mantras that people live by, Montaigne was a smart guy and he probably could have recited those quotes to you, but he wanted to stare up at the ceiling occasionally and see them.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. And then this also reminds me of Alexander Graham Bell, the guy who invented the telephone, he actually had different workstations for different types of work he was doing.
Angela Duckworth:
Really?
Brett McKay:
Yeah, so in his office near the laboratory, this is what his daughter said, “He occupied his mind with problems connected with experiments.” So this is in the little office near the laboratory. And then in his study in the house, he thought and worked over his theories of flight. This guy was thinking about flight too, not just telephone.
Angela Duckworth:
I didn’t know that.
Brett McKay:
And then the Mabel of Beinn Bhreagh, this was his houseboat, was the place to think of genetics and heredity. So he had different workstations for different types of work he was doing. And then by consistently doing specific types of work in each place, the locations became prompts for certain kinds of thinking.
Angela Duckworth:
And Brett, I know remote work is a complex and controversial topic, and I’m not here to say that it’s a bad thing necessarily for you, given all the pros and cons to work remotely. I mean, for anyone, I’m not saying you in particular, but I do think one of the real downsides of working out of your bedroom is you have the opposite of what Alexander Graham Bell had. There’s no transition. It’s a funny thing that I feel like the clothing that people wear today, are they working out, going to bed or going to work? You’re not sure because it all is athleisure, right? That’s how I am. I mean, there was a time historically where put on a suit and tie or you put your hat on as a sort of signal, like you’re going out into the world with some formality, then you take your hat off and you change maybe into your slippers.
I do think that if you are somebody who does a lot of work from home, you need to create an Alexander Graham Bell division of situations because otherwise, when does your work self know that it’s time to relax and be like dad’s self? When does dad’s self switch into some other self? I think that in my limited experience, because I did write this book partly from my house, I took a sabbatical and I thought it would be best for me to be in my pajamas all day working furiously on this manuscript. And in retrospect, I don’t think that was the best for me. And I think the blurring of the lines of all the selves, because I didn’t have the physical cues to tell me like, nope, switch, click, was not great.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. I work from home and I do a moderated form of location switching. So there are different parts of the house in which I do different kinds of work. So I like to do my administrative work at my desk, my office, and then I do my writing on a couch in my bedroom. And I think it helps a little, but I don’t think it’s as effective as with transitioning between distinct places. A related issue and related to remote work is that a lot of work today is on our computer and our phones. The problem with those things is that there’s just this mixture of personal and work in the same device. I have this problem, so I’ll be working and then I’ll get distracted by a personal text or email and I’m like, okay, I got to take care of this thing. Or I’ll get distracted with watching a YouTube video or something.
Any tips for how to shape our digital environments so that we can take advantage of the situational effect?
Angela Duckworth:
You’re not alone. I have stories like that. My 23-year-old daughter, Lucy, called me two days ago and asked me the same question like, mom, you’re a behavioral scientist. This happens. I was like, I have to post things on Instagram as part of my job, but then I have no idea what happens the last 45 minutes. The co-location of all that is good in the world with the temptations of all the things that are bad in the world, I mean, those are extremes, but in our phone, we have everything, our QR codes, the text message to our mom, our email, endless YouTube videos, Instagram, TikTok. I mean, it’s just all in one place. And I think that is again, the opposite of what Alexander Graham Bell had the wisdom of. It’s like you want places for certain things. We also just think about the history of humanity.
You could pray anywhere, but it is special to pray in a church or a mosque or a synagogue. The division of where we eat, being in a certain room of the house from another room where you’re going to relax and be with other people, like the family room. I think phones are really the opposite because in one three by six little rectangle, just everything is there. And I will tell you, like Mickey inflict, I do study self-control and resisting something that is easy, that is immediately gratifying and novel is very hard for human beings to do when of course at the very moment that you’re indulging in that video or whatever it is that you’re wasting time on, you know you should be doing something better. But given that choice, it’s not only little kids who eat one marshmallow instead of waiting for two marshmallows, it is all of us who struggle.
And that goes back to this willpower conversation. It is therefore a question that I should answer. How can you use a situational strategy rather than willpower when everything’s in your hand? I think that is one reason why when you can, you should put your phone not only more than three feet away. I would argue based on my research in another room, what’s special about being in another room? You literally cannot see it. You not only have to reach for it, you’d have to get up out of your chair and walk somewhere for it. Those elements of friction I think are enormously helpful. I mean, it’s not a miracle cure, but in our research, for example, students in America, and I say America because some of this research was done with the Gallup organizations as a representative sample of American teenagers, the farther the phone when they’re studying, the higher their GPA.
So I think you can say to yourself, when I can and when it’s appropriate, I’m just not going to have it in the same room as I am. I think that’s one thing you could do. And the second thing I’ll say is that there are all kinds of apps that you can install that try to create those barriers inside the phone. Opal, OneSec, things that will disable certain apps for certain times of day or will put some friction in. I mean, if you use OneSec, every time you go to the app that you have identified as a temptation, it puts a delay in the screen turns red and then it turns gray. It’s very slow. And then it asks you, are you sure? And after that period of time, sometimes you still want to go on that app, but very often, in fact, in research studies, significant reduction in the unwanted use of the phone.
So I want to say that the co-location of everything in the phone is one reason why we carry it with us everywhere, including the bathroom, which is gross, but we all do it, including me. But if you can uncouple the good from the bad, and if you can just put the whole damn thing in another place when you can, like you’re going to a meeting or you want to really pay attention, we go to yoga or whatever you can do, I think that’s the solution.
Brett McKay:
Okay. So for unwanted behaviors, friction up, add more friction to do it. And then for behaviors you want to do, reduce the friction.
Angela Duckworth:
Yeah, friction up, friction down.
Brett McKay:
Friction up, friction down. So yeah, you can apply this to your digital life, your work life.
Angela Duckworth:
Eating, everything.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. Fitness or health. If you want to eat less junk food, don’t buy junk food. If you want to exercise more, buy a kettlebell so it’s in your house, you don’t have to go to the gym. So just that’s frictioning down. So yeah, okay. The first thing is just think about your environment, what you can do to shape it, to help you achieve the goals that you have. Let’s talk about this idea of social environment. How can we use our situational agency to choose our social environment so that we’re more likely to do the things that we want to do? Because as we mentioned earlier, when we’re around different people, we behave differently.
Angela Duckworth:
Shaping your social environment admittedly is a lot harder to do than putting a water bottle next to you or writing down your favorite quote and taping it up next to your computer. But it’s at least as important, arguably more so. And the first thing I would say about your social environment is to have a social environment. And why do I need to say that? It’s because for the last 10 to 20 years, the amount of time that Americans spend by themselves, so not in any social environment, but in fact in a solitary environment, it’s really skyrocketed. And it turns out that we’re not just working alone, we’re doing everything alone. We’re eating alone. We’re doing things under our roof that we used to do outside of the home. And again, pretty much all functions, exercising, eating, working, et cetera. And so why is that a problem?
I think one of the most important things to understand about human nature is that things go better in box three and box two when box one includes other people. I have a postdoc in my lab, postdoctoral fellow named Donegan Folk, and he’s analyzed data on how Americans spend time and it’s very detailed data so you know whether they’re with other people, whatever it is that they’re doing. And one of the striking findings is that everything is better together. I think that suggests that one way you can shape your social environment is just to make your environment a little more social. I’ll give you an example. I think for a lot of people, they want to work out more. And I don’t know that the first thing that leaps to mind is a social solution to working out more. And people are like, “Oh, I’m going to write down my goals. Okay, there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m going to go to the gym. I’m going to make a schedule. I’m going to start running.” But you can do those things with other people. One of the best ways to do that is to have a friend who has similar goals to be your accountability partner. I know that I will get out of bed for you much more reliably than if it’s only for myself and my own resolution. You can join a running club. I think in Philadelphia, which is where I live, there are over 50 running clubs. And when I see them on this trail that’s a few blocks away from my home, it’s called the Schuylkill River Trail, I always smile. I know that those people are going to be great. I know that this habit is going to stick more than if it’s just them and their own resolution, their own willpower.
I also know that they’ll be happier. Not everyone has to have a social routine and so forth, but I just want to press the point that almost anything that you can think of undertaking a loan, training for a marathon, going to the gym, starting a new company, going to church more, almost anything that you can say, “I want to do this.” You can do it with another person or more than another person. You can do it as a team as opposed to a solo striver. And I think that will change everything.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, because they’ll hold you accountable.
Angela Duckworth:
Exactly. You’re more likely to get motivated to get out there if you know someone’s going to be holding your feet to the fire.
Brett McKay:
So yeah, if you want to exercise more, join an exercise group or running club. If you want to write more, find a writing group that you can join in your location where you meet up every other week to talk about what you’re working on. The other thing with being situationally agentic about your social environment is that not only can you get that accountability from other people, but it can also put you in cultures that will set you up for success. What role does a group’s culture play in our situation and helping us achieve our goals?
Angela Duckworth:
First, I’ll distinguish, at least for myself, what the difference is between the kinds of social engineering, if you will, that we’ve been talking about like, “Yeah, I’m going to join a running club and I want to work on this project with another person.” From culture, I think culture is more abstract. Culture is more all encompassing. The culture of Philadelphia is the culture of Philadelphia because the way we do things in Philadelphia is different from the culture of San Francisco or Cleveland. The way we do things around here, not just the intimates, your own friends and family, your coworkers, but just the way everyone does things around here, that’s what culture is. And I think culture matters. I mean, the culture of where you work, the vibe, the values, the way we do things around here at this place, I think that’s enormously influential of our box two thoughts and then our box three responses.
And some cultures are extraordinarily demanding, but also supportive. I think those are the best cultures, particularly for excellence. You want to be in a culture where it’s just never good enough, the never ending journey to improvement. And at the same time, it sounds like a contradiction, but it’s not. There is this unconditional support, this unconditional acceptance of you as a person, even if performance is never good enough, people are always good enough. And so those are the cultures I think that if you want to realize your own potential, you have to navigate toward, you have to ask yourself, and I think we’re talking about this last because it’s the hardest, right? It’s like, well, how am I going to change that? Of course, I would love to work at X, Y, and Z, but what magic wand is going to make that happen? Or yeah, I’d love to live in Silicon Valley, but I don’t have the money to move.
I can’t do it. I think we’re talking about it last because it’s the hardest, but I think it is also the most effective because when you change culture, you change all the physical objects that are within reach and within sight, you change your peer groups, you change the people you have access to as mentors. I mean, you change everything. So I think the idea that we can think like immigrants, right? If you think like an immigrant, you think it is possible to change in that more radical way than anything we’ve discussed so far. And that transition cost, though great, may be worth it. I think that’s the recommendation because what happens is that people fall into what’s called status quo bias, this clinging to the way things are. I live here, I’ve always lived here, I know how to live here, work has to be this way.
And that more radical move may be exactly the form of situational agency that you need to see radical change.
Brett McKay:
You mentioned this idea of microcultures in your book. What’s that?
Angela Duckworth:
Macroculture is I’ve moved to France. Microculture is I’ve moved across the city of Philadelphia, maybe even a few blocks. I mean, again, speaking just from where I am and where I live, if you take a 10-minute walk from my house, you can end up in a different culture than my neighborhood. And this is very much the conclusion of Raj Chetty, the Harvard economist who has studied economic mobility for his entire career. The idea that opportunity, that culture is not only a matter of countries or even states or cities, but even neighborhoods, I think opens up the door to possibility that you could make a smaller move and still see change in your thoughts and in your responses. And I would say that even without changing companies, you could ask yourself and really listen to what the answer is. Is there any way I can change my micro culture here?
Is there any team I can volunteer to be part of a few more hours a week and maybe anything that I can move away from in those adjustments that are possible even without changing your position in that company or the company itself?
Brett McKay:
Yeah. I think this idea of microcultures, you can use that if you’re looking to join a gym. Don’t just think about the amenities that it has, but like, well, what’s the vibe here? Is it very supportive? If you’re looking for a new church congregation, same thing. Check it out. How do people do things around here? Is this going to help me achieve the kind of thing that I want to achieve with this group? And then you talk about once you kind of get a grasp of this three box model and start exercising situational agency, it creates a flywheel of success because you’re successful in this one domain and then you can take that and it actually opens up new situations for you that can take you to the next level.
Angela Duckworth:
I mean, this idea of chasing a flywheel, of course, is something that’s been talked about in lots of contexts. Startups are always looking for the flywheel, right? But the basic logic is that if you’re in a better box one situation that leads to better box two thoughts that then produce better box three responses, including effort, resilience, productivity, other people will notice and you’ll be invited to better box one situations and you’ve just started at the beginning again. And there are many people that I’ve studied who have really kind of ratcheted up from not so great situation into fantastic and even ever improving situations because they got the flywheel started. And by the way, that same flywheel has a negative side, right? If you’re in a really losing situation that leads you to pessimistic, self-defeating thoughts that lead you to withdraw effort and to give up prematurely, people will also notice and opportunities will close and then you’ll be in an even worse situation.
So I think the flywheel operates just to say in fairness, in both directions. And I think very often these kind of autoproductive cycles are what explain how somebody becomes really great or has a kind of catastrophic trajectory.
Brett McKay:
Angela, this has been a great conversation. We’ve talked about a lot, but there’s so much more in the book, but what’s one thing you think someone can start doing today after they listen to this episode to start using this three box model to move forward in life?
Angela Duckworth:
Well, we’ve talked a lot about the tactics of situational agency. I want to just point out something that should precede any of the kind of adjustments. I think you should just take a day or two and notice. This I would call situational awareness. So before you start acting and changing where you put your water bottle, you might just notice. I mean, spend a day or two noticing how you respond with different people around, with different objects within view, do some experiments. The other day I gently draped a napkin over a plate of French fries that my husband Jason was trying unsuccessfully not to finish. I mean, they were really not very good fries, but if you put fries near him, he will eat them. And it was just an experiment just to see. I was like, “I’m not trying to get you not to eat the fries. I’m just going to put this napkin on this plate and move it a few inches away and just to notice, just become aware.” And it was amazing. He was like, “God, I don’t even want to eat them anymore. Isn’t that so interesting?” So notice what’s around you, notice who is around you, notice what thoughts those situations lead to. Notice whether you like those thoughts or not. Notice how you respond to those situations and those thoughts before you exercise situational agency. But yes, I do hope you exercise situational agency because I think many of us will discover that our situations can be improved.
Brett McKay:
Well, Angela, where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Angela Duckworth:
They can find me on social media. And then also I have a website, angeladuckworth.com. And I want to just say, Brett, I learned a lot during this conversation. I think we know a lot of the same people, but you know a lot of things that I don’t, so I just want to say thank you.
Brett McKay:
Well, thank you. And likewise, it’s been an absolute pleasure.
Angela Duckworth:
I’ll see you next time.
Brett McKay:
My guest’s name is Angela Duckworth. She’s the author of the book Situated. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. If you’d like to learn more about our work, check out our website, angeladuckworth.com. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.
