How Your Situation Shapes You (with Angela Duckworth)

Sure, you can use willpower or grit to break bad habits and build new ones. But maybe the key to success is simpler: change your situation. Psychologist Angela Duckworth explains to EconTalk's Russ Roberts why the people and places around us shape our behavior more than we realize--and why we're hard-wired to resist that idea. Listen as they discuss the three-box framework for understanding human behavior, why creating friction to avoid temptation is itself an act of agency, and how the cultures we choose to join end up shaping who we become.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econTalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you.

• 0:37Speaker 00

  Today is October 5, 2026, and my guest is author and psychologist Angela Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania. This is her third appearance on the program. She was last year in March of 2022. Her latest book is Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best, which is our topic for today. Angela, welcome back to Econ Talk.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Russ, it's good to be with you again.

• 1:01Speaker 00

  What's the main idea of Situated?

• 1:03Speaker 01

  The main idea of Situated is that the power of the situation, the forces that are exerted on you as an individual agent are more pervasive than you think, and that, therefore, you should be intentional about the situations in life that you put yourself in. It's an old idea, Russ, from social psychology, that the situation shapes you, and maybe a slightly new idea, or at least my take on it, that you can, before the situation shapes you, shape the situation.

• 1:44Speaker 00

  You know, this, to me, I add this to my list. I think that's true, by the way. I think the situation does shape us.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  You're gonna, you're gonna agree with me?

• 1:55Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  Right off the bat?

• 1:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, right off the bat. In fact, I'm gonna do more than that. I'm gonna talk about how uneasy my agreement makes me, which is, you know, when I think about classical economic methodology, which is, we have preferences, and we have constraints, and we face prices, and we make our choices to, quote, maximize our utility, meaning to be as satisfied as possible. It can include many things that are not traditionally the sources of pleasure, but they can be sources of meaning. It can include charity. But inherent in the economist's perspective on the world is an idea that we're in control.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  Right. The very word agent, by the way, right?

• 2:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Like, you're an economic agent, so, you know, agent to act.

• 2:43Speaker 00

  And you have agency. You have the ability to take action in the world and do so according to what you see as best for yourself. And more than the view that this is important for economics, it's also, of course, important for political philosophy. It's a justification for freedom. And, and yet, over the years, as the host of this program, I've come to listen to a number of ideas that challenge that. To pick one, one would be mimesis. You think you're doing what you want or what's in your own best sense. You're just imitating the people around you. And your book gets at that, as did a recent episode with Megan

• 3:26Speaker 00

  O'Giblin, that this whole willpower thing, which is the essence, in a way, of the economic way of thinking, doesn't maybe exist, at least not the way we think of it. So indict, I'm gonna challenge you now, indict your, your earlier work, which you do in this book to some extent, your work on grit. Explain what your worldview was then. Explain how it's evolved into this book, and then use that to talk about what's wrong with me, the economist.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  And then bring it to the most important question, which is what's wrong with Russ Roberts?

• 4:01Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Well, let's, let's, let's do this storytelling style. I started out my career as a psychologist a little later than some, right? Went to graduate school at 32, not 22. I had observed as a classroom teacher, mostly as a high school math teacher, that people differed considerably in their motivation. And it struck me that what people accomplish in life is very much a product of the quality and quantity of time on task. I think that was an intuition that only sharpened in the first half of my career. And I continue to believe that

• 4:41Speaker 01

  the quality and quantity of time on task is what gets you up any learning curve for anything, you know? You wanna, like, play tennis better. You wanna be better at chess. You wanna be a better public speaker, a better parent, a better citizen. You know, it's a learning curve. How much time are you gonna spend? And what's the quality of that time? And that, of course, led me to study grit. I say, of course, maybe not, of course. But for me, the distinction between the quality and quantity of time on task and whether you were a natural, you know, like, whether, whether the rate of change was just like, for you, a really steep learning curve, because I'm talented at chess, I'm talented

• 5:26Speaker 01

  at public speaking. To me, that distinction was very important personally, because I don't think, Russ, I've actually ever been like the fastest learner in any room. I mean, going back to the small rooms of elementary school, homerooms and so forth. But I've always identified as somebody who, you know, was a striver. I guess the kids say a tryhard. I think that's the vernacular for Gen Z, maybe with negative connotations. But I always pridefully considered myself a tryhard. So for the first half of my career, I, I, I looked at high achievers. I did longitudinal research at West Point and the Spelling D, and I confirmed, I think, a pretty common sense intuition, which is that the people

• 6:07Speaker 01

  who are willing to sustain high quality, high quantity effort are not always the most talented by any measure. They don't always have the highest SAT scores, certainly don't always have the highest IQ scores. We're talking about West Point. They don't have the best scores on physical ability, sort of like physical talent tests that they administer as part of the admissions process. So sticking with things and working really hard in a consistent way is what occupied me as a researcher for the first half of my career. It was important to me to try and understand where it came from. So topics that I know you're

• 6:50Speaker 01

  interested in, like, you know, whether you have a growth mindset, you know, the belief that abilities can change. Well, that determines how likely you are to be gritty, et cetera. The habit of doing the kind of practice that real experts do. It's goal directed, there's feedback. I mean, those things, I think, are of enduring fascination. But the reason why I, I guess you could call it a pivot, I feel like there's this, like, too easy narrative, you know, frequently used in TED Talks about, like, I used to think X, and now I think Y, and here's my story. I don't think it's quite that. I think it's more

• 7:28Speaker 01

  of a widening of the aperture. I mean, the reason why my interest has expanded to try to understand what's around a person is because it's not only your individual psychological agency, it's not only what's going on inside your mind that determines your behavior and your outcomes, but also the people that you are standing next to, happen to be standing next to, chose to stand next to. It's the culture of your zip code. I mean, Russ, I'm in Las Vegas, and let me tell you, Las Vegas is a different culture. Like, the things that people do here are different than 19103, my home zip code, right? Certainly different

• 8:13Speaker 01

  from where you are, right, in Jerusalem. So these things matter. And even, just to take the most trivial, but I think the most accessible example, like, what is within my reach and my view? The inanimate objects, right? These, like, inanimate objects that are within my reach and my view are going to exert their own gravitational pull on my attention, on my thoughts, my behavior, and therefore, my life outcomes. And so, it's an expansion. I know that sounds like a politician saying, like, I don't know, something that they got media training for. But it's not a contradiction. I mean, I didn't write the

• 8:54Speaker 01

  word willpower into grit, the book. I searched for it, and I, I didn't. I wanna have a conversation, a nuanced conversation about What has changed about the science of willpower, which I know you're very curious about, that I've worked in. But I also want to say that people who stay on a learning curve, who exemplify passion and perseverance are not paragons of willpower. So it's a nuance that I think is hard to communicate in a soundbite, but very important.

• 9:29Speaker 00

  Well, I think they're somewhat related. They're both related to forms of self-control. But it could be it's just part of one's nature, or one's nature plus nurture. And you're gifted with grit. I think, you know, like that.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Sorry to interrupt, but I think everything about us is nature and nurture.

• 9:51Speaker 00

  Oh, for sure.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  I know the mind loves, right? You know, the mind loves category. But I also don't think that's what I mean by like, oh, grit versus willpower. It's really about the source of motivation. So willpower, which we all use every day. I mean, you know, you don't feel like flossing your teeth. You get yourself to floss your teeth. You don't feel like getting up when the alarm clock goes off. You get up anyway. You feel like telling the guy who just ran the red light, like, what you think. You use a little willpower not to say that because you don't want to get shot. Like, you know, those are the daily, hourly acts of willpower that a human being is able to do because we have a dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. We have a part of the brain which is able to suppress or elevate impulses at will.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  And it's a thing, and some people have more, some people have less. It's partially genetic, it's partially environmental. But it's not the same thing as willpower. If you are Katie Ledecky or Michael Phelps, getting into the pool at five in the morning, staring at a black line and swimming at like the edge of your aerobic and anaerobic capacity, it is not because you are forcing yourself, using your dorsolateral prefrontal cortex the whole time. Yes, there is some amount of like, your body is screaming and you don't want to do it. But the deep motivation, I think, of people who become great at what they do is intrinsic. I mean, they have to be interested in what they're doing. And it has to feel important to them in terms of their values.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  And feeling interested in something and feeling like is an expression of your values is a different motivation than, I ought to do this, I should do this, I need to do this. You know, you know. They're both obviously goal-directed. But I don't think you become a Katie Ledecky or a Michael Phelps or a great anything if you're gonna have to will yourself like white-knuckled through those thousands of hours of practice.

• 11:49Speaker 00

  So I totally agree with that. I'm trying, I guess I'm trying to say something that they have in common that I see in your book, which is, it's not easy to say, I don't like what's happening now, so I will just fill in the blank. Say, try harder. I will be grittier. I will have more self-control. And I think that, I will exert my willpower more often. This, what I took from the first part of your book is that, is that that is tempting, but ultimately quite frustrating. And I thought maybe-

• 12:29Speaker 01

  That I agree with. That I agree with. I just, I just wanted to say like, that, you know, the hallmark of a great performer is just that they have an excess of this capacity. That's all.

• 12:38Speaker 00

  And it's hard, for those who don't, to acquire it, is what I would also say.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  Oh, that willpower is very difficult to acquire.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  If you don't happen to have prodigious amounts of, you know, iron will, for example.

• 12:53Speaker 00

  So let's-

• 12:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that's, that's, that's probably, that's largely true. Right? Like, people are not very good at like going to the gym for their dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Like, there's probably a little bit of plasticity there, but you know, and no neuroscientist or psychologist would recommend it anyway.

• 13:08Speaker 00

  But we can, you know,

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:10Speaker 00

  Obviously, you could improve your habits, you could build habits. But what I want to talk about, which I think is more helpful, is your three-box metaphor. And use the Thanksgiving example that you give, Thanksgiving dinner perhaps, or exercise, as a way to help listeners realign how they think about getting better at something.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  There's a framework. I've simplified it into three boxes with two arrows. I want to give credit where credit is due, Russ. I met a psychologist named James Gross, as you know, since you've read about James. Yep, yeah. It was very important to me that like, as soon as possible, I tell the world that I am not the author of a framework that I think is so simple, so beautiful, and so, so encapsulating of pretty much anything you would want to understand about human behavior and emotion. That psychologist, James Gross at Stanford, came into my life in November 2011. We were at a conference at Yale,

• 14:22Speaker 01

  and the topic of the conference was human behavior change. And at the top of the agenda, it said, how do we change? And James was the very first speaker. And when he got up, he, in his short amount of time, said, look, I've been studying emotion my whole life. Say you're at Thanksgiving dinner, and you're having the emotion of anger toward a brother-in-law who clearly does not see the current political situation the way you do. Your teeth are on edge, you feel you're like, you're getting a little hot under the collar. Literally, you're having difficulty enjoying this like, once a year tradition. So you've got emotion, right? And James, as a pioneer in emotion regulation, asked the question like, well, what do you do?

• 15:06Speaker 01

  As you point out, Russ, maybe the first thing that comes to mind is like, don't be angry. Calm down, right? Like, you know, like, don't lose it. And that is an act of willpower, right? You can actually force yourself to calm down, you know? It doesn't work very well, but it's not completely ineffectual. But James says, look, let's consider that the last possible thing you can do. What happens before you feel that emotion? Well, one box earlier, if you're looking at a PowerPoint slide, one box earlier, there are your thoughts, right? If you think like, what an idiot, right? Like, like, you know, like, like, does he have any empathy, right? Then that's going to make you feel angry.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  If you have other thoughts, like, oh, you know, I wonder what my brother, you know, experienced this year that would make him think this way? Or you could have completely benign thoughts like, God, the, you know, pecan pie is amazing, right? Like, whatever thoughts you have, they will shape that emotional response. And then one box earlier, so this gets to box one out of three, is the objective situation. Like, are you sitting next to your brother-in-law? It's like, are you, you know, you know, in the kitchen with your, you know, with your aunt, like, washing dishes? Are you, you know, are you, are you in a situation that gives you the thoughts that give you

• 16:34Speaker 01

  the emotional behavior response that you want? So box one is your objective circumstances, your objective situation. Box two is your mental, you know, reality, right? The thoughts that go, those are subjective. And then finally, there's your emotion and your action. And the reason why I find this to be like the E equals MC squared of human behavior, this sort of like, oh, it's all there, is that you can understand why it is that just trying to calm yourself down at box three, like, don't feel that way, is so ineffectual. Like, why not, you know, go upstream? Like, why not think about your brother-in-law a different way? And why not put yourself in some situation

• 17:17Speaker 01

  where you will have the thoughts that you want to have? And by the way, if it's Thanksgiving, you know, it might be that you do want to think about the pecan pie and not your brother-in-law at all. And therefore, you should probably like, sit by the desserts and not where he is, or, you know, volunteer to wash the dishes. So James was presenting this at this meeting at Yale as a way of trying to understand the many tactics that people use to regulate their emotion. And I'm sitting in that darkened auditorium thinking about achievement, which is my specialty, right? The psychology of achievement, of succeeding in approaching your goals. And I'm thinking, he's also just given me the blueprint for that. Because when people say, I want higher quality and quantity effort,

• 18:02Speaker 01

  like, I want to practice the way Michael Phelps or Katie Ledecky practices, they very often tell themselves, you know, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna will myself to do it, right? I'm gonna use willpower to do it. What they're missing is that they, the thoughts that lead a Katie Ledecky and a Michael Phelps to practice, and here I'd love to get into what those thoughts are, because I don't think they are thoughts that sound like, oh, just forcing myself. And then finally, they navigate in very deliberate ways into social and physical situations that give them those thoughts. So that's a three-boxes framework. I think it is deceptively simple. It's like, oh, how could it not be?

• 18:45Speaker 01

  But if you understand that, you can understand the psychology of habit. You can understand cognitive therapy. You can understand Skinner. And yeah, I think you can understand economic theory and the, these notions of like preferences and constraints in a way that is much richer than is sometimes appreciated.

• 19:06Speaker 00

  And we, we've talked on the program about alternative ways of self-control, meditation, and self-awareness.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  That's box two.

• 19:14Speaker 00

  And self-awareness.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Right, box two, right, self-awareness, yeah.

• 19:16Speaker 00

  Well, for me, it's also in box three, because when I'm in that mood and I'm on the edge of doing something I know I don't want to do, I'm gonna take, I might, if I, in certain times of my life, take a deep breath. Pause before I jump and start and yell back, calm down.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  Put on, as some people tease me, put on my Econ Talk Host hat. And people see me outside of this program, they say, you are so animated and passionate. I said, well, yeah, it's because I'm not wearing my Econ Talk hat. My Econ Talk hat, I'm calm, I try to be calm. I try to not get worked up. I try to be respectful of the guests. I try to say about my brother-in-law, well, maybe he's right. Right, that's another variation.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, let me take his perspective.

• 20:02Speaker 00

  That's box two. But having said all that, what I love about, what I think is the incredibly important insight of this so-called simple framework is, and you point this out, not my interpretation of your book, most people don't think about that first box. They are only thinking about what's happening inside their head and inside themselves, and they're either berating themselves, at war with themselves, themselves. And you're saying, you know, sometimes you just change your seat. And that's a metaphor. It's not literally, it doesn't just apply to Thanksgiving dinner. It's a profoundly important insight that I think you are correct, that most people,

• 20:47Speaker 00

  it doesn't cross their mind. It's just, and it's, it's the David Foster Wallace example that you give. You're in the water, you're a fish. The fact that the water you are in is too hot or too cold, or whatever it is, doesn't, you don't think about it.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  Flowing in the direction you want to go, or not flowing in the direction you want to go.

• 21:03Speaker 00

  Exactly, better, better way to say it. You're just in the water, and the idea that you might go to a different stream with different kinds of fish is not a common thought.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  Why do you think it is, Russ, that the situations we're in are so invisible to us? You know, obviously, I've been thinking about this for, well, depending on your account, like 10 years, five years. I mean, I took five years to write this book, in part because I think a book about the situation is much harder to apprehend, certainly to write, than a book about like what's inside your head, your mindset and so forth. Why, if you just had to armchair speculate here, is it that, that we don't think about the water we swim in?

• 21:50Speaker 00

  Well, this is also an underlying theme in your book.

• 21:57Speaker 00

  I think we have a lot of fear of change. So when we look at our situation, and the possibility that it might be the problem is so appalling, because if it is the problem, I have to move. I have to quit my job. I have to move to a different city. I have to find a different circle of friends. Here's a trivial example without any baggage. My desk, which you can't see over here, is, maybe you can't see it, I can't tell, but it's a mess usually. It's usually a horrible mess. And if someone said to me, which they sometimes do, you know, you ought to clean that up. You'll be more productive.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  Productive, clear-minded.

• 22:36Speaker 00

  I laugh. I don't need my fire. That's, that's childish. Don't tell me about Feng Shui and, and the harmony of the colors. That's nonsense. I can, I can read a book, have a deep thought, write a great essay on a bus, you know, that's moving through a bad neighborhood. So I think that's, that's not true, right? And yet I want it to be true, because if it is true, I've got to clean my desk, and I might have to move, and I might have to have different colleagues, right? In fact, here's another example. You're a great collaborator. Most of my career, I didn't collaborate at all, and it's a form of armor. It's a form of protection, right? Oh, maybe you should have different people.

• 23:21Speaker 00

  Well, because like, maybe, you know, maybe you'd be more productive, you'd have deeper thoughts. If you talk intently with someone as smart or smarter about your ideas, and it's like, are you kidding me? Do you think I need the pitiful? You know, it's like you talk about in the book sometimes about our inherent unease with taking drugs sometimes to improve our situation, whether it's depression or other, other problems we were facing. I am the master of my fate. Don't, don't, don't tell me I need to.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  The captain of my fate, the master of my soul.

• 23:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. I am the captain of my.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  Don't tell me that the ocean waves are like in a, you know, take me where like, I set, I set sail for the port that I want. You know, Russ, I think there are probably various reasons for why we are oblivious to the situation. I think where you began, I think is some form of status quo bias, right? Like that, like I, you know, as they say, you know, I yearn for change, but I cling to the familiar, maybe because change is almost always costly in the short run, right? Like, moving sucks, right? Like, you know, I'm, I'm not sure. I think it might be apocryphal that like in the list of stressors, you know, moving is at the top. I can actually think of a lot of, yeah, I'm not sure that's.

• 24:39Speaker 00

  Those are people who haven't done much other than move, I sometimes think, yeah.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was like, ah, it depends on what's on your list. Clearly, there are things that happen in life that are more stressful than moving, but it's incredibly stressful, and it's probably like stressful in ways that are just like surprising, like, you know, not knowing where to like mail a letter, or to like, you know, pick up a quart of milk is probably like, it's just like the friction is, is, is, it seems trivial, but okay, but it is, changing your job, also, there's uncertainty with all this, right? You know, you're making a bet. It may or may not pay off, even if the probability suggests that the expected value is higher. I think there are other people, though, for whom the resistance to thinking about their situation comes from another place, like the idea that you mentioned, which is like,

• 25:27Speaker 01

  I don't want to be the sort of person who, you know, needs the perfect situation for them to concentrate, to be productive, to like eat a healthy diet, to, you know, control their temper. Like, you would like to be the sort of person who in fact doesn't depend, doesn't like float on the waves like a cork. So, so there is a kind of self-concept, like a kind of like, I don't want to be that kind of person. In my research, I find that that is actually the most common reason why people don't do the trivial things, like, well, Russ, you have a desk that might be in need of cleaning up.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  I have, for a long time, continued to put my phone near my laptop computer when I have to do something really hard, like, you know, work on a New York Times op-ed, or, or this book manuscript. And I know, given my own research findings, that the temptation of a phone that is like at hand is very different from the temptation of a phone that is across the room or in another room altogether. And yet I persist. And why is that? Well, in my research of Americans who say, you know, you should probably not keep junk food or your phone around you, and then, of course, you ask them what they do, and they're like, well, I keep it around me, but I, you know, I try not to, you know, look

• 26:54Speaker 01

  at them, use them, eat them, whatever it is, fill in the blank. The most common explanation for this among the same surveyed adults is like, well, I would like to be the sort of person who can handle that, right? Like, who is stronger, an inanimate object like a phone or a bag of Doritos, or, or me? And so I think that's a, another reason that we have a self-concept that doesn't accommodate our, you know, I mean, maybe we should all go to Alcoholics Anonymous and admit that we are powerless over the inanimate objects in our, in our personal space. That's, you know, a version of step one in the 12, you know, steps of, of the, of the AA tradition. So I think there are various ways.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  And the last thing I'll just say is sometimes, Russ, like to say, for example, you're a graduate student in economics, and you're in your fourth year, and it's going okay, but not great. And you wake up every day, and you're like, all right, like, it's seven o'clock, like, I'm going to get my workout in, and I'm going to start working. And then like you do it again and again, and things are not getting a lot better. Sometimes I think it's lack of imagination, like the idea that maybe instead of waking up, getting your workout in, and like opening your laptop, maybe you should go talk to a different mentor, or the same mentor, but like, or other students.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  I think sometimes we don't imagine the ways in which we could change our situation for the better, and the lack of the counterfactuals are also what hold us in place.

• 28:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I just.

• 28:34Speaker 00

  Just to summarize that, that back and forth, that you just need to open your imagination to doing something different, where something different isn't something you've been thinking about, which is what's around you. And I don't, some of it's inanimate objects, some are the people, we'll talk a little later, I hope, about culture, which you write about. And some of it's physically moving to, moving, doesn't mean moving with your life, it could just mean, I'm gonna go work in the coffee shop, or I'm not gonna stop working in the coffee shop, because that's not a healthy place for me, and I should recognize it. I just want to just to clarify that, the poem I butchered a minute ago is Invictus by Henley.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:17Speaker 00

  A similar, a poem with a similar, which is the master of my fate, captain of my ship, but we can look it up.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  Captain of my soul, master of my fate, captain of my soul.

• 29:26Speaker 00

  Hang on, it matters not how straight the gate, how charged with punishments, the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul. Yeah, correct. Had to get a running start there. Another poem that has that bravado about it, of course, which you also mentioned, which you mentioned, is If by Kipling.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:48Speaker 00

  Which is an exhortation.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, Roger Kipling.

• 29:50Speaker 00

  To willpower, grit, courage, a few, many virtues. And I also want to put in an ad, although, of course, we take no money here for this, for the app that you mentioned, One Sec, which I put on my phone after reading your, that section of your book, and for about the last day and a half, my use of X has diminished greatly. Once, check it out if you want.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  It's working for you.

• 30:17Speaker 00

  For one day, it's a start, but I encourage people who are, who are troubled.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  Fascinating, isn't it interesting, Russ?

• 30:22Speaker 00

  Fascinating.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  Isn't that fascinating?

• 30:24Speaker 00

  And of course, you're tricking yourself in all kinds of different, you're tying yourself to the mast, Odysseus style, but you're, you're aware of what you're up against, the sirens of social media, and so you allow yourself to be somewhat fooled, to be, to get at the real thing you want. I want to tell one more story and get your reaction, because I think you'll get a kick out of this, about situations and the Thanksgiving dinner. There is a tradition in Judaism, I think it's a Hasidic story, where you should have an anger coat. You should have a-

• 30:59Speaker 01

  An anger coat?

• 31:00Speaker 00

  Yep, you put it in your closet upstairs, and when you get angry, you might be in an argument with your spouse, you might be frustrated with something at work, you go upstairs and you put the coat on. And by the time you get upstairs and you put the coat on, all of a sudden, you realize, what's wrong, why am I so angry? Calm down, you don't yell. It's a, it's a nice story. It's a nice, it's an example of your ethos, the change in your situation.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  Is it actually like, do you literally go upstairs and put on an actual coat?

• 31:28Speaker 00

  I don't.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  Or is it just like a mental?

• 31:30Speaker 00

  Neither, none of the above.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  Neither.

• 31:33Speaker 00

  I think it's, it's an interesting example, equivalent to putting your phone across the room. It says, I'm gonna impose a cost on myself, that I think will help me overcome my natural impulsiveness. So-

• 31:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:46Speaker 00

  But the punchline of the story is that my dad wrote a comic story about the anger coat, which went like this. He is in an argument, it's a mythical piece, it's a piece of fiction, but he's in an argument-

• 32:00Speaker 01

  This is fiction, just to be clear.

• 32:01Speaker 00

  He's in an argument with his wife, and he goes to get the anger coat, because he doesn't want to yell. And it's not where he left it. So now he's really mad, because he thinks his wife's moved it, which of course, half the time you've moved it, you forgot where you put it back and all, but it's a comic idea, but-

• 32:19Speaker 01

  That's, that's very good. I like that, too.

• 32:21Speaker 00

  Anyway.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  Nice little twist there at the end.

• 32:23Speaker 00

  But, my point, my point is that, you know, there's, I really like the metaphor of the three boxes, and the reason I like it is it forces you to remember that first box, the environment you're in, and that you can change it. And I think it's really important. So, that's, I think, really important about the book.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  And Russ, I think like this, um, thank you. I, I mean, candidly, writing this book nearly killed me. It was so hard. It was definitely, and by far, the hardest thing I ever did professionally, and maybe because my identity is bound up with my professional achievements. I think it's also the hardest thing I've ever done personally. I mean, I really struggled. I was like, how do I write a book about the situation, this thing that people aren't looking for books about, because they're not seeing their situations, and they're certainly not seeing their situations as a locus of their agency. I think the idea, though, is so deep. I mean, I'm not the first thinker to say that the situation is powerful.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  As you know, I'm a big fan of the philosopher Michel de Montaigne. I won't try to use my high school French and pronounce the name with like, whatever, South Jersey French accent, but Michel de Montaigne, about, you know, a half century ago, being like landed gentry, wrote essays, I mean, he invented the form of the essay, like to try, in French, to essayer, like to, to try to work out a thought. And he was very observant, I mean, really, I think he would have been a great economist, I think he would have been a great psychologist, because he was so observant of his own behavior. I'm very curious about like, when he lost his temper, and when he didn't. So he was a thinker who thought about the situation,

• 34:06Speaker 01

  because he noticed of himself that he could be a completely different man in, in one situation or another. He, he observed his anger go up and down, like from zero to 10, and then 10 back to zero, depending on, not just himself, because he was the same man, but according to what was happening. I think, I would like to go one step further, the Montaigne, you know, Montaigne said, you know, we think we go, but we are not the captains of our ship, we are more like quarks on the current, right? We are carried, he said, right? And I want to say that, that's, that's not, to me, the punchline of this book, because

• 34:48Speaker 01

  if, in the modern world, and maybe things have changed in 500 years, maybe if you were like a serf, you know, and you had just almost no freedom to change where you lived, how you lived, what you did, you know, where you did your work, what there was to eat, the inanimate objects in your personal space, I mean, maybe there is no situational agency in that circumstance. But I think in the modern world, and those of us who live in a part of the modern world and have the means, that at least I do, you do, many, not all do, then there is agency in, in, in doing those things that we just mentioned that people

• 35:30Speaker 01

  are resistant to doing, right? Like, you installed an app on your phone, you downloaded it from the App Store, and you bound yourself to the mast. So now, when you want to go on X, which I still call Twitter, but anyway, when you want to go on X, it just forces you to, you know that, like how the screen turns a different color? I don't know if yours turns red, that's, you know, like-

• 35:53Speaker 00

  Lavender.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  Makes, oh, that's nice, that's calming. Maybe they changed it to lavender. I think because I chose Gmail, it turns red. But, but the, I think it actually is color coded to the thing that you're, you know, trying to resist, the apps that you're trying to resist. You know, you were able to, to exercise agency, not in the moment of like, I probably shouldn't go on X right now, but in the moments that preceded that, which is, you know, to me, the agency was going to the App Store and downloading this, it's not really a blocker, but it's sort of a delayer, right?

• 36:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's clever.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  It's like, it's a little friction, and-

• 36:27Speaker 00

  It's very clever.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  It's very, very clever. So, so that is the point, I think, that philosophers have not yet taken seriously, the idea that agency extends beyond the mind. I think we're still stuck in the, you know, the, the received wisdom, that you can't change your situation, but you can change how you respond to it. And I, I think that's wrong. I, I don't think that's, that's good advice for, for young people or any of us.

• 36:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, we had that episode with Anna Mastroianni recently, where he said incentives are for losers. So, let's say you go to-

• 37:04Speaker 01

  What did, wait, what did he, yeah, what did he mean by that? Tell me.

• 37:07Speaker 00

  So, what he meant was, is that, well, let me give you this example, that works for us. I go to a bar, I don't want to drink too much, either because I have to drive, or I don't think it's healthy for me, or I don't like my behavior once I've had a few too many drinks. And, but it's, it's happy hour. So the drinks are inexpensive. So, economics predicts I'm gonna drink more than I would otherwise. And Anna Mastroianni would say-

• 37:31Speaker 01

  Price is dropped.

• 37:32Speaker 00

  Just drink the number that, don't be, don't be a loser, don't, don't say, well- For whether it's conscious or not, don't be motivated by, only by price. And by price, it doesn't, certainly not only monetary price, it could be pride, your reputation, and so on. Don't sell your soul to make a lot of money, because everyone around you is in a business, in a workplace that demands a bit of stretching, of say, of ethics. And so that's how you climb in the firm. And instead of saying, oh, well, that's what everyone else is doing, which is a situation example, do the right thing. And it might mean quit. And it might mean not going to the bar with the cheap drinks, which seems irrational, but you also know how you respond to Twitter. So.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Right. Russ, we've all been in situations where we can't get out of them, we can't really modify them. In that case, yeah, work on box two, like, try to think differently, work on box three, try to act differently, or feel differently. You know, it is possible to be at a bar where the drinks are half-price. It is possible to have one and not more than one.

• 38:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  But if you can, you know, at least, like, sit across the room so that the, you know, the bar isn't like, two feet away, it's 20 feet away, like, you know, I mean, my husband, Jason, has a lot of, well, I don't know, willpower, he's certainly a motivated, conscientious person, but he really will eat anything that's in front of him. I mean, it's just a fact that if he has french fries, or, you know, bowls of popcorn, I mean, if they just kept getting refilled, I think he would just keep eating them, like ad libitum, like a rat.

• 39:22Speaker 00

  I've always, I've always liked Jason. We've never met, but this is the second positive thing I've heard about. The first is, he's married to you, and the second is, he's married to something I also like, popcorn and french fries, I get it.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  French fries.

• 39:37Speaker 00

  He's a man of great discernment.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  He is. And, and he, you know, he tells me, like, get these away from me, and, and, you know, so, so, so I guess that's the, that's the, you know, blindingly simple insight, that the agency is located in the choice of the situation. Look, I'm not an expert on, on the sorts of things that psychologists are being asked to weigh in on, on the Cornell case, right, of this, you know, you know, awful incident with the woman who's now, you know, being called Jane Doe, and these men at the fraternity home. I know one facet of this is, like, who's responsible, like, you know, we were all drunk,

• 40:19Speaker 01

  or we were all taking drugs, but like, the agency was in the moment you decided, in a sober state of mind, to ingest a mind-altering drug.

• 40:31Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  Right? That was the agency. And it's the same thing with drunk driving, right? Like, is there agency in, like, oh, you know, I couldn't see straight, I like, you know, cognition was impaired? Your agency was getting drunk.

• 40:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  Like, the agency is, and then maybe you could say, like, and your agency was being in the place and with the people where you're more likely to drink too much.

• 40:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  So I think that's, like, kind of like, going all the way back to the origins of behavior.

• 40:56Speaker 00

  But you have a fantastic example in the book, which I think I'm gonna think about for a long time, and I will have, I think, some episodes on it going forward, which are people who, when they were in Vietnam, under great stress, and soldiers surrounded by other people in great stress, did a lot of drugs, and particularly heroin, which, I guess heroin is, they say it's, quote, not addictive, I guess, but when they came back out of, whatever that means, but when they came back out of war, they stopped using drugs. And the situation was everything in their case. And that, what we would say about the situation, one is warfare, bloodshed, cruelty, horror,

• 41:41Speaker 00

  the other is being around a bunch of people who think it's okay to deal with that by taking heroin. So both of those together work to make it hard not to take heroin, I get it.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  And, and the, you know, sometimes it's called the Vietnam, you know, heroin mystery, right? Like, the mystery, right? The, like, you know, the puzzle was, like, how do you have these, like, 18-year-old boys who are, by and large, not taking heroin, by and large, not addicted to heroin? I think many would say heroin is addictive, or this is a continuum of, like, you know, how addictive, right? But then, then they're, that they're in this situation, right? They're in Vietnam, and the statistics are just, like, stunning, right? You know, is it 1 in 10? Is it 1 in 20? I mean, just, you know, astronomically high rates of, like, taking heroin, and then taking it at a level where you could call it, like, some kind of addiction, not just once, but repeatedly.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  Then these young men return home to their, like, Iowa farms, or their, you know, whatever, you know, whatever party, and the situation changes. And the reason why I think it is a mystery, Russ, is because the thought is that a addictive substance should continue to, like, occupy your life.

• 42:51Speaker 00

  Haunt you.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  Right? Haunt you, and then it's like a light switch. It's like, you know, nope, the addiction levels go back to their previous, like, almost nonexistent levels at all. And I think, Russ, when you talk about the social norms, like, everyone's taking it, that's part of it, you talk about the stress, obviously, that's part of it, like, you're no longer in the jungles, like, at a time of war. There's also an element that's completely mundane, and that is the convenience of buying heroin.

• 43:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's everywhere.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  There was, you know, like, I mean, it really was, I think, easier to get heroin than it was to get a bottle of Coca-Cola, right? And the psychology of convenience is actually, I think, where I'm gonna turn my attention in the next, you know, chapter of my research career. Like, what is convenient? Like, what does it even mean, that something is convenient? I think it primarily means that it's frictionless. Like, for example, gambling, I feel like, you know, online gambling is a scourge on society, and I honestly cannot believe how it is that online gambling, and it's, you know, close cousin, the prediction market, has, like, become such a pervasive part of,

• 44:03Speaker 01

  of our lifestyle, when it's so obviously capitalizing on, like, the worst and weakest impulses in human nature? But one of the reasons why, you know, FanDuel, or like DraftKings, is so, you know, pernicious, is that it takes something that you had to drive to a casino for, right? You had to drive to a casino, park, walk in a door, and do something, right? Even lottery tickets, I mean, you still had to, like, go somewhere, and stand in line, give your credit card, and buy it. All that friction is gone, it's incredibly convenient. How convenient is it? You wanna do it at 4:00 in the morning? Great. You wanna do it at 10:00 at night? Great. You don't have to get up off the couch.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  You don't even have to move, because your phone is almost always in your hand, if you are, you know, an American adult. So I think the psychology of convenience, when you think about the Vietnam heroin mystery, is at least as important as the psychology of social norms, like, everyone is doing it. Of course, these things tend to go together, because what we make convenient in society, also, many people start to do, and now we look around, we look to our left, we look to our right, and everybody else is doing it. But, but I wonder whether this aspect of the modern world, right, like, what we have made convenient, effortless, and also, sort of, obvious, it's like, where our attention

• 45:28Speaker 01

  is already, I think that is going to determine what we do in our near-term future. And I have to tell you, Russ, like, I look around at what we've made convenient, like, DraftKings, it can be, like, but reading Shakespeare, I guess you could argue it's convenient, because you can look it up on your phone. But I need, I need to say that I think we need to make some things more inconvenient, and other things more convenient than they are right now.

• 45:54Speaker 00

  Well, I remember, I took a time management class, I don't know if I've probably told this story before on the program, but the instructor-

• 46:02Speaker 01

  But not to me, Russ, so I'm wrapped.

• 46:04Speaker 00

  You're, you can't wait. It was the Franklin Time Management Program, which I had total disdain for, I thought maybe I would learn something. I found it utterly fascinating. So the instructor asked the people, the 30 of us in the room, who wishes that they read more books? Every hand goes up, right? And he says, why don't you? And then he paused, and he said, because books don't ring.

• 46:32Speaker 00

  They just sit there. They don't.

• 46:34Speaker 01

  They just sit there. No notifications, no saying like, hey, have you read Anna Karenina, chapter two today?

• 46:40Speaker 00

  And I leave the books I love or I'm in the middle of, I leave them out. It sometimes frustrates my loved ones or loved one.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  It's part of the clutter problem.

• 46:49Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  There's some trade offs here.

• 46:51Speaker 00

  I want it to be close at hand. I want it to be convenient. I don't have to remember to go to the bookshelf. I want it to ring, so it has to be out to get my attention. And then on top of that, I want it not to be too far to have to go dig it out from wherever it is. Anyway, I want to change something totally different.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  Like, I just want to say one thing about books.

• 47:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, go ahead.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  Now, I sent you a PDF of this book because you are in Israel and I wanted you to have it right away. And, you know, I made it convenient because like, you know, you're on your laptop already, right?

• 47:17Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  You know what's even better? If you really want somebody to read something, send them a hard copy because it will be there. I can't tell you how many times people have sent me a book. I have politely declined reading it. They said, you know what? Let me just send it to you anyway. And it shows up and it's three dimensions and, you know, like throwing out books is like, not exactly like burning a book, but it's very hard to really throw out a book, right? Like, you know, hard to like, take it out of the mailbox and put it right in the recycling. And yeah, I open it. I mean, I, we can turn to something else, but you know, Anne Patchett read a book of stories that the actor Tom Hanks had written. Why? Because she was like, having trouble sleeping and she wandered into her study that

• 48:02Speaker 01

  was of course filled with books. You know, can you imagine how many books Anne Patchett gets to blurb? I think I've read every word this, you know, writer Anne Patchett has written. But at the top of the stack is Tom Hanks' book and she picks it up. So, so, you know, if you can really understand how powerful convenience is in your life, then you can just, you know, rule sovereign over yourself by ruling sovereign over what is convenient.

• 48:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, I love that. And I would just add, before I want to shift gears, but I would just add that there are people in the marketing world who think that people read the emails they send out. And that's not true. Some are read, but most people don't read them. They don't read the PDF that's attached to the, to the email. They don't open the et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I love that idea about sending a robot. But I want to shift gears and I want to ask you something totally different, which is the following. You mentioned earlier, and it's in the book a number of places about your, your study, success. And I want to ask the question, does this book make me a more successful person? And I want

• 49:17Speaker 00

  you to tell me what you think that means. It's not an easy question, actually. We could spend a long, long time on it.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  Does this book make Russ Roberts a more successful person?

• 49:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, the reader. And what do you mean by success?

• 49:30Speaker 01

  I think it's a fair question. I'm going to define success as the achievement of a goal. The bigger the goal, the more successful. I'm not going to define success as equivalent to happiness or the good life in the Aristotelian sense. But I think when we mean, I think what we mean by I have succeeded is that we have achieved a goal. And now I'm going to give you a scientific definition of a goal, Russ. There's a long one and a short one. The short one is a desired future. That's what a goal is. And it can be small, like, you know, I need to get another bottle of water. That's a goal, right? Like, oh yay,

• 50:14Speaker 01

  I got the bottle of water. I have achieved that desired future. Or it could be something really ambitious, like, you know, I want to integrate the economic perspective with psychology. I had that as the goal of a grant that I wrote with Jim Heckman now, you know, more than 10 or 15 years ago. So, goals can be grand, they can be trivial, but a goal is a desired future. And the longer definition is that a goal is a mental representation of a desired future state. But you kind of get the gist of it with a desired future. So, I define success as achievement of desired futures. I guess I'm agnostic on, you know,

• 50:57Speaker 01

  whether those, you know, futures are like, good in some moral sense and so, but I think that's what we mean when we say that we've been successful.

• 51:09Speaker 00

  But I think in our everyday society, most people mean financial success or career success.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  Status.

• 51:18Speaker 00

  Status, career.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  Fame. By the way, I was in the car. You know, the actor Rainn Wilson, who played Dwight Schrute on the American version of The Office?

• 51:27Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 51:29Speaker 01

  He was driving me actually from, from where we were and like, recording a podcast with him and like, to an event that he was going to be the interlocutor. And he said to me, he said, in American society, the thing that people want more than money is fame. And I said, really? And I was like, maybe you're just, you know, saying that because your box one situation is Los Angeles. And maybe in Los Angeles, people want fame. But I'm not sure about like, Austin, Texas, or, you know, Dubuque, Iowa, you know, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And he said, no, I think it is true because when you have fame, you can exchange it for anything else, you know, including money. So, anyway, that was an interesting perspective, courtesy of Dwight Schrute slash Rainn Wilson. I think there,

• 52:13Speaker 01

  there could be conventional, you know, markers of success, like, you know, the status of your job title, or the amount of money in your bank account, or the number of zeros in your like, annual income. But I, I think as a psychologist, I think success and achievement really are more broadly, you know, human beings have goals. We are goal directed as a species. I think there is no time in life where people lack goals. You retire, you still have goals. Like, what are you going to do on Tuesday? Right? Like, you know, what are you making for dinner? I mean, all of those things are goals. And I think that

• 52:53Speaker 01

  to me is the most useful definition of success, you know, the achievement of goals. Still limited, by the way. Like, I don't think this is something makes you a good person. I don't necessarily think this is, you know, the secret to happiness. But I think it's, it's more useful than saying like, success is money, right? Like, success is like, you know, Olympic athletes want to be successful, but I don't think they're looking for dollar signs primarily.

• 53:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, I didn't, I, let me say it a little differently then. Maybe I said it badly.

• 53:26Speaker 00

  Some of the examples you use, use Michael Phelps in the book, extraordinary, inspiring person for what he's achieved. Actually, achievement might be even a better, a better word than success. And you give a great example, I think it's a fantastic example of, Michael Phelps recognized that it wasn't just him and his grit. It was a great coach. I think it's Bob Bowman is his name. And then you give an example of a French swimmer who decides to leave France and go to Arizona State University because Bob Bowman's the coach there, and it turns him into a much better swimmer. And I, I think, I think there's a temptation, oh, let me just say it from my own perspective. What I liked about this

• 54:11Speaker 00

  book wasn't about achievement of the standard glittering kind, to allude to an Adam Smith quote in, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, but rather, my success as a human being, and I don't mean as virtuous, but simply as an understanding of how to, as you say, to achieve what I want. And when I achieve what I want, doesn't have to be the glittering things. It could just be, I get along better with my brother in law, and I don't spoil the Thanksgiving dinner. And I really like that as, for me, it's because I'm old. Most of my success is behind me to the extent there was any. But for me, what I got most

• 54:53Speaker 00

  out of your book was a way to think about how to be a more effective human being, not in the traditional achievement career sense.

• 55:05Speaker 01

  Yes. Like, the, you know, the resume is a little longer, you know, like, you know, a little more eye catching. I mean, I'll get very personal and candid, as I tend to do with you, Russ. I-

• 55:19Speaker 00

  It's a G rated program, Angela. I just want to say before you go, whatever you're going to say next.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  Right. Remember, we're on video. Like, let's-

• 55:25Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  Everything's being recorded. I mean, I have reflected on, you know, what I want to do in the next, you know, chapter of my life. I am 56. I devoted my 50s to writing this book. I, I, I feel like I have spent-

• 55:48Speaker 01

  A great deal of my life trying to achieve greatness, right? Like be the best psychologist that I could be, publish in the top journals. Write, yes, rah rah, right? Like, you know, write better, no write better, no write even better than you did before, right? And I don't know that I'll ever lose that. I mean, this goes very deep. I come from a family that I don't, actually have never met anybody from a family that is this obsessed with achievement. So I have

• 56:22Speaker 00

  Yours.

• 56:23Speaker 01

  In, oh, yeah.

• 56:24Speaker 00

  You're saying your family.

• 56:26Speaker 01

  My family, my family of origin, right? Maybe not the family that I'm trying to raise with my husband, Jason, but like, so, look, I'm not going to wake up tomorrow and not be ambitious. But I wrote in my journal just the other day that after spending so much of my life trying to be great, maybe it's time to try to be good. And, and I think by that I do mean a sort of like, okay, well, maybe the motivation isn't the, what did you call it, the bedazzling? What did, what did Adam Smith say?

• 56:59Speaker 00

  Glittering. He says there's two paths. There's the glittering path of fame, wealth, power, and then there's

• 57:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, with the obvious outward, sort of, you know, the accolades, right? Like, maybe I won't get a fellowship and a

• 57:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, the quieter path.

• 57:15Speaker 01

  A statue, a sort of like, a quieter path. Like, for example, like, what if I did things for the next 10 years and like, nothing got added to my CV? Nobody like sent me admiring, adoring emails congratulating me because, you know, what was it? I mean, I was recently in conversation with somebody who was obviously very ambitious and, you know, he was interviewing me about like what I was going to do next. And I said, I think maybe it's time to like seed the spotlight. Like, maybe this is what the, you know, psychoanalyst Eric Erickson said was the generative stage of life, where like, you're not trying to be great, you're trying to make somebody else great in, in some way that doesn't have a byline.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  You know what I mean? Like, you don't, you know, why not even make it to the acknowledgements section? I think he was really disappointed in that. He was like, oh, you're in your 50s and so forth. But anyway, yeah, I, I think you're right, though, to, to ask that deeper question. You know, if achievement is the accomplishment of desired futures, maybe we can still be ambitious in that kind of like, I want to be good. But it is a, it is a shift. I think it is a, I think it is a shift. And as somebody who's spent her whole career trying to understand the psychology of achievement, I, I think, I think one of the things that I got wrong, Russ, in writing this book is that there were times where it was so hard to capture the situation.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  I mean, I really felt like I was trying to bottle lightning. I was just like, how do I write about the goddamn situation? It's like, it's not that charismatic. It's hard to tell stories, like people are blind to it. And I think one thing I got wrong, to be totally, you know, brutally candid, is that when you don't enjoy what you're doing, like, it was like torture for me at times. I hope what I eventually produce for you feels fluent and beautiful, but I don't think I want to do that again. Like, I don't want to wake up in the morning and feel anguished, uncertain, like exhausted. Like, I want to feel like a good person.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  And also, I want to feel a sense of lightness in the next, you know, chapter of my life. So, you know, I haven't, I haven't quite figured it out. I think, I think I'm, and I'm not going to do something different than psychology. But, but yeah, you, you know, you ask a, you ask a question that I've been asking myself, like, you know, what is success? Like, what do you want?

• 59:50Speaker 00

  Well, you know, one of the trite but true lessons of life is that the connections we make with others are perhaps the most important thing we do. And when you're on the academic treadmill or the corporate treadmill, it's

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  Or the book promotion treadmill.

• 1:00:09Speaker 00

  It's really easy to convince yourself that, you know, I'll spend these evenings doing X, Y, Z away from my kids, but that'll, that'll be good for them, et cetera, et cetera. And it's also the other challenges, is if you said, I'm going to spend more time with my family, say, or volunteering, doing something with the skills that you have that are not as going to lead to such tangible results as publications and so on. How do you go about doing that in a, in a productive way? How do you, quote, spend time with your family? And, and some of that, by the way, takes practice because you're, we get out of practice in interacting with our, our children or our spouse. And I think that's a really, that's a good question for, it'll be your next project.

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  But not, but not a book.

• 1:00:57Speaker 00

  Not a book. Well, it could be a book, but if it's an easy book.

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  Well, you know, maybe you'll write it. I just want to say one thing about alignment, right? Like, I thought about alignment, you know, from the very first day I became a psychologist because really what grit is, is having this, like, very aerodynamic alignment of all of your thoughts and your intentions. So those goals that you have, the sub-goals, you know, the top level goal that gives you, you know, a north star, like, people who are really passionate and persevering have an enormous amount of alignment. There's like harmony among their goals and there's very little conflict. They're like, they wake up and like, I'm doing this, right? You know, there's very little ambivalence, hesitation.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  And actually, if you, if you read Chik Semihai's work on flow state, right? The psychologist Chik Semihai said, the opposite of the flow state is psychological entropy. And I read that as like, the arrows are not aligned, right? You know, there are arrows that are like heading into each other, they're a kilter. I think this second book is about aligning all the arrows outside of you, right? It's like, okay, like, how do you put yourself in the ocean current that is going where you want to go? So now you not only have inner alignment, but you have outer alignment. Like, all the people around you are like-minded, you know, and similarly valued, like, like, so value, I don't know if that's a word, but like, you know, they have similar values or great. You've got a coach, you're in a culture that's taking you where you want to go.

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  But I think the very deepest, you know, way to think about alignment is that, you know, when you have like a sense of alignment with your like deepest values, right? Like, you know, my family or like, and obviously there are conflicts, but you've resolved them in some way where you're like not, I, I feel like myself to be, you know, maybe like more open than I should be, like while I'm like in the middle of book tours. Like, I feel like there is something misaligned for me about promoting my book. It's like, hey, you know, people in the world who have so little attention left for anything, look at me, click here and buy this. Like, it feels very misaligned.

• 1:03:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, it's, I remember when I published my first book, I was obsessed with it, which was incredibly destructive, I think.

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  Obsessed with what?

• 1:03:21Speaker 00

  With getting it sold, with getting people to buy it, to get people to read it. And then I would get a, I got a wonderful review in the Wall Street Journal and they didn't have any copies anywhere. And so this is like, oh, well, not a big deal, which I can say now. At the time, it was, I was just so just, you know, upset about it.

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  Distraught.

• 1:03:39Speaker 00

  Distraught. And, and I think

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  Angry.

• 1:03:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. Fame is a very unhealthy thing to pursue. If it comes your way, as it did for Adam Smith, it was, he never

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  Was he famous in his lifetime?

• 1:03:53Speaker 00

  He was, and he, but he did not pursue it. Fame in those days wasn't quite like fame today, but it wasn't so different.

• 1:04:04Speaker 00

  But anyway, I want to close

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I'm having an allergic reaction to self-promotion, I'll tell you that.

• 1:04:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I understand. Like, you get sick of hearing your own voice sometimes, which is hard for a faculty professor, but it does happen sometimes. I want to close with culture. And I want to add, give an example that's not in the book, see what you think of it. I love this phrase, you have, "Culture is the way we do things around here." It's a nice way to sum up sort of a combination of norms and expectations. And I often

• 1:04:37Speaker 00

  We'll say to young people who have a job offer from a certain kind of place, which I'm not going to mention, but I think is, quote, "not a healthy place," they'll say, "Don't take that job." Or if they ask my advice, anyway, I don't tell them, "Don't take the job," because they're often very excited about it. But if they ask me, "What do you think?" I say, "Well, you know, it's going to change the way you value certain things, and I don't know if that's so healthy." But what I didn't think about is the way we do things around here. And part of what's, I think, harmful about certain cultures and beneficial about certain cultures is the way things are done around here. And if you're in an environment with a culture that's not a healthy one or that's destructive, you become inured to it. You start thinking, "It's no big deal. This is the way things

• 1:05:22Speaker 00

  are get done," and you get careless. So it's just an interesting example of your point about situations. Obviously, you want to pick a situation where you can thrive, where there's a great coach, say, for your swimming skills. And obviously, you want to be in a place like away from the happy hour bar, maybe if you've got a challenge with dealing with alcohol. But there's something else, and that is joining an organization. You shouldn't just look at your boss. You should try to get a feel for how are things done around here, and how might that shape me when I'm young and thinking about the future? And I never thought about that. And I think that's a useful thing for young people to think about.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  I mean, every place you go has a culture. I mean, that's, you know, it's not just like, oh, cultures. Like, you put two or three people in a room for any extended period of time, and a culture evolves. It grows spontaneously. And therefore, you should be intentional about the cultures you choose, because you are making that choice. Like, you take any job, and you are choosing a culture. I think the point about preferences that we began with and didn't really quite explore, right? Like, oh, you know, economic theory, you try to explain behavior through my preferences. It's like, I'm going to like, you know, under certain constraints, kind of like, try to maximize my utility according

• 1:06:42Speaker 01

  to my preferences. But preferences are malleable. Like, the things that you really want are not immune to culture. Here's an example. There's a young man named Anthony, who I interviewed for the book. Maybe he's not so young now. But he went to law school with, like, you know, every idealistic ambition. He was like, "I'm going to go to Harvard Law School, and then I'm going to, like, you know, do my part to, like, you know, fight poverty and to, like, you know, create economic stability." But like, guess what? Harvard Law School also has a culture, a way we do things around here. It's obviously not one

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  note. There are many people who go to Harvard Law School who have ambitions like Anthony. But modally, people go into corporate law.

• 1:07:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:33Speaker 01

  So Anthony finds by his third year that he too is going to corporate law. Like, he's like, you know, it's just the way the water is flowing.

• 1:07:41Speaker 00

  And he's proud of it by the time you talk to him.

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  Well, he is. He is. He is. He's like, you know, because then you've got all these, like, milestones, or like, get this internship, right? Do this in 2L, do this in 3L, you know, like, and then he's in corporate law, right? And it takes him a little while for his body to have the allergic reaction to it. He's like, "Wait, hold on. What am I doing?" And then it actually takes a fair amount of work to, like, navigate back into the public sector, which is where he came from, before he went to the law, you know. So I do think that we should recognize that when we decide to live in Miami, Florida, or we decide to work at, like, this consulting firm, or take, you know, this particular job, like, don't think that your preferences are going to be the same over time. Your

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  preferences are malleable, infinitely malleable, certainly not. But we are cultural animals, and that means that our cultures not only shape our present behavior, but also shape us in ways that are enduring. And maybe that's the most profound message of the book, right? Not only, you know, is the fact that you have one sec on your phone going to change your behavior in the moment, and, you know, what you put on your kitchen counter is going to, like, change what you eat that afternoon. Not only, you know, do the people that you tend to work with, you know, most, going to, like, shape whether you do good work or great work, mentors. But maybe this point about the way we do things around here becomes

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  the way you do things, too. And therefore, whether you're going to choose, you know, the sort of, like, shiny object, success, or maybe a deeper sense of, you know, what it means to be the person you want to be, you know, your agency, you know, whether you choose to recognize it or not, extends beyond, you know, the way you think about things and what you will yourself to do. Your agency, maybe most importantly, is in making the choices of where to be and who to be with.

• 1:09:37Speaker 00

  My guest today has been Angela Duckworth. Her book, not that she cares that I mention it, but it's called Situated. Angela, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  Russ, thank you.

• 1:09:55Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to EconTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.