Willpower Expert: The Secret To Effortless Discipline - Angela Duckworth - #1158

Angela Duckworth is a psychologist, professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and an author. Expect to learn what Angela has learned about her worldview since writing GRIT, if removing friction from your life is making you weaker, how important physical environments are and when to change them, how to know whether you have an environmental problem or a willpower one, how to engineer your environment to enhance grit and much more… Sponsors: Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get up to 20% off Timeline’s leading longevity and cellular health supplement at https://timeline.com/modernwisdom Get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit, and more when you first subscribe at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get 15% off your first order of my favourite Non-Alcoholic Brew at https://athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠⁠ Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠https://chatgpt.com Timestamps: (00:00) How Has Angela’s Worldview Changed? (02:12) When Does Grit Stop Being Useful? (09:03) Should You F**k Your Feelings and Just Work Harder? (11:33) Discipline: Is It Willpower or Engrained? (18:51) How Does Environment Impact Success? (24:29) The Most Underrated Environment Design Hacks (28:29) Why Groups Make Goals Easier (35:41) Why Modern Life Is Making Us More Isolated (39:22) Do You Really Need a Mentor? (46:37) Can Grit Lead to Burnout? (53:03) The Best Way to Recover From Burnout (57:02) Chris’ Experience With Burnout (01:06:11) Why Alignment Changes Everything (01:09:40) How Angela Redesigned Her Environment (01:12:42) Does Removing Friction Make Life Weaker? (01:24:29) When to Push Harder and When to Change Direction (01:27:54) How to Engineer a Culture of Excellence (01:39:11) What’s Next for Angela? Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/books⁠ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: ⁠https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom⁠ Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠ #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠ #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠ - Get In Touch: Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast⁠ Email: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/contact⁠ - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  People of the UK and Ireland, if you want to come and see me live, tickets are very limited for my live tour this October, but they are still available. Dublin is already sold out. However, if you're a fan of modern wisdom, if you love psychology, philosophy, human nature, personal development, and you want to hear stories that I definitely can't tell on the internet, then come and see me live this October. ChrisWilliamson.live has got all of the tickets. Dublin is completely gone, but there are limited tickets everywhere else. I'll see you soon. ChrisWilliamson.live. You wrote one of the defining personal development books of the decade. What?

• 0:31Speaker 01

  I wrote it 10 years ago.

• 0:33Chris Williamson?

  What's changed in your worldview since then?

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Well, as a psychologist, I really did spend the first half of my career trying to understand the importance of individual effort to achieving excellence. And I wrote a book about it. And I recently reread that book. And I wanted to know whether I changed my mind. I mean, you know, I continued to do science, other scientists, people keep saying, and you know what? Don't disagree with a word in grit. I really don't. Other people can, but I don't. I feel like there is a final common path to becoming great that requires consistency over time. And that's the message of grit. And, you know, the reason I embarked on this in the first place is that I knew that I had achieved what I had achieved through effort and not through natural talent. So there was a personal

• 1:20Speaker 01

  dimension, and it was my vocation, my calling as a scientist. But as a scientist, I continued to ask the question, you know, like, what else, what else is there? And also, where does this come from? Right? So your DNA will incline you to be grittier or less gritty. But we also know that it's not just your DNA. So I also wanted to know, like, why would somebody be passionate and persevering? And this curiosity inevitably leads you outside of the mind of a high achiever and into their situation. It leads you naturally to like, who's around them? What's around them? Where are they? And so the second book is about

• 2:03Speaker 01

  everything that inclines a person to devote individual effort, and also everything that makes individual effort pay off.

• 2:12Chris Williamson?

  When does grit stop being useful? What are the limits of grit?

• 2:18Speaker 01

  You know, I think the personal reason why I wrote this second book is, is that as somebody who has gotten very far in life through her own effort, she has asked the question, you know, when is it not paying off? And I will tell you, when you are trying hard and you're not making the progress you want. Well, if you're me at a certain age, you just try harder, right? I mean, wake up earlier, grind harder, and then stay later, right?

• 2:49Chris Williamson?

  That's the assumption, right? If I'm trying hard, if I think I'm trying hard and I'm not getting results, it must be that I think I'm trying hard, but I'm not trying hard enough.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  And then I can try harder, right? I mean, it's kind of like natural. You're like, oh, then, you know, do 20% more, right? You know, you're not getting where you are. Like, turn up the volume, right?

• 3:05Chris Williamson?

  It's like an inverse Parkinson's law, not that work expands to fill the time given for it, but effort expands to make something happen.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  Right. And sometimes that works, right? Because sometimes you aren't at 100%. And sometimes, like, yeah, like, you know, you're lifting weights and you just like exert a little more effort. Yeah. So I feel like this trick that we learn, you know, try harder is not wrong, but it's incomplete. And I think the limits, I mean, you asked me, like, what are the limits? When you are trying hard and then harder, and you're not making progress, you have to do something that was not natural for me, which is to ask whether the situation itself was not the right situation. You know, to me, it felt like, first of all, I don't know that it would occur to me. Like, you know, I always look inward, right? It's like, you know, what can I do? I don't want to look outward. That was reflexive to me.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  And also it felt kind of, yeah, like, well, I'll use the word cowardly. You can use the word, like, it just felt embarrassing and shameful. It just felt like being a loser to, you know, ask whether-

• 4:03Chris Williamson?

  What? You're saying that you can't do it on your own? Oh, you need a helping hand. You need this crutch in order to be able to get across the line?

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 4:10Chris Williamson?

  It would be more noble if you suffered more.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, right. And it's, you know, the hard way is the best way, right? And so that, that like, that rule of thumb, right? Like, effort is everything. If it's not working, try harder. I think it's dangerous. I think it's incomplete. And I think by being incomplete, you can like end up in the wrong place.

• 4:28Chris Williamson?

  Do you know why I think, one of the reasons why I think that asymmetry maybe that people have has been so prevalent in the modern world, at least at all, because of the fact that you wrote a massive book about it? I think a big part of it is that on average, more people probably do needs to be told to put their emotions to one side and just work harder. I think that if you were to take an aggregate of-

• 4:54Speaker 01

  If you take 100 people, you'd be like, how many people like actually just need to turn up the volume on their effort? And then how many people actually need to get situated? You would say like, more people need just to like-

• 5:03Chris Williamson?

  Not even that, that I think far more people are leaving a lot on the table when it comes to how hard they're pressing the gas tank, full stop. And you are always going to have more agency over just effort applied. Like, it's immediate. It's there right now, right? I can just do that. I can just do one more rep now. I can just stick about for another 30 minutes now. And the problem is, there's a selection effect, which is the kind of people that listen to podcasts like this and read books like yours are already in the group who are probably turning themselves inside out, thinking that they're not doing enough already. So this is what I call advice hyperresponders. So-

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Advice hyperresponders?

• 5:44Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, same word. Yeah, yeah.

• 5:46Chris Williamson?

  They basically exaggerate that which they're predisposed to already, as opposed to correcting the imbalance.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  Which I think, actually, so you might say that about advice hyperresponders. I mean, you could argue that that's just human nature, that our, our strengths get raced, then our strengths get stronger, right?

• 6:05Chris Williamson?

  Well, yeah, because you're-

• 6:06Speaker 01

  It's like the problem with every physical therapy problem that anybody ever had, right? It's like, oh, you're using your like glutes and like, because you have strong glutes, you know, like, you're not using the other muscles, right? Like the hamstring. So, so I think that it could be a general truth, right? That if you have gotten far in life through effort, and maybe you're right, that numerically, like, okay, that's not everyone, like, maybe that's the minority, like, then it's those people, maybe not 100 out of 100, who knows what the ratio is, like, those people are the ones who like, make the mistake of just like pushing harder instead of finding a situation where their effort has higher return.

• 6:45Chris Williamson?

  Bingo. Yeah, they gravitate toward a message that reinforces their worldview already.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:50Chris Williamson?

  And it also confirms what the reason that most people are doing that, which is the fear of being the inverse. Like, the person who's already adamant, why, I'm just so, I'm just so lazy. It's like, dude, you haven't missed a gym session in like, three weeks. But like, you notice when you have a cupcake, as opposed to the guy that hasn't left the couch on an evening time for like, two months.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:12Chris Williamson?

  For him, advice just goes through him like he's a poltergeist.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:16Chris Williamson?

  Whereas, like, the imbalance isn't corrected, the predisposition gets exaggerated. That's basically how this and it's-

• 7:23Speaker 01

  So how do you feel about these advice hyperresponders? Do you feel like they are, it's good? Is it bad? Like, what do you think about advice?

• 7:30Chris Williamson?

  It just, it just is. I think, you know, men who hear the message, don't be pushy with women, unfortunately, in a post Me Too world, what's happened there is, the guys that were just blowing through boundaries and being assholes, they coasted past that advice completely unchanged, while the guys who probably could have done with a little bit more confidence to go up and speak to a woman, oh, I knew I was too much. I knew that I was too much. I see it everywhere. I see this absolutely everywhere.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Interesting. That's why I'm saying it's like a general truth. It's not just about like effort.

• 7:59Chris Williamson?

  Bingo. It's across, it's across the board.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  Whatever your strength is, it is in a way a weakness.

• 8:03Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Strength and your fear will be reinforced by whatever. And this is to sort of bring it into land. In a meritocracy, where you are your outcomes, which means that the winners are deserving of their successes and the losers are deserving of their losses. What do you want? I want to own my outcomes.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:20Chris Williamson?

  I want to know that if I put my fucking foot on the, on the-

• 8:22Speaker 01

  It's on me.

• 8:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's on me. Not going to rely on anyone, atomized society, individual responsibility, man. I'm going to sigma lone ranger wolf my way to the top. Like, it's alluring. It's very alluring.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  What do you think about my thesis that individual effort matters? But what do you think about the thesis, like, and your situation matters enormously and much more than people think? I mean, do you feel like it's a weak message? Do you feel like it's, you know, what do you think?

• 8:50Chris Williamson?

  No, I don't think it's a weak message at all. I think it's a important counterbalance to kind of the prevailing personal development message of the last 10 to 15 years or so. Like, even when I think about-

• 9:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you had to like, give a one liner for the personal advice that is given for last 10, like, what's your perspective on like, what is, what is that message?

• 9:11Chris Williamson?

  Fuck your feelings, just work harder.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Just do it.

• 9:13Chris Williamson?

  Fuck your feelings, just work harder. Yeah, that's, that's been-

• 9:15Speaker 01

  By the way, I'm trying to curse less, so you're like a terrible influence on me.

• 9:18Chris Williamson?

  I'm sorry, I'm British. I'm afflicted, I'm afflicted with British.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's okay. It sounds much better with your accent. So like, I think you can say anything you want.

• 9:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the cussing thing, I do need to, I do need to dial it back.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  There is research actually that shows that like, it is actually just a sign of being sincere because like, you're not editing. So, you know.

• 9:36Chris Williamson?

  Meanwhile, your prefrontal cortex is stepping in to avoid you from.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  I work a lot with children and parents. And so like, that's a totally different context.

• 9:43Chris Williamson?

  Speed run their development, speed their, and their education. They're gonna start using you when they grow up. Hey, you're in adva-, you're a precocious developer here. I see that your language has come on.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, so since you're a prodigy, but like, so the last 10 or 15 years, I agree. There's, I think there are two messages, honestly. I think there's one, which is like, just do it, right?

• 10:01Speaker 01

  I do think there's another one, which is a little more nuanced, right? So, so for me, as a scientist, I'm not a journalist, I'm a scientist. I study human behavior and I study human behavior change. And I think I speak for pretty much every behavioral scientist. When we say that your response, you can change directly, but you can also change your thoughts. And if you change your thoughts, then you don't have to use willpower because your thoughts, like, if you say to yourself, like, I want to go to the gym, then you don't need to use willpower to go to the gym. So you can either change your will, like at the last, and it's like, I'm gonna force myself to just go to the gym, right? Or earlier than that, you can change your thoughts, you can reframe it, you can rethink it, you can have a paradigm shift.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  Like, I wanna go to, you know, gym is my temple, like, I'm the sort of person, right? I think, to me, the last 15 years of personal development advice has either been like, just do it, or just change your thoughts so that you will want to do it. And I think the, the, the message of this book is, I think, blindingly obvious to people who study human behavior for a living, which is that our thoughts are much more influenced by our circumstances, by like, who you're talking to and what they just said. And like, you know, is the can of soda to your right, next to your elbow or not? Where's your phone? These elements of your situation are much more in charge of your thoughts than you think.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  People think they're in charge of their own thoughts, and very often, the situation is in charge of your thoughts.

• 11:32Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. You think people with discipline or high willpower are actually more disciplined? Or do they, have they just designed lives that required less of it?

• 11:42Speaker 01

  So I think one of the, like, signal discoveries of the last 20 years is that we assume that people who go to the gym, like, and they go for their run, and they get their work done, and they're not procrastinating, and they control their temper, and they have five-year goals, but they actually break down those five-year goals into like, one-year goals, and they make progress on them. They return emails, like, we think of those people as having enormous willpower. And I think like, 20 or 30 years ago, that's what scientists would also say. I think the fact that people have willpower, I mean, willpower is a thing. I mean, there's a part of your brain at the front that is able to suppress or elevate impulses for the rest of your brain. Like, you can will yourself to do things. But the discovery is that highly successful people are not using willpower.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  Highly successful people are doing exactly what you said, which is they're arranging their lives, so they don't need to use willpower. I mean, it's, it's kind of the opposite of like, brute force and being like, a general, right? You know, Sun Tzu said, you don't win a war through brute force. You do it strategically, and you do it, the law is really the law of least effort, right? So like, how can you set up a situation where you think, I want to go to the gym? It's like, well, for me, I'll tell you, it's like this trivial. If I have my gym clothes out, right, the night before, I mean, I keep my gym clothes in the fourth drawer of my bureau. It's not that hard to reach into the, like, it's not like I have to climb a ladder, right?

• 13:08Speaker 01

  So in the morning, I could reach into the fourth drawer of my bureau and pull out a top and a pair of shorts, and I'd be ready to go to the gym. It would take me, I think, three seconds and almost no calories, right? So how can that make a difference to whether I go to the gym or not? If the night before, I reach into the fourth drawer, and I take out the shorts and the top, and I lay it on top of the bureau, I will tell you, it makes a huge difference. It makes an enormous, especially when I'm traveling, by the way. Because when I'm home, I have a routine, but like, the difference is that, first of all, it's a visual cue, right? Like, our attention is just whatever we see, right? There's an expression, what you see is all there is.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  If I see it, I think, oh, right, I could go to the gym. And that micro friction, the micro friction of like, I could open the drawer, I could, like, I could hunt around, I could like, find it, is enough to make the difference. And so to me, the, the insight is, yeah, don't wait for willpower. Like, that's the worst way to change human behavior. Again, I think I speak on behalf of Angela Duckworth, and I speak on, on behalf of scientists who study this, like, everyone I know. And also, if you're going to take the message of the last 10 to 15 years, it's like, it's all in your mind, it's your mindset and so forth. What books do you need to have visible? What, what quotes you have, who do you need to be around to give you the thoughts that you want, to give you the behavior you want?

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Like, that's the three boxes model. The situation is box one, your thoughts are box two, and your response to your thoughts is box three.

• 14:40Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. That's interesting. Is that, so that's the big change, you think, over the last couple of decades?

• 14:45Speaker 01

  For me, I think my, you know, I sound like a politician when I say like, well, I don't, it's not a contradiction.

• 14:52Chris Williamson?

  Your academic diplomacy is showing.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  It's, it's, it's really like, I'm, I'm, I'm trying to be honest in a way that doesn't sound like I, you know, am making it up, because it, it is truth. You know, when I was in graduate school, like, the very first thing you learn is about the power of the situation. There is a book that I don't think a lot of people have read, but some people have read. I know Malcolm Gladwell read it, and it changed his life. The book is called The Person and the Situation, and it is not a bestseller. It is written by two academics who never went on podcasts, right? They are Dick Nisbet and Lee Ross. And every graduate student in psychology has to learn what's in that book. And what's in that book is that people have the experience of being intentional, goal-directed, right?

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Why'd you do that? Like, why did you drink that? Why did you say that? What, you know, what was in your mind, right? And that's only partly true. The book about the person, the situation, is really about the power of the situation over the person. The book mostly talks about how, whether you're altruistic, or, you're gonna make me curse, or not altruistic, like, a total, fill in the blank, do it.

• 16:01Chris Williamson?

  Asshole.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Okay. Whether you are one or the other, I could have said that, but like, I'm trying to.

• 16:06Chris Williamson?

  You just can't call the kid an asshole. It's slightly different.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Yes, I don't, I don't do that either. That one I don't have a problem with. But it's, it's very much, okay, so here's a, here's a, a study that is highlighted in The Person and the Situation, that, again, like, every graduate student in psychology, it's called the Good Samaritan Study, right? And it actually literally takes place at a seminary. So these are people who are going to go and do the ministry, right? It's their job to be altruistic. They're nothing like the.

• 16:33Chris Williamson?

  Predisposed to be lovely.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's like, they're predisposed, and, and it's like, all they think about, right? So in the Good Samaritan Study, they, they basically have, in one condition, somebody who's like, obviously homeless and, and suffering, right? And, and, you know, they're, they're there. In the other condition, that's also true. But in one condition, these Good Samaritans, right, these seminarians are like, rushing to get to a next appointment, right? Like, you give them a phone call, and they're supposed, and another one, they don't, it's a trivial situational feature. It shouldn't affect their character, right? You didn't make them more altruistic by like, calling them and saying like, oh, you have to be in this place at 2 o'clock.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  But it has a massive effect on whether they stop and help the person who needs help. So this is the kind of thing that all graduate students in psychology learn about, the hidden power of situations. We feel like we're intentional, but we're much more reactive. Okay, you learn about that in graduate school. So I can't lie and say that I never knew about the power of the situation. But I do think that connecting this to excellence, like, connecting this to agency. There are philosophers who have pointed out that the agency of the individual is located within. There are not many philosophers who say that you have agency over your circumstances,

• 17:54Speaker 01

  that whether you choose to have water next to you, or whatever you're not trying to drink, soda, whatever, like, is up to you. I think that, to me, was an insight that I hadn't fully appreciated when I started out.

• 18:09Chris Williamson?

  It's a feedback mechanism as well, presumably, that you can engineer more agency, which means that you can engineer further, which means more, ta, ta, ta, ta, ta, ta.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  I think there are many examples of positive feedback cycles. And in a way, when we're talking about like, a strength becomes more of a strength, right? And a weakness becomes more, that's also positive feedback. Right, the Matthew effect, right? Like, you know, the rich get richer, whatever it is that you're doing, well, like. So I do think situational agency begets situational agency. And it's not just that. But when you start to change your situation, and you realize that you do have a responsibility to put things around you and to be around people who bring out your best, I think that encourages you to do more of the same.

• 18:51Chris Williamson?

  What are the environmental similarities that you discovered when studying world-class performers?

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Well, since we are in Austin, I will tell you that the signature example of grit would be Michael Phelps, right? 365-day-a-year swimmer for a 20-year career, right? And I had dinner with Michael Phelps's coach, Bob Bowman, who is a coach here now at UT Austin. And to me, the story of Michael Phelps is a perfect illustration of how grit is essential and how grit is not enough. And here's why. You can be as gritty as Michael Phelps. I really don't think there's anybody who's worked harder than Michael Phelps, and he's actually said that himself.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  He was like, I'm not gonna brag about a lot of things, but I will say that I don't think anybody swam harder than I did. Like, nobody practiced and trained, and it's not just the physical, by the way, but mental, something that Bob mentioned, kind of like, parenthetically last night, it's like. It's not just the mileage that he put into the pool and how much he would mentally visualize every competition, but not just what Bob asked him to do, which is to like, imagine how you want the race to go, but he imagined all the ways the race could go. And then like what he would do so that he was completely able to be like in the moment. But then when you ask the question like, well, would Michael Phelps become arguably the greatest athlete ever, right? Because he's certainly the most decorated Olympic athlete by a stretch, right? Nobody's going to approach this record that he has of 28

• 20:23Speaker 01

  medals, 23 of them gold across a 20 year career. But you could also ask the question, was he situated, right? And absolutely. Okay. So let's consider that Michael Phelps was born 10 minutes away. Well, he's actually born an hour away from where Bob Bowman, I think the greatest swimming coach in history, happened to be, and he was then moved to be only 10 minutes away because Michael's sisters wanted to swim and they wanted to swim where all the best swimmers were. So they started going to the North Baltimore Aquatic Center. And that is where the best swimmers were. So the best team and also the best coaches, like the kind of youth aquatic center that like actually recruits nationally for coaches,

• 21:05Speaker 01

  which is why Bob Bowman moved from California to Baltimore. So it was a situation. He also had his mom. So he had ADHD as a diagnosis as a nine year old, I think. And he had this mom who was so situationally wise, she understood that in certain situations, Michael was a pain in the ass. Look, you're got, you know, by the end of this podcast, I'm just going to be dropping F bombs, but he was a pain in the ass. Letters home, you know, teachers saying like, this kid doesn't have potential, like he's also disruption. But she knew that in the right situation, he would have complete focus and total effort. So that's the pool.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  I think these features of a situation, Baltimore Aquatic Center, a team of athletes who even at ages like nine, 10, 11, were used to the kind of practice that elite swimmers do. A coach who ends up being, you know, in the storybooks as like one of the greatest coaches ever. You cannot explain Michael Phelps's achievements without talking about his situation. And then if you just look at, you know, subsequent things, I think Michael actually did have a lot of situational agency. When Bob Bowman moved from Baltimore, Michael Phelps had the good sense to follow him, right? Like, he knew that he couldn't be the swimmer that

• 22:24Speaker 01

  he could be with Bob unless he was with Bob, right? So I think there is a story that is not often told. You show me the paragon of grit. And if you keep looking, you will also find a situation that was their ally.

• 22:38Chris Williamson?

  The supplement industry is full of products making claims that they can't back, which is why I'm such a massive fan of Momentous. Their co-founder Jeff Byers played in the NFL and saw firsthand just how wildly the quality of supplements can vary. So he built Momentus around a higher standard. Every product from Momentous uses evidence-backed ingredients, transparent doses, and independent third-party testing. Everything is NSF certified for sports. So what's on the label is actually what's in the tub. It's why Momentous is trusted inside all 32 NFL locker rooms. It's why I've trusted them with my own supplements for years. Best of all, Momentous offers a 30 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it and try it for 29 days. If you don't love it, they will give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to 35% off your first subscription

• 23:22Chris Williamson?

  and that 30 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com/ModernWisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S.com/ModernWisdom. Modern Wisdom at checkout. Isn't that interesting? First off, an inversion of the athlete going with the coach as opposed to the coach going with the athlete? Because usually people think about the athlete as being the once in a generation talent. But what Michael Phelps identified was that he would only be what he could be if he was around this particular guy.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  This particular arguably once in a generation coach.

• 23:55Chris Williamson?

  Also, what's kind of interesting, you know, the word is situation. When people think about situation, it's kind of amorphous. It's like big, it's ephemeral. But he'd found this singular, this one linchpin that because he would have left his teammates, he would have left his home, he would have left his routine, his car, the, what, maybe the new pool's a little bit longer or colder or wider or something. Maybe the chlorine's slightly different. Or maybe you can't get the same kind of food or the raw milk that he was drinking on a weekend isn't available, or he's not got his friends or his girl or whatever. It's like his situation was a guy. So how have you come to think about this? Because look, I really appreciate you saying, asking me for critique at the top. It seems like your career in academia has made you sort of wanting to hear things. I was a little

• 24:40Chris Williamson?

  bit worried when I was like, Angela Duckworth's next book's going to be about situation and environment design. I was a little worried when I first thought about that because I'm like, as with a productivity background and like spending a lot of time with David Allen's getting things done and environment design, like, you know, you don't want to be distracted by your phone. Don't have it next to you on the table. I'm like, don't, it can't be, it can't, it can't be. And what I'm keen to do is to, everyone now understands that your environment sort of can influence you. I want to move past like, don't have the chips in the house.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. You're like, this I know.

• 25:10Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's great. But I want to go to, I want to get really deep on the environment design stuff. What is the cutting edge shit that makes the biggest difference that people don't already know? People know that they shouldn't live that far from their fucking gym, right? People know that they shouldn't.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  By the way, they don't necessarily do anything about it, right?

• 25:29Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's good.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  So like, before we just skip over like, oh, everybody knows that like, you know, what's within your reach is what you're going to eat. Like, everybody knows that. How many people put that into practice? When I wrote the chapter on like, set up your space, I was like, blindingly obvious, but nobody's doing it. But I agree with you. There are also chapters on everybody knows it's important, but they don't think it's possible. I mean, there's other things, but before we skip past like, what's within reach, and I'll just say, I think in my research, by the way, when I ask Americans, like, what's the best way to control your behavior? They say it's to control the situation. Ask the same Americans, what do you do? They say they use willpower.

• 26:09Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 26:10Speaker 01

  Well, then I asked follow up questions. I said, why? And one of the most common responses was, I want to be the sort of person who can do what they want because of their will, not because they need the situation. They don't want the situation to be a crutch. I think it is a kind of a mark of character. Like, you don't want to be the kind of person who needs to take GLP-1s or to like, you know, you want to be the sort of person who doesn't need that, right? So I think that, that to me is at least part of the answer. But you asked the question, like, what's not obvious, right? So let's get to that. Here's something that I think is not obvious. I think it is not obvious that by and large, you'll be more successful achieving your individual goals if you do it as part of

• 26:51Speaker 01

  a group. And I'm not talking about just sort of like, oh, being specifically on a swimming team or I'm literally talking about like, so somebody's trying to run a marathon, someone's trying to be a better public speaker, entrepreneur, start a company, become a better marketer, right? If you ask the question, could I find other people who don't necessarily work with me on my project, but are just striving for the same goals, also trying to run a marathon, also trying to go to the gym more, also trying to fund a company, but maybe a different company, right? Research shows, and I think this is counter-cultural, research shows that you will be more successful on average if you do that in a flock, like as part of

• 27:30Speaker 01

  a tribe. And the reason I say it's counter-cultural is that DIY is the prevailing, like DIY is an expression. Do it yourself was introduced more than 50 years ago, but it's now 50 times more common. And when I see young people in particular, the things that they try to do, they try to do with their own individual effort. It doesn't necessarily occur to them to find, you know, other aspiring writers, like other aspiring, whatever it is. And that to me is an insight that if I could go back in time, I think of young people that I've advised and like, I'm trying to help them with their time management and their confidence and so forth. How often did I say, who else do you know that is trying

• 28:12Speaker 01

  to like, be a graduate student? And how often did I say, like, let's help you find a group? Because it's easier in some ways if you're a swimmer, because you join a team. I think it's less obvious, but just as transformative to do that for like, quite literally any individual personal goal you have.

• 28:29Chris Williamson?

  What like? What are some of the non-obvious goals that people have used groups to help them with?

• 28:34Speaker 01

  So one of the, you know, examples that I found in my research on this was, there is a group of surgeons, right? And it wasn't necessarily they were trying to be better surgeons, but surgery is like an all consuming thing. What they really wanted to do, they were all young men. They were just finishing, I think, like, the part of their specialized training. So they're all going into orthopedic surgery. They met at a conference because, you know, that's what they did for their, but they had a dinner and they said that they had a different goal other than being world-class surgeons, which they all, by the way, ended up being like, they're all chaired professors at like, the best hospital systems in the country. They had another goal. They wanted to be good fathers and they wanted to be good husbands. And they wondered how they would do that, right? And

• 29:19Speaker 01

  they were living in different cities. They had their own lives. And at this point, they're strangers, right? But they decided to have dinner at the next conference and the next one. And then they decided to have a group text thread. And you ask these men who are now at retirement age, how different would your lives be if you had tried to become world-class orthopedic surgeons and achieve this other goal of being men, you know, being men who showed up for their family and so. What's the road not taken? And each of these men will say that the road not taken is not the best road, that they are, that their lives were transformed. And then they gave examples, you know, they've seen each other through. True tragedy and every possible, you know,

• 30:02Speaker 01

  personal struggle. And it was because they had this group. And it really was nothing more or less than a group text thread. And then getting together a few times, you know, with some increasing frequency, right? So now not just at conferences and so forth. When I think about my own career, like when I interviewed them, I was like, oh, what about me? Like, I don't have that. And I'll tell you that I have room to grow too, because I have collaborators. I have a team that works in my lab. I don't have what these men have. Like, I don't have this, like, group of people who are sort of struggling with the same professional and personal challenges. You know, it is essentially creating Alcoholics Anonymous for yourself. Like, it's creating a mutual aid society,

• 30:47Speaker 01

  which is how Alcoholics Anonymous sometimes calls them. It's like, I don't have that. And I think, I think it would even, for me at 56, and a lot to be grateful for, I think it would transform my life. And I'm actually trying to start one. I like, actually reached out to these women who were like, what? Like, all in their 50s, actually one in their high 40s, or maybe she's 50. And I said, like, I interviewed these surgeons. I want to try to do what I, what I'm trying to do. But I would like to try to do it, like, somehow in some kind of fellowship or community with you.

• 31:20Chris Williamson?

  Do you want to make the Avengers Assemble of high-powered lady academics?

• 31:24Speaker 01

  They are really high-powered, I have to say. They, I, I think, I think it's very important if you're going to decide to, like, start a group, right? You can join a group if you can find a group. I think you just join a group, right? Like, you're trying to marathon and you just find the local running club. There are apparently over 60 in Philadelphia. So like, there's got to be a running club wherever you are. And there's probably a group of people who like, want to write a book or whatever. But if you're trying to find a group, like, these orthopedic surgeons could not find a group that they could just join of, like, other elite orthopedic surgeons who cared about family and so forth. Well, then they start one, right? If you're going to do that, I think you should probably look for two things. I do think stage of life, like, the difference between a mentor and a peer is that a mentor is above you. They are farther than you, they're above you. And honestly, they're usually older than you.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  So I think finding somebody who's at the same stage of life and then who are really, like, like-minded. And so, yes, you won't be surprised that the women that I reach out to are all, like, very accomplished women. And they're all around my age.

• 32:22Chris Williamson?

  You know what it makes me think about? It makes me think about the difference between reading fiction and nonfiction with the mentor versus peer relationships. So in a mentor relationship, it's largely unidirectional, right? The advice is going to come-

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Yes, it's asymmetric.

• 32:33Chris Williamson?

  It's going to come from them to you. But in the same way as reading fiction can often teach you more stuff than reading nonfiction does, because you understand the protagonist's motivations. And, okay, well, what does that mean? It causes you to reflect. It's more indirect. In the same way, when you've got a peer group, indirectly, the advice that you need to give somebody reveals something about yourself to yourself.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Which is, by the way, part of the magic of AA, right? Alcoholics Anonymous, as they say, like, you only keep it when you give it away. I mean, there is something in the advice giving that is self-awareness.

• 33:06Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, how, you, you mentioned before about the identity element of personality, right? I am the sort of person that goes to the gym. I am the sort of person that does the thing. Like, it is hard to proselytize about this thing that somebody else should be doing, without it at least somehow throwing into sharp contrast the fact that you're not doing it yourself.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  I actually did do a random assignment study where we asked people to give advice, as kids, right? Like, you know, how do you not procrastinate? Like, and so that was the whole intervention.

• 33:35Chris Williamson?

  Advice giving is an intervention.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  Exactly. And, you know, yeah, the grades went up. So like, basically, in the treatment group, which was like, you know, in a few minutes, like, just write down the things that you would advise other students to do. Like, that was the whole thing. Like, we didn't tell them anything.

• 33:48Chris Williamson?

  They weren't even giving it to a student. It was an imaginary student.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  They were told to, like, give it to a student. And actually, we don't lie in our studies. So we actually did give it to other students, because it was actually good advice, it turns out. And then the students who are randomly assigned to give advice, and then the, the control group was just a control group. It wasn't that they received, it was just a control group that, like, didn't do this. They, they actually did better themselves. I do think there's something about, like, our, I think it's partly, by the way, self-awareness, like, you, you basically do some reflection. And then also, there's a kind of, like, well, I just said it. So like, I should probably do it, right? Like, a kind of consistency, like, you don't want to be a hypocrite, right? But I do think your point about what is the difference between a peer and a mentor is profound. And I guess if I, if I, if I wanted to sum up what I just said about, like, what's something non-obvious about your situation? Like, are you doing things alone?

• 34:35Speaker 01

  And more and more Americans are doing that. Over the last 15 or 20 years, we're spending more time alone in every category of age. And particularly with young people, but it's not just young people. We're also spending less time out of the house, it turns out, like, by over an hour. So over the last 20 years, we're spending, like, you know, less time, just not under our own roofs, which means that we're very likely alone, but we're sort of isolated, right, from the rest of society? And a new finding that was just published, not by me, but by, you know, scientists who specialize in this, we're speaking about 300 fewer words a day. So we're sort of becoming a isolated, silent-

• 35:16Chris Williamson?

  Oh, okay, you don't, you don't mean vocabulary breadth. You mean, volume of words spoken.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  Number of words over the last, say, 15 years is like going down about-

• 35:23Chris Williamson?

  The same thing is not true for me. The podcasts are in the room.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  Well, maybe you are, like, you bucking the trend. But imagine what it would be like without your data.

• 35:31Chris Williamson?

  You know what it's like when Bill Gates walks into a stadium and everybody, on average, becomes a billionaire? I walk, I walk into the room and everyone, on average, becomes a podcaster.

• 35:42Chris Williamson?

  Andrew Yang in the American Time Use Survey came up with four stats that I thought were fascinating. Between 2003 and 2024, the amount of time that Americans spent attending or hosting a social event declined by 50%. Among young people aged 15 to 24, they spent 70% less time attending or hosting parties in 2024 than in 2023. Men who watch television now spend seven hours doing so for every hour they spend hanging out with another person outside of the house. And number four, this was the most insane, the average female pet owner spends more time with her pet than all humans put together.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  Oh, God, right. Well, I didn't know about, I think I knew about the first three of those stats. I didn't know about the fourth one. But like, this is the painting of the, you know, this is the picture, right, of like, modern American life. And one reason I wrote a book on this situation is that I don't think the default settings of the modern world are good. I really don't. I think this trend toward isolation, towards being on your phone all the time, you know, being in some little segregated part of the world where, like, you only interact with people who are basically agreeing with you. Like, I, I, I don't think it's good. And so if you're going to change your life and if you believe the science that says to change yourself, you change your situation, the imperative is even more urgent, is what I'm saying.

• 37:04Chris Williamson?

  Isn't it interesting that you've had to sneak this pro-social thing that has happened for the entirety of human history and is the single best intervention, according to the Harvard Longevity Study, people in making you live longer?

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Relationships.

• 37:20Chris Williamson?

  It'll improve your performance, so maybe you should do it. You know what I mean? We have to sneak it into the meritocracy somehow.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  You know, I am not a great commentator on, like, how, you know, my work fits into the rest of the world, partly because, and if you knew me well, you would really believe me. I know what I know, and I really don't know most things. Oh, my God, like, current events, like, basic world history. So I can't necessarily fit my work, but I am a studier, I am a student of human excellence. And so, you know, you could say, like, oh, the only way that somebody's going to listen to you talk about relationships is because, like, they think it'll help them achieve more in this meritocracy. And you may be right. But I only know what I know. And I am a psychologist who studies high achievers. And I can say, as a student of high achievers, that their relationships, their mentors, which we haven't talked about too much, but their peers,

• 38:10Speaker 01

  like, they are arguably more important than their physical environment. But I don't want to discount the physical environment either.

• 38:16Chris Williamson?

  Somewhere along the way, low energy just gets accepted as a part of getting older. Turns out, there's a reason for that. As we age, our mitochondria, the parts of our cells that power us, become weaker and make less energy, which is why I'm such a huge fan of Timeline. They've developed this that helps to clear out your damaged mitochondria so your cells can actually renew themselves. Timeline is backed by over a decade of research and has more than 50 patents and is the number one recommended mitochondrial supplement on the planet. This isn't just theory. In clinical trials, people saw mitochondrial renewal increased by more than 40% in just 16 weeks, along with improvements in their overall energy. I've been using it for over two years, since my doctor recommended it to me way before I partnered with Timeline. And eat your heart out, Martin Shkreli,

• 38:59Chris Williamson?

  because they've just dropped the price and it now starts at $99. Best of all, there is a 30-day money-back guarantee, plus free shipping in the US, plus they ship internationally. And right now, you can get that $99 price with an additional 20% off by going to the link in the description below. Heading to timeline.com/ModernWisdom, using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's timeline.com/ModernWisdom and Modern Wisdom.

• 39:21Chris Williamson?

  A check out. Okay. Hit me up about mentors. What did you learn about mentors?

• 39:25Speaker 01

  So you can, you know, dig up stats on like, you know, your likelihood of becoming, for example, an award winning scientist is like two times to four times larger if you're mentored by an award winning scientist. And the, the, the kind of, oh, a mentor makes a difference. I don't really know that there are a lot of people who need convincing. Like, how many people would say, you know, it doesn't matter if like Oprah Winfrey is going to mentor you as you try to make your way like in media, or like, it doesn't matter whether you have an editor, if you're a writer. Like, I think the intuition that mentors matter is common. What is rare, I think, is the idea that you can proactively be a mentor magnet. You can, you can attract mentors. And I will tell you that not every high achiever, but most that

• 40:10Speaker 01

  I have studied, is a mentor magnet. And what am I talking about? The sort of person who other high achieving people who are farther down the path want to mentor. And you know, not everyone is equally mentorable. So what are these people like? Like, let me give you a very specific example. I think, I think the situation is so abstract, honestly, that like, you know, you don't know what to do with it because it's like everything. So let me be concrete. I got a email in my inbox on May 13, 2013, from Cody Coleman. I wrote about him in grit. I also wrote about him in situated, and he's the only person I put in both books. I wrote about him in grit. Why? Because in that early email in 2013,

• 40:53Speaker 01

  he introduced himself as somebody whose life could only be explained through passion and perseverance. He was born to a mother who was serving time in jail. So he was literally born in a prison outside of Trenton, New Jersey. And from those inauspicious beginnings, you know, a childhood of just sheer chaos, right? Like, the police, police were being called, like, you know, every other week because of, you know, domestic disturbances. There was a menagerie of cats and dogs. He has severe asthma. You could hardly breathe. His grandmother was taking care of him, but she was basically losing her mind. So, you know, he, these are not the circumstances that you would think. And then one day, he'll graduate from MIT.

• 41:29Chris Williamson?

  Prototypical excellence.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  I mean, this is the thing. He had this, this remarkable escape from, from poverty. So when he emailed me, he said, I watched your TED Talk, and I think, I think you have explained a lot about my life, and I would like to talk to you. Right? So he basically was asking me for a curiosity conversation. I think that's, that's the term that is used for like, I'd like to learn something from you. Right? And again, not a term, well, not again, it's a term that I want to just hasten to say, like, I didn't come up with it, but I think it's a perfect description. So in that email, he expresses curiosity. He also expresses preparation, because he wasn't writing me something that like, it took two seconds, like he had watched what I had, he had read a little bit of what I had written.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  And then he signed off with something that I think is signature to mentor magnets. He said, if there's anything that I can do that might be helpful in any way, like, I would love to do that. Right? And by the way, he was something like 20 or 21 years old when he wrote this. It's not Shakespeare. It was just sincere. And he signed his name. And you know what? Of all the emails in my inbox, I replied to that one. So who is this person who's prepared, who has something to say, who wants a few minutes of my time, who is offering to be helpful? So to be a mentor magnet is to be the sort of person where, you know, the universe does reach out to you because you're mentorable. What happens next? So I meet Cody. I find out about a story. I write about it in grit. By the way,

• 42:57Speaker 01

  he continues to live, so I can tell you what happened to him. So after he reached MIT and he graduated with a four nine out of five, he went to Google. From there, he went to Stanford. He got his PhD at Stanford in computer science. He was the third black recipient of a PhD in computer science in the university's history. And now he's the CEO of an AI startup that, according to Forbes magazine, you know, may be valued at a billion dollars, like, at some point in the future. So why does he play a role in this second book? He gave a TED Talk himself, it turns out, years after I gave mine. And he gave it in Palo Alto to a Stanford audience. And because it was a Stanford audience, he had no problem like

• 43:39Speaker 01

  putting graphs up on the PowerPoint slide behind him. So he has a graph up, and there's a gray line that's gently sloping upward. And he says, that's what most people think. You know, you meet me here, and you think like, you know, he did better and better. He went to MIT and so forth. Like, that's not my life. This is my life. And there's a red exponential curve, right? Talk about the Matthew effect. When there is a flywheel, when good begets better, and better begets best, you actually get exponential growth. This is what he said. I think of my life in five year chapters. In each chapter, my situation was better than the last. And you can only explain my exponential improvement,

• 44:22Speaker 01

  not linear, but exponential, if you really understand my situations, and how each one, right? So from his high school to MIT, from MIT to Google, from Google to Stanford, now to like San Jose, Silicon Valley, that the opportunities multiplied and the support multiplied. So, so I think, I think you can be a mentor magnet. What did Cody not do? He didn't email me and ask me to be his mentor. Mentor magnets do not email people and say, hi, Chris, could you be my mentor? Hello? You know, like, they don't do that. They ask for a short conversation. They offer to be helpful. They express gratitude. And

• 45:04Speaker 01

  very often, that will lead to another conversation. What they also do, by the way, is work with you on something. So mentor magnets have a habit of asking whether they can contribute to a project that the mentor is already working on. When Cody reiterated his offer to help, I initially thought, no. And then I realized, I had a project that was ongoing, where I was trying to teach little kids to be gritty. And I thought, oh, this is perfect. I'll have Cody Coleman record a video about how, from very humble beginnings, he got to where he got through passion and perseverance. So we worked on that project for about three months, which is about, you know, that's why I call them mentors for a season. Like, you, you go from a mentor for a reason, could I have a short conversation, to a mentor

• 45:46Speaker 01

  for a season? He did that. And then he continued to just be like, a grateful, curious, wonderful person. When I read his PhD dissertation, which was on AI, and I didn't understand the math, so I pretty much skipped the acknowledgements. I was like, oh, I know, I'm not going to understand this. His acknowledgements are three single spaced pages. He thanks by full name, over 200 people, like, you know, dozens of teammates or fellow students. Like, there were 17 administrators of the computer science department at Stanford that he thanks by full name. Cody Coleman is a paragon of grit. Cody Coleman is a mentor magnet. And

• 46:28Speaker 01

  Cody Coleman is a perfect example of like, yes, you need grit, but you also need to have the agency to navigate into better and better situations.

• 46:37Chris Williamson?

  What's the relationship between grit and your new insight around situations and burnout?

• 46:44Speaker 01

  So having experienced burnout, and I'll be, I'll be honest. When I used to teach burnout, because burnout, you know, burnout is a, a word that a psychologist named Christina Maslach coined. She was studying burnout. It has a very specific definition. Depression is, you know, you're depressed, you know, it's pervasive. Burnout is specifically about work. Right? So, so when you experience this trifecta of exhaustion, and also like a weird sort of dissociation, or like, I'm not really present. And finally, like, kind of a helplessness, right? This is the trifecta of burnout. That's what burnout is. It's an emotional state

• 47:25Speaker 01

  characterized by, I'm exhausted, I feel strangely not connected to my work anymore, and also nothing I do is working, and I have no agency. Right? So that's what burnout is. I would stand up in front of PowerPoint slides, and I would tell my MBA students, for example, and my undergraduates about burnout, and the psychology of burnout, and Christina Maslach's research, and, you know, what we know about burnout. It was completely abstract to me. I could have been talking about Mars. I'm like, you know, Mars is a planet, right? And then I experienced burnout in my own life. I mean, if I'm completely honest, I experienced burnout while I was writing this book. And why? Right? Well, first, what? Right? So like, I was experiencing exhaustion, this weird sort of like, I'm sort of doing

• 48:09Speaker 01

  this, and I'm doing it seven days a week, and I'm doing it from before dawn to after midnight. But it's also kind of like, the opposite of the flow state. I'm just like, I'm like, weirdly not in the moment. Right? And a real feeling of sort of like helplessness, like, I work harder and harder, nothing's happening. So I was experiencing this emotional state of burnout. What I think was happening is what we were talking about at the very beginning of this conversation. It wasn't going well. I just tried harder. And it's still, like, I just kept digging the hole deeper. And I think the danger of only thinking that grit is your superpower, and also being ashamed or negligent of, you know, the, the, the change in the situation that would make things better. Like, I think, I think what

• 48:53Speaker 01

  happened was, I should have asked for help. And I'll tell you, I asked for it too late. I also did, you, you said, like, let's not talk about the physical situations kind of obvious. Here's something that wasn't obvious. I was working at home, seven days a week, in my pajamas. Like, I literally think-

• 49:07Chris Williamson?

  Voluntarily gone back into COVID.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  It was exactly. It was actually an extension of the pandemic lifestyle. Everybody else went back to like civilization. I decided to stay. You know, I thought it would be better for concentration.

• 49:16Chris Williamson?

  Self imposed misery.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  It was, it was awful, because I was like socially, you know, I was put in solitary confinement by, by choice. But I didn't ask for help early enough. I didn't ask for help often enough. I didn't put myself in the company of other people.

• 49:30Chris Williamson?

  What would the help have looked like?

• 49:33Speaker 01

  Well, I had a person that I met three years into writing this. By the way, this book took five years to write, right?

• 49:41Chris Williamson?

  Congratulations.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's.

• 49:44Chris Williamson?

  On being sane.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  I, you know, I may live a shorter life because of it, but it took five years to write. But of course, you know, the research took longer, but the hard part for me was the writing. Three years into it, when things are going terribly, right? I'm not sleeping. I mean, the stress levels were like, I had cortisol just like coursing through my body. So I would go to sleep. I, it came to the point where I would go to sleep at 10:30 and my body's fight or flight response would wake me up at 11:30 and then I would just be awake all night. And then start the next day exhausted, but also trying to work harder. Right? So.

• 50:18Chris Williamson?

  I've been there.

• 50:18Speaker 01

  Have you been there? Have you experienced burnout, by the way? Okay, well, if I finish this story, you tell me yours.

• 50:24Chris Williamson?

  Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  Well, actually, you want to tell yours now?

• 50:27Chris Williamson?

  You get your rock bottom out and I'll get mine.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  All right, I'm gonna get, okay. So I'm telling my husband I'm retiring. I, I, I, I literally was fantasizing about being a pastry chef. I don't even eat past, I don't even eat pastry. I'm like, why would I be a pastry chef? I mean, there are all these like escapist fantasies. You know, I, I had a friend named Julie who was like, you know, you seem a little bit stressed. I barked, she was like, do you want to go skiing? I was like, I can't go skiing. She was like, uh, you know, do you want to, do you want to go for a walk? Like it came down to, she was just sort of negotiating and like, she was like, can I take you for a walk for an hour? No, I can't take a walk for an, this is a sign of burnout. Like, no, I can't take a walk for an hour because I need that hour to work because this is going so poorly. I met somebody who I asked for help. I got sort of set up.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  His, um, his name is Rick Cott and he had just retired from being an editor. And he had time and he had patience and he had, for some reason, like from the moment we met, he had some affection for me. Like he was just sort of, so I would have these calls with him because he lived in New York, I lived in Philadelphia. And he would ask me how I was doing and with increasing honesty, I told him. And then at each subsequent meeting, like, let's talk the next editor. You know, when you have an editor, you're supposed to produce for them, right? And what you're supposed to talk about is the writing and then what you need to do next. And each Saturday I would show up with no pages and I would say to him, like, I'm wasting your time. Like I'm, I'm a mess. I'm a dumpster fire and, um, and you don't even know me. I did tell him, I was like, I'm, I'm, I'm actually usually a competent, smart person,

• 51:57Speaker 01

  but not right now. And he kept meeting with me and there came a point where he said, you know, I think the problem with this book is not what you're saying, but the structure of it. And then he went off and he reworked the structure. He sent it to me and I immediately saw that it was wrong. I said, that's not the structure. He said, how? And then I basically wrote him an email that was long enough and detailed enough where I got it right. And then that changed everything. And then I, and then I did just have to rearrange things because I already had the science and I already knew. So that was my rock bottom and that was my belated cry for help. If I had asked earlier, if I had, if I had his support earlier or other support, I really think I would have suffered less.

• 52:42Speaker 01

  Maybe burnout wouldn't have happened at all. But that's why burnout to me is a personal thing now. Like I don't just teach it in the abstract and I think people who are really gritty and already try hard and you're right, maybe they're in the minority. I don't know. But I think it's us, it's us who like digs the hole deeper and doesn't ask for somebody to throw you a rope.

• 53:03Chris Williamson?

  While you're on a roll, let's say that there is someone who is burnout or burnout adjacent.

• 53:10Chris Williamson?

  What does the science say and or your personal experience about recovering from burnout?

• 53:16Speaker 01

  So Christina Maslach is exactly the person to follow. And by the way, over the arc of her long career, I read one for the last, you know, academic, she's a meritist now, right? Now retired from Berkeley. And, and just on this note here, and then we'll talk about like, what's the prognosis, right? Like, what's the prescription and what's the prognosis? And then I do want your personal story, burnout. But she said in one of the last academic articles of her career while she was still active at Berkeley, like people always think that the problem with burnout is the person and they try to fix the person. Maybe the manager tries to fix the person who's burned out. Like what can I do? You know, this person's burned out. I need to fix them. She said, it's almost always that you have to fix the situation. And I am quoting in like nearly verbatim. I'm not saying that because I wrote a book called Situated.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  So what's the prescription and what's the, um, what's the prognosis? The first thing that I think that Christina Maslach would say is that when there is a mismatch between the person and their work situation, that can create burnout. One of the ways that's mismatched is workload. Like you're doing too much, right? Like you're working 60 hours, you can only really handle 55 or she was like, that's only one. And then she names five others, by the way, like lack of autonomy, like misalignment of values, um, you know, a system that, you know, for you doesn't feel like it's a fair system. Like there are many ways that your work situation can be a mismatch and overload of work hours is only one and maybe not even the most common.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  So the first thing about the diagnosis, before you get to the prognosis and the prescription is you should try to figure out what the mismatch is. And I will direct you to her work, not mine. Then what is the prescription and what's the prognosis? The prescription is actually to make situational changes. And if you're a leader, you can try to change the situation for others. And if you're a employee, if you're not in charge, I do think you have to look at what's wrong. And in one way or another, and sometimes it does include leaving the position, but not always, like, okay, lack of autonomy, like, how do I find autonomy? I mean, I don't have like a one liner sort of like, oh, do this because it depends. But you have to fix the mismatch. I mean, that's the key insight.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  The situation has to change. You cannot will yourself to not be burned out. You cannot think yourself out of burnout. You have to change the situation and the prognosis is good. Burnout to me is not like a characteristic of a person, like their height, you know? Like there are burned out people, like the sort of, like it's an emotional state, like joy or pride or fear or depression. Like it, it has, it has a, a reality and it can feel like forever, but I was burned out and I'm not burned out now. I may be burned out in the future, but it's not permanent.

• 56:07Chris Williamson?

  I've learned from over a thousand podcast episodes, the easier that you make your health routine, the more consistent you'll be. It's like golf, right? You want to keep it simple and not mix a bunch of pills. You want the eye of the tiger, not the DUI of the tiger. That's why I'm such a huge fan of AG1. One scoop contains 75 vitamins, minerals, probiotics and whole food sourced ingredients in a single daily drink. And that's why I've been taking it every single morning for nearly five years now. And they've taken it a step further with AG1 Next Gen backed by four clinical trials. Those trials, it was shown to fill common nutrient gaps, improve key nutrient levels in just three months and increase healthy gut bacteria by 10 times, even in people who already eat well. Plus, if you're still unsure, they've got a 90 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it and try it every single day for three months. If you don't like it, they will give you all of your money back.

• 56:51Chris Williamson?

  Right now you can get 20% off a welcome kit and that 90 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinkag1.com/modernd wisdom. That's drinkag1.com/modernd wisdom. The fascinating thing I've sort of come to learn about burnout, at least my particular variant of it was mine was.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, tell me, can you tell me?

• 57:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, mine was, mine was brought on by getting ill. So I lived in a house that had toxic mold and for someone that has.

• 57:18Speaker 01

  How old were you? Like what was?

• 57:19Chris Williamson?

  Uh, it was three, two years ago, three years, started living in the house four years ago, and then moved out about two and a half years ago when I found out. So I had a good bit of time and my, my time under tension, as bodybuilders say, was significant. And if you have the wrong polymorphisms, you can't, your detox pathways don't work in the right way. I lived in a house with another guy. He was fine. I was whatever the opposite of fine was.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  And it was like a fungus or something that was growing.

• 57:42Chris Williamson?

  It's the same stuff that, I mean, this country's wonderful in many ways, but your building materials are wood and that's not, a house is, a building is not supposed to be made out of wood. It's supposed to be made out of brick, like a civilized society.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  I will ask my, uh, real estate developer husband, like, yeah. Because if it absorbs the water and then it just gets wet.

• 58:00Chris Williamson?

  It's organic, it's organic material and it gets wet and hot and wet and hot. And then it gets encased in insulation and then it gets.

• 58:05Speaker 01

  And it never dries out.

• 58:06Chris Williamson?

  Cloud over it. Well, even if it does, there's like little microbes that are in there and you just need one water leak and everything's now ruined.

• 58:12Speaker 01

  Okay, so then what happened?

• 58:13Chris Williamson?

  So anyway, I, I go through that and my capacity gets limited.

• 58:16Speaker 01

  No, no, but wait, can you be more vivid? Like what happened? Were you like short of breath? Were you like, what, what happened?

• 58:21Chris Williamson?

  If you want to, allow me to bring you down the rabbit hole.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:24Chris Williamson?

  The first thing that I noticed was a significant decrease in energy. So I was getting very tired on a nighttime. I used to be a club promoter, so being up until very late was kind of par for the course for me. And by six or seven or eight PM, it would feel like gravity was four times as heavy as it should be.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  Wow, okay.

• 58:42Chris Williamson?

  I would go to sleep for between 10 and 12 hours and no matter how long I'd slept, I woke up feeling more tired than when I went to bed. So every morning was starting slow. And then you begin this sort of recursive, I am not the sort of person that has energy. The morning is going to be hard. So it becomes kind of self-referential.

• 58:58Speaker 01

  Self fulfilling prophecy, right? You're like, this is going to be an awful morning and then you have an awful morning.

• 59:02Chris Williamson?

  Awful morning, yeah.

• 59:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've been there.

• 59:04Chris Williamson?

  Uh, and that kind of intervention becomes quite difficult. I mean, I couldn't bear the sound of porcelain. Like if anyone was putting cups out, so loud sounds, especially a punctuating sounds or percussive sounds, those were very uncomfortable to me. I didn't want to spend time around people that were talking, but I didn't want to spend time in silence. I couldn't put up with music. I didn't want to see my friends as much. I wasn't being as extroverted. It was a lassitude, like the emotion of lassitude of being ill.

• 59:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:29Chris Williamson?

  But without knowing that I was ill, which is the fascinating thing.

• 59:32Speaker 01

  What was going on?

• 59:32Chris Williamson?

  I, fuck knows. I'd like being moody. I'd, I'd just press the you are being a bitch button. You're being a bitch button. Like every single issue that I've ever encountered throughout my entire life has always been fixed by working harder.

• 59:46Speaker 01

  Right. And was that your response to this?

• 59:48Chris Williamson?

  Of course it was.

• 59:48Speaker 01

  You're like, suck it up.

• 59:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so yeah, just go harder, go harder. So I did, which obviously made it all worse. And this is what was kind of fascinating. And maybe this, maybe again, my particular variant has got this sort of medical pharmacological, you know, biological, like.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  Not generalize it to everyone, but yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:06Chris Williamson?

  But if there is something that comes in and suppresses your capacity, what becomes very interesting is the.

• 1:00:13Chris Williamson?

  You working harder actively makes the problem worse. And there's very few situations in life where working harder won't improve things. Very few, like when you actually, when it comes down to it, like it might not make it better, but it's rare that it makes it worse. And this is one of them.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  And this is like, this is a case where it is.

• 1:00:32Chris Williamson?

  This is one of them.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  This is one of those.

• 1:00:33Chris Williamson?

  And what's also fascinating is a lot of kind of ironies, I suppose, very unfortunate ironies. One of them being that you get ruthless brain fog. So I forgot the names of people that I'd known for ages. I forgot the names of streets. I forgot the names of cities. I looked down at my shoes one day and couldn't remember how to tie my shoes. The brain fog was insane. The smell of standing water was awful. The smell of cut grass was awful, things that I used to usually like. And all of this stuff had changed and it's your body just, it has no idea what's going on. It's trying to fire all of this stuff and it's, I got COVID at the same time and there was maybe some long COVID-y stuff. And then EBV and you go on this weird Sherlock Holmes, like.

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  Trying to figure out what's going on.

• 1:01:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you've got the, you've got the pipe and you've got the monocle.

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  Oh God, you literally have the pipe.

• 1:01:18Chris Williamson?

  I do indeed. I need to, I'm British again, I'm pontificate.

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  Yes, it's all good.

• 1:01:22Chris Williamson?

  You're trying to work out what it is. Is it this, is it that? And it's just, they're all red herrings. They're all dead ends. I'll fix this thing. Oh, you've got some BPAs. It's like, everybody's got BPAs. Well, might be the BPAs, we'll fix that. Oh, it's not that. Oh, you've got some EBV? Everybody's got EBV. Okay, well, you might fix that. You've got allergies or whatever, you know, whatever it is. And there's all of these things that are problems on a piece of paper, but aren't the reason that you feel like shit.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  They're not the reason, yeah.

• 1:01:44Chris Williamson?

  And then you go through all of this stuff. But the thing that sort of made me think about it was you saying about the sleep. And what's really, really ruthless for anyone that's going through complex illness, environmental stuff, is that they can feel absolutely wiped during the day and wiped when they get to bed at night. And then after a brief amount of time asleep, they're like completely awake. If I could invert my night to my day.

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:02:11Chris Williamson?

  I would have been fine.

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, because you could have like alerted and like.

• 1:02:13Chris Williamson?

  This is awesome, like kind of, apart from the fact that it's.

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  I'm highly aroused.

• 1:02:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. It's like 12:30 and sure, I did a saliva cortisol test where you spit in a tube, like every, maybe you did one of these too. Every two hours or every hour you do this throughout the day or in the night as well.

• 1:02:30Speaker 01

  I didn't need to, I knew what was going on.

• 1:02:32Chris Williamson?

  I've inverted, you literally inverted my cortisol melatonin response. I was like, wow, that's kind of impressive. Like I'm an owl. I've become an owl. I've burned myself out so much that I've become an owl.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  Right, right. Well, I'm not a sleep researcher, but I'm in a department with one. And he says, you know, the ideal sleep is like a box wave, right? So you're asleep, then you're awake.

• 1:02:51Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  You're asleep, then you're awake. And pathology is when you're asleep, but you're too aroused and you're like awake, but you're too sleepy. Like, so, so I have been there. So then what happened? Then what's the end of this? So you're not in this situation anymore.

• 1:03:05Chris Williamson?

  Not to the same degree. Still, it is a very, very slow recovery. And that was two and a half years ago. But it's better, better adjacent. So it's good. Brain function appears to be at least somewhat back, better days and worse days. But that combined, and the reason that I think at least is associated tangential to burnout, is that when you have a couple of things, limited work capacity, but specifically limited mental capacity, which is different because it's like attacking your ability to think.

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:38Chris Williamson?

  And I have a friend whose dad was really struggling and was taken into a psychiatric ward. And he turned to her one day and he said, this illness has taken everything from me. It's even taken myself. And that like sentence really stuck in the back of my mind because he's a very smart man that for a long time had relied on his mental horsepower to get him out of. It's kind of like being, it's kind of like having the ability to fly or something. And you go, if I, if I get backed into a corner with the world, I can just press the I can fly button and that'll lift me out of the situation and I can, I can live to fight another day.

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:16Chris Williamson?

  And it's the same thing as what most people think of when it comes to their mind. They're like.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  Right, like I can.

• 1:04:22Chris Williamson?

  I can use this, this, you know, very carefully curated thing between my ears to fix the problems. And in the past, I've used my mind to fix the problems. But the very thing that I would use to fix this problem is the very thing that the problem is attacking. And it felt so ironic and like very hopeless, hopeless. Like lack of agency, inability to change, low motivation, all of that stuff. And yeah, it was like an induced burnout. And then when you try to apply the foot on the gas lever.

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  Right, like I'll just try harder, like I'll just.

• 1:04:53Chris Williamson?

  That's the thing that's sapping, it's what you've got the least of and it saps more from what you need it for, for recovery. So, and then here's the really, really ruthless thing. And this is like pretty much sort of bringing it into where I'm land, where I'm at now. What I realized was that I kind of detrained my grit muscle.

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  How so?

• 1:05:11Chris Williamson?

  Well, because when I learned the lesson of when you try harder, things get worse. I need to learn to be gentle with myself. I need to learn to give myself a lot more grace. I have to, you know, just pick a small number of battles each day that you're going to have some discipline in. But obviously that kind of becomes lax and it sort of begins to fluff somewhat. And that explains why I've gained like 12 pounds this year and that for the first time in ages.

• 1:05:39Speaker 01

  Because you're not working out?

• 1:05:39Chris Williamson?

  Because I'm not working out as much and I'm eating more. Okay. And then I wasn't getting up on time as much and I wasn't meditating as much and I wasn't reading as much. And I was taking my foot off the gas with this and that and the other. And I'm like, oh, huh. I have, I now need to relearn how to do hard things because for a long time, doing hard things made me worse.

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:59Chris Williamson?

  So I'm having to consciously relearn something for the second time that I already learned like 15 years ago.

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  Like you're coming back to it.

• 1:06:08Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's been a really fascinating, like full circle thing.

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm not going to disagree with your story. It's not yours, it's not, you know, it's not my place to disagree with your story and I don't disagree with your story. But I do want to say that the grit muscle, like one of the things that I have known, not just since writing this book, but I do elaborate on it in this book, is that I don't think the grit muscle is a voice that says just do it. It's really not. Michael Phelps didn't just do it. Like he didn't just like force himself. Nobody loves swimming more than Michael Phelps. He still does, by the way, right? So the self-talk is not just do it. It's very rarely just do it, right? Occasionally you do have to just say like, okay, right now I'm going to tell myself to just do it. But talk about exceptions to the rule.

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  I mean, the complaint I have about like the grit muscle, and I can be blamed for this like one word, you know, it does sound like, you know, white knuckle it, but it's really, this is interesting. This is important. I can do it and I know what to try next, right? If you have those thoughts.

• 1:07:14Chris Williamson?

  Closer to alignment.

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  It's all about alignment. Actually, what I did this summer, instead of like ruthlessly promoting myself for book tour, which would have been maybe something I should have done, was I went to, so in the book I talk about this professor, James Gross at Stanford, who is the intellectual progenitor of this idea of like the situation leads to the thoughts and the response. Or he's, you know, we all think this in social science, but he kind of laid it out in this really nice framework. And this summer I spent a sabbatical working on alignment. So to me, what alignment is, is that internally you're aligned. Like I want to do this. Why? Because it's interesting and it's important and I can do this and I know what to try next. You know what misalignment looks like?

• 1:07:59Speaker 01

  Well, it's important, but it's not interesting. Or it's interesting, but I can't do it. Or I think I could do it, but I don't know what to try next, right? So, so if you want a picture of the mental

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  life of a paragon of grit, it's a bunch of arrows that are all pointing the same way, right? And that's not just do it. Just do it is like, you know, I'm going to like force this arrow another way, right? The reason why we met and spent a sabbatical together is that this second book is about aligning all the arrows outside of you. Like, I don't know if you took physics, but in physics, you know, there are a bunch of diagrams with arrows, right? And the arrows are forces, right? And you learn to draw the arrows and you subtract them. You're like, what's the net force? How about friction? But you know what makes something go fast? It's when all the arrows are pushing in the same direction. And that's true internally and externally. All I'm saying in this book is line up the arrows. Don't ignore the arrows. Do you have peers? Do you have mentors?

• 1:08:56Speaker 01

  Like what is your physical space? Where do you live? Right? So that's lining up the outside arrows. And the reason why we're meeting to talk about alignment is that we think that a life well lived, we think if you go all the way back to Aristotle, like what is the good life? It really is about alignment because now like if I'm aligned with you, right? Like my internal arrows are aligned, like my external arrows like are getting, but also like my goals are aligned with your goals. They don't have to be the same goals, but they're in alignment. Like to me, that is like, that is what the good life is. Like that's what Aristotle meant for us. So, so alignment is to me what this book is about externally, but it's sort of, you know, a bigger concept even than that.

• 1:09:40Chris Williamson?

  Let's do some environment stuff. What did you, after doing all of this research? It's going to be one of the most applicable ways, places that you've gone to. What have you changed environmentally beyond gym kit is out?

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  So I've had a fascination with quotes, right? And there are certain poems that I'm, you know, trying to commit to memory, including, you know, If by Rudyard Kipling. And my current one that I'm trying to memorize is called Pity the Beautiful. Pity the Beautiful, the dolls and the dishes. Anyway, so, so, so I could, I could tell you that my favorite quotes like Nelson Mandela. I never lose, I win or I learn. Right? So I have long wanted to memorize certain quotes, but I have changed, which is I write them down. On, I, I print out poems and I paste them on the wall and I write down quotes and I like usually on two by two post-it notes, like I was going to try to get them like needle pointed or whatever.

• 1:10:38Speaker 01

  And anyway, I was just like, I was going to write it down on a post-it note and I put them at eye level. And I swear to God, when I leave my office, the last thing I see is Nelson Mandela. Right? And you know why that's important? Because I want to say to myself, I never lose, I win or I learn. I believe that. And yet I feel like a loser when I lose. And so I need to see the two by two post-it note. So like some of the people I study, including Cody Coleman, Cody Coleman has post-it notes everywhere, literally, like, you know, the post-it note on his mirror.

• 1:11:10Speaker 01

  So I become like the people I study. I'm decorating my personal space. It's not just when I'm taking out and you said like, what's obvious? It's like, people know they shouldn't have Halloween candy around. They should, you know, you don't want to drink Diet Coke, don't have Diet Coke. Right? Like, that's kind of obvious. I'm not saying people do it, but I think what you put into your physical environment is what you put into your head and what you put into your head is what you do. So that's been the most recent change.

• 1:11:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, your body is made up of everything that you put into your mouth and your mind is made up of everything that you put into your eyes and ears.

• 1:11:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:40Chris Williamson?

  And yeah, curating, that's interesting.

• 1:11:44Chris Williamson?

  Jared, have you ever considered you might have a drinking problem? I don't consider a lot, Chris. Well, you drank an entire case of Athletic Brewing Co. last night. But they're non-alcoholic. And that's not a problem? Sorry, man. I kept chugging, wait for the regret to creep in. Never happened. Didn't you end up going home with that chick with the lazy eye? I didn't seem lazy to me. See, most people like Jared don't actually want to change what they drink. They just don't want the next day to be a complete write-off, which is why I'm such a huge fan of Athletic Brewing Co. They make the best any brews on the planet. So you can still have something cold and tasty, just without the usual trade-off. You can find Athletic Brewing Co.'s bestselling lineup at grocery or liquor stores near you or best option, get a full variety pack of four flavors shipped direct to your door.

• 1:12:26Chris Williamson?

  Get 15% off your first online order by going to the link in the description below or heading to athleticbrewing.com/ModernWisdom using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's athleticbrewing.com/ModernWisdom and Modern Wisdom at checkout. Near beer terms and conditions apply. Athletic Brewing Company, fit for all times. So I've been thinking about the aversion some people have to relying on environment.

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:49Chris Williamson?

  In your opinion, if you remove too much friction from someone's life, does it make them weaker?

• 1:12:55Speaker 01

  I think if you remove all friction, then yes. Right? Because like a muscle, right? Like we, we adapt, right? So the reason our muscle grows is that the challenge exceeds its capacity and then it rips a little bit and then we like repair it and that's how we work. So I think a life of no friction would be, you know, a life of weak character. So I, I agree with that. But what I want people to do is make hard things easier. Like I talked to Alastair Brownlee in my research for this, right? He's a very gritty person. I don't think you can become like one of the world's greatest triathletes without a lot of grit. And his dedication to his training is famous, right?

• 1:13:37Speaker 01

  So nobody is going to talk about like winning triathlons without doing the hard work. Right? But Alastair Brownlee tried to make hard work as easy as possible. Like he literally bought a house that was close to where he could swim and where he could run. I mean, he could be gritty and just be like, well, I'm just going to like drive to the trip. Like, no, but he wanted to make it easier. Right? Like he does my gym trick of like putting out the clean clothes. He was like, oh, by the way, it has to be dry. I mean, maybe somebody who works out that much, like, you know, he has to run the laundry a lot, like it has to be clean and dry and the kind of thing you want to get into. So I think, imagine having a world-class coach and a bunch of peers who are also trying to train for a triathlon, maybe not on a team, but just like they're also trying to, like you trade tips, your friends.

• 1:14:23Speaker 01

  You've got all of these physical things around you, the training clothes, right? All of that makes doing the hard thing easier and it still leaves the hard thing. Right? It's just like being on Bob Bowman's swim team. Right? Like if you sign up for this swim team, you will train harder than maybe any other swim team, but you just go and it's all there. So, so I think that's the lesson. I will never back down because I think it's the law of psychology that you don't improve in human skill without resistance. Right? So you can't take the hard work out of excellence, but you can make hard work easier and you do that by setting up your situation.

• 1:15:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So three things come to mind. The first one is life requires quite a lot of effort and I think it should be reserved for the places where you don't get to choose how much effort you need to apply, if that makes sense. Second one is one reason why it's less sexy or less well-promoted to try and make life easier or to have the peer group thing is that it makes for a really shit movie. It makes for a horrendous movie. What you want is the protagonist to be brushing up against friction all the time.

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  And then it makes him the hero, right?

• 1:15:36Chris Williamson?

  Of course.

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  Because if it's a situation.

• 1:15:37Chris Williamson?

  If Rocky was him with a bunch of peers and a lovely mentor.

• 1:15:41Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:15:42Chris Williamson?

  And he'd laid his clothes out and everything was done. So, okay, well, we've removed a lot of the dramatic tension, which is exactly what makes for a good movie. And I think we've kind of imbibed the story of the hero.

• 1:15:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:53Chris Williamson?

  And we're now trying to live it that way.

• 1:15:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. That's so actually insightful. In the last chapter.

• 1:15:59Chris Williamson?

  You didn't need to be surprised about it.

• 1:16:00Speaker 01

  Well, I hadn't thought about it before. I, I am surprised. I cannot be surprised.

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  In the last chapter of the book, I wrote the story of my daughter and how she was in seventh grade, she fails her, she was, she's in this like super advanced math class, you know, the kind of math class where like you get the college math, you know, in your junior year or something of high school. Look, I used to teach math, literally full-time as a high school and middle school math teacher. I know math and also I'm a quantitative social scientist. Like I am not an author by, by profession. I'm a, I'm actually a psychologist, right? So, so I'm looking at her seventh grade math and she, she fails these tests and I'm looking at these questions and I'm like, wow, has seventh grade math changed? Like I literally couldn't do them.

• 1:16:43Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 1:16:43Speaker 01

  And I said to her, like, look, you know, this little track you're on, which a very small number of kids are on, it's like, it's, it does seem too hard. Like, why don't you just go into like the normal advanced math class and you'll still like get to calculus by the, you know? My husband, the real estate developer, objects and he says, you know, I don't want to, I don't want my daughter to learn that she's a failure. I actually don't care about math, but I don't want her to learn the lesson that being a failure. So he brings home scrap paper, they learn the math together. It's basically a very supportive situation. Right? So, so here's what happens in this little narrative, right? Let's make it into a movie. So Amanda wakes up early. She has coffee for the first time. I mean, it was mostly milk, but yeah, she drank coffee the first time.

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  She furiously works on the problems of the math test that she had already failed. Her teacher says, you know what? I'm not going to replace your grade, but I'm going to let you take the test again so you can show me what you can do. Right? And you can also prove yourself wrong, that you're like not a math person. She's working mornings, she's working evenings, they cut church to like, you know, practice math. And then the time of, the moment of truth comes and she takes the math test and she triumphs and she does a hundred percent on these math tests, who don't count for a grade, but that sets her trajectory. So she finishes, she stays in the math class.

• 1:18:05Chris Williamson?

  Symbolic.

• 1:18:05Speaker 01

  She gets an A. Yeah. She graduates from college years later as a math major and not any college, but Harvard. So it's like not easy math. And I showed this story to an early reader and they look at the story, they read the story and they say, this is a story of grit. And I'm like, what about the father who learned all this really hard math and like sat with her and like gave her the next problem, like just like explain things? What about this crap? Like, what about the fact that like everybody in our house like tiptoed around her and gave her all this? Like, what about the personal space that she set up where she like put her phone, she actually had the foresight to like zip her phone into a pocket of a coat and then put it into a clothes.

• 1:18:46Speaker 01

  Like, what about the math teacher who said, you know, I'm going to give you a second chance? Like, show me. So I think you're exactly right, but it's not only because like if you have Rocky and he has like a lot of things going for him, it doesn't, I think you're exactly right about that. Maybe that's the more profound point. But even when we have true stories of people who were gritty and had a great situation, we somehow edit out the situation. We just like only want the hero, like a silhouette on a white piece of paper. And the danger of that is that when we go to try to do great things, we think that's the way to do it.

• 1:19:23Chris Williamson?

  And go exclusively to self-reliance.

• 1:19:24Speaker 01

  Do it. You cannot be Michael Phelps without Bob Bowman, full stop.

• 1:19:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. The third thing that it made me think about, so my chosen instrument of choice is talking. And I worked with a, a speech coach for a good while and a, a diction coach and a comedy coach and a bunch of other people did improv and a lot of other things. When I said to my friends that I was going to start to work with a speech coach, they sort of had this alarmed look or they were a little bit uncertain and they said something to the effect of, what if you lose your sort of natural speaking voice, your natural speaking cadence? And I said, well, that's interesting that you would say that about me working to improve something which objectively can be improved with someone that's a professional, because you wouldn't have said the same if I was playing the saxophone.

• 1:20:12Chris Williamson?

  If I was playing the saxophone as a beginner saxophonist, you would not say, well, what about your beautiful, natural way of playing the saxophone? You go, well, it's wrong or it could be better. Right? What about your beautiful way of running?

• 1:20:25Speaker 01

  Because they want it to be natural, right? They want it to be.

• 1:20:28Chris Williamson?

  So this is the distinction. At least this is my total, this is total bros. This is the hat for bro science. So this is like, I should have had this on the whole time talking to you.

• 1:20:34Speaker 01

  Wait, what does this hat mean?

• 1:20:35Chris Williamson?

  For bro science. If I'm a, I'm a bro scientist today.

• 1:20:38Speaker 01

  Okay, yes.

• 1:20:38Chris Williamson?

  It's basically.

• 1:20:39Speaker 01

  Because you're the captain here now.

• 1:20:40Chris Williamson?

  Correct. That's it.

• 1:20:42Speaker 01

  That's good on you.

• 1:20:43Chris Williamson?

  Here's my, thank you. Here's my, here's, here's my working theory, which is. There are certain things about us that we feel as being close to our sense of self.

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:54Chris Williamson?

  Like who we are.

• 1:20:55Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah. Who we really are.

• 1:20:56Chris Williamson?

  The way you speak is so fundamental to the person that you are. The language you use, the cadence that you speak in, how you enunciate words. That's you. The way that you play the saxophone, that's not you.

• 1:21:10Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 1:21:10Chris Williamson?

  And I think.

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, what do you think?

• 1:21:13Chris Williamson?

  Part of the reason that people have this little aversion to talking about environment and situation as opposed to grit and self determination is that it feels like it's less me.

• 1:21:26Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:21:27Chris Williamson?

  It's not.

• 1:21:27Speaker 01

  It's like, there's 100 points. And if it's gonna be like 20 to the situation.

• 1:21:31Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yeah, well, it's less you.

• 1:21:33Speaker 01

  Then it's less me.

• 1:21:34Chris Williamson?

  It's less, it's less you. Not only does it mean that if the environment was to go away, that you're less self sufficient.

• 1:21:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:21:41Chris Williamson?

  I put you on a desert island.

• 1:21:42Speaker 01

  Truly less you.

• 1:21:43Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:44Speaker 01

  That's very, yeah.

• 1:21:45Chris Williamson?

  You contribute less to it.

• 1:21:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:47Chris Williamson?

  And you get to own it less, which means that there's less pride associated with it.

• 1:21:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:51Chris Williamson?

  And I just want it to be me.

• 1:21:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:21:55Chris Williamson?

  It's this almost like transcendent thing. Does that make sense?

• 1:21:58Speaker 01

  It's just not true. I mean, yeah, I think that's right, right?

• 1:22:01Chris Williamson?

  I'm objection handling on your behalf.

• 1:22:03Speaker 01

  100 points, how many go to Rocky, right? Like, let's give all 100 points to Rocky.

• 1:22:07Chris Williamson?

  How many go to Adrian?

• 1:22:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And I can't remember if it was Coach Mickey. Was this Coach Mickey?

• 1:22:12Chris Williamson?

  I think so, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:14Speaker 01

  And, and you know what? Maybe there is some kind of like, yeah, I mean, I guess if you were gonna take away some of the Rocky points and give them to Adrian and give them to Mickey, like, then Rocky has fewer than 100. It's just the reality, though, right? And the question is, like, do you want to be Michael Phelps winning 28 gold medals? Or do you want to get all 100 points for being Michael Phelps without Bob Bowman, without Debbie Phelps, without his teammates? By the way, I just listened to Roger Federer's induction speech. This is like, actually what I do. Oh, my God. I will never get bored of studying excellence. So I don't even play tennis. I don't even watch tennis, but I'm watching Roger Federer's 29 minute acceptance speech to the Tennis Hall of Fame.

• 1:22:54Speaker 01

  And if I could do a word cloud of that speech, the single biggest word, the most common thing he said was ecosystem, right? As he is being inducted into the Hall of Fame, he's talking about the two, by name, the two guys who string his rackets, right? The, like, his physiotherapist, like, he named his coaches by name. I didn't realize he had so many, past and present. Like, the thing is, is that if you want to get all the points, like, you can give Roger Federer all the points if he doesn't have all those people that he relies on, his agent, like, okay, that's fine. But he won't be the Roger Federer that we know. And the question is, how far do you want to go? Are you willing to give up some of the points to other people, to the situation, and go farther?

• 1:23:38Speaker 01

  Or do you want to keep all the points to yourself, like, completely DIY? Self-made man. I did everything myself and nobody helped me? You can keep all the points, but you won't go as far.

• 1:23:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's so great. I've got, I've got the pie chart in my mind, and it's not just the portion. You can have 100%, but the size of the pie is going to be smaller.

• 1:23:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:56Chris Williamson?

  Yes, as I start to bring more people in.

• 1:23:58Speaker 01

  You can have 100% of a little pie, or you can have a wedge of a bigger pie.

• 1:24:02Chris Williamson?

  I want a big pie.

• 1:24:03Speaker 01

  And that, to me, is the story of success. And I knew it when I studied paragons of grit, I think, but I wasn't thinking about it very hard. I was like, oh, right, and like, let's talk about you. But now, when I interview people, I ask them about their mentors, I ask them about the people that they're training with. I literally ask them about their physical circumstances. I ask them, like, what's on their desk? I ask them what's in their refrigerator? I ask them about their routines? And so I do think that there is this complete story, if you look for it, but we're not looking for it.

• 1:24:30Chris Williamson?

  How do you know when to work harder on yourself and when to change your circumstances?

• 1:24:34Speaker 01

  I'll say this. I think if you want to work harder, let's, you gave me an A and B choice, right? A, work harder. B, change your circumstances, right? I'm gonna say that they both end up with change your circumstances, and here's why, right? I think to answer your change of cer, like, if you feel burned out, then you probably are trying really hard. If you recognize this feeling of like exhaustion or whatever, like, oh, it's like helplessness, then you probably are, just like you were and just like I was, like, digging yourself a deeper hole. And absolutely, that is like the canary in the coal mine. Change your circumstances. Like, you need more support and probably, you know, an adjustment of challenge for the time being. All right, that's choice B. So that's when you, but what about working harder?

• 1:25:17Speaker 01

  And you made the argument that, like, maybe that's the modal thing. Like, maybe that's most of the time what people need to do. They need to, like, push harder on their resume. I think you still end up with change the circumstances. Here's why. So say you realize, like, you know, I've been getting 70% at work, and if I'm honest, like, that's what's holding me back, right? So now you decide you're gonna give 100% or even like 75%, right? As a behavioral scientist, I'll say if you're giving 70, try for 75, not for 100. But anyway, leaving that aside. So then, if you accept this, you know, three box framework of all of human behavior, they're like, I want more effort in box three. That's my response. I want to come into work and be 75, if not higher. Then you have to ask the question, what thought will make me do that, right? I've told you that I don't think the thought is just do it.

• 1:26:02Speaker 01

  I think you have to think that your work is more interesting, important, that you can do it, and you know what to try next. I think that's the only way to sustain a higher level of effort. But the reason I say that you eventually get back to circumstances is like, what books do I need to read? What podcasts do I listen to? What people do I need to be with? Like, what mentors do I need? What conversations do I need? What's my physical space need to be so that I can have those thoughts that will get me to work harder? So eventually, I think, whether it's getting a coach, a therapist, a mentor, a peer group, a change of your situation in any way, like, eventually, that's where you end up anyway. Even, I mean, if you're smart about it, even if the answer is like, work harder, because this is not just to do once.

• 1:26:47Speaker 01

  If you only have to work harder, like, today at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, once, then maybe you could just use willpower. Go for it. It'll be tiring, but you can do it. But if you have to do it every day at 4 o'clock, and every week, and then every year, there's no way you can do it by just forcing yourself.

• 1:27:03Chris Williamson?

  Right, so in, in your opinion, it's less situation specific, and it's more like iteration specific? If this is a one-off, then maybe you can just put foot.

• 1:27:14Speaker 01

  All I'm saying is that willpower is this thing that you can use when you really need to. And you can do it once. I think anybody can do. By the way, we're better at it than animals. Like, we're better at it than dogs and chimpanzees. Like, you can put animals through, like, the same kind of tasks that you put young children. And human beings are better at delaying gratification, better at forcing ourselves to do things that we don't want to do in the moment. But all I'm saying is that you're right. Like, it's, if it's iterative, if you have to do this again and again and again, and the path to excellence is consistency, right? Like, that is the seminal insight of grit. The path to excellence is consistency, and the path to consistency is a situation that sets up consistency.

• 1:27:53Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes. So you spent some time at Oxford, right?

• 1:27:57Speaker 01

  I did, two years, and I actually started speaking with a faux British accent because of the power situation. I was like, cheers, did this, like, oh, you know, trousers around the ankles. And I, you know, the power situation is very.

• 1:28:08Chris Williamson?

  Look at how far you've fallen.

• 1:28:11Chris Williamson?

  So unfortunate.

• 1:28:15Chris Williamson?

  So I have got this new live show, which I'm about to go on tour with. And one of the things I talk about, because I'm going back to the homeland, the UK and Ireland.

• 1:28:23Speaker 01

  Oh, you're gonna start in UK?

• 1:28:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm talking about tall poppy syndrome.

• 1:28:28Speaker 01

  Hmm, this is a British, unpack this for me, but this is the British.

• 1:28:32Chris Williamson?

  It is, it is an affliction. And it actually came from New Zealand and Australia originally.

• 1:28:38Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 1:28:39Chris Williamson?

  Interestingly enough.

• 1:28:39Speaker 01

  That's like the origin story.

• 1:28:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it comes across. It's, it's a situation in which a person who becomes conspicuously successful or wealthy or high status or whatever is derogated by people around them. And interestingly.

• 1:28:54Speaker 01

  This is a British thing.

• 1:28:55Chris Williamson?

  Very, very, very. It's kind of like.

• 1:28:57Speaker 01

  It's the poppies.

• 1:28:58Chris Williamson?

  If we, if, if football didn't exist, it would be our national sport. That's like, kind of how central it is. A deviation, it's typically sort of preceded with a deviation from the norm, that somebody decides to do something that's a little bit different. Yeah, very much so, there's a lot of.

• 1:29:13Speaker 01

  But excellence, then, is derogated, is what your point is.

• 1:29:16Chris Williamson?

  100%, yeah. I mean, you're allowed to be successful, but only if you treat it as a horrible accident that you got there.

• 1:29:25Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 1:29:25Chris Williamson?

  It's like, it very much is, you're sort of ashamed. It's like, oh, my God, I, I appear to have.

• 1:29:31Speaker 01

  This explains like all the Hugh Grant humor, right? Like, in all this.

• 1:29:33Chris Williamson?

  I appear to have created a successful business. I'm so sorry. I must not do this again. I prom, I swear it won't happen.

• 1:29:40Speaker 01

  Not very American, by the way.

• 1:29:41Chris Williamson?

  But I, no, no, no, no. My best friend, George, has got this line. He says, "British affliction is cynicism, and the American affliction is bullshit."

• 1:29:51Chris Williamson?

  It's so true.

• 1:29:53Speaker 01

  Two sides of the same, yeah.

• 1:29:54Chris Williamson?

  It's so true, right? That one is feet are too-

• 1:29:57Speaker 01

  One is like, I'm better than I-

• 1:29:58Chris Williamson?

  One is feet are too hard on the ground and one is head is too high in the clouds.

• 1:30:02Speaker 01

  Ah, good, nice.

• 1:30:03Chris Williamson?

  And, uh, yeah, I think it's, it's beautiful. But I just, what it made me think about.

• 1:30:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:07Chris Williamson?

  Is I've been, I did my first work in progress show last night here in Austin. I do these secret shows and there's 50 people. So I'm not working out the material.

• 1:30:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:14Chris Williamson?

  I'm talking to people live. So I'm, I'm-

• 1:30:16Speaker 01

  Getting feedback.

• 1:30:17Chris Williamson?

  Almost, yeah, doing DVD extra commentary of like, okay, so this is where I'm at. I'm basically talking to myself, but there's a room of people that are listening to me pontificate to me about whatever. Anyway, uh, the, the tall poppy thing is, is kind of there. And I was, everybody had to, cause it's all Americans, obviously in Austin. I had to get them to pretend to be British. And I was like, imagine that you're British for a second. Of actually for the next hour and a half.

• 1:30:37Speaker 01

  They could do that, but yeah.

• 1:30:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:38Speaker 01

  Austin nights.

• 1:30:39Chris Williamson?

  And the interesting thing about the tall poppy syndrome culture, I can't think of a socio-cultural influence that is more high friction for excellence than something like that.

• 1:30:56Speaker 01

  We haven't talked about culture, right? Because you know, when you say like, if you start out the obvious and everyone can do it, but maybe everyone isn't doing it. It really is like, what's within three feet of you? Push it away if you don't want to do it, like move it in, like decorate your space. Okay, fine. Culture is the exact opposite. Culture is like all encompassing, it's abstract, but it's also the most powerful thing you can do. Right? And when you're in a culture of excellence, you know, one of the reasons why Michael Phelps ended up being excellent is because he's Michael Phelps. But another is that Bob Bowman created a culture of excellence, right? Like it's the expectation that you-

• 1:31:28Chris Williamson?

  What does a culture of excellence look like? And how can somebody engineer it themselves?

• 1:31:32Speaker 01

  You know, what is excellence, right? Right? Excellence is like aspiring toward like a greater level of achievement than you have. One definition, right? Which was like aspiring to a greater level of achievement than you have now. Right? And, um, one of the things that I think is a problem in society is that there are people in places where that is the norm. Right? That we are striving, right? Like, and, and whatever it is today, cause I think excellence in, in, it's cliche, like, is it a journey? What, like, that's the key to it though. Like, it's not that there is a certain watermark. It's just that you're constantly trying to improve. Like anything you do, I am sure you came home from your first try and was like, I hope, a list of things that you wanted to do differently. You're like, oh, I didn't, so these adjustments.

• 1:32:16Speaker 01

  I think a culture of excellence where that is the norm and that that's what everybody is trying to do. And when you describe tall poppy syndrome, right? Where it's like quite literally the opposite, right? That like, if you do it, it's embarrassing, it's shameful and like, it's punished, right? That's the opposite. So I will say that if you really want to change, and I know most people won't move, right? The one thing people are very reluctant, I'll say this, some people can't move, right? It's too expensive. But it's the one life change that people most don't want to do. Why do I know that? There was an economist named Stephen Levitt, who was very interested in what's called status quo bias. It's your tendency to cling to what you have.

• 1:32:58Speaker 01

  Like, I live in Philadelphia and I have to live in Philadelphia. And you start making lists of all the reasons why you can't move out of Philadelphia. For me, it's like my mother-in-law lives there, my mom lives there, you know, my work is there, like my friends are there. So you can make a very long list. But what Stephen Levitt wanted to say in his research was there may be actually times where you actually make both lists, like the list of reasons to stay and list of, and actually the lists are equally long. And maybe you intellectually realize that the list of reasons to go is longer, right? And status quo bias is the irrational, like steadfast clinging to the way things are. So he has a flip the coin experiment.

• 1:33:41Speaker 01

  You know, you flip the coin, its heads, you change and its tails, you stay, right? But for anything that you're trying to decide. So he has people do this experiment, but they get to decide what they're flipping the coin for. And some people are like, should I get a tattoo? Like, should I break up with my boyfriend? I mean, these are literally things that people wrote down. One of the items was, should I move? So there are a great number of people in this experiment who, when asked the question, like, what is a life decision you're struggling with? And you really don't know whether you should change or stay.

• 1:34:11Speaker 01

  I don't know if I should move, right? So in this experiment, he flips the coin for you. There was like literally this electronic coin and he was like, heads, change.

• 1:34:19Chris Williamson?

  You're moving.

• 1:34:20Speaker 01

  Tails are, and you didn't, you know, feel like, should you get the tattoo? Yes. You know, like, should I not get the tattoo? So, so in his data, the one thing that people are most reluctant to follow the advice, heads, change, is where they live. So when you talk about like, okay, living in, you know, it's different when you grow up in the United Kingdom than here. It's different when you grow up in Philadelphia than Austin. I think the biggest change you can make in your life is to change your zip code. The biggest change is change the culture of where you spend 24 hours a day. Because when you change that, you change your mentors and your peers and your physical environment. But it's the one thing that people are most reluctant to do. And I think people should do it more.

• 1:35:05Speaker 01

  The Economist magazine, which is, it is British, is it not? I believe it is.

• 1:35:10Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:35:11Speaker 01

  It seems like, okay, this is how little I know about the world, but we subscribe and my husband reads it. When the Economist magazine put out their guide to big life decisions, they said, based on economic research, and it's true, the single highest effective thing that you could do to change your life is to move to a zip code with greater opportunity, to a neighborhood. And yet, research from Steve Levitt and others would suggest like, it's the one thing we don't want to do. So you moved here.

• 1:35:39Chris Williamson?

  I did.

• 1:35:39Speaker 01

  And like-

• 1:35:40Chris Williamson?

  It was terrifying.

• 1:35:41Speaker 01

  And was it an accident or was it-

• 1:35:43Chris Williamson?

  No, it's completely terrifying.

• 1:35:45Speaker 01

  And why did you do it then?

• 1:35:46Chris Williamson?

  Because I was sick of the UK. You know, I, I'd met a million people running nightclubs and I had a handful of friends, which was great. But my friendship exposure to conversion ratio was not, it's not fantastic, right? My funnel wasn't funneling in internet marketing speak. I was seeing so many people and I fell out of place.

• 1:36:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:36:04Chris Williamson?

  And I was like-

• 1:36:04Speaker 01

  You didn't have your tribe then?

• 1:36:05Chris Williamson?

  No, I was really, I, I, my exposure to people was high. No one can say that, but I've met more people, I've shook more hands in person than most people, except for like international diplomats. Right?

• 1:36:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:17Chris Williamson?

  So I'd really done the thing and I felt like I'd kind of completed a lot. And I, the UK, there's many things, I have to do the fucking throat clearing of like, wow, it's very nice to listen to all the rest of it. It's wet and cold a lot. I wasn't, I didn't feel like I fitted in from a cultural perspective that-

• 1:36:33Speaker 01

  Was it because you had tall poppy like ambitions or was it like more than that?

• 1:36:37Chris Williamson?

  That feels a self, self-aggrandizing, which this in itself is a British, I've got British syndrome happening right now.

• 1:36:43Speaker 01

  It's happening right before my eyes.

• 1:36:45Chris Williamson?

  Bingo. What I will say is that ambition is not curated.

• 1:36:50Speaker 01

  You're ambitious and so you, when you fit in here.

• 1:36:52Chris Williamson?

  I very much so, I feel more, apart from in terms of the accent, uh, I feel more at home in the US than I have for most of my time.

• 1:37:01Speaker 01

  And why Austin?

• 1:37:02Chris Williamson?

  Uh, because it is currently the center of the universe for podcasting.

• 1:37:06Speaker 01

  It is, by the way, what the hell?

• 1:37:08Chris Williamson?

  I think apart from LA, it's got more people in the top 10. In fact, it might have the most number of people in the top 10 of anywhere. LA will be close because Jay and Stephen are there and maybe Alex-

• 1:37:19Speaker 01

  And Dax.

• 1:37:20Chris Williamson?

  And Dax, I don't know if Dax was in the top 10 last year. He might've been. But anyway, it's, it's, it's got a great community of people here. Everyone's a cultural refugee from somewhere else, which meant that, um, social groups hadn't had a chance to ossify. Interestingly, there's a lady called Tracy Vianco. You might not be interested in this, but it's, it's kind of cool. Um, the, the reason that bullying is, exists in schools more than exists anywhere else is because the amount of time that social networks have had to, uh, be in stasis and to ossify.

• 1:37:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:50Chris Williamson?

  Like you get to stratify out where the pecking order is. Whereas if there's too much migration-

• 1:37:56Speaker 01

  If there's like too much mobility and so forth, you don't get this like-

• 1:37:59Chris Williamson?

  Fucking company that people work at for life. People come, people go, so on and so forth. So people that stay-

• 1:38:05Speaker 01

  Right, then you have like the same kids for 12 years who are like, yeah.

• 1:38:08Chris Williamson?

  That's why bullying exists.

• 1:38:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:09Chris Williamson?

  And, uh, Austin is basically, um, a passing point for a lot of people. They've, you know, they've been here for one year or three years or six years or something, but no one's been here, no one was born here. Like, there's basically nobody in Austin that lives here was born here.

• 1:38:24Speaker 01

  I have not met anybody who was like, except for the mayor. I think he was born here, but like, but okay. So if you want to be a great podcaster, go to Austin. If you want to be a great artist, like, don't try to do it in the middle of, well-

• 1:38:36Chris Williamson?

  Probably for the best.

• 1:38:37Speaker 01

  I was going to say like a few, like Kansas, right? Like, so, so this is the thing, that's why the power of moving, right? And you're the rare person who moved.

• 1:38:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, and the, the escape velocity to do it is, is quite high. It's, it's really, gravity's heavy when you're doing that thing. It's, it's operationally difficult. There's lots and lots of friction. It's scary. You're going to go to this country on your own.

• 1:38:59Speaker 01

  Doesn't it suck at the beginning?

• 1:39:00Chris Williamson?

  It's, well, I mean-

• 1:39:01Speaker 01

  Almost certainly it's got at the very beginning.

• 1:39:02Chris Williamson?

  The excitement for me was so great. I was like, oh my God, I'm actually doing the thing.

• 1:39:08Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 1:39:09Chris Williamson?

  Was, was enough to get me over that. I'm interested in, obviously you've been through the burnout thing, new book, congratulations. It was very, very wonderful and you've taken a topic that's important and made it interesting and-

• 1:39:20Speaker 01

  I hope so.

• 1:39:21Chris Williamson?

  Accessible. What are you going to curse yourself with after this?

• 1:39:27Speaker 01

  Not another book. I'll tell you what I think is on the horizon for me as a research scientist. And, um, uh, and I did put my heart and soul into this book, but I am a scientist. So I think the seismic changes in technology, phones, social media, AI, everyone's talking about it. But as a behavioral scientist, I can't say that I have seen anything that's changing the way we spend time, the way we do or don't socialize, the way we exercise, the way we do everything, religions, uh, that's greater than the things that are happening right now with AI, with screens. Or human life doesn't look like it did 50 years ago or even 20 years ago.

• 1:40:12Speaker 01

  So I'm going to study that. I won't write a book about it, but, uh, I feel like I've done my work. I've done the inside game of success and now I've done the outside game of success. And now I just want to understand, you know, how in this new, you know, world, um, people can be successful.

• 1:40:27Chris Williamson?

  Unreal. Angela Duckworth, ladies and gentlemen. Where should people go to check out everything you're doing?

• 1:40:31Speaker 01

  I have no idea.

• 1:40:33Chris Williamson?

  You are-

• 1:40:34Speaker 01

  I'm not very good at influencing.

• 1:40:35Chris Williamson?

  You are horrendous at influ- I don't know where to send people. Have you got a website? What's the website?

• 1:40:39Speaker 01

  I have a website, I have a website. It's angela duckworth.com.

• 1:40:42Chris Williamson?

  Wonderful. And the book is called?

• 1:40:44Speaker 01

  Situated.

• 1:40:45Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. And it is available?

• 1:40:46Speaker 01

  It is available everywhere.

• 1:40:48Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. That's it. All right.

• 1:40:50Speaker 01

  You did it.

• 1:40:51Chris Williamson?

  Goodbye, my beauties.

• 1:40:51Speaker 01

  Thank you, that was so fun.

• 1:40:52Chris Williamson?

  You're the best.

• 1:40:53Speaker 01

  Awesome, awesome.

• 1:40:56Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Born in Roma fragrances by Valentino Beauty, the iconic fragrance duo. Donna Born in Roma Eau de Parfum is a feminine fragrance featuring juicy black currant, central jasmine, woody cashmerin and warm vanilla. Its masculine counterpart, Womo Born in Roma Eau de Toilette, has notes of fresh violet leaf, aromatic sage, green vetiver, spicy ginger and mineral salt. Shop at macy's.com.