Welcome to our next installment of Idea Lab. I'm Zoë Henry, a reporter with Inc.
and I'm joined today by Angela Duckworth, a professor of psychology at the
University of Pennsylvania and the author of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
Thank you for having me. Yeah, how are you? I'm great.
So just to give some context, Angela Duckworth was designated a MacArthur Fellow,
otherwise known as the MacArthur Genius grant. However, when you were growing up your
father would not necessarily have agreed with that characterization of genius
would he that's absolutely right out of the blue
my dad would occasionally say really apropos of nothing at all you know
you're no genius and I was a little girl probably you know doing my homework or
watching TV more or less minding my own business and I did have to wonder what
it was that inspired my dad to say things like that and he wasn't a mean
person and I don't think he meant didn't mean way but I think what he meant about
himself because I think when people are talking sometimes talking to you
they're often saying things that well that they're saying to themselves
talking observe and talking to me of course he was saying you know there's
not evidence here that that you know you're a natural genius that you're kind
of off the charts and being smarter than other people he meant what a lot of
people mean when they say words like genius natural or talent you know
somebody for whom excellence comes effortlessly somebody who was born
knowing how to dance or you know dunk a basketball or solve a mathematical
equation let's get into your research a little bit because I think a lot of what
you do in a lot of what you talk about is this other component besides talent
besides this natural aptitude if that in fact really exists that is necessary for
success that would be great what does that mean to have grit when
you're trying to do something really hard for example trying to get an
interview with a particular person and you know the answer is no and then you
ask again and the answer is still no and you know you ask the assistant and you
and make a contact with somebody else and the answer is still no the question
is do you give up or do you keep trying and to some extent what it means to be a
gritty person is to not give up to keep trying and how do you measure grit I
hear that you have this grit scale when I started studying grit the first thing
I needed to do is figure out how to measure it and I didn't want to just you
know think about it right or reflect on you know stories I really wanted to have
data so I started out by interviewing people who were super achievers people
who are at the top of their field and you know in sports the arts politics
business and I asked them to describe other superachiever the people that they
most admired and the grit scale was a questionnaire that almost verbatim
captures the qualities that were described to me the two themes being
passion over the long term married with perseverance over the long term and that
same questionnaire is what I put into the book so people can figure out you
know if they answer honestly how many they are so tell me a little bit about
the business executives that you've interviewed the entrepreneurs do you
find that they're very gritty people and do you think that grit is necessary to
achieve success in business to be perfectly honest I have not yet met a
world-class executive who is not a paragon of of grit of passion and
perseverance one of the people that you know knows a lot about grit is Jamie
Dimon who's of course the leader of JPMorgan Chase one of the largest banks
in the world what was interesting to me about that conversation is that what he
chose to begin with when I started to ask him about you know his success was
actually a story about his failure you know the first thing that he said to me
was like let me tell you about the time I was fired that is actually I think the
kind of thing that I'm learning from people who exemplify grit in in Jamie's
case that it's not about being involving perfect
what Jamie took out of that experience is that how you react to that failure is
signature to who you are as a leader not the failure itself but your reaction to
that another example that you point to in your book is the founder of Shopify
Toby like Toby was you know growing up and in
Germany and you know not demonstrating any of the hallmarks of a future success
right in particular he was doing horribly badly in his academic classes
although he was very smart I think and so he ended up doing this kind of
vocational internship and programming and he had a mentor named Jurgen but
every time before work and did you know Toby would print out the code that he
had written and and give it to your again and Jurgen would overnight with
the red marker you know mark it up and you know show what he could have done
better and through this cycle of continuous improvement Toby did improve
and not only did he improve in his coding his confidence improved and
finally there came a day where a very important client was supposed to be
walked through the new software that been developed and uragan said to Toby
you're gonna take this not me and I think that's what you find with people
who are very greedy that there wasn't mentor in their life who pushed them
hard beyond what they thought they could do at the moment how do you find the
balance between pushing yourself enough to get to where you need to go and just
completely derail in yourself it's it's for that person that you're coaching you
know what is just beyond what they can do I'm not saying that it's easy to
figure that out but that's what you're aiming for right you know not what they
can do comfortably not what's impossible for them to do but something with you
know some support they could get there and in fact actually when you ask
developmental psychologists how children grow up and how do they learn to walk
and how do they learn to talk and do all the things that grown-ups do what's
really important is that they're constantly being asked to do things that
are just beyond what they can comfortably do now and we have to learn
to do that as as grown-ups and speaking about pushing yourself beyond beyond
limits or to the limit let's talk a little bit about West Point I know that
you've done a fair amount of research there you've applied the grit scale
which has successfully predicted which which students which cadets would make
it through beast barracks which is this beginning beginning training course that
is infamously very very hard to complete what do you think that entrepreneurs can
learn from West Point cadets the fascinating thing about West Point is
that it takes really two years if you think about the admission process to
college which we both know pretty well it's pretty tough it's very stressful
you know that pales in comparison to what it takes to get into a place like
West Point you know the Congressional
recommendation the physical fitness test and I think the fascinating thing about
this admissions process is that nevertheless you have cadets who are
admitted 18-year old men and women who could make it through West Point and do
well but who drop out before for example that first summer of beast barracks
training is over so the question is for an entrepreneur how is my life like
beast barracks right I think what it has in common is you're in a place where
you're doing things that you've never done before that you're possibly failing
at or at least below average and I think we face that decision you know do I
stick with this thing and commit to finishing and commit to improving on my
weaknesses or do I take the easier path which is to drop out I mean at West
Point for instance you don't necessarily have someone who's who's you know really
coaching you but you have people who have done this successfully what can you
do when you're an entrepreneur and you're starting something completely new
you might not necessarily have guidance in your particular area I mean what if
what advice would you have for for someone like that here I think we can
think about what it is about people who can do what some of the most successful
people that I've studied do which is to find a mentor to give them the coaching
and also the support that they need right so how do I become the sort of
person who mentors would like to mentor I recently did a talk at investment bank
called Evercore and one of the senior executives said to the group of more
junior executives figure out how you can be a great mentee that will attract a
great mentor and that is a big part of actually becoming better and better at
what you do there's this one anecdote in your book where you recall a radio
commentator observing Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton and their communication
styles and he effectively says you know both are very good communique
but while bill is a natural hillary is obviously trying she's a little bit more
stilted she's not a natural in the way that bill is so a what do you think
about that what does that sort of indicate about our perception of effort
as a society and then B what do you think that entrepreneurs maybe could
learn from Hillary Clinton's work ethic you know this contrast that many of us
have and I'll confess to have having it myself really especially before I got
deep into the research is that there are Naturals and they're the winners and
they're the ones for whom things really come spontaneously without any training
or experience and then there are the strivers who sort of claw their way to
you know maybe almost as high a bar but but not quite and that really is the you
know Bill Clinton versus Hillary Clinton contrast that that a lot of us have I
have some perspective on this too because I was in the speechwriting
Department for a summer during the Clinton administration and it's it's
even at the level of being you know that close to things you know people would
often talk about bill as being a complete natural really now what I think
is absolutely true is that there are people who have aptitudes and interests
that are genetic that incline them in a certain direction you know people who
are interested in communicating to other people and who are sensitive to okay I
noticed that that person's not looking at me anymore so maybe they're not
interested in more that that I think is real and so I don't want to say that
there's no such thing as Talent by the same token when Bill Clinton was born he
was a baby and babies don't know anything so he had to at some point in
his life acquire speechmaking skills and and the question in my mind is how ever
you easily or with more difficulty acquire these things you do at the end
of the day have to practice and acquire them and so to some extent even naturals
are also strivers and what do you think about the the political candidates would
you say that maybe one of them is grittier than another based on what
you've seen in debates or campaigns I think that at the level of you know
being a presidential candidate for the United States of America you have to be
at a pretty high threshold of grit it's you know inconceivable to me that you
would get there without being very very passionate and and very very persevering
right whether you're right about all your policy positions is a completely
separate question why don't we talk a little bit about applications of grit in
the workplace so say I'm an entrepreneur and I want to hire a really great gritty
workforce right early stages of the company don't necessarily have a lot of
capital like you need to be really tight and I don't want a lot of turnover in
the next six months the next year which means they probably want some gritty
employees what can entrepreneurs be on the lookout for when hiring employees
leaders want gritty people on their team and the question is how do I find them
and how do I know before I've had that person work for me which are those
gritty people right the one thing I would not do is you know give them a
questionnaire where they can fake their answer right I think a questionnaire
like the grit scale is awesome for reflection right that's so great for
hiring it's totally fake bull right completely fake of all right I am a hard
worker I finished whatever I begin I think I know how to get a grit score of
5 out of 5 right but the second thing that people have you know sometimes
think about leaders say like oh I'll interview for it right I'll sit down
this person for a good 45 minute conversation and I'll ask them about
their failures and their setbacks and then I'll be able to figure out how
gritty they are I think they're - I'm not confident that really you know
talking to somebody about what they did do or what they could have done or you
know how they think about things I'm not sure that that's really an accurate
assessment of their grit when I think of grit I think is this person gonna wake
up tomorrow morning and be pointing in the same direction how how hard are they
really gonna work after their first mmm performance review you know when they're
actually doing well at their job are they gonna be hungry to get even better
relentlessly committed to excellence all of those things are easy to talk about
in 45 minutes very very hard to do my best idea is to look at somebody's
resume look for evidence of grit where are the
trends there that say oh yeah this person did something for not one year
but a number of years and then ask the question okay what evidence do I have
that they actually progressed in that when we code resumes for that we can
actually predict all the same things as we do with the grit scale yeah that's
sort of interesting because I feel like it's a popular idea right now that may
be actually hopping jobs and you know trying a bunch of different things is
actually better for your career I mean I think there's research that shows that
more Millennials are doing that than their parents were than previous
generations were so what's fascinating about the Millennial you know we kind of
like to bash Millennials right you know you're one so you've been bashed
actually right by people like me who are older and we like to complain about how
you know you hop jobs and you look at the National Bureau of Labor Statistics
which actually tracks that sort of thing and 20-somethings today are no more
mobile then 20-somethings were a decade ago to get two decades ago going back to
when the data were being collected so it's actually not true that Millennials
job hop more than 20-somethings in previous generations what is true is
that they job hop more than 40 year olds like me 40-somethings or 60 something's
and I think the reason is that 20-somethings don't know yet what they
want to do and so they are exploring whereas by the time you're you know 60
something one hope sounds a figurative happen exactly trial and error trial
yeah yeah because I find that some of the grittiest people that you've
interviewed that you speak about in your book didn't have a linear path to to
what they're doing to success right the former East Africa bureau chief for the
New York Times who knew that he loved East Africa but didn't necessarily think
that journalism was you know what he wanted to do with this life so he's sort
of you know through this roundabout way became a journalist as a way of getting
to East Africa and to me that's sort of interesting that reflects this
trajectory of grit that isn't that isn't straight an era you do kind of have to
try a bunch of different things and see what sticks right I think that when you
look at very matured gritty people you know people who I would call you know
Paragons of grit because they full exemplify passion and perseverance it's
true that they have this kind of life organizing top-level goal you can call
it an ultimate concern something for which all the other things that they're
trying to do or really just means to ends right like means to this one thing
that they're trying to accomplish but then you can ask well how did they get
that way right they usually didn't you know have this
vision of where they ultimately wanted to go until at some point where they
were kind of halfway in the middle of exploring and getting there so they have
these low-level goals and mid-level goals at some point they realize you
know what I want to be in the Olympics but it didn't start out that way
you know Jeff gentlemen if you talk to him when you was 18 you said you know
what I think you're gonna become a journalist someday I don't know that he
would have believed you how does that sort of reflect on maybe choosing a
business idea I think that you could talk to a lot of people about to start
their own companies who think wow I could do this or I could do this or I
could do this and you sort of have to find the balance between something
that's realistic there is actually a market there and this could work and
something that you're passionate about right so how do you choose your business
idea yeah you know we're choosing a business idea here's one way I think
that you can make these decisions you know for a lot of people they think oh
the business idea is you know starting a cookie business right you know it's that
actually the idea that motivates you or is it something a little bit more
abstract so is it the cookie business or is it that I like baking and food and I
want to take care of people I think actually trying to introspect and say
what is it that I am really passionate about it's not usually the very very
particular concrete specifics it is usually something more general and that
should be the compass that should be what guides you and then once you start
your company how do you think that grit affects the way that an entrepreneur
leads right so I mean you could think about things like raising venture
capital you need to raise capital but at the same time that means that you do
have to give over some control some other people are gonna have a stake in
your business so how would a gritty person sort of manage that would they
avoid raising capital you know all these local decisions you know should I take
the VC funding should I you know keep the equity here you know should I
outsource this function or should I keep it in-house there really
or bigger purpose I think the ultimate concern here is to build the best
business that I can whether I take the VC capital or not it's just a question
of like is that gonna advance that high level goal but doesn't a gritty person
want to sort of own their idea and be able to control the trajectory you know
I think the idea of grit is about trying to achieve something that's really
important and interesting to you if that means in some cases giving up a little
to control these things if they get you to where ultimately you want to go then
that's good who do you think is like the grittiest entrepreneur you've ever
interviewed well one of the people that I studied although I mostly talked to
his mom Jackie is Jeff Bezos who's of course the founder of amazon.com you
know one thing that Jackie Bezos his mom did was to encourage his interests for
Jeff it was problem-solving I mean he used to take apart things and build
because he was fascinated with like how to fix stuff and you know in a way
amazon.com is just one big problem solver I think that the idea of asking
yourself what am I so interested in that even if I didn't get paid would I be
thrilled to do what I could genuinely say I love my work you know I think
that's the direction which will also be the most successful in right what do
parents need to be doing or thinking about to raise great kids so I've got
two kids at home and actually they're two girls and ones 14 and one just
turned 13 and I had the first one just before going to get my PhD and the
second one in my first year so in a way I kind of grew up as a psychologist
studying the science of excellence at the same time as I was raising like he's
a weight living it's like yeah so here's one thing that I took home as a lesson
you know based on the research but actually you know just as much based on
my experience as a mom you know I told my kids when they were even 5 or 6 years
old that I did want them to do something even at that young age that was hard and
what I meant by hard is the kind of practice that experts do you know
constantly working on something that is for them a relative weakness right so
not a place where you would go and people just praise you and then you'd go
home but you know actually I want you to hold your arm this way
we know one when Madeleine is exactly which is actually both of them ended up
in ballet now I didn't let them quit they were only allowed to quit at the
end of the tuition payment so there was a little parental enforcement because
when it was a sunny day and they wanted to go play outside instead of going to
the ballet studio they asked me if they could quit but no I didn't let them quit
until it was a natural stopping point you know I think that the the leaders of
this world are all parents you know the word parent means to bring forth and and
that's what a true leader does they are bringing out the best in you and so the
the great people that I've interviewed who are themselves mature Paragons of
grit are in most cases themselves mentoring the next generation do you
think that grit guarantees happiness I mean we talk a lot about the
psychological price of entrepreneurship once you have a successful company that
doesn't necessarily mean that you are happy you know when I look at the
question scientifically and we measure grit in the same people in which we
measure their life satisfaction their happiness or we could do different ways
measuring how much positive motion they have or the opposite of that how much
negative emotion you have crystal-clear picture which is that grit and happiness
and well-being go hand-in-hand so the people who are at the top of the charts
for me on grit are also in my research at the top of the charts on happiness
that said it doesn't mean grits like guarantee because this is a relationship
it's on average people are high grit on average are happy with their lives but
it is the clear trend I think for me the question is how can they be so happy
with their lives when they're constantly trying to improve and they're always
looking to be something better than they were yesterday and I think the answer is
that I can say of myself that I am comfortable being uncomfortable I am
satisfied being dissatisfied with the last thing that I did and that kind of
process of always trying to get better for me is it's self gratifying in a in a
way that's different from you know pleasure yeah but you make this really
interesting point in your book about you haven't necessarily interviewed the
wives or the children of some of these super successful executives Jamie Dimon
it took me like so it's sort of hard to tell right I mean if does great comet
the expense maybe of your personal life it is an excellent question to ask
whether greedy people are themselves super happy with their lives but at the
expense of all the nearest and dearest to them right and I haven't actually
collected any date on that but I do have two daughters and a husband so I simply
ask them and I even just the other day asked my 14 year old even she knows that
I'm here doing the interview and I'm therefore not at home when she comes
back from school and she did say to me like I wish you were home you know like
I wish you weren't gonna have to go to New York for that interview and then I
said to her like do you think that it would be better if I were a little less
gritty and she took a moment to think about it and she said no I think you're
pretty great so for me I think there are these trade-offs absolutely but one of
the things I'm trying to do as a parent is to show to my daughters what it means
to pursue a career that is deeply meaningful to you and infinitely
interesting always trying to get better and always getting up when things don't
go right so you have advice for entrepreneurs who maybe struggle with
this idea of of work-life balance being an entrepreneur like so many other
really challenging things is an endurance sport right it is not a sprint
it is truly a marathon you do have to think about you know how can I take care
of myself so that I can be here just tomorrow right but but for the long run
that does mean taking time to exercise that does mean you know calling your
best friend when you let yourself do the things that you've kind of sworn off
because they're not supposed to be part of the goal they actually end up helping
you get there yeah right because you could be wasting time stressing out or
crying when you could be calling someone who could give you emotional support who
might actually help you achieve a goal even faster right yeah it's not just
about working harder and longer it is about working smarter right and one
thing that's really interesting to me in talking to business leaders and
executives is that sometimes they feel like the younger people coming up don't
do enough periodic reflection I'm wondering if you think that women
entrepreneurs have to be grittier their male counterparts you know I've
been asked this question by a lot of very successful women executives and
also for example women who make it to partner in law firms and their
hypothesis is that in fact you do need more grit to be a woman because in
addition to all the challenges that both men women face you have extra ones
challenges that you would say well they shouldn't be there but they are there
how do you create a gritty culture to things it culturally support grit one is
that it does need to be a culture of high expectations of you know we're
never done improving the Japanese word for this is kaisi right and I do think a
culture of Kaizen can be intentionally created by a leader the second thing I
think that a leader needs to do is to be truly unconditionally supportive for the
people who work for you they need to feel two kinds of support I'll use the
word affection or you know some leaders have
even said loved ya you know which they really do mean it in the sense that like
you are truly caring for these people as other human beings the other kind of
support is autonomy support is the jargony psychological term rate but I
think of it as respect you can be a leader who says look I am demanding but
I really care about you and I really respect you as an individual when you
say that you have a different opinion than me I'm actually listening because I
think you have something that's valuable to say that combination of demand and
support is very powerful in in forging grit when you're a startup I think it's
probably pretty easy to make you're not easy but it's simpler to make your
employees feel supported right it's simpler to see what's going on to be
able to give them tasks and see how well they're excelling but as you grow it's a
lot harder to you know be as as focused on creating that culture so do you have
any advice for maintaining that feel as the company gets larger I would take a
page actually from from people like Jamie Dimon or Kat Cole you know they
really try to build a core team an executive team that is you know really
consistently emphasizing the same values the same traditions that they would
themselves so that they don't have to be in every meeting that they
now have other people who are you know saying the same thing and I think human
beings are very good at actually emulating somebody who is in a more
senior position and that's where a bigs a question like how do you look for a
co-founder I just went through this process so I think a non-profit so I'm a
I'm an entrepreneur in a sense because I started a non-profit but of course it's
a non-profit not a for-profit company I had the same problem that many
entrepreneurs did I knew that I didn't have all the skills that you would need
to make this nonprofit accomplish its mission which is advancing the science
and practice of character development I had the science part but I didn't have
the educational practice part so I looked around for somebody who would
complement me that said though Donald and I have different skills we're both
extremely ready and I simply can't imagine this working out very well if we
weren't well matched in how hard we were willing to work our passion for the goal
of this organization so we are matched on grit but different in our skills
there's one moment in your book where you're describing coming up to an
esteemed colleague and esteemed person in psychology Marty Seligman my advisor
your advisor you're sort of telling him about your research and he looks at you
and he goes you haven't had a good idea in two years then he says you need to
stop reading so much and start thinking what did that mean to you and was it
helpful because I hear you developed a formula for achievement after that what
Marty meant by that is that you cannot come up with a great idea simply by
reading other people's ideas he wanted me to draw on my own experience you know
I realized that he he was right could he have said it a different way maybe but
the thing that Marty was pointing out was that I was doing these studies and
each of the studies was Phi I mean they're interesting but they didn't add
up to a an overall theory of achievement and he knew that if I were gonna really
make a difference that I had to put it all together
and and that's what the book is when we think about achieving something no
matter what it is you know making a better roast chicken or you know selling
more units you know it it's always going from here to there it's always going
from where I am right now to where I want to be and I thought about it I
but you know distance what do we know about distance and I remember in my high
school physics class where we all learned I think distance equals rate
times time right so to get somewhere you have to be traveling a certain speed and
you travel for some amount of time and the faster you go and the more time you
spend well the farther you get and I think in a very real sense achievement
is like skill times effort then you can ask the question okay where these skills
come from that I think has another equation efforts in this equation too
because of course you try but the thing that you're multiplying effort by is
talent right so how how much better do I get every time I give an interview oh
wow I'm really talented every time I do an interview I get a lot better so if
you put these two equations together right you do a little bit of algebra you
get achievement is equal to talent times effort times effort and effort counts
twice because effort helps you build your skill so I think the mind meta
theory is that achievement is a product of both talent and effort but in some
sense effort counts twice thank you so much for your time today and for joining
us for idea lab thank you so much it's been a total pleasure
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