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Masters of ScaleAngela Duckworth on her new book, the limits of grit, and her advice to founders | Masters of Scale
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Post pre-med: Choosing kids over medical school
Jeff Berman asks about Angela Duckworth's first major pivot. She explains how tutoring in the Cambridge community pulled her away from a pre-med neurobiology track toward children's education, and that her father stopped speaking to her for six months.
- •Daughter of Chinese immigrants, pre-med was her expected path
- •Tutoring hours outweighed lab and lecture hours
- •She saw a gap between kids' potential and the education they received
- •She skipped the MCAT and committed to working with children
Her father's reaction and the "I'll show you" response
Duckworth explains that her father's anger came from love, the sacrifices he made as an immigrant, and a cultural lack of public service tradition. She describes how his opposition fired up her "I'll show you" response.
- •Her father converted school hours into hours of his work
- •He saw education as a lower-impact path than medicine
- •Helping strangers of a different race did not compute for him
- •Hearing "that's impossible" triggers an "I'll show you" drive
Kids' brains and untapped intellectual potential
Duckworth describes what she saw tutoring kids: bored children could not learn, while interested ones showed real intelligence. She cites processing speed declining through adulthood and the gap between potential and outcomes. Jeff shares a similar story from his time as a public defender.
- •Bored kids can't learn; interested kids show sharp intelligence
- •Processing speed declines with age, while adults gain wisdom and knowledge
- •Failing grades contrasted with obvious potential
- •Jeff describes a client who connected rights to the Boston Tea Party
Mr. Z and the power of environment
Duckworth recounts running a Harvard-Cambridge public service program and a teacher telling a curious boy an after-school program was only for the smart kids. The moment taught her that people overestimate natural talent and underestimate environments.
- •She ran a program matching Harvard students with Cambridge neighborhoods
- •Mr. Z told an eager boy the program was for the smart kids
- •She felt powerless to change the situation
- •Genes matter, but environment and opportunity are underestimated
From nonprofit founder to Oxford and McKinsey
Duckworth explains how she founded a nonprofit summer school, handed it to a successor, and won a scholarship to Oxford to study neuroscience. She then took a McKinsey job to bridge to the school year, negotiating for pro bono work, and left after eleven months.
- •Founded a nonprofit summer school that later scaled
- •Handed leadership to a younger successor at 24
- •Won the Marshall scholarship and studied dyslexia at Oxford
- •Joined McKinsey despite knowing nothing about business
- •Realized we are smart about what interests us and dumb about what doesn't
Teaching seventh-grade math in NYC public schools
Duckworth contrasts McKinsey with a Lower East Side school with barred windows and one shared bathroom. She says she was not a great teacher, because she focused on quantity of practice rather than quality and misunderstood motivation.
- •Same subway line, but a starkly different world
- •Teaching was far harder than consulting work
- •Quantity of time on task is not the same as quality
- •Exhorting kids to try harder mostly didn't work
Pivoting to a psychology PhD
Duckworth describes the tearful uncertainty after teaching. She decided she did not want to be a principal or an MBA type, and applied to one program, the University of Pennsylvania, starting a PhD at 32.
- •Cried over uncertainty about her next step
- •Found teaching not intellectually fulfilling enough for her
- •Considered charter schools, an MBA and HR before rejecting them
- •Applied only to Penn and started at 32
Not a leader, and choosing research over clinical work
Asked why she doesn't see herself as a leader, Duckworth says she respects leaders but has only a small lab. She then recounts advisor Marty Seligman steering her away from clinical training and how she came to understand where her energy lies.
- •Leaders run org charts, which she does not have
- •Singular focus is a lesson of grit
- •Seligman told her not to check the clinical training box
- •One-on-one therapy did not energize her, research did
- •Her PhD goals were set from day one: kids' motivation and learning
Discovering grit in high achievers
Duckworth explains how she landed on grit by studying top performers to find their common denominator. She found passion plus perseverance, with stamina mattering more than intensity, and says C-suite leaders embraced it because they are gritty.
- •Her father's household instilled an obsession with excellence
- •She looked for the common denominator among high achievers
- •Passion and perseverance, especially stamina over intensity
- •Business leaders embraced grit and want to make others as gritty
The accidental path to TED and public influence
Duckworth says becoming a public intellectual was an accident, starting with a TEDx invitation from Blue Man Group co-founder Chris Wink. A short, memorized talk for a PBS collaboration took on a life of its own and put her in the spotlight.
- •She was asked for interviews even as a graduate student
- •A TEDx talk led to a shorter main-stage talk
- •She was told to memorize the talk without a teleprompter
- •The talk spread through coaches, parents and managers
Scaling through words and the long tail of achievement
Duckworth says her success came from combining skills, especially her love of words with psychology. She explains that achievement is skewed rather than bell-shaped, because rare combinations of traits interact, and she describes writing as teaching.
- •Mr. Carr's English class sparked her love of words
- •Achievement follows a skewed distribution, unlike additive traits like height
- •Super achievers combine rare features that interact
- •Her agent told her she is a teacher
- •Academic colleagues see popularization as not nuanced enough
William James and the case for one-liners
Duckworth defends simplified writing by citing William James's Talks to Teachers, in which he cut abstruse detail. She then discusses her work with Danny Kahneman on the pros and cons of one-liners and the danger of overweighting any single idea.
- •She cut a year-long manuscript down to one sentence in the new book
- •William James edited his lectures down to practical principles
- •Science accumulates one-liners such as grit predicts achievement
- •Relying on one one-liner can overstate grit or cognitive biases
- •Her advice: accumulate many ideas rather than swinging between fads
Grit is not enough: the power of the situation
Duckworth explains her second book's theme that you must make your situation your ally. She describes how trying harder nearly broke her marriage during a stressful period, and how therapy, family, friends and mentors helped.
- •Her best-known one-liner is that grit is at least as important as talent
- •New message: grit is not enough, situation must be your ally
- •Trying harder was her only trick for forty years
- •A stressful 2008 nearly broke her marriage
- •Therapy, family, vulnerability with friends and mentors helped
Two pieces of advice to founders
Asked what to do when you have grit but the situation isn't right, Duckworth says founders often don't ask for help. She recommends joining a formal community of founders and proactively cultivating mentors, and says both individual advisors and long-term peers have value.
- •Founders' try-harder independence is a double-edged sword
- •Join a formal community of founders, like a flotilla
- •Mentors must be proactively made, not found by luck
- •Peers can be specialists called for a reason and lifelong friends
- •Having someone beside you makes hard things easier
Publisher timestamps
- 0:00Discovering her passion for children's education
- 5:59Uncovering the intellectual potential of children
- 17:51What Angela learned working in NYC public schoolsRead this chapter
- 21:14Pivoting to a career in psychologyRead this chapter
- 29:23Angela Duckworth on choosing to study grit
- 32:50Angela's rise to becoming a "public intellectual"
- 51:04Angela Duckworth on her new book
- 54:15Angela's two pieces of advice to foundersRead this chapter
