Thank you. One of my daughters is nineteen, and she is quite literally torn between applied math and behavioral science psychology. And when I smiled as you shared that story, I was trying to think of the multiple reasons why you might be a little disenchanted from having dipped your toe in the water of psychological science those decades ago, because some people would say, "Oh, this is all about depression and schizophrenia and fascism." But there are other reasons. And I will just say from my daughter's ambivalence, it's not really that so much because psychology shifted, but more than psychology is also like a mile wide and an inch deep, unlike economics and physics and other fields. So anyway, there would be at least a couple of reasons why people might say, yeah, I'm interested in human nature, but I'm disenchanted and don't want to go in that direction anyway. I'm glad that you're still engaged, and I'm still engaged.

Well, thank you. And I'm looking forward to this conversation. I think Gandhi and all of our great leaders are psychologists. Right, because how could they not be? And what is more interesting or more difficult to understand is the nature of who we are. So I'm excited to see where you take us.

I'm happy to share a very fast forward express lane version of the biography that led me to research human achievement. I grew up in a family and actually not just my nuclear family, but my extended family. You could either call it a healthy obsession with achievement or perhaps an unhealthy obsession with achievement, depending on your evaluation of it. But my upbringing led me to believe that achievement was very important in life, maybe the most important thing in life. And again, I'm not saying that was a good thing, but it was true. And then, B, I heard so often this kind of like, oh, this cousin's smart that cousin's even smarter. The implicit narrative was that achievement was very much about IQ and giftedness. The great people did things kind of magically because they were different from everyone else and so much more innately capable.

I knew that that wasn't me because even in my homeroom, meaning my classroom of maybe 30 kids when I was in fifth grade, I was ten years old. I could look around and say, "Well, those two people are more intelligent than I am." So what does this imply for the limit on what I could achieve? And I grew up to actually question that assumption and question that narrative and to ask the question instead, what else is there like how much is possible? And what I came to in the research on grit is that maybe hidden from view when we see what someone eventually becomes is the process that led them there. What we inevitably find is not a very short, straight-line journey, but a long journey with setbacks and lots of practice. And what we see about experts when we go to YouTube and look at 14 seconds of high achievement is that but what we don't see is the years where they were kind of a bumbling idiot, honestly, and all the mistakes and rough drafts that are hidden.

So I think it is very much about sustained passion and perseverance over long periods because that is the nature, I think, of human achievement that is somewhat obscured from view. But in every case that I have studied pretty much consistently the narrative.

I mean, one way to think of this is the difference between intensity and duration or intensity versus consistency. So when people hear the word passion or think of hard work, maybe the mental image that comes to mind is just crazy intensity, like, 'I just pull through all-nighters' and or 'I'm really all in.' And that's not necessarily bad. But I think what's more indicative of somebody who's going to become successful is the consistency and the duration of their commitment. I mean, let's use the analogy of physical therapy. I remember my husband recently had to go to physical therapists, and he got the setup exercises, and he did them for two hours. I think he was only supposed to do that for half an hour and was like, oh, look. And that's intensity. But I think what most physical therapists want you to do is just do these exercises every day, seven days a week for maybe forever, depending on what it is that ails you. And luckily, I married somebody, my husband, who's good at consistency, too. But I think the intensity, which is what the word passion sounds like, is in some ways a bit of a red herring or law because I think the more rare thing and the thing that chips away at a very difficult problem or builds a great corporation or makes a civic change that needs to happen is consistency. And so many people start with intensity and sincerity. But you ask, where are they a year later? How many days a week are they thinking about it? Five years later? Are they still in the game ten years later? The answer is very often no.

Did you think your thinking was going to be pleasant or fun?

Two things are hidden in those comments that you said. I want to highlight them; I think one is that I think of joy and getting energy out of what you are doing. I mean, if you do not eventually come to that, I do not think you will be great at what you do. By force of self-discipline and willpower, nobody can make themselves do something as obsessively and consistently as people with real grit do. I mean, if I did not enjoy psychology, I would not be even a very good psychologist, I think much less a great one. Same for writing. There are things that I don't enjoy. For example, managing people. I have this non-profit organization. I don't get energy out of leading a group of people other than watching each of them grow to their potential. Now, I wish I did, but I don't. Therefore, I'd rather write about it and research it and then let somebody else actually directly manage and be the executive.

So I think this idea of joy and enjoyment and energy is key.

The second thing I want to amplify in what you just said is that it's not always possible for us to forecast accurately what will give us joy in the future. So it could be the very beginning years of something like music or meditation or leadership or writing or anything that you enjoy more or less than you will in the future. And it can go both ways. You start really enjoying something, and then you get into it, and you're not getting energy out of it anymore. Or it could be the opposite as it was for you. So it's not an easy rule of thumb to follow your immediate experience because that may or may not be a good forecast of your future. But I do think at least understanding that being intrinsically fulfilled by your work is necessary, if not sufficient, to becoming great at it and knowing that there's always going to be a little bit of dynamic change there. So, therefore, the human problem is not an easy one, which is like what should I do? I don't love it right now, but maybe I will learn to. I do love it right now, but I may not always. But at least you have some principles to navigate by.

So I think that I teach an undergraduate course at my university. I'm just two hours driving south of where you are? I'm at the University of Pennsylvania, and I just finished teaching this semester. This course is called Grit Lab. And I had a little over one hundred students, all between the ages of 18 and 20. I threw in a few high school students there. And they're all asking this question like, how do I like what I do? And like, what's my recommendation prescriptively as somebody who studies human development? What should I say to them? Now I want to correct an error for about, I don't know how long I've been preaching that the way to be gritty is to have a goal hierarchy where you have a top-level goal, like, for me, use psychological science to help children thrive. It's a top-level goal. And then I have sort of ten-year goals and then five-year sub-goals. And then I have my to-do list for today. And it's a hierarchy where each of the subgoals serves a master goal, which serves so beautifully.

It sounds like you could have a map for the next two decades if you're super gritty. But I think I've been wrong in the following way. And I told my young students this. Who can see that far to the future? I mean, I don't know where I'm going to be in ten years. I don't even have clarity for about five years. And I shared with them that Danny Kahneman, who's someone we both admire and whom I just adore. I remember having a conversation with him not too long ago where I was like, did he plan a path for behavioral science? He reminded me that you can only see, like, maybe two, possibly three years in the future. But three is a lot because then there's so much uncertainty depending on what happens next year will change where I want to go. And so, you can't map out your entire journey in decades. What I said to my students is what I'll say to you now is like, I think I was wrong. Yes, goals are hierarchical. It is wonderful to have some kind of guiding star, or even you could think of, like navigating by some constellation: my values, our benevolence, and excellence. Okay, I want to move in that direction. But I think what that allows you to do is say, but I don't know where I need to be ten years from now. I don't know if I know I'm moving in that general direction, and I know I need some kind of plan for the next year or two. Then, between my ultimate general direction and this, there's a huge amount of freedom and uncertainty, and I'm not going to try to map it all out. It's not possible.

For example, you have to have a plan for at least the next year or two or maybe three, depending on how complex and large the organization is. Or really, when you start getting beyond two or three years, who knows? Maybe the Internet will happen, or maybe global politics will shift, or whatever it is you can anticipate. So I do think you need to know your core values. That's what I said to the students on the last day of class. I said navigate by the stars. You can't have that kind of map, but you can navigate by the stars, and the stars are your core values and your deepest personal interests. And there are many places that you could get navigating by the stars, and maybe it'll be the director of McKinsey, and maybe it'll be a professor, perhaps you'll be a non-profit leader. So, yes, of course, navigate by something, but don't try to map it all out with precision second, third, fourth decade from now.

I'll share something surprising to me and it is consistently true when I ask my students to evaluate themselves on their passion and their perseverance for long-term goals. And, when I look at data collected from research studies, I consistently find that people score more in perseverance than in passion. It's a little non-intuitive because you would think that what's so hard about passion is just doing what you want to do. And the perseverance thing sounds harder. Deliberate practice every day, being resilient in the face of setbacks and obstacles, taking negative feedback. But I think for many of us, maybe in this conversation together, when you hear that many people struggle more with the direction they're going than the determination and following it, I think it will resonate with many people. I certainly felt that way for many years in my life. I would say from 22 to 32, I was lost in a way. I didn't know what direction to go in, but I was always a hard worker.

So, I almost prayed for someone just to tell me what to do because I could easily work 70 hours doing it. I just didn't know where to start. And so I would say that, if that's some comfort to people who think like, "Oh gosh, yeah, I'm a hard worker, I have a great work ethic, I take negative feedback, but I'm still somewhat paralyzed because of trying to figure out where to set off on my journey." And the second thing is like prescriptively, my recommendation is as many entrepreneurs say, just go anywhere, take any step, because no matter what you do, even if you went exactly in the opposite direction by taking the step, you would learn and then you'd be like, oh, it's like when you recalculate your GPS. But the only mistake you can make is not to move. The only mistake is not to look because then you won't learn anything, and then you will kind of guarantee that you won't get anywhere

And then making sure that you're okay with all the missteps if you're a young person and you go off, and you do an internship, and you hate it, that's great. Look how much you learned. You learned that you didn't want to do that. You learn that you didn't want to have a boss like that. You learn that you didn't want to become a boss like that. A lot of the remarkable women and men that I study will say things like the one I'm just thinking of. She was a sous chef. She started this apron company. Now it's a multi-million dollar brand. She just wrote a book. Her name is Ellen Marie Bennett. And she said, "Dreams first, details later." And I think for all of us to take that step. It could be the right step. It's probably not. It could be the wrong step. It could be a very wrong step. But do it first, then figure it out, and then recalculate. I think that so many very smart and perfectionistic people don't really like that messiness. But if you can at least recognize that, that's pretty much the only way there is to like to get anywhere that maybe it will incline you to embrace it a little more comfortably than you would otherwise.

Ellen Marie Bennett. And I think her book is on the bestseller list right now.

I guess we need to do our homework, so I will do the same.

Yes. You have to take it.

The replication crisis is the growing pain of science maturing. The specific criticism is that some of the things that we published as scientists and said, hey, these are the findings, and they are more or less facts. I mean, scientists would also put air quotes around facts like facts until proven that they're not like it's not true. So one of the famous ones in psychology is, for example, the ego depletion effect, which is when people do something that's very hard, like they are trying to solve problems, but they're impossible. Then you give them something else to do, like a proofreading task, that they're starting to get worse on that second task. And the idea, which is very sexy, is that your self-control runs out like fuel. It's just sort of like the uptick gets empty, and that effect looks not to be nearly as big as it was thought to be. Some would argue that there is no effect. It's an illusion of life. So that's one example in my domain with grit. Some would argue that when you really properly control in statistical ways like four things, it really doesn't affect achievement.

Of course, as a scientist, I then have to process all of this on two levels. One is my work and the second one is at a better level in my work. I would say like, oh, but I pre-registered a meta-analysis with over ten thousand people over ten years and looked at it like I can say to you, that I think that the basic finding in my own research, which is when people tend to work hard over long periods in a consistent direction, if you ask me, like, does it predict achievement? I would say yes. Based on my pre-registered replicated findings, I would say yes. However, I would have put a semicolon in that amount, let me say it in a less jargony way. How powerful a predictor is grit or anything else scientists study, but not as powerful as you might think.

The effects are very small. I think the reason why, and I'll end with this, is that human beings are extremely complex, and the world is complex. You put together the complexity of an individual with the complexity of the world. And then you say, if I know that great score, can I predict whether they're going to become a Nobel laureate? Not likely.

I think there was a point in history, maybe for most of human history, either you thought like a scientist, or you thought more like an artist. So, on the one hand, you think we're now in the 21st century. I think that people who are attracted to this kind of conversation would want to do both. They would want to read science. They want to understand how the vaccine was developed and randomized control trials. And yet they would also like looking at philosophy and reading poetry and understanding with the humility in which we would say that any of these ways of trying to understand the universe and ourselves, they're all limited. It doesn't mean we should throw out one or throw out the other. But I think just recognizing the limits of any way of trying to understand ourselves is useful. And I think in the 21st century, more and more people will want to think like scientists, but also think like a philosopher and understand that spiritual traditions have something to offer and art and music and poetry and more.

About a century ago, a very famous psychologist named Watson had this idea that really good parenting was highly demanding and not very supportive. And that would be the way to raise children who were strong, disciplined, productive people. But I think one of the many reasons why that is bad advice for parents is that when we choose between supportive and demanding styles, the natural thing is to find the magic point on the continuum. And it's a false choice because it is possible to be supportive and maximally demanding. After all, they're not opposites. There's lots of research now on parenting and parenting styles. It's warmth and caring. That's one thing. And it's also respect for the autonomy of your child. And so you can be maximally supportive in that you love your kid more than anything, and you respect them as independent people who may disagree with you and want to go their own way.

At the same time, you could be highly demanding in the sense that you hold your children to high standards morally or in other ways as well. And so you don't have to choose between the two. You could be one hundred in both styles. I think the research suggests, and also I think by extension, leadership is like parenting in so many ways that to be a great leader, to be a great parent, is to be someone who the people follow. And that would say, like, this person truly cares about me. They completely respect me. And while they're tough, they keep holding me to a higher standard, and they keep making me grow. So I think that's one sense in which this either-or is wrong and that the answer is both and now executing. That's not easy, but at least it gives you a sense of what you're looking to achieve as a parent or as a leader.

I think for me it's the same, by the way. And my mother is just a fountain of kindness and doesn't even have, it seems, the capability to be critical. And then my dad was the opposite. I don't have data on the spectrum, but I have a hypothesis that for many of us, even though it's possible to be both at once, I want to aspire to that individual as a parent. But I do think that many of us have had this located in two people. However, you're going to get your fix of support and demand. I do think you should seek it out. I don't seek out only demands. Where are your self-esteem and your confidence going to come from? But also don't just be I know this is true of you. Like, you don't just want to be with people who just tell you, like you're great all the time. I know that you're always trying to get better. So I do think whether it's in two people or even more than two people like we should, each of us seek out support and demand this so that we can keep getting better.

I'm wearing this vest that says Character Lab, and if you want to visit me, you can come to Character Lab. And I will say this every culture and every spiritual tradition has said that it's important to try to be a good person, to live a good life for yourself and others at the same time. And that, to me, is what character is. It's being honest and grateful and generous, curious, creative, humble, persistent, disciplined. And I guess I would say that's my dream. And my hope is that because we know that there is science behind every single one of those elements that I mentioned.

Now, all these spiritual traditions from around the world have been saying this is important, maybe in the twenty-first century. And I know it seems improbable given the very current circumstances in which we could get even better and more efficient at developing our character. And I think that's what will happen. It's a very old-fashioned concept in a way. But I think I imagine a future where we could each of us say, like, I want to be more honest and kinder, more generous, more grateful, more curious, more humble, more gritty, more self-disciplined, and all the rest. So I think that's why I was so excited about this conversation. I love the interaction you're having with me.

I'm a big Eleanor Roosevelt fan.

Till next time. Bye-bye, everyone. Take care.