When Life's Not Working, Don't Try Harder. Change Your Situation Instead. | Angela Duckworth

**Dan Harris** (0:03)
Hello, everybody, welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. As many of you know, I am very interested in, perhaps too interested in the topic of success. And when we think about success, we often think about things like hard work or luck or smarts or emotional regulation. But I think, quite infrequently, I'll speak for myself, do we think about your situation, like the people you're surrounded by and your physical location? Turns out there's a bunch of research to show that your situation matters a ton. So how do you influence your situation?
That's what my guest is going to talk about today. Said guest is Angela Duckworth. You may know her from her huge bestselling book, Grit. She's got a new book out called Situated. She is also a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Angela Duckworth, welcome back to the show.

**Angela Duckworth** (0:58)
Dan, it's good to be with you again.

**Dan Harris** (1:00)
You made a big name outside of Academic Circles. You already had a big name in Academic Circles when you wrote a book called Grit.
You gave a TED Talk on it. You published a bunch of research on it. Chapter one in this new book, which again is called Situated, is called, I believe, Beyond Grit. So what's that all about?

**Angela Duckworth** (1:17)
I studied high achievers from my very first day of graduate school and my first preoccupation with them was everything that they have in their heads that makes them different. Who wins multiple gold medals over multiple Olympics?
Who takes home the Grammy, the Oscar? And I really wanted to know psychologically what is different about their mindsets, their habits, the way they organize their goals. And I still believe in all of that, Dan. I still believe that there is an inside game to achieving your potential and I wrote a book about it. I tried to write down responsibly everything I knew about what I had learned from these achievers, not just by interviewing them, but by doing large scale longitudinal research. Then I became interested in, as you said, everything that's around a person that is equally a common denominator of achieving your potential.
That, it turns out, is actually harder, I think, to think about, to write about, to study. But there is a great deal of research, including my own, that shows that the situations we are in powerfully shape everything we do think and feel. I think if there's one maybe non-obvious take home of this book, it is that you can change your situation. We're often taught not to think about our circumstances because we should look inside for what we can control. And I want people to look inside and outside for what they can control.

**Dan Harris** (2:52)
When you say situation, what are you referring to specifically?

**Angela Duckworth** (2:56)
Well, what I'm referring to is everything, Dan.
So what chair you're sitting in, the light, what's within reach, what's out of reach, everything physically around you. Like if you were filming a movie, what are the props, what is the scenery, what are the past, I mean, every physical detail. And then also every element of your social situation, like who are those people, what are they doing, what are they saying? And even at the level of greatest abstraction, I mean your culture, you know, like, are you in Philadelphia? Are you in Philadelphia in the summer? Are you in San Francisco? Are you in Singapore? So I think these aspects of your situation are so all encompassing. Everything from like, how far is your cell phone from you right now? Do you have a water bottle near you? To like, are you in an individualist culture right now? Or not? I mean, it's all your situation.
And, you know, I know it might seem like some of those aspects are changeable, some of them not. I'm going to make the perhaps provocative argument that everything about your situation, you have some agency to change if you think it can be improved.

**Dan Harris** (4:12)
We'll get into that, for sure. Tell me a little bit about exactly what the research shows, though.

**Angela Duckworth** (4:18)
Let me begin with the problem of self-control. That's something that I started working on also on my first day of graduate school. Self-control and grit sound like the same thing to a lot of people. They're not. They're close cousins, I would say, but they're not exactly the same thing. Grit is passion and perseverance for years and decades, you know, really striving to achieve some meaningful and especially challenging goal.
Self-control everybody needs, no matter how ambitious they are, because everybody needs to get to bed at a reasonable hour, you know, eat this, not that, get some amount of physical activity, do their taxes, floss their teeth. And self-control is doing what is better for you, not just 50 years from now, but even five minutes from now, and forgoing some temptation that is instantly rewarding. Self-control has always been a problem for humanity. I would argue in the modern era, we have fashioned temptations that humanity has never dealt with before, like, you know, the infinite scroll, ultra-processed food and so forth. So self-control and grit are not the same thing, but they are close cousins because they are both about, you know, living a life that you want to lead.