Transcription
[Music]
Hi Angela, hi Jeff. I am, um, super interested in getting to this phase of your career and how you're scaling it. But you are one of those relatively small handful of people who made some major pivots along the way to get to where you are. Um, and so I, I, I really want to go back to college to start with you to talk about your first major pivot and and where it took you, if you don't mind sharing that story with us.
Well, not to stereotype, but I am the daughter of Chinese immigrants who grew up in suburban South Jersey. So it was a bit of cultural destiny to be Premed, and that's what I was. I, um, started out as a neurobiology major, actually graduated as a neurobiology major. But along the way, I found kids. So I started tutoring, um, actually back in high school. But as I got into my extracurriculars in college, you know, I just found like more and more hours on the side of the ledger of being outside of the lecture hall, even outside of the lab, and in schools and in homes in, in the Cambridge, Massachusetts community. And at one point, I did tally up and there were more hours on the side of the ledger of being, you know, in the community versus in the lab or in the lecture hall.
And when I made this discovery that kids are amazing, kids are wicked smart. I mean, you know, if you just think about like our knees and hips as we get older, we're like, "Wish we had the knees and hips that we had when we were young." We also don't have the brains that we had when we were young. And just sitting next to kids who are like, 11 years old, I was like, "Whoa, you're, you're wicked smart relative to me, anyway." And then, and then the, the, the epiphany of like, "Oh, I need, I need to change my life" was just that I, at the same time, had this dawning recognition that the education that these kids were getting was not at all like the education that I got growing up in my home and in the schools I had attended.
So I, I made a hard pivot. I, um, I guess I sometimes like to call myself post-Premed. Um, and I decided to not take the MCAT. Um, my dad refused to talk to me for six months, I think, um, after I made that choice. And I decided to dedicate my career to kids and to initially education, um, teaching, nonprofit stuff, and now as a psychologist who studies, um, human development.
Before we, we get to where that led you, um, there are two threads there I'd love to pull on. One, your dad didn't talk to you for, for six months. Um, uh, I, I, I understand there, there, there was a lot of family pressure to, to go become a doctor. But you were obviously smart and driven and passionate. What was it that, that led him to say, "I, I can't speak with you. I'm so angry with you. I can't, I can't even communicate with you for that long"?
You know, so, so as with anything, you know, it's a little more complex than, "Oh, my dad was a, a bully or an ogre." It was, it was much more, um, nuanced than that because my father loved me. I mean, oh my gosh, my father loved me. Um, and, you know, he had sacrificed a lot in coming to this country, um, as he often reminded me. Um, and, you know, he, he, um, had this conversion formula for like, "Every hour of my being in school was equal to how many hours that he had to work." He did the same when we went to a restaurant. It's like, "That chicken breast is going to cost me." So, you know, it was very clear to him, and also to his children, that he had made a lot of sacrifices. But it really was out of love. I think every immigrant comes, I think, in some way to make a better future, not for themselves, but for, you know, the people who come after them, especially their families.
My dad, in addition to feeling like I was squandering a Harvard education, you know, like I was being foolish, essentially foolishly idealistic, like I didn't know that I was going to have less of an impact as a classroom teacher than I, than I would as a, as a, as a physician. I think the second, you know, you know, underlying current was that, you know, in China, um, and again, I don't want to paint too, you know, broadly with this brush because, you know, I can't speak for like, all billion-plus Chinese people. But I think it's fair to say that there was not a cultural tradition of public service. You know, there was a tradition of helping your children and helping your cousins and helping your fourth cousins and your grandparents and your parents, but not total strangers, um, particularly of a different race. It just didn't calculate for him. He just couldn't figure out why I would want to sacrifice, in his words, he called it a sacrifice, you know, "my dreams for theirs."
Did it make you rethink the decision to pivot to kids?
Okay, I was a little bit of a rebel. I mean, my dad and I had this incredibly close and affectionate relationship. I, I don't think I'm divulging any secrets by saying, like, I was his favorite. I think my brother and sister would have hardly agreed throughout childhood that, you know, I was the apple of my father's eye. But we had this dynamic where, you know, if he said no, I said yes, and if he said yes, I said no. And, you know, I, I have this, "I'll show you" response that I feel like I should write a whole book about. Like Jerry Seinfeld has it, Michelle Obama, I mean, there are so many stories where the moment someone says, "Oh, that's impossible," you curl your fist into a ball, there's a fire in your belly, you lean forward, and you say to yourself, and sometimes out loud, "I'll show you." So when my dad told me not to go into education, yeah, I said back to myself, because he wasn't picking up the phone, "I'll show you."
And that, I mean, it ties back to the, what your, your reference to kids' brains. And because it sounds like a very kind of teenage reaction right there's this, "I'll show you. You don't know. I know. I'm smarter than you." Yeah, right. And so when, when, when you referenced earlier that, that kids are so much smarter than we are as adults, um, that their brains just function differently, what, what exactly were, were you seeing back then that inspired you, that, that, that may not be obvious to most of us?
Well, give you my first-person account of what it felt like as just a kind of, you know, I'm 20 years old, I'm sitting next to a kid, I'm trying to teach them how to do a homework problem. But also maybe, um, you know, give you one footnote, which is just what we, what we know from modern neuroscience and psychology. So when I was sitting next to a kid trying to help them do their homework, I mean, it was clear to me that they were very often extremely bored. And when they were bored, they couldn't learn anything, right? It was just like, you know, trying to pour water on a concrete surface. But when they were interested, so this would often happen not when we were doing the homework problem that they were begrudgingly trying to solve, but more like, you know, "Let's take a break and like talk about music or like talk about, you know, like anything that you care about, skateboarding, you know, whatever." And wow, they were so smart. I mean, they could memorize facts, they, they, they, they could make connections, like abstract, um, you know, kind of general truths from disparate sets of facts. I mean, all the things that we would call intelligence.
And, you know, when you sit next to kids, and anybody who sat next to a kid, I mean, you, their clock speed, and this is where, you know, modern science kind of affirms this kind of personal observation. I mean, their, their brains are working faster. So something called processing speed tends to decline throughout adulthood. I mean, basically, you peak at the Junior Prom, and then, you know, you get slower from there. Now, what we do have that kids don't is wisdom and knowledge. You know, I have strategies. If you made me study for the SAT today, whoa, I would kill it. I'd be like, "All right, here's what we're going to do. You know, a little practice, etc." But it struck me like, you know, like a bat between the eyes. I mean, it was, it was, it was hard to ignore the, the gap between the obvious intellectual potential that these kids had, especially when they were interested and encouraged, and on the other side of this chasm, you know, their failing grades, their trajectory of not graduating from college, and, you know, leading the kind of life that, you know, I know my father and mother came to this country so that I would not have that kind of life. And so for me, it was not that difficult a decision. It was, um, in a way, obvious.
I mean, the story really resonates with me. I, I started my career as a public defender representing children, um, first in juvenile court and then children charged as adults in Washington D.C. And I'll never forget, I had one client who reviewed his file before I went out to the juvenile jail to see him. And, um, it was clear from the file that he, he was going to really struggle to understand basic concepts of rights and what have you. And we spent a while talking about basketball and, you know, girls and whatever else he, he was interested in to try to establish that, that connection, that rapport before we settled into a discussion. And when I started talking to him about his rights, he asked me, "Is that like the Boston Tea Party?" And I said, "You know, what do you mean?" And he said, "Well, you know, they were like fighting to have rights, right?" And I, all of a sudden, you're like, "Oh my gosh, this, this kid, he drew the exact right connection." And so I'm, I'm curious, as you were in Boston, were you in schools, or were you in these kids' homes? You know, where, where were you? And were, were you having these experiences where you're seeing, "Oh my gosh, this, this child is actually brilliant and has just been completely missed by the system?"
Well, I was in the Cambridge Public Schools. So I ran this public service program that matched Harvard students with, there are 13 residential colleges at Harvard, and by complete coincidence, there are 13 residential neighborhoods in Cambridge. I was doing a variety of other things where I could see from different angles what was going on. I'll tell you one, um, story. So, um, I, I had the idea one of these years in in college that there should be an after-school enrichment program. And since I was a science major, I thought it would be, you know, really cool to teach kids how to like learn about solar energy by making like a hot dog cooker out of like tin foil and cardboard. And I go around to the schools' classrooms and I'm knocking one by one on the doors of, I think it was like fifth or sixth grade classroom, um, teachers. And I, I went into one classroom, I remember the teacher's name, Mr. Z, for short. And, um, he, he, uh, you know, lets me do my little three-minute commercial at the front of the classroom. And one little boy puts up his hand and is asking questions about it. You know, he's sort of leaning forward in his seat, he's got a big smile on his face. And Mr. Z interrupts him and he says, "Oh, not you. This is not for you. This is for the smart kids." And I nearly took a baseball bat to that man. I was like, "That kid will never forget what you said." And God knows what you've been saying the rest of the school year. When I left that classroom, you know, I knew I was relatively impotent. You know, I can't get that classroom teacher fired. I couldn't fight the unions. I couldn't, you know, make decisions at a level of policy that would directly change that kid's life. But I knew I would never forget that story, and I never have. And it taught me a lesson, which is that, yeah, for sure, we have genetic endowments. You know, I am probably lucky to have gotten certain genetic cards from my dad and certain from my mom. I don't want to deny that. But holy smokes, the environment you're in, the people who you're with, the opportunities that you have. I think we vastly overestimate talent that's natural and vastly underestimate the power of our environments.
Yeah, it's extraordinary the power that teachers have for good and for bad. I mean, that, that Mr. Z story is, um, is stunning. I don't mind, you know, naming him, by the way, because that was his nickname. I'm like, Mr. Z. Also, it's been 40 years. There are so many paths you could have taken from there. You ended up as a management consultant along this journey. Um, just take us, take us through that, that arc of the journey, if you would, and, and, and how, how you made your way back to education.
So I graduate from college, and the first thing I do is something that I had set up during my senior year of college, which is I, I started this nonprofit summer school for kids. And I wrote around on my bike all senior year. Like, I think I got almost every business in Cambridge, Massachusetts to donate. I mean, it was ridiculous, like photocopies or free ice cream. Probably I could have used the help of somebody like you, Jeff. But anyway, I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't have a, a business bone in my body. But I, I incorporated a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, we had a board of directors, we opened our doors, and then, you know, we ran and actually, uh, and ended up being, um, profiled as a Harvard Kennedy School case study and won the Better Government Award and celebrated its 30th anniversary recently. So it ended up becoming, I guess you would call that a successful startup, or, you know, a startup that, you know, in some ways scaled. I think at last count, they served like 10% of the children in the Boston-Cambridge area.
But, but what happened to me was in the second year, like as this was, you know, clear to me, the whole idea was that young people can help young people. So I was the oldest person on staff at age 22, because the teachers were college students and high school students, and the kids were like in fifth and sixth grade, right? So at 24, I was really old. At 24, it was like clearly the founder needs to like make room for the successor because we need another young leader. And that's exactly what happened. So we recruited, um, a, a terrific leader named Sarah Feldman, and she took my place. And then I had to ask myself, "What's the next chapter in the life of Angela who's clearly now very post-Premed?" My, my father had started speaking to me again, kind of begrudgingly. He was just like, "Okay, well, your life." And I decided to go to Oxford. Well, I, I decided I would try to go to Oxford on a scholarship. And I actually ended up winning the same scholarship as Reed Hoffman, our, our friend. And it's called the Marshall. And so I had two years to kind of figure out what I was doing. I ended up getting an MS in Neuroscience that complemented my undergraduate degree in neurobiology, and I studied dyslexia, you know, how children, um, uh, you know, sometimes struggle, uh, with, with learning how to read.
And then when I was about to finish, I, I, I was thinking like, "Well, how do I get back into the K-12 American education system?" And the real challenge was, my degree program being on the Oxford schedule ended at the end of October. But as we all know, the American school year begins in September, if not in August. So I had this problem. And I solved it by by going on these recruiting, you know, basically McKinsey hovers over Oxford like vultures waiting for, you know, a stag to fall over. So they just pounce on you and say, you know, they have like a smoked salmon canopy in one hand and a huge offer letter in the other, and they're like, "Would you like to come and work for us?" And I went to the McKinsey interviews, and I was like, "So what's McKinsey?" And they're like, "Well, we're management consultants." And I was like, "What's that?" And they're like, "We help businesses be more productive." And I was like, "Okay, okay." And they're like, "We're going to ask you some questions." You know, this was back in the day when you just walked into your interview and you just had a conversation. I didn't know what a case study was in the sort of McKinsey, um, sense. So they started asking me questions. They're like, "Okay, imagine there's a a travel agency and they're trying to increase their revenue." And I was like, "Wait, what's revenue?" And they defined it later. At the end of that case, I was like, "Wait, can you just redefine profit and revenue, and then I'll solve this problem for you?" And they did. They defined the term. And during that interview, I immediately understood that they were asking me the same kinds of questions that I had to tutor kids on. I was like, "Oh, I tutored a seventh grader in algebra. Same, same logic."
So I, I do my best bumble through this, um, interview, and I'm, I made an offer, and I accept it under one condition. I said, "I don't really care about increasing the productivity and the revenue and the profits of these companies that pay you obscene fees, but I really care about public education. If I come and work for McKinsey, can I do pro bono work for most of my time?" "Sure, that's fine. Just come." And I get there to New York, and of course, looking at my resume, neurobiology undergraduate from Harvard, Masters of Neuroscience from Oxford, I'm immediately put on all the pharma teams and all the medical devices teams. And, um, I did do a little bit of pro bono work. But anyway, that was the pivot. And I only lasted 11 months. And I only lasted 11 months because that got me to September of the next school year, and I went immediately to work in the New York City public schools.
So critically, it was not a lack of grit that that led you to leave McKinsey. It was really following passion, is what it was. I mean, my friends were more surprised that I ever went to McKinsey than that I left. They were like, "What are you doing at McKinsey?" Like, you know, "Nothing about business." Like the way these young kids felt about algebra is how I felt about business. And I still do. Like, "Gee, I don't know what you do. I don't know what Reed does. I don't know the difference between a hedge fund manager and someone in private equity, or if one is a subset of the other." And I had this, um, amazing board chair of my nonprofit that we can talk about if you like at some point. But it's a nonprofit to help children using, using, uh, psychological science. And the board chair was named Fose Dean. He was the board chair for something like eight years. And I would constantly get his title wrong. I was like, "You're a hedge fund manager." And he's like, "No, it's really more of a holding company." And I'm like, "But you are at Tiger Capital." And he was like, "Well, I was in the." And I just, my brain shut off as soon as he started talking about those things. So McKinsey was a digression. Fro would affirm that, um, I think, uh, knowing how he knows me now. And, and I think one of the general lessons for me as a psychologist is, we are so smart about the things that we're interested in, and we are so dumb about the things that that are not interesting to us.
What was it like switching from McKinsey, where you're, you know, sitting there having $1,000 meals and working, Masters of the Universe, yeah, to to going into New York City public schools?
Well, I remember taking the same train. I took the same subway train, but instead of getting off at Midtown because, you know, I lived, um, on the Upper East Side, and I would just stay on the train until I get off in the Lower East Side before it was all bougie and, and expensive. And, and when I got off the train several stops later than Midtown, I mean, it was like night and day. Um, I, I think one of the startling differences, I mean, you know, you walk in, there are bars on the window. Like, there are bars on the window. I couldn't tell whether they're trying to keep people out or keep people in, but it did have the feeling of a jail cell. There was like one terrible bathroom that everybody in the school had to share. Like, literally one, like, one stall. So all the teachers, all the kids, you can imagine what that was like by the end of the day. What I think I was most struck by was how much harder it was, you know, to be making whatever I was making as a first-year New York City, uh, teacher teaching seventh grade, um, math. I mean, it was just so much harder. I mean, it was like, "Wow, I thought, you know, figuring out what to do with your, you know, $7 billion of excess cash revenue was a pro." Like, this is hard, right? What do I do with this kid who, you know, sitting in front of me, has eight problems, and I have 45 minutes to like, change their life per day?
So, so it was humbling. Um, and I don't think I was a great teacher. Um, I tried really hard. But I think the, the things I failed to do, um, as a teacher probably were the inspiration for like, everything I've done since then.
Well, say, say more. What, why, why were you not a great teacher?
Well, I, I mean, I did try, right? So I was like, "I will, you know, triple the amount of time these kids get math." I mean, when you're talking to somebody who's in seventh grade and they only have second grade skills, I mean, some of these kids were like, barely adding, right? It's like, and not reliably. Like, 7 plus 8 sometimes came out as 15, and sometimes it didn't. So, so, so the most obvious thing to do is just like, increase the time on task. I mean, I don't think that was wrong. But I think one of the things I have since learned is that learning is not just about quantity of time on task, it's about quality of time on task. There was so much I had yet to understand about how to make learning efficient. And if we, if we want to, and get into the 10,000-hour rule and what that really means, but this is all the science of learning that I, I learned afterwards. And I think the other major mistake was, um, a failure to understand human motivation. So I thought just by kind of like exhorting children, like, "Try harder. Like, if you try hard, you can make a life for yourself. If you try hard, you can go to college. You can get out of this hellhole where you live." And I thought these, like, you know, daily, I don't know, like sermons I would give on just like trying hard, you know, it's, we're, we're going to motivate them. And I, I think, I think for the vast majority of my students, it was not at all effective. And, and that's that's why I discover many better ways to motivate ourselves and others, uh, today as a psychologist.
Talk about the decision to pivot out of teaching and get into, I mean, you must have had extraordinary insights which have informed so much of what you've done. But, but what, what was that next phase of the journey like for you?
Well, Jeez, I first want to say it was tear-filled. I mean, we got this old couch from my parents. I ended up marrying my, um, my classmate from Oxford and then my McKinsey consultant colleague, uh, Jason Duckworth, and that's where I get my very Welsh-sounding last name. We had this old couch, secondhand from my parents. It was really ugly, but super comfortable, and it had these like huge overstuffed pillows. And Jason joked that, you know, "If we could like get all the salt out of that couch because I cried so much into it, we could just like have enough salt for like New York City for the rest of the century." I cried so much because it was so uncertain for me, you know, and I, I didn't know. I was like, "I don't, I don't want to be a classroom teacher forever." I think, I think that was very clear to me. It's not that I disrespected the profession, but it wasn't fulfilling all of my needs. I personally didn't find it as intellectually challenging as I had found my coursework at Harvard, and I was missing that.
The other thing I realized, because there was a, um, a moment in time where I thought maybe I would start a charter school. I thought like, "Oh, that's how to scale, right? Like, you know, I've got this classroom with 30 kids." I had this urge to scale my impact. But then I, I, I kind of figured it out without even trying. It was like, I was looking at these other principals and leaders. I, I just, I didn't have that leadership desire, actually. And I still don't. Um, I don't think of myself as a, as a leader in any conventional sense. So I was really stuck. I was really unsure. And I was looking, you know, I was like, "Maybe I should get an MBA." "Oh my God, that sounds horrible." "Should I become like, what is human resources?" "Should I go into that?" And like, then I looked into it and I was like, "No, please God." Um, and, and then finally, I kind of put two and two together and I was like, "I love kids. I have these, you know, insights into the problem, but not the solution of motivation and learning. And I'm, I'm pretty good at science." And I, I think maybe, um, I should go and get a PhD in Psychology and figure out how to help kids not as a classroom teacher, but as a psychologist who who unearths, you know, their, their motivational and learning processes. And so I made a hard pivot again to apply to a PhD program. My husband and I, at that point, were living in Philadelphia, so I only applied to one graduate school because it was the only one within commuting distance, and that was the University of Pennsylvania. And I was 32, I think. And, um, I was accepted. And they, um, they sort of looked at how old I was and they were like, "Actually, we have a spot, like now, like you can, you don't have to wait until the cycle begins." And so I started my PhD when I was 32.
Angela, I'm surprised to hear you describe yourself as not a good leader, um, given, given the power of your leadership in our culture. Um, why don't you think of yourself as a good leader, given the impact that you've had?
When I think of leaders, you know, I think of Louis van Gaal or Tory Burch. You know, I, I think of people who are actually leading people. Like there's an org chart and there's a box with their name on it, and there are lines below it. And, and I don't really have that. I have a micro lab. I have one graduate student. I mean, only have one graduate student. I guess I could put an org chart together, but it would only have like one box, and, you know, it would be very simple. Um, I, I guess you could argue that I'm a thought leader. Um, but I do think I, I, I really respect leaders. You know, but I respect them the way I, I respect ballerinas. You know, they're doing something I don't do. They're, it's, it's a craft. Uh, it's a lifelong learning curve. I mean, all the things that you need to do to be a great leader, you know, I wouldn't be a very, um, you know, great psychologist if I divided my attention between learning how to manage people, having those one-on-one conversations to be supportive and demanding, etc., and also to do my work. And that is one of the big lessons of grit. One of the reasons why gritty people have these obsessive, um, passions, you know, that they like wake up and they're like, "Still interested in," is because that singular focus enables them to get really far in that pursuit because they're not diluted by chasing all different things.
And did you, did you think you would go have a private practice working one-on-one with kids? Is that how you imagined your, your career as a psychologist?
Well, my whole story is like, "How Angela was incredibly ignorant and then dot dot dot." So I started my PhD program, and I knew about as much about psychology as I did about revenue and profit, you know, at my McKinsey interview. And I say that because my training had been in neurobiology and neuroscience, and that is a different discipline than psychology, right? So I knew about neurons and the brain and, you know, the spectrum protein and so forth. But I didn't really know about psychology. So when I started the PhD, I asked my advisor, uh, who turned out to be, um, well, as he, as he pointed out to me, a very famous psychologist, Marty Seligman. I asked him, "You know, there's this box on the form that says, 'Check here if you want clinical training.'" And he said, "Don't check that box." So I said, "Okay." So then after getting into the program and and learning that clinical psychology is actually helping people in therapy, I went back to Marty and I said, "Why didn't you tell me to check that box? Like, that's what I'm here for." And he said, "Well, there are two kinds of psychologists, right? They're the psychologists who are therapists, and they help people, you know, one-on-one. Um, and then there are the other kinds of psychologists. They're research psychologists, and they don't help people one-on-one. They study things, and that helps people in a more, you know, diffuse way." And I said, "Well, I, I think I should check the box. I mean, I think I'm the kind of person who would want to be a therapist." And he said, "Angela, I want you to tell me, well, no, no, don't tell me their name, just imagine the most boring person you went to college with. Do you have a mental picture of that person?" Angela, okay. Now imagine yourself locked in a small closet with that person for 40 hours a week. That was exactly how Marty put it. Um, I, I ultimately decided to heed his advice, perhaps, you know, for the better, perhaps for the worse. But it wasn't really so much this image that Marty conjured of how terrible it would be to talk to people with problems. I think one of the things that you learn as you, you know, make your bumbling, nonlinear way in your career is that certain things do give you more energy than others. You know, I had figured out by then that the one-on-one patience and compassion that my own therapist shows for me is not something that Angela Duckworth gets a ton of energy from. But I did feel like I got a lot of energy from the research side. So I am a research psychologist, and I have never been clinically trained.
As you went through the, the PhD program, given the experience you'd had in the Cambridge schools and the New York schools, were you targeting specifically? Did you know, "Okay, I'm, I'm really going to study kids and understand how to make an impact at a, at a, at a scale level?"
You know, if there's any solace for those of us who feel like, "Gosh darn it, how did I not have this career epiphany earlier?" You're like, "Oh, I wish I were 22 instead of 32." Well, I sure felt that way. But one of the blessings, right, a solace was, I kind of knew what I wanted to do by the time I belatedly started. So my classmates were like, a decade younger than me. But I knew what I was in graduate school for. I wrote my application essay saying that, "I am here to unpack the potential of kids and to understand what motivates them, what what enables them to be brilliant, um, and what does the opposite." So from day one, I was after this puzzle of human motivation and learning. And I started, you know, studying it in various ways. One of them ended up being, uh, the grit research that I've done on high achievers. But there were other strands. But everything I did from the very first day of graduate school to where I am today was motivated by those, by those kids that I was sometimes not, you know, helping as much as I wanted to, um, earlier in my life.
All right, let's talk about grit. Because when you do a Google search for Angela Duckworth, um, if we were to graph it, it would be a hockey stick starting in 2016. So, how, how did you land on grit? How did you isolate that variable? And then, I mean, it's really quite an extraordinary branding as well that you've done here around this word. It's a really powerful word.
Just, yes, yes, yes. Um, yeah, well, okay. So I did inherit something from my father. You know, I don't say this, you know, in the genetic sense, but, you know, being incubated in a household that talked about high achievement every single day, I think I was bequeathed, as it were, or an obsession with excellence. I love the Olympics. I love three-star Michelin chefs, even if I don't go eat in their restaurants. I love people who win the Nobel Prize. I love to watch anybody. I mean, if you're a world-class plumber, I want to watch you work, right? There's nothing more beautiful to me than the ballet of, you know, human performance at its best. So I did the kind of straightforward, I don't know, I just didn't have anything else to to think to do other than to talk to these people who were Nobel laureates or who had won a Grammy award for their recordings or, you know, you fill in the blank. And what I was looking for is not what made them different from each other. What I was looking for was the common denominator. You know, what makes a prima ballerina the same as a Nobel Prize-winning physicist? I mean, that's a great question to ask, right? Because they're so different in so many ways. I, I found that they, they had this common, you know, trait. Uh, they had this combination of passion for what they did, unfakeable, 24/7 love of what they did, and they had perseverance. I mean, wow, they had this incredible ability to work and to outlast other people. And I think in both dimensions, passion and perseverance, the thing that was most striking was not the intensity, but the stamina. And I stand by that. And other labs have found that in their scientific research that when you look at high performance, it's not like, "Oh, this person stayed up for three nights in a row." Like, I predict that they will be the hardest worker in the long run, that they'll be the most successful. But it's really consistency over time. Because, you know, as Jerry Seinfeld says about writing, you know, "It's a game of tonnage." Right? So, yeah, there's the quality of practice, but you do have to be in the game. And so I found this common denominator emerging, and I thought to myself, you know, "Lots of things like, how do I get kids to begin to develop on this trajectory?" And then I also just wanted to reverse engineer those high achievers and ask the question, you know, "How close can we get to that kind of excellence in our own lives?"
Grit was obviously, um, enthusiastically embraced in the business world. Um, were you surprised at all by how it was received and, and how it's been implemented?
I was not entirely surprised because I think I'm right. I mean, I haven't changed my mind about high achievers. I think two out of one, they are gritty. And I think the reason why it was so enthusiastically received by C-suite leaders is that they are so gritty, and they now have the puzzle of how to make everyone else as gritty as they are.
You embark on this research journey, you identify this common denominator. It's then a leap to become, um, really a public intellectual. Right? I mean, so that was a total accident, by the way.
Well, so how, how did that happen?
So I started being asked to do interviews even when I was in graduate school, which I thought was kind of ridiculous. This, um, you know, I remember being asked to be on the local news because I had published, you know, research, and I guess like somehow the local news got wind of it. And then they wanted me to come on and talk about, you know, "And now we have Angela Duckworth, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, here to talk about the science of success." And so I would, you know, hold forth as best I could. And then one day, Chris Wink, who is one of the co-founders of the Blue Man Group, so anybody who's been to the Broadway show knows these, these, uh, avant-garde performers, is like, they paint themselves entirely blue, and then without uttering a word, they do this, like, funny pantomime performance art thing on stage. And so Chris Wink calls me out of the blue and he says, "Do you want to come and do a TEDx talk?" I don't know anything about TEDx. He explains. And he says, "The theme is creativity." And I said, "Oh, well, Chris, I, I don't study creativity. I study grit." Right? And he said, "Anybody who's creative knows it takes a hell of a lot of grit for one moment of inspiration." I was like, "Like, yeah, that's so true."
So I go up and I give a TEDx talk. He's like, "Oh, by the way, it has to be 18 minutes." I was like, "Okay." So I come home and, you know, I don't think twice about it. And then I believe that there were producers at TED who, I think every year they, I don't know how they figure out who who's going to go speak at the next big TED event, but somebody comes across my video and it's, um, you know, recommended that I go on, you know, a main stage. And actually, what I did was not really a real TED event. It was like, it wasn't TEDx. It was like this, it was like this collab with, uh, Public Broadcasting Service. So Bill Gates and, um, others who were really passionate about education were all asked to give TED Talks. I was one of them. Uh, John Legend was our MC and host. And, you know, they said, "Oh, this one is not 18 minutes." They said, "This one is going to be, you know, fewer than six minutes." I said, "Okay." Chris Anderson, who was the head of TED and I think still is, said, "Oh, and, uh, one thing, Angela, everyone else is going to get a teleprompter, but not you. You have to memorize your talk." And I said, "Oh, that's not really my vibe. Like, I don't really memorize talks." He's like, "Well, you're going to memorize this one." So I said, "Okay." So I go up in some, you know, car. Do you know why? Do you know why he, he said no teleprompter? You have to memorize. I don't know why. I guess I should have asked him. Um, but, um, and yeah, I don't know. But, but when I got there, I did know that those were my instructions. So I gave this talk, and I then went home from New York City back to Philadelphia, and I just didn't think about it. I was just like, "Okay, check. Like, I did my job. I did my, my best." And then the talk ended up taking on a life of its own. I think like coaches and moms and dads and managers everywhere started forcing people to watch my talk. And, and I, I guess in some ways, it was a blessing that it wasn't 18 minutes, but it was a third as long. It probably matched the attention spans that we are evolving toward. And I, I think maybe there was a message there that was hopeful to those of us who don't feel, as I do, like, you know, we're not the most talented and most innately gifted people. I, I, I'll say that that was probably the one event in my life that put me into the spotlight, but as I said, it was accidental. You know, it was not intentional.
The arc from there, because you are on this journey, you are a research psychologist hoping that your work will have impact, be beyond, you know, the academic circles in which in which you'd be living, to to today is is kind of mind-blowing. I mean, it's, it's a scale journey that we don't often see.
Have I failed? Is it mind-blowing? I don't feel like when I wake up in the morning that I have like blown up.
Well, I, I mean, part, part of what I find extraordinary about it is you are, I think, one of the most influential public intellectuals of the last decade. Um, and yet, as, as we think about influencers in a modern sense, we think about people who have 7 million Instagram followers or 14 million TikTok followers or what have you. And you're, you're not showing up every day and producing, you know, nine short videos and what have you. So, so, you know, the combination of the TED Talk and the book and what's come from that, it feels like your career has just changed dramatically, and your impact is happening at a scale that very few people reach. So I'm, I'm just, I'm curious about that. Is that fair?
I don't want to be falsely modest. It's probably a healthy thing not to wake up in the morning and think like, "Wow, I'm an influencer." It's probably healthier to think like, "Where's the coffee?" Which is usually the first thought that I have when I wake up. I, I will say this, you know, um, uh, when I was in high school, I had this English teacher named Mr. Carr. And by luck of the draw, I had him twice. I had him my sophomore year and my senior year. And it was in Mr. Carr's English class, in in my high school, Cherry High School East, um, that I discovered a love of words. Um, and, um, I learned how beautiful they were. You know, I remember him like, you know, reading poetry to us and just like, "Oh my gosh, swoon." Um, and so what happened to me along this journey, you asked me about pivoting from, you know, Premed to education, you know, the detour I took at McKinsey, you know, figuring out that I need to become a psychologist. There was at the same time, more gradually dawning realization, maybe not, uh, like, you know, lightning flash from the sky epiphany, that I loved words. I loved using them. I loved speaking them. I loved writing them. I sure as hell loved reading them. And I think one of the things that people who become successful, um, and people who scale, as you say, um, what they do at some point is figure out not only one thing that they do well, but a constellation of things that they do well.
I was once asked to give a 60-second lecture. So, you know, TED Talks went from 18 minutes to, in my case, like six minutes. But I was in, in one occasion, uh, asked by my university, University of Pennsylvania, to give a 60-second lecture, which is a tradition, I think, that stretches all the way back to Benjamin Franklin. Anyway, you stand out on the campus walkway, you know, it's called Locust Walk, and you deliver in the, you know, under the great blue canopy of sky, a 60-second talk. Like, what can you possibly communicate in a minute? And I decided that I would try to communicate what I thought was, um, true of superachievers, right? And, um, I said, you know, "If you look at a distribution, right? You know, you think maybe there'll be a bell curve, right? Like most people are average in the middle, some people on the left, some people on the right." Um, but that is not true when you look at human achievement. Human achievement is not bell-shaped. It's, um, extremely skewed, right? It's, um, what some would call log normal. But the point is, is that there's this really long tail to the right, and then basically everyone else is.
Bunched together anonymously, you know, 99% of humanity, like, all you know, around average, right? For example, if you look at, um, just one very crude metric, right? If you look at artist paintings, right? And a very crude, imperfect metric is how much they're sold at, uh, at auction. And you ask the question, like, take a Picasso, right? Or a Matisse. And you ask, how much is that sold at auction compared to the average artist painting sold at auction? And you kind of can't even do the math because, like, what do you do when you have to divide by zero?
So, so when you look at this distribution, you have to ask the question, what gives rise to a normal distribution? What gives rise to a skewed distribution? A normal distribution comes from multiple factors happening, but they're additive. They don't interact with each other. So, for example, height is normally distributed because there are over a thousand genes that determine your height, but they don't interact with each other very much. So it's just like, oh, you know, flipped this switch on, this switch off, whatever.
But what I think happens at the tail in superachievers is they have a combination of features that are very rare together. They're, they're rarely found in the same person, and they often interact. And in my case, I would say that, you know, there are a lot of psychologists who are better at me at psychology. And there are a lot of writers who are far better than me. I mean, I can name them, John McPhee and Patchett. I mean, the list goes on, who they're better at writing. Judy Blume. I mean, Stephen King, right? But, but Judy Blume and Stephen King don't know about psychology. And a lot of my colleagues in psychology, I'm sorry to say, don't know a whole lot about writing.
So I think what happened to me, in addition to the pivots that you've asked me to describe, is that there was this dawning realization that I have a love of words, and I could bring that love of words with me in my work as a psychologist. And if I could use that, then maybe I could do something that, that would be really special. I think, I think the part, part of what I'm, um, hearing also is, I can stand, uh, on the Penn campus and give a 60-second talk. I can stand on a TED stage and give a six-minute talk. Um, I can, uh, stand in front of a room of thousands of people and have a 45-minute conversation, or I can write an entire book. And I, I can give you the form factors here in which you can digest it, and, and the level of detail that you want. And you can then take the lessons from that and make them actionable in your life. I mean, that, that feels like, am I right that, that's that's been part of the key in a way? It's the through line, right?
And to me, and I know that writers have different philosophies about the words that they string together and what they're trying to accomplish. But my literary agent, um, a wonderful mensch named Richard Pine, he said to me, Angela, you are a teacher. And and I think that's how I write. You know, I'm trying to do the same thing I was trying to do with my seventh graders, like teach them algebra. I'm like, how do I take this hierarchical linear model with the set of time-varying covariates and explain to a smart but non-social scientist person what the bottom line is for their lives? And it's precarious work because I don't want to mislead by simplifying, but I will, you know, stand up in front of you and say that I think it's honorable work. I think a lot of my academic friends thinks it think it's, um, um, and possibly worse than, you know, dangerous. You know, like they don't like the kind of TED Talk. They don't like this that we're having this conversation because it's impure. Because it's not, it's not academically, you know, enough. It's not nuanced enough. It doesn't, um, it doesn't, um, embrace the full complexity, right? There aren't, there aren't the, the caveats and the footnotes. You know, it's not just the form.
I think that bothers them. I think it really, in a meaningful way, disturbs them that people would leave out some of the things that they think are important. And I understand that. I, I feel that way myself. There's a, there's an Angela who hates the, you know, I wrote this whole book last year, which I realized, um, ended up only being one sentence of the current book that I'm writing. Like, literally, I spent 12 months trying to figure out how to explain to people the difference from the dorsal striatum and the, you know, the ventral striatum. And, you know, how goals and habit formation are related to what Skinner or Alley wrote. And, you know, after a year, I looked at what I wrote and I was like, no human being, including my mother, wants to read this. And and so I, I, I, I didn't throw it all away, but I started a new Google document. And quite literally, Jeff, that entire book is one sentence in in the new book. And I think there are a lot of academics who would say, I hate that one sentence. That one sentence leaves out a whole book. And they're right. But also, I think they're wrong.
Well, and they're wrong because why? Exactly. What, what are they wrong about? Okay, here I'm going to, um, I'm going to call on William James. You know, there's a kind of a joke in psychology that a psychologist isn't a real psychologist until they've invoked the great William James. So William James was, um, uh, the chair of Harvard's psychology department, um, almost exactly a century ago, maybe a little more. And William James actually, um, I wish he had lived to see TED Talks because he was, um, very much, you know, uh, engaged in the project of sharing what he had learned. I mean, he was a master of scale. He delivered a series of lectures that he called Talks to Teachers. Um, and by the way, um, William had a brother, Henry James. Henry James, you know, the famous writer and playwright. But the the joke in my discipline is that, uh, that, you know, Henry was the psychologist, but, but William was the writer because William James was such a, a beautiful communicator. And if you read the introductory, um, comments, you know, his first, um, uh, uh, words on the page, because you can actually just download Talks to Teachers for free, it's it's everywhere on the internet. He says, what I have learned from giving these lectures to school teachers is that, um, you know, that that I really needed to call, I needed to edit. And every time we would give a talk, I would learn to take out more and more of this, like, abstruse academic detail and leave in the practical implications and the most basic principles. And I have, um, you know, taken that to to heart. You know, for a time, and I've, I've lapsed a little bit, but I would reread the entire Talks to Teachers lecture series every summer as a discipline. Um, I think I've now sort of almost committed it to memory, so I don't need to do that. But I think that, you know, William James was a TED speaker. I mean, he he knew that if he could deliver a short lecture on the nature of memory, on the nature of attention, on habit formation, on love, on faith, that he would do more good than giving an 1,800-hour, you know, exposition that nobody would listen to.
Yeah, um, we'll link to the William James Talks to Teachers. Show that would be a great service to humanity. It it's reminiscent of the old sort of adage that, you know, why, why did you write me a 20-page memo? I didn't have time to write you a five-page memo. That's Mark Twain. Yeah.
But Angela, how, going back to kind of this inflection point, um, with the TED Talk and the book and and the branding around the word grit, how has it changed how you've thought about the scale of your impact in your career?
Well, you know, when you, um, embrace this role that William James, um, you know, with the same ambivalence I do, I think, you know, embraced, um, it's not that you don't wake up, uh, worrying. So I know you are a fan because you must be, Jeff, as are, you know, all of your listeners, of Danny Kahneman. And as you know, Danny passed away recently, um, at age 90. And, um, Danny and I were, um, right up until the end, working together on, um, a project. And, um, it was, in a way, the project of, you know, the pros and cons of oneliners. So Danny, um, said, and, uh, I agreed, and we wrote together with with students in this project in an article that will be coming out soon, that that in a way, what science is, is it's it's like, you know, psychology is the amassing of like more and more oneliners. You know, it's like, you know, X relates to Y. Like that's kind of the basic parency of what we do. Um, and and in terms of like the worrying about this, right? Danny and I, you know, realized because both of us had, in a way, become unlikely influencers. I guess I don't think Danny Kahneman set out to, you know, have a New York Times best-selling book and to be, um, known as, you know, the father of, you know, cognitive bias and so forth. But we both wrestled with this. And and we realized that when you come up with a oneliner, to, you know, grit predicts achievement. Grit is not the same thing as talent. You know, um, thinking fast is not the same thing as thinking slow. You know, what happens is that the simplification really does have a dark side. We like, oh, what about all the things that people are going to misunderstand? And in particular, the thing that we worry about most is that when you only metabolize one oneliner, then you can overestimate the importance of grit, the importance of cognitive biases, the importance of anything. And so we wrote this paper to say that oneliners were will probably always be, you know, in a way the currency of of, um, you know, how we communicate with each other because it's also how we learn and how we hear. You know, like people learn in oneliners. But one thing that we can do is to try to accumulate oneliners, right? And to kind of like write them all down and, you know, occasionally look. And I think I think you do this through the through the podcast and through these conversations and take a step back and reflect a little bit and not be so myopically focused on grit or on cognitive biases or anything else and say, okay, well, I've learned about escalation of commitment, but I've also learned about grit. And I've also learned about anchoring bias, but I've also learned about conscientiousness and also about culture and and and try your best to make sense of the oneliners, right? So that you don't have an oversimplified view and that you're not this like pendulum swinging from one fad to another. And I am more of the optimist of the two of us, as you won't be surprised, but I am hopeful that that human beings are able to do that.
Exactly that. Um, and I know that people like Danny Kahneman did exactly that. That that he was both able to communicate in simple ways that people could understand, but there really was, and maybe never will be, as complex a thinker.
What's the most important oneliner of your career?
Probably the most well-known is that grit is at least as important as talent in predicting achievement. Um, I think that's the one I'm known for. But I'm hoping, you know, to live a little longer and to do better than that.
Well, as you as you think about this next phase of your career, um, what, what does success look like?
What I have been occupied since writing Grit and, um, certainly for the last few years in earnest, is a second book and a second line of work, and it is on the power of the situation. So, you know, in a few words, grit is not enough. Right? And if you give me more words, you're like, oh, Angela, your oneliner can be a little longer. You can even have a semicolon. You know, I would say, okay, Jeff, how about this? Grit is not enough. You must have your situation as your ally. Um, and, and what I'm obsessed about is something that psychologists, in a way, it's like telling a chef that you know, you need to make sure you have to like put enough salt and fat into a dish. It's like the chefs are like, yeah, we know that. It's elementary. But I feel like that about how this power of the situation narrative is is blindingly obvious to to psychological scientists, but maybe not to those of us who are just navigating our everyday lives.
When I was growing up, and, um, Jeff, you know, you kind of navigated me through my my life history, you know, so much of what I accomplished was really trying harder. You know, like sitting there in my BC Calculus class, and I'm like, I know, I know that Derek got it faster, and, you know, Chang Kim got it faster, but they can't outwork me. Like, I am going to learn BC Calculus, right? And I felt like that for, I don't know, 40 years. And even in my own marriage, um, I thought to myself, wow, you know, my husband, I mentioned, is a real estate developer. Well, if you put two and two together, you realize he was a young real estate developer in 2008, right? And, um, it was a very, very stressful time. He was working some weeks 100 hours a week. I was on tenure track at an Ivy League institution. We had two young children who had to be taken care of. Like, there was so much stress, and the only trick I knew was try harder. The only trick I knew was grit. I was like, you know, I'm going to wake up earlier. I'm going to stay up later. I am going to use every ounce of my will to make the life that I need to make for my children and my husband and my career. And I'll tell you that that led to a real crisis. Um, it almost broke our marriage. Um, there were just, um, an unbelievable number of therapy hours that we logged, trying to rescue ourselves from the precipice.
And what has, you know, struck me now, and what I'm writing about, is that grit is not enough. You need a situation. We needed therapy. We needed our parents to actually like step in and basically talk some sense into us about, you know, our naive understanding of relationships and what a marriage really is. We needed to reach out to our friends and actually be vulnerable and not just have small talk, but actually tell them that we were in crisis. He needed to change his work situation. He has an advisory board now of mentors who, you know, kind of help him prioritize in ways that he would never be able to do on his own. I reached out to mentors to, you know, help me figure out my research program and help me accomplish it in more effective ways. And so to me, you know, grit is great, but grit is not enough. And you absolutely need to make your situation your ally if you're ever going to, you know, run the marathon of success.
What's the, what's the action item or the set of action steps for someone who has got the grit, you know, the determination? They're, they know that they're going to work hard enough to give themselves the best chance, but, but the situation isn't yet right. H, H, how, how do we assess that and what do we do about it?
Well, in a longer conversation, I would love, Jeff, to hear what you think about, um, founders. But I think one of the mistakes that I see founders make is because they've had this trick that has gotten them really far in life, like try harder and be independent, right? You know, to, not be a slacker, right? To not, like, whine and, you know, um, get other people to solve your problems. I think the, the double-edged sword of that is they don't ask for help. And what I would say is a number one action step is, like, you should be in a formal community of other founders, right? I think this is why I'm a big fan of incubators, especially the ones that are, you know, well, well-designed, like Y Combinator. Like there, there's a power in the solidarity, the accountability, and the peer learning of a group. You know, you want to be in a flotilla, not like off sailing on your own. So that's number one. And when I look back at the mistakes that I've made in advising young leaders, it was to not tell them that first. I'm like, oh, wait, who are you talking to? Like, what's your AA group, essentially? Right? If you don't have one, you need to get one right now. And the second one is related, which is, I think you need to make mentors. When you listen to people talk about their mentors, it's like, it's like a, a thing that falls out of heaven, you know, like, oh, I'm so grateful that this person came into my life and, you know, they put me on the straight and narrow and right. But they're not just falling out of heaven. You have to proactively make them. It's a relationship, and you need to start at the beginning and cultivate and, and, and so forth. And I think if we are honest with ourselves when we think about our most meaningful mentorships, we did have a role in in holding up our end of the relationship and even in initiating the relationship. So those would have been my two pieces of advice to founders. You know, go find another founder. It doesn't have to be your co-founder for your for your startup. It could be somebody who's doing something totally different, but you should be meeting regularly, trading stories, crying on other's shoulders. And then you should go and, um, very proactively cultivate mentoring relationships.
And for for that support group, have you found that it is enough to have nodes where I'm going to, you know, Ben for this and Roy for that and Sunil for this other thing, or or is it is it actually better if they all converge together, you actually convening your board of advisors, personal board of advisors to to talk through things?
I think it's both and. Um, you know, some people say, you know, you have, um, like friends for a season, friends for a reason, and friends for life. And, you know, whatever, like, whatever you want to phrase it. I do think there are different kinds of, um, of of peers. And sometimes there is the kind of like person you call for a reason, right? You're like, this person is amazing at operations, and I'm going to call them about this operations problem. And this person is a tech wonderkind, and I'm going to call them for the, but I'm not going to call the tech person for the oper, and, and vice versa. So I think that is true. And at the same time, I do think that, you know, if you are able to develop a a real relationship with somebody who you know through thick and thin, through the decades of your life, I mean, amazing. Now, again, that could be your co-founder, but it could, in many cases, be somebody who's like leading their own company, and you're coming back again and again. And, you know, honestly, like, gosh, like what a life, you know, when you come to the end of your life and you think, like, I did the hard things, but I found ways to make them easier, and I did it with this person that I love and have loved. You know, win-win-win, amazing.