32. Angela Duckworth Explains How to Manage Your Goal Hierarchy

**Steve Levitt** (0:03)
So I taped an interview with Angela Duckworth for People I Mostly Admire a while back. But before we published it, Stephen Dubner gave it a listen. And he said, wow, I really love that interview. Is there any way that I could take it and publish it instead in the Freakonomics Radio feed? And look, I will do anything for Stephen. So I said, sure, no problem. You take it.
So he published it, and all was good. But you know, I went back a few days ago, and I listened to it, and I love it too.
So I decided I'm going to repossess that interview. And today, back where it belongs in its rightful home, on People I Mostly Admire, my conversation with Angela Duckworth.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:47)
Welcome to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levitt.

**Steve Levitt** (0:54)
I first encountered Angela Duckworth 15 years ago when she came to the University of Chicago Department of Economics to give an academic seminar. I don't remember many details, only that my colleagues, who are always raucous and rude, were particularly outspoken that day. It was the first time I remember a psychologist being invited to give a seminar in the economics department, and also the last.
I'm not sure what my colleagues so disliked about Angela's work back then, but I think it's fair to say that Angela has definitely had the last laugh. It is hard to imagine how anyone could have been much more successful than she has been over the last 15 years, both inside and outside of academics. Let me make a prediction before we get started today. Officially, I'm supposed to be interviewing Angela, but I'm pretty sure, given my past conversations with her, it won't take long before I become the interviewee and she the interviewer.
Angela Duckworth, it is so great to get to talk to you today. People get to hear you chatting with Stephen Dubner on a regular basis on your joint podcast, No Stupid Questions. But I suspect you and I will have a very different sort of conversation today for better or for worse.

**Angela Duckworth** (2:04)
I look forward to it. I'm going to call you Levitt throughout this conversation so I don't get confused.

**Steve Levitt** (2:10)
All right. That's how I feel most comfortable. So let's start with grit. In 2016, you wrote a book called Grit that really touched a nerve in society. It became a mega bestseller. Could you give us the two-minute version of grit?

**Angela Duckworth** (2:24)
The two-minute version of grit is that when you look at high achievers, so Olympic athletes and frankly, Steve, people like, oh, Levitt, people like you, entrepreneurs who are really successful across all these different fields, they have one thing in common, likely not the only thing, but one common denominator that I've studied as a psychologist is this combination of perseverance and passion over really long periods. That's what I call grit. I think if you wanted a one word synonym, it would be stamina.
So it turns out that these Nobel laureates and Olympic athletes and high achievers across other domains try to do things that are really hard. They're typically trying to achieve a certain thing. So they're not waking up every day working really hard on a variety of different pursuits. They are trying to achieve what I sometimes call a top level goal, something that might take years or decades or a lifetime, but which is for them worth pursuing at the cost of other, maybe easier, maybe more novel directions.

**Steve Levitt** (3:29)
So what I think often gets lost in the shuffle is that grit isn't actually a characteristic of a person. It's an interaction between a person and a project. And that's one thing that's frustrated me in the broader discussion. For instance, you have this grit test you can take online where there are a bunch of questions.
And then I, as a person, am given a grit score. But don't you think that kind of mixes up the message? We don't want to be gritty about everything. We want to be gritty about the right thing.

**Angela Duckworth** (4:02)
So I do think that grit is a quality of the individual. And I also think you can't be gritty in a vacuum. You have to be gritty about something. But when I say it's a characteristic of a person, imagine that there was a universal law that Levitt couldn't do what he's doing now, or that Angela Duckworth wasn't allowed to be a psychologist. The question is, in this hypothetical world where you can't do this thing that you've been doing for really your whole professional life, what would you do? Would you become a dilettante? Would you retire?