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The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk
The Price of Becoming
www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming
My guest: Angela Duckworth is a psychologist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and a MacArthur "genius" grant recipient. Her book Grit was a #1 New York Times bestseller, and her TED Talk is among the most-watched ever. Her new book is Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best.
Key Learnings
She almost lost her mom in the Atlantic. Angela took her 87-year-old mom snorkeling miles offshore. Her mom had not swum in decades. Within minutes, she had aspirated water into both lungs and was unconscious. Angela treaded water, held her mom's head up with one arm, and waved the other until help came. Her mom is 91 now and painting.
No amount of grit would have saved them. Angela could not have swum her mother to shore. What saved them was changing the situation, which meant getting other people to their side.
The situation is the ocean. It's that powerful, and most of us don't know what water we're swimming in.
Grit isn't wrong. It's incomplete. Angela hasn't renounced anything. She's expanding it. Effort is what you bring. The situation determines whether that effort compounds or gets swallowed.
Angela was a striver, and it worked for a long time. She knew she wasn't the most talented kid, but nobody was going to outwork her. She wanted to make the cheerleading squad without being able to do a split. She wanted a solo in choir while barely able to carry a tune. She worked her way to both. Most people would be surprised how far sheer effort can take them.
Then it stopped being enough. To get as far as she actually wanted to go, and to do it sustainably for herself and the people around her, ignoring the situation was a mistake.
The shift: stop making the best of your situation through effort alone, and make the situation better first.
"Of all the ways you can change your behavior, willpower is the absolute worst."
You can white-knuckle a donut. You just can't do it forever. Resisting works in the moment and reliably leaves people exhausted, which is why it fails on day three.
Your urges come from your thoughts. Your thoughts come from your surroundings. Donut, delicious. Then your hand moves. Instead of fighting the urge, ask where the thought came from.
The better question: what situation would give me different thoughts? Not "how do I resist," but "where can I be so that the thought never arrives?"
Three inputs shape what you think: the people around you, the physical objects within reach, and the place you're in.
Situational agency. Angela coined the term. The situation isn't given to you. It's taken.
Leon Marchand was already sixth in the world. His parents, both former Olympians, didn't tell him to train harder or wake up earlier. They told him to change his situation. He emailed Bob Bowman, moved to Arizona, and within two years cut more than eight seconds off his personal best and broke Michael Phelps's last-standing individual world record. A year after that, he won four golds in Paris.
What actually changed for Marchand: the best coach in the sport, a lane full of people who all believed they could win it all, better facilities and nutrition and physical therapy, and a culture where world-class was the baseline rather than the ceiling.
The situation isn't a given. The situation's taken.
Control the controllables. The situation is one of them. Angela agrees with the mantra. Her objection is that most people apply it only to what's between their ears: mindset, attitude, goals. Marchand didn't rethink his attitude. He got on a plane.
Get the outside game right, and you get much of the inside game for free. Change the room and the thoughts change with it.
Every reason you can't change your situation is probably true, and beside the point. When Angela told people what she was writing, they immediately listed the reasons they were stuck. The mother-in-law, the spouse's job, the kids' school. None of it is wrong. All of it ignores the list of things they could change.
Her late father-in-law's whole philosophy was two words: show up. Wedding, funeral, baseball game. Show up.
John Wooden taught high school English for 14 years. He kept an apple on his desk. He thought of himself as a teacher first, which is also why he sat high in the bleachers during games instead of courtside. He'd taught them in practice. The game was theirs.
What Wooden's players took with them: to be your best at anything, find a great teacher. Angela sees a DIY culture pulling the other way. When she tells young people to email someone, the answer is often that they'll just learn it on YouTube or ask a chatbot. You can teach yourself a lot of guitar that way. You will not become a great guitarist alone.
Belief is borrowed more than you'd think. Nobody tries hard at anything without the thought "I can do this" somewhere in their head. That thought usually arrives from someone else first.
Angela was a self-described ditzy cheerleader throwing keg parties. Her 10th- and 12th-grade English teacher, Mr. Carr, saw a writer. He handed her books. He took time on her pages. By graduation, she was the rare Harvard freshman who signed up for a second semester of the required writing course, just to keep going.
The Pygmalion effect. Bob Rosenthal made up a test, told elementary teachers which kids were about to bloom, and picked the names at random. The teachers called on those kids more, listened harder, encouraged more. By year's end, the kids fulfilled the prophecy they'd been randomly assigned.
Every single person she has interviewed has a Mr. Carr. Olympic athletes, Olympic coaches, CEOs, world leaders. Someone who could see farther than they could see.
Confidence is a half-filled helium balloon. It has to get batted back up again and again. Which means you don't need your mentor once. You need them on the bad days.
Angela forwards her rejection letters to her team. The journals she submits to reject over 90 percent of submissions, and the rejections run eight single-spaced pages. She sends them around so the younger scientists watch her fail, hear that she's angry and discouraged, and then watch her get back up.
She failed writing this book the first time. Up before dawn seven days a week through an entire sabbatical, and the clock ran out. She called her publisher and her agent to give the money back and asked whether she owed interest. They called it a pause. She said remote controls have separate buttons for pause and stop.
Burnout and imposter syndrome were abstractions until they weren't. She had taught both. She had never lived either. Not eating, not sleeping. What got her out was not more effort. It was a better situation: additional editorial support and mentors to get her back on track.
Frankl and Maslow argued about this for decades, and Maslow conceded. Self-actualization aimed only at yourself leaves you unfulfilled. Maslow's final writing added a level above it and named it self-transcendence.
There are only two types of people: those who are humble, and those who are about to be humbled.
Angela's champagne moment a year from now: celebrating the people around her. Erikson called this stage generativity, and the question it asks is how everything you've learned can help the next generation do better than you did. Her students should excel her. They should be the ones on podcasts. She wants to cede the spotlight on purpose rather than have it taken.
Her core identity is psychological scientist. Not speaker. Not author. The stage is a flow state, and she's good at it, but take away the research, and it isn't her anymore. Worth knowing which one yours is.
Reflection Questions
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#591: Ryan Holiday - Do The Right Thing Right Now
#673: Dan Coyle - Flourish. The Transformative Power of Creating CommunityPodcast Chapters
00:00 Apply for the Learning Leader Circle
01:39 Meet Angela Duckworth
02:57 The Dedication to Her Mother
04:17 Her Mother Nearly Drowned
07:08 Grit Isn't Enough
09:47 Willpower Is the Worst
12:26 Where Your Urges Come From
14:31 Marchand Got on the Plane
19:57 The Excuses That Sound True
22:27 Wooden Taught English for 14 Years
26:25 The Confidence You Borrow
32:22 Five Minutes With Pete Carroll
34:27 A Half-Filled Helium Balloon
35:29 She Forwards Her Rejections
37:05 What Success Feels Like
40:28 Frankl, Maslow, Self-Transcendence
45:59 The Book She Failed to Write
52:57 The Champagne Question
54:03 She Wants to Be Surpassed
57:27 Scientist First, Speaker Second
01:01:34 EOPC