World-Leading Psychologist: How to Change Your Life by Changing What’s Around You | Angela Duckworth - EP 814

In this episode, John R. Miles sits down with Angela Duckworth, one of the world’s leading psychologists and bestselling author of "Grit," to explore a powerful idea from her new book, "Situated:" if you want to change your life, you may need to pay closer attention to what’s around you.

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

• 0:01John R. Miles?

  Hey friends, what if your biggest problem isn't that you're not doing enough, but that you've spent too long proving that you are enough? You can be successful, needed, and surrounded by people and still feel completely unseen. That's the problem I explore in my new book, The Mattering Effect. I show you how we become hyper-visible for what we produce, while quietly becoming invisible to ourselves, and introduce the matter framework to help you reclaim meaning, autonomy, trust, time, energy, and reciprocity. Stop auditioning for your worth, start living from it. The Mattering Effect is available for preorder now at matteringeffect.com. What if the problem isn't that you need more grit? What if you're simply in the wrong situation?

• 0:43John R. Miles?

  We've spent years being told that success comes down to what's inside us, our discipline, our mindset, our perseverance. But when I sat down with Angela Duckworth, she challenged that idea in a way I didn't expect. She told me that sometimes the difference between struggling and thriving isn't a different person, it's a different environment. Take a listen to this.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Whether you are optimistic or discouraged, whether you think your work is interesting and that you matter, or you think the opposite, is not just a function of what's inside you, it's also a function of where you are.

• 1:23John R. Miles?

  It's your friend John, and welcome to Passion Struck. I'm so glad you're here. Whether you're a longtime listener or someone who just discovered the show, thank you for pressing play today. Maybe you've built the life you were supposed to want, but you've quietly wondered why it still doesn't feel like enough. If that's you, you're in the right place. Every week, I sit down with the world's top scientists, researchers, and thinkers to uncover what it actually takes to build an intentional life that matters. Thanks for joining me, let's get into it.

• 2:03John R. Miles?

  This is episode 814 of Passion Struck, and today we're kicking off a brand-new series called The Adaptive Human: How We Thrive in a Changing World. Last month, in the Adaptive Brain series, we explored how our brains change,

• 2:21John R. Miles?

  how biology influences us, how our environments shape our behavior, and what it takes to keep becoming. Now, we're widening the lens, because adapting isn't something that happens inside your brain. It happens in relationship with the world around you. And I can't think of a better person to begin this conversation with than Angela Duckworth. You probably know Angela from her groundbreaking work on grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance Over Time. But in her new book, Situated, Angela takes the idea somewhere much deeper. She argues that grit is necessary, but it isn't sufficient. The people around us, the places we live and work,

• 3:07John R. Miles?

  the cultures we're a part of, and the situations we find ourselves in can either amplify our strengths or diminish them. And that raises a question I couldn't stop thinking about while reading the book. Do our situations change who we are? Or do they reveal who we already are? Because think about your own life. There are probably people who bring out your confidence, places where you feel more creative, environments where you become more generous, curious, ambitious, or courageous. And there may be other situations where you become a version of yourself you didn't particularly like. Angela and I get into all of that.

• 3:50John R. Miles?

  We talk about situational awareness, the power of mentors and peers, why willpower is often the least effective place to intervene, and how leaders can create environments where people are more likely to flourish. And we go somewhere especially important to me and for the work I'm doing around my upcoming book, The Mattering Effect. Can the situations we create actually communicate to people that they matter? Angela and I explore what happens when people are constantly required to prove their worth, and what changes when an environment instead communicates, "You belong here, your contributions matter, we want you to succeed."

• 4:32John R. Miles?

  This conversation made me rethink something I say all the time. Sometimes the most intentional thing you can do isn't to try harder, it's to challenge the conditions that you're trying so hard to survive in. So let's dive in. Here's my conversation with Angela Duckworth. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now, let that journey begin.

• 5:05John R. Miles?

  I am absolutely thrilled to welcome Angela Duckworth back to Passion Struck. Angela, it's so great to see you again.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  John, I'm so happy to be talking again.

• 5:13John R. Miles?

  Last time, we shared a conversation about your book, Grit, and we discussed, and really tried to help people understand how passion and perseverance matter enormously to so many people. But you now have this new book coming out that I'm holding right here for those-

• 5:31Speaker 01

  You are holding that's copy.

• 5:34John R. Miles?

  Called Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best. What made you realize that grit was necessary but not sufficient?

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Well, I will say, I know people watch TED Talks and people get on stage and they're like, "I had an epiphany and my whole world is different. What was white is black, what was black is white." I mean, that makes for a really tidy narrative. It's not quite that. It's not, "Oh, I thought success was entirely an inside game." I now realize it's also an outside game, not just what's inside your head, but the people and places that surround you. That's not quite true. Because when I was in graduate school, I was a TA for social psychology. And one of the most important discoveries, you could argue like the whole foundation of the field of social psychology is the importance of the situation.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  And there's this really famous book among nerdy academics called The Person and the Situation by Dick Nisbet and Lee Ross. It's not a bestseller. I don't think a lot of people have heard about it outside of academia. But it's all about how the person is one thing and their situation is another. So, John, I think you and I both believe in grit, in passion, and perseverance. But I think increasingly, it's urgent to remind people or to explain how the outside situation changes that whole inner landscape. And whether you are optimistic or discouraged, whether you think your work is interesting and that you matter,

• 7:08Speaker 01

  or you think the opposite, is not just a function of what's inside you, it's also a function of where you are.

• 7:16John R. Miles?

  I think it's easy to believe that success comes entirely from internal strength, rather than acknowledge how profound the environments around us influence us. And I think we don't realize that influence enough in how we go about our days.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  You're supposed to be asking me the questions, and I know we just got started, but you have been thinking about the very same topic as I have been thinking about for a very long time. Why do you think it is, like in your opinion, John, why is it that we turn our eyes away from our circumstances and look within when we're trying to do better?

• 7:58John R. Miles?

  Thank you for asking me that.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  I really want to know. I'm going to turn the tables on you right away.

• 8:04John R. Miles?

  I think it's actually a few different things. I was actually interviewing Dr. Daniel Amen yesterday, and he and I were talking about this very question. As I was writing my first book, was starting to think about what is the biggest roadblock from getting us from where we are in our life to where we want to be? And yes, fear is up there, and us being what I call a visionary arsonist is up there because we tend to arson the very things that we want in life. But I introduced this concept of the mosquito auditor in the book. And to me, a mosquito is one of two different things. I call them, in case you've never heard me discuss it,

• 8:49John R. Miles?

  I call them the bloodsucker, the invisible suffocator, and the pain in the ass. And I use the mosquitoes in two contexts. One, they're the people in your life who you need to put boundaries around. And two, they're the environments that hinder you from going to where you want to go in life. And the way I like to think about this is throughout most of my career, I practiced what I would consider to be situational leadership. And to me, situations-

• 9:19John R. Miles?

  Are really important when you're talking to different people. One, because we have different personalities and different motivations. So you can't use the same leadership style with one person than you can with the other. But two, the situations that you're in also determine how you have to carry forth those conversations. So if you're in the middle of a project that's going well, you talk to people in one way. If you're in the middle of a project that's going extremely poorly, you have to use a different type of communication technique. And so that whole concept is something that I've really been trying to understand.

• 9:59John R. Miles?

  And of course, the signals that we get back to us on how we're seen, valued, et cetera, also play a very important part in that situation.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think some professors, including myself, talk about situational awareness. We're just to develop that muscle of paying attention to the situational factors. A mistake I've made as a still developing situational leader. I mean, I'm hardly a leader, right? I run a little lab. I'm not running a company or an organization of any real size, but there's still young people who work for me. And a situational mistake I make as a leader, but I'm working on it, is when a young person shows up late, isn't taking notes, maybe goes on their phone in a meeting. I call them out right there. I'm like, you were late. Where's the agenda? What are you doing on your phone? And I know that the situational leadership move there is to be aware

• 10:54Speaker 01

  that in public, people are not likely to be open minded about criticism. They're going to be crushed, defensive, humiliated. Why didn't I just wait 10 minutes until the meeting was over? And then just pull that young person aside. And then the privacy of my office with the door closed, say, look, why were you late? I almost could say those same things verbatim. So sometimes I'm blind to the situation and just not aware, not sensitive to how important context is. I think it can make a world of difference and it's intellectually easy to acknowledge, but it's very hard to put into practice.

• 11:32John R. Miles?

  It is so hard to put in practice. And I wanted to add one thing to your question. I'm sure you're familiar with the work of Jamil Zaki.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, at Stanford.

• 11:41John R. Miles?

  At Stanford. So he studies a lot on cynicism, but as I was interviewing people for my upcoming book, he and I had a conversation and we were talking about the environments around us. And he came up with this idea that what we're really in right now is a marketplace of mattering. Meaning we're having to prove our worth in pretty much every environment that we're in, whether that's in a social environment, a school environment, a work environment, even our family environments. And when I started to unpack that, his conclusion was really profound. Because when you think about it, when you're constantly having to prove yourself,

• 12:23John R. Miles?

  instead of just being able to be yourself, a little part of you is getting taken away with every single interaction. And so that's why I think when people feel like they're not enough, or many of the circumstances where they feel like they're growing more invisible in their life or more numb, it's because they're experiencing of these many experiences that are diminishing their worth in their environments. What's your thought on that?

• 12:52Speaker 01

  I am a huge fan of Jamil Zaki's work. I think he's a great psychologist. He's a great writer and he's a really great person. My daughter was lucky enough to be on Stanford's campus for four years. And Jamil has an outsized influence there. But I think the questions that he's bringing up in this perspective is, they couldn't be more important right now. There's a very old concept of unconditional positive regard in humanist psychology, which is no longer a term that people use these days. But in the 60s, there were these humanist psychologists who felt strongly, from their clinical practice, seeing people who were depressed, seeing people who were anxious, seeing people who were suicidal.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  They felt like one of the things that is so critical to every person's wellbeing is a sense that unconditionally, they have worth, that they matter, not because of what they did, not because of some meritocratic race. And this is not to say that they were against a meritocracy in terms of society, but they just felt like the kind of unconditional positive regard that some of us had when we were growing up from our parents. Some of us felt in our religious faith that God loved us, no matter whether we did well that day or we didn't do that well. And I think they were right. I actually think this age old idea, maybe partly from psychological science,

• 14:20Speaker 01

  but partly from religious traditions and other philosophical traditions, that human beings stand on their own. When I was growing up, John, I had this aunt and uncle. I never really learned to speak Chinese, so I called my aunt Shiwei, which is a terrible pronunciation of what it should be in Chinese, which is little auntie. And then her husband, who was my uncle, for some reason, when I was little, I called him big man because he was, well, he was big to me. I later realized he's not that big of a man. But Shiwei and big man gave me the one thing that I think has been the source of my confidence for the rest of my life, unconditional positive regard. When I walked into the room, they lit up.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  It was like, you made my day. I was sometimes a brat. I was sometimes selfish. I'm sure I made a huge mess. I, it didn't matter. They didn't say it's okay to make a mess. It's okay to be a brat. It's not okay to be a brat. It's not okay to make a mess, but my love is not contingent. And I do think that in today's world, how many likes do you have? Where are you ranked? What's your GPA? I do think we're, it's just like you said, there are these diminishing events, many of them. And they're eroding, I think, a sense of unconditional positive regard.

• 15:37John R. Miles?

  We'll be right back with more of my conversation with Angela Duckworth. As you're listening, I'd like you to consider one question. What places or people bring out your best? Angela's message is a powerful reminder that growth isn't only about working harder on ourselves. Sometimes it's about becoming more intentional about the environments that we're choosing. If you want to go deeper, you'll find a companion workbook for the Adaptive Human series inside The Ignited Life on Substack. The link is in today's show notes. Now, a quick break for our sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support the show.

• 16:18John R. Miles?

  You're listening to Passion Struck, right here on the Passion Struck Network. Now, back to my conversation with Angela Duckworth. I love that story because from the second we're born, we experience the mattering instinct. And we are looking from that instant into our parents and other people around them to show us why we belong in the world. And when people ask me, especially when it comes to their kids, what's one of the most important things that I can do right now to make my kids feel that they matter more? And it's really important because, I don't know if you knew this or not, but 35% of youngsters believe they don't matter.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  Didn't know that. One out of three kids think they don't matter.

• 17:01John R. Miles?

  Gordon, this comes out of Gordon Flett's research. And the more staggering part of this is when they asked their parents, only 8% of them thought it could be possibly true that their child could feel that they don't matter.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Right. We don't realize how much young people don't feel like they matter.

• 17:18John R. Miles?

  We don't. And one of the most simple things you can do is, first time you see your child in the morning, or when you come home from work, is to just spend a minute and a half of just looking at them with a huge smile, making them feel that they're the most important thing in the world. And

• 17:37Speaker 01

  It's just like my aunt and uncle, right? It's just like, why big man? It's like, hi, hello. Yeah, I love it.

• 17:46John R. Miles?

  In the book, you use David Foster Wallace's famous question about water. And I wanted to ask you, perhaps you can give the quote, but what are the forms of water you think that we're swimming in right now that most people aren't noticing?

• 18:01Speaker 01

  David Foster Wallace, some people have read his books, other people have not. A great writer, tragic life, by the way, that's a whole other conversation, which we can begin if you like. But when he was delivering the commencement address at Kenyon College, he began with a parable about two fish and they're swimming along. And then an older fish swims towards them from the opposite direction. And as he passes by, the older fish says to the two young fish, hi, boys. How's the water? And the older fish keeps swimming and one young fish eventually turns to the other and says, what the hell is water? And it's really well, I'm sure he said it much better than I just conveyed,

• 18:45Speaker 01

  but it's such a terrific parable because I do think we become inured, habituated to the water we swim in, literally, like you don't see the things that you see every day. You don't hear the things that you hear every day. Some of that's good, by the way. My husband and I, when we were raising our two daughters and just starting out in one of those like starter first homes. It was literally our first home and all we could afford was a little twin. So we had half of a house and it was across from train tracks in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Lovely neighborhood, but in fact, you could hear a train go by every 25 minutes. And when we first moved in, we thought, well, this is going to drive us crazy. And eventually it was like water. We were like, what, what train?

• 19:29Speaker 01

  We just stopped hearing the train. So that can be a good thing that we get used to things. But I think the great danger is that sometimes you're better off if you change the water. Sometimes you should be swimming in a different place with different companions. And I think that's the great danger that when we get used to things and we turn a blind eye, we miss the opportunity to improve the situation. And it happens to me still, I wrote a whole book about it and I'm not saying I'm perfect at it, but I'm working on developing more situational awareness so that I can seize those opportunities and change the water, make themselves available.

• 20:06John R. Miles?

  I love it. Years ago, when I was working on my MBA, I took this class and I loved this class because the professor was really challenging us because at the time, all of us were, there was an executive MBA. So all of us had day jobs and he had us look at the Fortune 500 from the seventies. And then he had us compare it to that time. And what was so interesting was that about 75% of the companies on the Fortune 500 no longer existed. And when I think about what your book is about and what you were just talking about with the water, I think this is something a lot of leaders and a lot of companies don't get right. They keep swimming in the same water and they don't.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  The water, the whole ocean's changing.

• 20:51John R. Miles?

  Yes, and you just look at coffee. For so many years, you had Folgers and Maxwell House. And then Starbucks comes in with this completely new, overpriced idea that completely shifted the market. Or you look at the way Amazon has reshaped everything. And I think the reason why a lot of these companies go away is they don't see these fundamental environmental changes. And by the time they hit them, you can't move a battleship that quickly. And so it's amazing, these little startups take over billion dollar companies.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  It is amazing. I know when I was a little girl, I used to wake up very early with my dad. My dad spent his whole career working at DuPont Chemical Company. And he would always leave very early in the morning, but I would wake up and I would make his coffee. And I would get out the mug and I would put that teaspoon of Folgers crystals or Maxwell House. He liked Taster's Choice, by the way, just like the freeze dried little, yeah, it was terrible. I wasn't very tempted to drink it and I would put the hot water in and it never dawned on not just me as a little girl, but my dad or so many people that the whole way we drink coffee was about to change. And I think sometimes when a visionary or just someone says, hey, things are about to change. The rest of us are like, no, they won't.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  No, that can't be. I really think the research on status quo bias is relevant here. So there is research, John, as that people truly cling to the familiar, even when they say they yearn for change. And that bias to keep doing things the way we've been doing them, to keep eating the things that we've been eating, to keep hanging out with the same people that we hang out with or not hang out with anyone, which I think is a habit that a lot of people are in these days, which is something that I think really needs to change. I think it's so strong, this kind of psychological inertia that keeps us doing things the same way as we've done them before.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  And what the research shows is that even in high stakes medical decisions, like even when the change is clearly better, people still have a bias toward the status quo.

• 23:04John R. Miles?

  It is so true and it's so hard to overcome that, that barrier. And I remember most of my career was implementing technology solutions. And as the person implementing it, the people who were our customers, the business customers, most of the time, always thought that technology was going to make the huge impact. And I would always tell them, technology is like 15% of the equation here. Like 50% or more is you changing your habits. It's fundamental process and behavior change that needs to happen to make any of these technology solutions work. Cause if you don't change the way you've always done things, having a new solution isn't going to make anything any different.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  It's interesting that you could offer the word, the 50%. Some people call it the 5% problem, which is like 5% of people will use a technology for what the technology can do. 95% of people, some would argue, don't look at Khan Academy. Khan Academy is a terrific learning resource. I mean, for free, you can get world-class tutoring from Sal Khan himself, possibly the world's best teacher. And 5% of Khan Academy users, they come back, they learn calculus, they learn statistics, they learn programming. Yeah. And then 95% of people don't come back to this free, online, 24/7 friendly UX awesome platform.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  You can tell I'm interested in the topic of behavior change. I know you're friends with my collaborator, Katie Milkman. We believe whether it's 50% or 95%, so much of what needs to change is the sort of thing that you talk about on this podcast.

• 24:45John R. Miles?

  And I love it. In your book, you have a whole section on how we change. On that note, after reading the book, I kept coming back to this distinction, Angela, between shaping and revealing. Do great situations fundamentally change who we are? Or do you think they simply permit parts of ourselves that were always there to emerge?

• 25:03Speaker 01

  That is a next level question, maybe I would say PhD, not just MBA, because there is a nuance here that I'm delighted to elaborate on. I think the situation does both. One is it reveals how great you are. Just imagine a really gritty entrepreneur, but now in the right circumstances, all that effort, all that tenacity, all that ingenuity pays off. Because for example, they live in a country with a free market. Like we sometimes forget, like there are people who live in countries where it doesn't matter how entrepreneurial you are. There's no market, there's no meritocracy, there's just ingrained social order. And you don't even have the legal right to sell things, right?

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Those other societies exist today. I thank God that I was born in the United States. My parents immigrated here so that they could have the land of opportunity. They literally came here for the land of opportunity so they could have those opportunities. So in that way, I think the situation, America, revealed the grit, the intelligence, the talent that my parents had. But I think it also changes us. So my answer is both and because when you put a person in a situation where their effort pays off, something happens to that person. That person wants to work harder. They have seen the fruit of their labors.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  That opportunity that creates a better future for you, there's nothing more motivating. And so I think that situations really have a double effect on us, both in terms of revealing all of the capabilities that we have and actually enhancing our capabilities over time. Because they really unlock, I think, a level of motivation that, you know, is only available to us if we are in a great situation.

• 26:59John R. Miles?

  Yeah, I've got a great story for you on this. When I was at Lowe's, I come into this new job. Listeners have heard me tell this story, but I was brought in because Lowe's at that time had experienced the largest hacking incident in retail history. So I was being brought in in part to fix that. But a week and a half into my job, new head of HR had recently done an employee engagement survey, calls me into her office and said, not only do I have to deal with cleaning up this technology security issue, but oh, by the way, your group that you inherited was just ranked dead last in Lowe's out of 350,000 employees. And so I start getting into this. And what I found out was that the environment that

• 27:41John R. Miles?

  had been created for the employees was suppressing the very capabilities that the employees had, meaning they were being micromanaged so much that none of them were given the agency to perform their jobs the way that they felt it should be intended. And I will never remember, I was talking to a manager who had been at Lowe's for about 18 years, and we were implementing this new set of solutions, strategy to rebuild the group. And he says to me, well, what exactly do you want me to do? Well, he's on a 24 by seven watch. I said, I can't be there with you. I am intending you to use the best knowledge that you have, given the circumstances, to create unique solutions to motivate your

• 28:26John R. Miles?

  employees and do things differently. And Angela, I will never forget it. He looked at me, almost tears in his eyes, and he said, this is the first time, the entire time I've ever been at Lowe's, where anyone has ever given me the ability to do what I thought was best in the situation, instead of what I was told to do. And I couldn't believe it.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  That probably brought tears to your eyes, just to fathom that was the first time somebody actually cared about what was in his head. I have a parallel story from my graduate student. Now, she's a professor at Kellogg, the school of business at Northwestern, and her name is Lauren Esker Swinkler. When she was a PhD student, she went to a school, and she was testing an intervention where you ask young people what their advice was for doing better in school. And that was the whole intervention. It was just like, hey, what's your advice to other kids about how to do well? And she asked everyone. It wasn't like, oh, let's go to the gifted and talented questions. Let's go to the honors classes. She just did the intervention at the school. And afterwards, one of the students

• 29:29Speaker 01

  who was, I think, maybe special education, like certainly not a thriving student at the school, with tears in their eyes, you know, this gives a little boy, tears in his eyes, approached her and said, nobody has ever asked me what I think about how to do well. And it was a failing student, and I'm not saying that these kids are perfect. And I don't believe in romanticizing the poor or anything, but it really stuck with her for the rest of her career, that people do matter, that we so often treat each other like they don't. In my little lab, because I'm not a real leader, but I have a tiny little lab, and I have a rule, which is if I tell you something, please hold me accountable

• 30:14Speaker 01

  to the what, the why, and the when. This is what needs to get done. This is why it needs to get done. This is when it needs to get done by. But I should let you decide how, right? And I think that autonomy that you're talking about, this sort of, yeah, you matter, and you probably know better than I do. Who am I to tell you that job? I agree. That's a critical element of situational leadership, not one that I would say I'm a master of. But I recognize it's important. I'm trying to do better on that one.

• 30:42John R. Miles?

  I want to explore identity, because I've been doing a lot of work recently, trying to figure out what influences the identities that we give ourselves. And we talked about this a little bit in the beginning of the episode. But something you wrote really has me thinking about this in future solo episodes. You write that what we think influences what we do, but where we are influences what we think. And to me, the first thing that jumps to my mind is family that we're born into, like how much our family situations determine what we think. But I was hoping you could expand on this.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  This is in some ways, an encapsulation of modern psychotherapy, John, because cognitive therapy is the bedrock of much of modern psychotherapy. If you go to a therapist today, and you say, I'm depressed, or I'm anxious, many, if not most of them, will really pull out the tools of cognitive therapy. And that is about your thoughts influencing your response. So if you're feeling depressed or anxious, that therapist is going to want to know what thoughts lead you to feel depressed, or to feel anxious. Maybe you're having catastrophizing thoughts. Maybe you're having thoughts about your identity and feeling like, nobody likes you. I don't belong here. But my point in this book is that you can

• 32:01Speaker 01

  ask a follow up question, which is, gee whiz, where do those thoughts come from? And I do think that our family origins have a kind of, you know, long shadow in our lives. They really cast a shadow in the sense of being influential. I sometimes hear my father in my own voice, or my mother. By the way, I prefer it when I hear my mother. And my father's daughter and my mother's daughter, but I think I have my best self when I have my mother's daughter. So that is partly the legacy of our situations, right? So part of what we think today is because of the situations we were in the past. But one very interesting feature, I'll go out on a limb here and say what I think. I think very often psychologists today are like, wait, let me just narrowly say something about this one

• 32:44Speaker 01

  particular finding. But I am a student of human nature, and I will go out on a limb and say that our current situation has more influence on what we think than our past situations. And there's a very famous psychologist that no one's heard of, well, very few. His name is Michael Lewis. A lot of people have heard of Michael Lewis, the prolific and amazing writer. But this is not the Michael Lewis who wrote The Big Short and Moneyball. This is Michael Lewis, the developmental psychologist. And he made the compelling claim that, of course, as a developmental psychologist, people always would ask, what is the influence of like, where you were when you were three or four, on the man or the woman you are today? And they were waiting for the answer, oh, enormous, like wherever

• 33:27Speaker 01

  you were at three or four, whether you had an attachment style that was secure, or parents who were this way or that way. Well, that's how you can explain your middle aged self. And he argued that your current situation exerts dramatically more influence. So let's say you're a grumpy person, and you have this sense that maybe you're a grumpy person, and you don't want to be a grumpy person. You could blame the grumpy people in the family that raised you, and the grumpy neighborhood that you grew up in. But you could also say, I notice that when I'm with really positive people, I'm a little less grumpy. Because I bet that's true. I bet there are people that bring out your humorous side,

• 34:07Speaker 01

  your sunny side, your optimistic side. And my advice is, go hang out with them more, because you can't change your past. But you can change your future. And you can't change the situations that you were born into. But you can change the situations that you move into.

• 34:26John R. Miles?

  I'm going to share something with you, because I just released a solo episode this week on the movie Hook, about Peter

• 34:35Speaker 01

  Oh, even the children. Yeah.

• 34:37John R. Miles?

  I'm going to relate this to what you just said. So in this movie, Peter Banning, who's played by Robin Williams, is this mergers and acquisitions attorney. And he's doing global deals, he's making all this money, but he feels completely empty inside. And what ends up happening is he gets taken back to Neverland, where the Lost Boys look beyond who this adult is now, and they see that this is actually Peter Pan. And they're like, you're Peter Pan. And he goes, no, I'm not. I'm not Peter Pan. I'm Peter Banning. I'm this mergers and acquisition attorney. And the movie keeps going on and on. And eventually, he discovers that he actually is Peter Pan, and it culminates with him

• 35:21John R. Miles?

  flying. And then I think what people don't think about in that movie is then he goes back to his real life, his real wife, his real kids. And he realizes that so much of who he was, he has been putting a mask on because of the situation he has evolved into, that much of the joy, the things that made him feel alive, he's been suppressing so long, he completely forgot the prior version of himself. I think it happens in both directions. I think sometimes we forget the things that make us who we are. And in other cases, we look too much at the modern, our modern life, and we forget who our past.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  There's something I didn't put in the book, but I thought about it. And I think I must have written a draft of the book that had it. Many actors will say that when the Oscar goes out for set design, or costumes, by the way, this is the part where people go and get something to eat, right? Because they're like, oh, costume design. And sometimes they actually have those awards at a different part of the day, because they're like, not the red carpet, everybody tuning in. But many actors will say, and I guess I include actors and actresses under that one term, that it's so important that when you step onto a set, and you're either in a crowded boardroom, or you're in a subway, or you're whatever it is, the set and the costume. Are you wearing a doctor's coat? Are you

• 36:46Speaker 01

  wearing an artist's mock? Are you wearing a chef's apron? Are you in rags? Because you're supposed to be playing somebody who's on the streets? Are you playing a stockbroker? These things matter, because we step into the role. And I'm sure in this draft that never made it into the book, I'm sure I quoted Shakespeare, "All the world is a stage, and each of us is a player. And therefore, pick your stage carefully," right? If you want to be a different person, then choose a stage where that is the role. So I love that, because I think for a lot of us, we did probably prefer our childhood self to the self that we are walking around as today. And I don't think this means go back to

• 37:29Speaker 01

  your childhood bedroom. I think it means just be in a place that evokes those qualities that you miss about yourself, curiosity, or kindness, or playfulness, or humor. I don't know. Ask yourself, where can I be that way more?

• 37:43John R. Miles?

  I'm glad you brought that up. I am so excited in November to go see Rush in concert. And one of my favorite songs by them is Limelight, which uses that exact quote in it.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  Oh, really? Wait, Rush is still in concert playing? That's impressive.

• 38:00John R. Miles?

  They have, they brought in a new female drummer who is absolutely killing it. I can't imagine trying to replace Neil Peart, but she's doing it.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  That's great. I'm no music aficionado, but sometimes I'm like, what? They're still on tour? They're still alive? Amazing. Well, enjoy the concert in November. I will not be with you, but I will be with you in spirit.

• 38:22John R. Miles?

  Angela, I can't talk to you and not bring up service academies, given your work around West Point. And one of West Point's most famous graduates is General Stan McChrystal. And I spent a good deal of time studying Stan, and I had the opportunity to interview him. And in my first book, I wrote about something that I call the gardener, like your gardening model of leadership. The idea that leaders don't manufacture growth so much as cultivate the conditions that allow them to emerge. And as I was reading Situated, it made me think, are great leaders less like architects imposing structure? And are they more like gardeners designing environments where people can flourish?

• 39:07Speaker 01

  I couldn't more enthusiastically endorse gardening and the gardener as a metaphor. And John, I'll have you know that I know you have a copy of the book and you know how it's got arrows on the, it's like, oh, you're getting you where you want to go. There was an alternative cover that had a plant on it. It was just like, because what you want to be is a plant that is being taken care of by a great gardener. To be with a great leader, and I don't know General McChrystal, but I'm a huge admirer. And I've actually read some of his writing and I just, I gotta write him a fan letter someday because I practically shout out with enthusiastic agreement with so much that he says. I think that the leader is a gardener because there are people who come under your leadership and you don't get to control their genetics.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  You don't get to control their past. You have the opportunity though, to plant them in really rich soil and to expose them to sunlight and to water them. I think that idea that this is not like architecture where it's like this wall is definitely going to go here. But more if I fertilize, if I provide some, let's see what this person can be. It's a lot more open ended. And I know you have a great respect for autonomy of individuals like that, I think honors their autonomy, right? You're not saying that your job as someone who follows me is to be what I specify in complete detail. But more that it's my job to help you be the best version of yourself that you can be.

• 40:34John R. Miles?

  So I'm going to ask a follow on academy question. So the last time you and I spoke, to remind the audience and to remind you, I mentioned to you that I happened to be at the academy when we had the largest cheating scandal in the academy's history. And not only was I there a part of it, I was one of the top five or six people on the honor brigade board who were administering the whole court cases that were going against the individuals involved. And I wanted to ask you, because here you have a situation where it involves a double electrical engineering course. It happened to be the final for the midterm.

• 41:14John R. Miles?

  And you had what ended up being about 400 individuals from that class who ended up cheating on this test. If you were analyzing this event today through the lens of situated, how much responsibility do you think belongs to individual character? And I know you study self-control a lot, intentionality, how much belongs to the environment that normalized certain behaviors that allowed the cheating to begin with?

• 41:41Speaker 01

  You're asking me a straightforward question, John, and I want to give you a straightforward answer, but I also really want to be complete. Cause it's zero to 100%, right? How much is the individual responsible? How much is it character, right? And how much is it, is it 70, 30, 50, 50? You tell me, Angela, right? That's a very common question, I think, like how much is the person and how much is the situation? I don't want to answer that question. It's not because I'm running for office. It's because it's a lot more complicated. First, I'll say that when a person cheats, I think they should take 100% responsibility. I have two daughters and if they ever come home and say, well, I had to lie because I'm like, I don't want to hear the because lying is wrong.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  I don't care whether you're trying to get a lease approved or try to get a promotion. Lying is wrong and it will always be wrong. And I think if a person cheats, even if there are 399 people who are cheating alongside with you, it doesn't make it any less wrong. So that's the first thing is I think individuals should take 100% responsibility for their ethical behavior and misbehavior. That doesn't make me a saint. It just makes me clear about what I think is right and wrong. Second, when 400 cadets are cheating, you have to ask the question, are we putting cadets into a situation where it is easier to cheat?

• 43:04Speaker 01

  And despite the fact that they should take 100% responsibility, could we put them in a situation where that's less likely or less easy? Think about dieting, right? If you overeat, then the only person who overate is you. Nobody is tying you down, putting food in your mouth. But if you are like at a baseball game or a children's birthday party, it's really hard to eat well, right? What are you going to eat? Where are the vegetables, right? Where's the protein? So I do think we should acknowledge that people are 100% responsible for their behavior. And the situation is enormously powerful. 400 cadets cheating has to point a finger at a situation that needs fixing.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  So hopefully both and doesn't sound like I'm running for office and I want it both ways. But I do think the person is paramount. The situation is more powerful than anybody can really imagine. And the way out of all this is if you're a leader at West Point, you do two things. You remind the young women and men at West Point that they duty honor country, right? That they are part of the long gray line and they are responsible. The second thing you do is you try to find a way that situation doesn't happen. And one of the things that the psychology research on dishonesty clearly shows is that when it is frictionless, when it is the norm,

• 44:28Speaker 01

  absolutely more people are going to cheat. Not everyone, but more. So put in friction and don't make it the norm. In my class, John, I start every class with a quiz. So I have solved the attendance problem by saying that you can come whenever you want, but there's going to be a seven minute quiz at the beginning of the class. So show up whenever you want, but it's over in seven minutes. And I'm collecting the hard copies. And though I honor my students by assuming their honesty, I also make it easier for them not to cheat. How do I do that? I make it easier because there are four forms of the quiz. So you have form A, B, C, or D. There's only a 25% chance that the person whose paper you're looking at is your form. That's better odds to just look at your own paper. I also make it easier for them. I say, I'm going to make it easy for you.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  I'm going to walk around the room because gosh, I'm so glad to have you here. I'm going to walk around the room for seven minutes. I gotta get my steps in. I'm going to just be with you. And now they've got a professor walking around the room. They've got a hard copy quiz that they really can't easily cheat on and their eyes are on their paper. So it is the person and it is the situation.

• 45:33John R. Miles?

  Thank you for answering it. I look back and I think from my own personal experience being there, I think a lot of it has to do with the tiny environmental frictions that existed at the time, meaning.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  Can you tell me more about them? Yeah. Cause I'm just curious because that was a scandal that so many people heard of because it was so huge.

• 45:52John R. Miles?

  So this is electrical engineering. If you've never taken it, it's one of those concepts that you either get or you fundamentally don't. And if you're at a service academy, you don't have the luxury of being able to go to a fifth or a sixth year. You have to graduate with 160 credits. When I was there, my lowest number of classes I was ever taking was like 21 credits. So junior year, it's even worse. I'm taking probably 24, 25 credits. In addition to that, I'm division one athlete. You have military bearing that you're responsible for.

• 46:30John R. Miles?

  You're doing training. You've got all these distractions, temptations, interruptions, and what I think are hidden taxes that are placed upon you. And you know that if you don't do well in this course, you're either going to get, you're either going to fail it. And then you're going to have to go to summer school and repeat this when you've got all these other things.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  And you have other things going on. Right.

• 46:51John R. Miles?

  And so I think there's so much pressure on it and they throw it at you during an extremely difficult semester or year, because it's the most pivotal one for your, whatever major you're doing, that a lot of people are just trying to find an easy way to get through it because of the amount of pressure that's thrown at you. It's not right, but I do think that friction in some ways is causing it.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  There's a philosopher, I think he's more of a philosopher than a psychologist named Christian Miller, who studies character. He's at Wake Forest University, if I'm not mistaken, and maybe you've interviewed him. He's great. You should have him on the show. Have you had him, Christian Miller?

• 47:35John R. Miles?

  I haven't, but I will.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  Not yet.

• 47:37John R. Miles?

  I'll definitely look him up.

• 47:38Speaker 01

  He's really brilliant and he's thought a lot about honesty and character. And I read his book on character and the part that's jumping to mind right now is that he ends with like prescriptions. It's like, how do we have more character, right? Because that's a goal for people personally as parents, as leaders. And he does say, let's put people in situations that are amenable to character, right? If you're a gardener, how do you cultivate a environment where honesty is not only the norm, but just possible? And I know that a lot of young people today, they say, oh, I was under so much pressure. I needed to cheat. Just talked to a young woman. She's 22 years old. She just graduated and her professor said, don't use AI. And then she did and asked if she

• 48:23Speaker 01

  ever told her professor, she said, no. And to me, that's cheating. That's cheating. I can't tell that young woman that I think it's right. I have to say it's wrong. And we do need to examine the situation. So both and like it's wrong. And how can we make people not feel like they're under that much pressure? What you described, I think is a lot more pressure, frankly, than most young people are actually objectively under. But still, Christian Miller is right. Let's create character conducive situations. And I think that's a concept that I don't know how popular this will be about the book, but I end the book about situational responsibility. And that's where I address leaders and parents and so forth, because we have a responsibility to create

• 49:07Speaker 01

  situations for other people that are the best. We are all gardeners, if we are parents or leaders.

• 49:14John R. Miles?

  You're absolutely correct. You and I have talked a lot about mattering, but can someone matter to an organization, a family or a community, and still feel fundamentally insignificant within it based on your work?

• 49:30Speaker 01

  I'm sure there's a lot behind that question. I may not be interpreting it in its full sense. I think if you feel like you matter, then you do feel significant because almost by definition, I feel like mattering is feeling significant. My favorite definition of purpose or mattering is to feel that you are part of and in service to something larger than yourself. That doesn't mean feeling like you're the head of the thing, or you're the most attractive or smartest part of the thing, just part of the thing and in service to it. And I don't know, I think it can be very small. I feel it every day. If I do something really small. I felt like my mother's

• 50:15Speaker 01

  daughter, the security guard in my building, whose name is Pete, and it's just like amazing. And everyone loves Pete and I love Pete. And when he said hi to me, because he says hi to everyone, I noticed that he sounded a little hoarse. And I was like, Pete, what you got going on there? And he was like, oh, getting a cold. And I said, mint tea with honey. And he was like, yeah. And I was like, they have it on the eighth floor. He was like, okay. So I was on the eighth floor later and I was making myself a tea. And I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna make a second tea and put some honey in it, because that's what my mother would do. And I went down to the first floor instead of mine, which is the fifth floor. And I just brought him the tea. And I don't even think Pete likes mint tea with honey, but I felt like I mattered. How does that matter in the school of Wharton, that one guy has a cup of tea with mint? And how much does

• 50:57Speaker 01

  it matter to me? Or how much do I matter? It's a tiny thing. But John, I felt good for the rest of the day because I felt like I was in, I was part of and in service to someone, something that wasn't me. And it was, it was, I really truly feel like my best self, when in small ways, I can do a good thing.

• 51:20John R. Miles?

  Angela, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm gonna put the book up here one more time, Situated.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 51:27John R. Miles?

  And I just wanted to tell the audience, I just did the tip of the iceberg version of this. You really want to read this book because there's so many stories we didn't get to, like with Kurt Lewin, Water Michelle, the one that I had hoped we'd get to, but we didn't, was Roger Barker, but Michael Phelps is in here, Aaron Beck, and we didn't even touch on your three boxes model. So I would encourage so many of the listeners to read this book. It is very difficult to create a second book as great as it was, but I think you've done it. So congratulations to you. And thank you so much for joining me again.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  Thank you, John. I'm honored to be a guest here. I'm honored to be a friend of yours. I really appreciate both.

• 52:10John R. Miles?

  I hope that conversation with Angela Duckworth gave you a different way to think about your own potential. We spend so much time asking, how can I become better? But sometimes the more important question is, where can I become better? Because the people we surround ourselves with in the environments we choose, don't just influence how we feel, they bring out parts of us that might otherwise remain hidden. And I think that's a powerful place to begin the new series. If today's conversation resonated with you, I'd love to hear your biggest takeaway. Share it with me on Substack, LinkedIn, or Instagram. And if you know someone who's been working hard, but still feels like they're not thriving, send them today's episode. And if you

• 52:54John R. Miles?

  haven't already, be sure to follow Passion Struck on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube, so you don't miss what's coming next. Because Thursday, we're continuing the Adaptive Human series with one of the world's greatest thinkers, Jared Diamond. Jared is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel. And his new book, Profits, Profits, Coaches, and Kings, asks a deceptively simple question. When do leaders actually matter? He looks at leadership across history, business, sports, and religion, and explores how much a leader's impact comes from their individual ability, and how much comes from the circumstances surrounding them. And that creates a fascinating connection to today's conversation. Angela asked us to look

• 53:39John R. Miles?

  at how our environments shape the person we become. Jared asks, what happens when those environments shape the impact a leader can have? Because leadership doesn't happen in a vacuum. The right person in the wrong circumstances may accomplish very little. The right circumstances can make an extraordinary difference. I think you're gonna love this conversation.

• 54:00Speaker 02

  If a couple who are about to get married ask, what's the secret of a successful marriage? I know that couple is at risk of getting divorced, because to have a successful marriage, you've got to get 37 things right. You have to agree about sex, and money, and children, and religion. And if you think that one thing is most important, your marriage is going to end up in disaster. Similarly, if a leader asks, what is the one most important thing? I would say the one most important thing is to stop looking for the one most important thing, to focus on getting 37 things right.

• 54:30John R. Miles?

  And tell them, remember, you may not be able to control every circumstance you're given, but you can become more intentional about the circumstances you choose. I'm John Miles, and as always, stay curious, stay intentional, and stay passion struck.