Why Changing Your Situation Works
with Psychologist Angela Duckworth
What if you can become your best self by changing the situation around you?
In our season 4 finale of How We Future, Lisa Kay Solomon talks with psychologist, University of Pennsylvania professor, and author Angela Duckworth about her new book, Situated, and the powerful role our environments, relationships, and circumstances play in shaping what we think, feel, and do.
Angela’s previous book, Grit, explores how to leverage our inner qualities. Now, she’s examining the “outside game”: the mentors, peers, teams, spaces, and systems that can help us thrive.
Listen to the full episode to learn strategies for changing your environment, building supportive relationships, making behavior change easier, and using your agency to create better conditions for yourself and others.
Lisa and Angela cover:
Angela’s three-box model for changing behavior
Why changing your environment can be smarter than relying on willpower
What Michael Phelps and Jerry Seinfeld teach us about situational agency
And as always, we’d love to hear from you: What’s one part of your situation you could change to make the future you want a little easier to reach?
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Angela Duckworth: The Incredible Hulk. It's like you can tear the wall down with your bare hands through pure strength. That's one way to be a hero. Or you could be like James Bond, 007, who just sidesteps the villain and then lets them crash into the wall themselves. I feel like when you change your situation, you're being so much more graceful, so much more wise.
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Lisa Kay Solomon: I'm Lisa Kay Solomon, and this is How We Future, where I talk to some of my favorite changemakers about shaping tomorrow starting today.
Welcome to the finale of our fourth season, where we've been exploring big ideas with some extraordinary people. You might know Angela Duckworth from her groundbreaking work on grit, focused on the inner game of resilience. 10 years later, she's written a new book titled Situated, focused on what she calls the outer game. In essence, Angela wants us to be equally intentional about where we are, who we're with, and what we've designed around us.
Angela and I discuss how changing our situation can often be far more powerful and far less painful than trying to summon more willpower. We talk about some greats like Michael Phelps, Jerry Seinfeld, and why and how mentorship and our environment can be a form of strength and agency. As we wrap this season, I can't think of a better conversation to leave you with. What if you have more power to shape your future than you think, not just by changing yourself, but by changing the situations around you? Thank you for spending an amazing season with us. Here's my conversation with Angela Duckworth.
I cannot begin to tell you how excited I am for this conversation.
Angela: [chuckles] Thank you. I'm delighted to be in conversation.
Lisa: It's amazing. In some ways, I'm thinking about how we first met, which was about a year ago at the Aspen Ideas Conference. It was very much the situation that allowed us to meet, which feels appropriate to talk about your new book, Situated.
Angela: We had a great situation. It's good to see you again.
Lisa: It's so great to see you again. I'm thrilled to be talking about your new book. As we were just talking about before we started this conversation, I'm a tiny bit obsessed. It is so good. It's so what we need right now. I just cannot wait for the world to read this book and feel as empowered as I did, chapter after chapter. Maybe we'll start with why you decided you needed to write another book.
Angela: When I wrote my first book, Grit, I vowed publicly and privately never to write another book, partly because, as every writer knows, and as you know, it's so darn hard. After a few years, I began to think of another book for two reasons. One is I really do think books are maybe the only medium in which you can really develop an idea. A book is not a tweet. It's not an Instagram post. It's not a Substack. It's really an elaboration of an idea. It takes a whole book sometimes to get that idea across. That was one reason. I became convinced, I guess, that the technology of books, as it were, was one that I should really be open to because of the second reason.
The second reason is that in my own research as a psychologist, I was increasingly aware of how important situations are to what we think and how we feel, what we do, and how invisible they can be. We don't know the water we swim in, so to speak. Put those two factors together, and 10 years after writing Grit, I have this second book.
Lisa: It's such a beautiful compliment to Grit, where I know you talk about grit as the inner discipline or the inner way of thinking about how we can get better. I took so much from that book. This is really the other part. That's the part that kept coming back to me as I read through the book was just how invisible, as you said, these things are. Yet, what if we made them visible? What if we name them and give frameworks around them, and the book is rich with them? I love when you say, "Grit is one thing. A great situation is another. Fully realizing your potential requires both."
Angela: I really believe that. I think there's an inside game for achieving your dreams. A lot has been written about that. Not just grit, but optimism and mindset and on and on. It's not that I disavow any of that. I actually think the inner game is very important, and we should master the inner game because how we think about things, our attitude, our assumptions, our beliefs, they really shape what we think and feel and do, but also the outside game. Where are you? I began to see in my own research, some of my research is quantitative, with statistics and data collection at large scale.
Some of my research is just talking to people, talking to high achievers, people who have won a Nobel Prize, people who have won multiple gold medals at multiple Olympics. When you talk to those people or artists, musicians, it came to my realization a little bit late, I guess you could argue as a researcher, that not only are there common denominators about the inside game, like, "Oh, they're optimists, they believe in growth, they're positive thinkers, they think about what they can change, they don't dwell on what they can't." Equally, there were common denominators outside.
Every single high achiever that I have studied has had an important mentor in their life, somebody who changed their life forever. Every great achiever points to the team, their peers, like, "Oh, I wouldn't be here except for my co-producer. I wouldn't be here except for my co-founder. I got to tell you about this personal assistant I had. Met her 20 years ago, and I will tell you, she is every bit as important to this company as I am." When I became more and more aware of the common denominators in their situations, I thought, "Why is this realization coming so late?" I think it's because of what you said. We're blind, I think, in a way, to our situations.
I don't think we wake up in the morning and tally up the factors that are for and against us in our situation. We just muscle through, and I think that's a mistake.
Lisa: Yes, and an opportunity. I think that's really what this book opens up for educators, for parents. I know you have a specific chapter to help parents, for leaders. I was really taken with the diversity of cases that you talked about. Individuals that we put up on the pedestal as an individual, and you break down, no, behind them was a support system, was a team. Maybe we could start even with Michael Phelps, which is just such a compelling story. We all admire Michael Phelps and everything he achieved, and even his individual battle. He really is quite open about how much he struggled with his own--
Angela: Courageously so, wonderfully so. Thank you, Michael Phelps.
Lisa: Exactly. This great quote that starts off the chapter where he says, "Without Bob, my story is different, 100% different." I just think, yes, and it's not just Bob. It's Bob and the system around Bob Bowman being his coach, of course. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that story.
Angela: I am also a great fan of Michael Phelps growing up when I did. I watched Michael Phelps swim several Olympics. The world now knows that his career spanned 20 years from age 11 to age 31. He started swimming quite early. He ended quite late. Swimming's a very demanding physical sport. In those 20 years, Michael Phelps became the most decorated swimmer in all of history, but also the most decorated Olympian of every sport. He has broken the world record for breaking world records in athletics. When you look at Michael Phelps, maybe my first book was to say, "Look, don't just assume he's talented."
When you ask Bob Bowman, as you point out, his lifelong coach, was it just talent? He was like, "Yes, Michael is double-jointed, true. He absolutely has the proportions. He's 6'4". His torso's longer than his-- absolutely, he's talented." What I got to see by watching him swim every day for 20 years is his work ethic, his grit. The first book was, how does Michael Phelps think? What wakes you up in the morning so passionate about what you do, again and again and again, on the good days, on the bad days, after victories, after losses? The outside game is Bob Bowman, his amazing coach. Arguably, the best swimming coach in history.
His team, there's something about these world-class teams where, even in a sport that's individual, like swimming, you have these teammates who are almost in your lane with you, sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively, but pushing you. There's also Michael Phelps's mom. I devoted a whole chapter, as you know, to Debbie Phelps because Michael was a handful. He had a formal diagnosis of ADHD, and he had many teachers' notes that were like, "Michael's a handful. I need to manage this classroom. Michael won't sit in his chair. I don't know what's going to happen to Michael. Debbie knew what was going to happen to Michael.
Debbie was like, "He can learn. He's not stupid. If we put him in the right situation, just watch what he can do." She said to one teacher, "I know he can't sit still. I'm asking you to put him in the back of the classroom. He needs to pace. He needs to get up out of his chair and walk back and forth." I promise you that if you let him do that, he'll pay attention. He won't be disruptive. Michael had this situation that included a world-class coach, a world-class team. He had a world-class mom. His sisters, Whitney and Hillary, were just like the sisters everybody wants to have. He's so dedicated, so loving.
Interestingly for Michael, they were his first role models in swimming because both Hilary and Whitney were very committed swimmers. When Michael was just a baby, he would just be in Debbie's lap, just watching his sisters go up and down. Debbie says that Michael learned so much about swimming technique only from just watching his sisters. Again, was Michael talented? Yes. Was he gritty? Absolutely. Did Michael have a great situation? Inarguably so.
Lisa: Gosh, there's so much to unpack in that story. A couple of things. One is you're reminding me, when my kids were really little, like eight or nine, I remember seeing them in the pool, and my daughter decided to do the butterfly. I was like, "Where did you learn the butterfly?" She's like, "Michael Phelps and the Visa commercial."
[laughter]
Angela: She was in love with that commercial.
Lisa: Of course, it was that. That's the first thing that comes to mind. The other thing is I am lucky. I do a lot of recruiting for Stanford Athletics. The coaches will often call me. I see how hard they're recruiting these athletes to try to market Stanford as a support system, not just a place to go to perform. I just have some of these hilarious pictures of me coming up to some of these basketballs like belly button. That's a story for another time. I'm always so pleased when some of them decide to go to Stanford because they see that support system around them. I'll just share. It's interesting. We're recording this ahead of when we're going to be publishing it.
Today in Wimbledon, Stanford former tennis player Arthur Fery is in the quarterfinals after joining as a wild card. Even though he left Stanford a couple years ago, his coach, Paul Goldstein, as soon as Arthur Fery hit the tiebreaker in the fifth set, an unlikely win in the round of 16, Paul bought a ticket to go over there. He's now in the player's box right now. We saw a pre-interview of him. He said, and I really thought of you, Angela, and I thought of this book. I thought, "What a gift to give me language." Paul said, 'Arthur is an incredible tennis player, but even more than that, he's an incredible human."
I thought, "Oh, this is what it means to have a mentor that believes in you, someone who's going to show up even though he's not currently his coach.
Angela: Isn't that beautiful? I love this.
Lisa: It was beautiful. I was like, "This just feels so perfect."
Angela: I think that the very term mentor, which is a big part of your situation, is the people around you. Of course, that includes your teammates, your peers, but your mentors are a special relationship. We don't have as many mentors as we have peers. Mentor, as you now know from reading the book, is a term that comes from the Greek myth Odysseus, the Greek tale. When King Odysseus left for the Battle of Troy, and he only had one son, Telemachus, he entrusted the care of his son, the raising of his son, the parenting of his son, to his wife and to his good friend, whose first name was Mentor.
Every time I see a relationship like that, and it doesn't take much to just glimpse it, you're like, "Oh, that speaks volumes.' You can just guess at what this relationship is really like. It's so beautiful. It makes you want to cry. You're like, "Right," because there are people that I can think of in my life where I'm like, "Why did you love me so much? You gave me everything. I gave you nothing." Now that I'm 56 and I'm in the position of being a mentor, I also want to cry because there's nothing that is as beautiful as bringing forth that next generation. Sometimes it's your own biological children. Sometimes it's a stranger that becomes part of your family.
Lisa: Yes, and you just don't know. I think the book offers that invitation to just start off with curiosity, not that transactional, will you be my mentor, like the little Dr. Seuss mother, like, "Will you be my mentor. Are you my mother?" Just being open to it. I used to teach a class years ago called Networking by Design. It was really about trying to communicate the power of building relationships of all kinds to help you for a lifetime of learning. That networking, which gets this bad rap that I think people bristle from, oh, it's transactional, is really an opportunity to learn from each other. You just spell it out so beautifully in your extended chapter.
Angela: What do you say to undergraduates or young people, I guess, about networking? I agree with you. The word is a beautiful word, but it has negative connotations, Machiavellian somehow in its connotation. What do you tell young people?
Lisa: The first thing I do is try to make the difference between a transactional network of going in for a very short-term specific purpose, like get me an internship, and the opportunity to learn about somebody else and to build a relationship that's going to last a long time. I also try to take the stakes down. Coming to a place of empathy, which is another theme throughout the book, empathy for yourself, is to try to understand that these young folks really haven't had a lot of practice in building relationships. COVID certainly didn't help, where they were taken out during their developmental years.
I just try to lower the stakes about, hey, you can build a relationship. They feel a little bit of the imposter syndrome, like, "What might I have to offer Angela Duckworth? She's so amazing." I'll just remind them. I'll say, "You know what you can offer? Your energy, your curiosity, do your homework, be authentic, be curious." I love that you brought in Brian Grazer's curious conversations model. That's one of my absolute favorite books, A Curious Mind. I feel like if you're curious and you're willing to talk to a stranger, not with the intent of a specific goal in mind, you're never without options. That's always going to help you learn. That's a very productive, positive thing to be able to do.
Then the other thing, I tell them because it's both philosophically how to think about it, but then I break it down. I love that you talked about this in your book because it's practice. I started to actually bring in as a assignment, even, or ritual in my class, is that when I have guests come in, I ask my students to write a handwritten thank-you note to the guests. It has to be handwritten. I don't want you at GPT writing it. I want them to be laborious. I say, "Be specific. What did you learn from them? Follow up." Then it's my greatest joy to be sending out these packages of handwritten thank you notes to my guests after class. It's just a win for everyone. Everybody feels good.
Angela: I'm immediately stealing that, Lisa. Immediately. I have not done that. That's such a great idea. I love it in 10 different ways. I want to say about this distinction between transactional and relational networking: when you describe, show up, be curious, be prepared, really listen. Have empathy for that person. Have curiosity. That is what I think mentor magnets do. As you know, I write about this a little in the book, but I was just struck in my own experience: who do I mentor? I was like, "Eli, Kayvon, Cody." I'm just counting on my fingers.
Then I realized about all the young people that I have stuck with. It wasn't just in office hours. It wasn't just a semester, like, "Oh, my gosh, have I known you 12 years? How did that happen?" I realized that they have all the qualities that you said, and they're all free. You don't need to be born into privilege. You don't have to be a genius. Can you be kind? Yes. Can I write a thank you? Yes. Can I spend 10 minutes preparing for this 10-minute conversation? Can I show up 2 minutes early instead of 2 minutes late? Can I write a note 6 months later because, hey, I saw this article in The New York Times, and I just was remembering in our conversation, we talked about this.
Who wouldn't want to mentor somebody like that? It's a beautiful thing.
Lisa: It's a beautiful thing. I have a few students, every year one or two, really continue to stay in touch. They reach out, "Hey, I'm thinking about you." You're making me think, even during COVID, where everything was online. I had one student reach out for office hours, and he said, "I just want to get to know you better." Seven years later, we're still in touch.
Angela: Of course we are.
Lisa: Of course, we are. I didn't even know he was a basketball player because we're all in these little Zoom boxes. I didn't know he was actually 6'2". He started working with me on a whole effort. I started with a couple other coaches to infuse civic engagement into student athletics. He got really involved. He won all these awards at Stanford. I didn't get him those awards, but I think it was the first time that somebody paid attention and said, "Hey, you got something here."
Angela: How did you start working on that project? I'm curious about that because I do see this three-stage evolution. Many times young people are like, "I want to mentor for life. I want to be Oprah Winfrey to Maya Angelou." It's like, "Yes, so do I." This mentor for life, to me, is stage three. Stage two is you're a mentor. You have a mentor, not for life, but maybe for a season. Like, "I'm working on a project. I would love to hear more about that." Before that, it's just like, "I went to office hours." Mentors for a reason. For me, there's an evolution. Mentors for a reason become mentors for a season. Some of those stick around and become mentors for life.
How did that particular collaboration or project-- what did you start working on with this Stanford basketball player?
Lisa: Oh, it was amazing. It's a whole long story about how I started moonlighting as a civic futurist. That's a separate conversation. Similar in looking for an opportunity to make a difference. This student, Sam, came to office hours. He said, 'Lisa, I just--" We're bouncing around. It's COVID. We're not in the same place night after night. "I just want to get to know you." I thought that was fantastic. We had a great conversation. I learned through that, which I wouldn't have known because the class was 60 people in these boxes, that he was a Stanford basketball player.
I started working with the Stanford men's basketball coach, Eric Reveno, about this idea of infusing civic engagement into student athletics. I knew we needed to get student voices involved, and Sam was the closest one. I reached that back out to him, and I said, "Sam, listen, totally okay to say no. To veto, but would you mind looking at some things we're developing?" We were developing a civic drill playbook. Make it super easy for athletes to be athletes. By the way, another great athlete we worked with was a Penn volleyball player, a captain, Elizabeth Ford. We could talk about her. That's a great story.
Long story short, I basically shrunk the ask to make it really small. I was like, "Sam, can you just take a look? All you need to do is tell me if these activities bore you. If they bore you, done. I don't need to know why. I'm just fine. The whole point is to make it interesting." He was like, "Lisa, no problem." The next thing I know, though, that little bit, next thing, he's coming up with drills. Now he's coming up with ideas. He contributed in so many ways. It's now a national organization. There's an engaged fellowship. I really attribute it back to Sam's leadership on this. One thing he did: he said, "You know what, Lisa, we need to create engagement and energy. Let's create an all-star civic tailgate party."
He goes, "I'm going to get Condoleezza Rice to join." Next thing I know, though, is to get Condoleezza Rice, he enlists his coach.
Angela: Did he get Condi?
Lisa: He got Condi. We got Steph Curry. We got Tara VanDerveer. We got Cameron Brink. Amazing things can happen if you allow yourself to be in that discovery phase with somebody else. I think, and I know you have a big part of this about the importance of creating things with peers. That is a form of changing your situation.
Angela: Yes, I love that story. Practically speaking, because like you, when I teach students, I'm like, "Okay, here's the theory. All right, but brass tax, this is what it looks like." I do think the recommendation, don't send emails over the transom to strangers asking them to be your mentor for life. It's just weird. It's like asking someone to marry you who hasn't met you. I agree. Sometimes you hit it off, and sometimes you don't, and you can't predict. I completely agree with you there.
Practically speaking, I think if you have met somebody who you really would love to mentor you, and you've had an initial curiosity conversation, and you would love to get to know them better, to me, engaging in a project is the way that I stay in orbit with anybody, peers or anyone else. I'm very busy. I'm not watching TikTok all day. I'm just working on projects. If you're working on the same project, then we're in the orbit of each other. I really like that story for that reason. I do think that asking yourself, "How do I attract the mentors into my life who will change me? Would it be better if I were in a different peer group?" Sometimes the answer is no, but oftentimes it's yes.
Just thinking about when you mentioned peers, my roommate from college, and you know I wrote about her in the book with her permission. Stokely, when I met her, was like-- and we all have imposter syndrome, I think, at least for some time when we go to college. Man, she was drop-dead beautiful. She really is the spitting image of Reese Witherspoon, platinum blonde hair. She had that southern lilt because she was from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. She had also flown planes across the country by herself. All those things where you're like, "Wow, I'm just vanilla ice cream compared to this exotic flavor." Yet she struggled with alcoholism, as I came to learn later in our friendship.
She told me about AA. She told me that there was a point in her life where she said, "I do need to change my peers. The people I'm hanging out with, my fellow drunks," as she put it, "They're not good for me." It was a very deliberate move to replace her peer group with, now, a lot of her friends are AA friends. Asking yourself, "Can I change my situation?" Changing my situation is hard, but it's the best way to change yourself. Once you start going to AA, you're not the same person as you were before you started going to AA. Once you have a mentor in your life, you're not the same person as the person who didn't have that mentor in their life.
Lisa: I'm so glad you brought that up. That was such a powerful story. I'm grateful that she was willing to be vulnerable. Just another strength.
Angela: We debated. I was like, "It's anonymous." She was like, "Oh, that's a debate." At points, she was like, "Okay, don't use my name." Then just like, "You know what, what the hell, use my name.'
Lisa: It's so empowering to own it.
Angela: Yes, I think so.
Lisa: I think that's a great segue to a core framework that I really wanted to spend some time with on the three-box model. Wow, that is a game changer. You even talk about it as, like other people, it's like, "This is a game changer." I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the three box model and how it can be so helpful in helping people realize that, first of all, they have more agency than they realize, and that perhaps choices that they make earlier in the pipeline of change can be way more powerful and effective than, I think, some of the mainstream messages we get that change is all about willpower.
Angela: You know much more about design than I do, but as a psychologist, I came to an appreciation of the situation through a psychologist at Stanford named James Gross, who is really the world expert on emotion regulation, certainly one of the pioneers in the field of emotion regulation. As he was beginning to become the expert that he is today, he saw all these different things that people did to change their sadness or their anxiety. Sometimes they would try to suppress their feelings, and sometimes they would try to think positively, and sometimes they would do-- they had a long list of things.
At some point early in his career, he said, "Wait, this is just like an infinite list of things that you could do to regulate your emotion. There has to be some framework. There has to be some rhyme and reason to these. He discovered that there are these categories. The last thing you could do, the latest thing, is just to suppress your feelings. That's similar to, "I'm not going to eat the carrot cake. I will not be on Instagram. I'm going to shut this app down. I'm going to go to bed right now." You can do that. That is called response modulation. It's acting at the last possible moment because you're in the heat of the moment, and then you're forcing yourself to do something.
We put that in a box because it's going to be three boxes and two hours. That's the third box. That's the last thing you can do. We've all done it. Human beings are probably better at doing that than other animals. We can really suppress impulses better than other animals, but we all know we're not so great at it. One box earlier, there's the thought that led to the impulse. What is the thought that led you to be sad? What is the thought that led you to be jealous? What is the thought that led you to be angry? What is the thought that led you to want to eat carrot cake? Whatever that thought is, you can also intervene there. That's box two.
Instead of waiting until box three, you can intervene at box two. You're like, "Okay, you know what? I need to think of carrot cake as the food of the devil. I need to think of Instagram as rotting my brain." You can do that, and we've all done that. Reframing is a very useful strategy for changing emotions and behavior. The first box is the situation. That is your objective reality. Who are you sitting with? What is in front of you? What's within line of sight? You might think to yourself, "If I don't want to eat the carrot cake, rather than willing myself not to, rather than forcing myself to think of carrot cake as evil, why don't I just not have carrot cake in my house?"
As some of us do, "I'll put it in the freezer because who wants to defrost carrot cake for six--" By the time that it defrosts, you don't want it anymore. There are ways that you can change your objective, physical, and social situation in ways that spontaneously change your thoughts. When you don't have carrot cake in the house, you're less likely to even think of carrot cake. You might think of other things. Then, of course, the thoughts change your reaction. Box one changes box two. Box two changes box three. Why don't you begin at the beginning? A stitch in time saves nine. That has been a through line of the research that James and I have conducted in our now, I guess, 15-year friendship and collaboration.
Lisa: It's so powerful. You're just so clear about knocking some of these messages we've gotten that just don't serve us well. You say, "Our research shows that of all the ways you can change your behavior, willpower is the absolute worst." Yet, we're like, "Oh, no, I just got to try harder. I just got to do more." It's coupled with, I think it's slightly different, but it's along the same lines, which is like, "It's a cop-out to change my situation. It means I'm not trying hard enough." I just really hope this book helps people reframe that there's so much more in their control to help them and others be successful. That's actually smart.
Angela: I hope I don't get in trouble with Nike. I pass a Just Do It t-shirt just about every day. It's always all caps. Obviously, sometimes you do have to just do it. Again, I feel like it's this macho, like, "Oh, I could do it the hard way." Why? I don't know. I'll also get in trouble with Half of Humanity when I say there's something so bro about it. It's like, "I'm going to do it the--" It's like, "Wait, is that the smartest way to do--"
I want to get more exercise. You could just do it, or you could be like, "What is my favorite thing to do to exercise? Could I put my sneakers by the front door? Could I put my clothes out the night before? Could I wear clothes I really like? Could I go with a friend?" All those things make it easier. Wouldn't that be a smarter way? I didn't put this in the book, Lisa, but I thought about The Incredible Hulk. It's like you can just tear the wall down with your bare hands through pure strength. That's one way to be a hero, or you could be like James Bond, 007, who just sidesteps the villain and lets them crash into the wall themselves.
I feel like when you change your situation, you're being so much more graceful, so much more wise. Again, as somebody who doesn't know a lot about design, but I'm coming late to this game of like, "Oh, this is what architects and designers mean about creating situations in which talking to each other is the natural thing to do. Exercising is what you want to do." I really feel like I'm coming to an appreciation for so many things that are probably obvious, honestly, to people like you.
Lisa: I'm so glad you said it because I will say that throughout the book, I'm like, "That's a design problem. That's a design opportunity. She's talking about constraints. She's talking about reframing." I'm so grateful. I've never met him, but you bring up Richard Thaler in the book and nudge theory. When I first read about that work, I was like, "This is design work, making choices to make the right response easier. This is what we call when we say design." You have this--
Angela: You got there first. I have to say that. You did get there first.
Lisa: No. Whatever works. That's the other thing. It's like "Whatever works. You want to hear design words? I'll give you design words. You want to hear economic theory? I'll give you economic theory." No, to me, this captures it all. Succeed more, suffer less. Who doesn't want that? My mother used to say to me, who got her PhD at Penn, she used to say, and she still says, she said, "Avoid unnecessary suffering."
Angela: Why? What is her PhD in?
Lisa: She got her PhD in counseling. Oh my gosh, she would love this. She, this was in the '80s, wrote a course called The Psychology of Personal Growth in the School of Ed.
Angela: Oh, what? Hello. I didn't know that.
Lisa: I know. Is that incredible? We joke. We're like, "Mom, you'd be so much more famous if you just didn't play so much golf." She was like, "I can't give up my golf. That was a huge life moment for her. Just transformational in all the ways.
Angela: I'm sure your mom knows-- Viktor Frankl had an outsized influence in, I guess, all of society, but in the counseling and therapy worlds. I read Man's Search for Meaning. I bring up Viktor Frankl because I do think sometimes people think like, "Oh, didn't he write a book about how suffering is good?" I'm like, "He did write a book about surviving Auschwitz and Buchenwald. He did write about how there can be dignity in suffering." I put Viktor Frankl into the book because it was really, to me, a great tragedy that people would have this incomplete understanding of Viktor Frankl's message.
Many of my students have read Man's Search for Meaning. I'm sure many of your students have as well. It is true that he wrote about how even in the face of abject suffering, you can find dignity. He also wrote that to suffer unnecessarily is masochism. He also wrote that when you can change your situation, that is the first thing that you should do. I think about the lesson of World War II, which I hope in today's age we would not forget. Viktor Frankl wanted the situation to change for those who were held in the concentration camps.
Also, when he became free, did everything he could to travel the world and tell people that when you have freedom, you need to use it with responsibility and you need to effectively create situations in which all people can achieve their ambitions and to live freely. I feel like there is this message that somehow got garbled. If you really read Man's Search for Meaning and you read it the way I think Viktor Frankl would want you to read it, it would say that we have a situational responsibility. I worry about that, especially now. I'm not sure that we're in a great situation as a world or as a country.
If Viktor Frankl were alive today, I'm sure he would be able to say much more eloquently than I can that we need to not ignore the situation. I feel like if we just live our lives blind to the situations we're in, then the world's not going to get better.
Lisa: I'm so glad that you brought that up. That was a very powerful part of the book, really taking a step back and being like, "Let's look at the bigger message here." Of course, the book goes a lot into situational awareness, so just paying more attention, situational agency, like what you can do to change your environment. I love that it ended with situational leadership and situational citizenship. I think those are really important messages. It's one of the reasons why I love working, again, with athletes because they are in positions to model different kinds of behavior. One thing that's pretty much true is that a lot of people go to athletic events and they're watching. Eyeballs are already on them.
Angela: I guess the only thing that she can agree on is it's fun to watch a sports game. No, I wrote the whole last part of the book, Lisa, at the very 11th hour. The whole book was done, and it was already as long as I thought it should be. I was like, "Okay, I think I'm done. Oh, my gosh, this nearly killed me, but look, I'm done. Phew." Then I realized that it was incomplete. I really feel like if this is only a book about you becoming personally a better person, then I will have missed the opportunity to say the most important thing, which is that it's more important to make the world a better place for other people than it is to make the world a better place for you.
I wrote all of that, including the parenting chapter, all at the very end of the end. It was already supposed to be done, done, done. I hope I did an adequate job. I tried to say what I thought about Viktor Frankl, about Abraham Maslow and Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I don't know how capably I did it, but I think it's an important message.
Lisa: Oh, it's so important. I'm so glad. I don't know whoever said it's not done because that's so painful. You're like, "It's done." "It's not done." I think it's so important. One line that really stuck with me, and I'm curious about how doing the research and now the book is influencing your own teaching and the choices that you're making, is that moment where you ask your Wharton students to consider the difference between a great performer and a great leader and really making that distinction because I think our young people in particular are so focused on performance.
I certainly see that with Stanford students. Like, "I performed. I did everything I needed to do to get in here," versus really take a step back to ask, "What does it mean to lead in this moment?"
Angela: I always say to my students and to real leaders that I'm not one. I'm a professor, but I do have this perspective on leadership from interviewing a lot of world-class leaders. Many of them are in business. Some of them are in government or in civic activism or the arts. The difference to me between being a performer and a leader is that a performer tries to achieve excellence as an individual. A leader has a different task. A leader is trying to bring out the best in other individuals. They're setting the stage. They are setting up the structures. They are maybe helping to chart the path, but they're actually not the performers anymore.
I think it's a very difficult transition because you almost never reach the upper echelons of leadership without being a star performer yourself. Switching from being a teacher to the principal, from the principal to the superintendent, or the star salesperson from the VP of sales is difficult because it is different. I think it's harder. When you become a leader, I think you do really appreciate the value of design and the value of situations, as I'm putting it in this book, the psychology of situations, because all you're doing is setting people up. You're like, "If I put this office by that office, I think those two people are going to talk to each other. I think if I reorganize the teams in this way, we're going to collaborate more."
Again, I'm not a leader, but the leaders that I talk about in the book, including Toby Cosgrove, who led the Cleveland Clinic during the doubling of its growth. Most importantly, during the time that it became patient-centered, as opposed to statistics-centered or physician-centered, but patient experience-centered, and by the way, working with designers while doing that, those leaders were really psychologically wise. They were situationally wise. They understood the inside game. They understood how the outside game changes the inside game.
Toby Cosgrove, in particular, was such an architect of the situation in ways that now that I talk to people at Cleveland Clinic, he's now retired, it's like his legacy. That building the hospital this way with this corridor, with these offices, the patient parking spaces by the front door, the doctor parking spaces in the back, farmers markets. No junk food in the cafeteria. All of these design choices, I think, have set up Cleveland Clinic to be a wonderful place to be, not just to survive, but to live.
Lisa: I love that you go into detail of all of those. I try to be very thoughtful about the precious real estate I have with my students on the minutes that we're together. From the very beginning, there's music playing. It's intentional. There's welcome. I think part of it is to help them feel the power of what happens when you pay attention to the holistic details, to let them be the best version of themselves more than they ever thought that they could. They are so guarded, and they are so nervous about being wrong or, again, not performing. I think it just completely changes the game. I have to bring up one more story before we close, which is I love the fact that you brought in Jerry Seinfeld. How did it occur to you to bring in Jerry Seinfeld into a book about situations?
Angela: I am a woman of my generation, so I've also watched a lot of Seinfeld, not just all the Seinfeld episodes, but also Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. I'm a big fan. I would love to say that I'm best friends with Jerry Seinfeld, but I am really mostly an admirer and a student of his practice. What really was to me interesting as a psychologist was his intentionality as a comedian. Most people will appreciate this, because I think we all love comedy, that so much of comedy, it's the craft of writing. The joke isn't written once. It's written again and again and again.
There's a New York Times Magazine article on Jerry Seinfeld's behind-the-scenes of this one Pop-Tart joke. It's many, many iterations and doing it in different stand-up venues. When you look at a high performer like a Jerry Seinfeld, and you ask, "How does he get himself to write so much?" He writes every day. How does he get himself to write every day? Just like Michael Phelps. How does he get himself to write when he feels like it, and how does he get himself to write when he doesn't feel like it? As Jerry Seinfeld puts it, writing is a game of tonnage. You just have to put in the hours.
He's so intentional about the situation. He has his coffee cup right there. There's a certain kind of blue pen that's clear-barreled. It has to be that pen. He has to be writing on this kind of yellow legal pad. He has set up his situation with all of these cues. There is famously the wall calendar where he's keeping a streak and gives himself a red X every time he does his writing for the day. Just visually, that reminder, which, as my research shows, it's one of the strongest predictors of achieving goals, is having a visual cue. If you're trying to do something every day, you can see behind me: I have a timeline of the study that we're doing.
I was like, "We're printing it out. I know everybody has the Google Doc. We are printing that out and taping it to the wall because we have to walk by it every day. Did we do this? Did we do that? Did we not do those things?" At the writing routine level, Jerry Seinfeld was so interesting to me. As I dug a little deeper, I learned that Jerry uses other kinds of situational cues. He literally puts on his jacket, which those who are real Seinfeld fans knows that this is not a guy who goes casual to his standup, but he's always wearing a jacket. He says that when the jacket goes on, my body knows it's time to perform. When I splash the water on my face, I know it's time to get started for the day.
One of the ways you could think about this is that if you were working on a film set and you needed to prepare the actor for the role, you'd be like, "Let's give them this costume. Let's give them these props. Let's put them in this setting so that they can act like a queen, or so they can act like whatever, a corporate villain." Whatever it is that you want to bring out in yourself, you could set up the stage with the props and the costume and the backdrop appropriately. Then you will, as William Shakespeare said, all the world's a stage. Each of us it's players. You will step into that role.
I felt like Jerry Seinfeld, who was not only a high performer, but, as all comedians are, a student of human nature, that he had observed the importance of the situation and has used it. That's, to me, a great example of situational agency.
Lisa: I'm so glad you brought that up. There's also this great exchange when you talk about his own awareness of his situations in the conversation with Letterman, where he makes the distinction between morning guy and evening guy that have very different goals. That, of course, brought in the future's work of how evening guy, who wants to have one more drink, needs to have a little bit more empathy for morning guy, who's going to wake up feeling crappy because evening guy was having too much fun. Like you, I was really taken with that New York Times article. I remember signing it to my students at the time. I was like, "Look at this."
Angela: [crosstalk] for reading?
Lisa: I did.
Angela: Love it.
Lisa: I was like, "Look at this. It's the yellow--" Again, we tend to assign hero status to these people, that they're just genius and that's the way it is. No, he's out there night after night. He's practicing. He's practicing the pause. The connection, the time around his own process of iterating and prototyping. Those are design moves, for sure. I was so delighted when you brought that in because I just think it's important for us to break down these myths.
Angela: It makes it accessible, right? No, you may not have necessarily the run of success that Jerry Seinfeld has had as a comedian. To me, and I'm sure this motivates you too, I don't care if my kids win an Oscar or an Emmy, but I want them to achieve their potential. I do. It's so hard to really, truly know your own future. Of course, maybe we'll never really know it. I do think we put these false limits on ourselves. Like, "Oh, I could never do that. I could never sing acapella. I'm not an athlete. I'm not a natural entrepreneur."
When you look at the stories of the people who are successful in all those fields, and you see the nitty-gritty of how they did it, you're like, "Oh, it's doable. There is a possibility that maybe I, having not seen that example, would not have been able to imagine."
Lisa: Lately, I've really been talking about-- particularly in this moment where there's so much flux and change, and it can be hard to know where to start and begin, I talk about this idea of build on what's fixed, design around what's flexible. There's so much more that's flexible than we even realize, but even noticing. Again, I just want to say your book gives so many wonderful opportunities, and the appendix that's filled with very applicable ways to bring it into your life.
I could go on and on. We didn't even talk about the fundamental attribution error, which is the one thing I remember from my psych 101 class freshman year, or giving me an understanding of why I'm so different when I visit Philadelphia versus when I'm in Silicon Valley. The importance of the environment on my personality and how that's a feature, not a bug. On and on. We will include all that in the show notes and more, but maybe I want to end with gratitude for you, including the Serenity Prayer in your book, because I think that really captures so much of what this book is about. For those that don't know, I'll maybe say the prayer.
Maybe I'll give you the final word on how your great research just expands this for us. The prayer goes, "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
Angela: It's a beautiful prayer. It's the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, who was a Protestant theologian and preacher. He wrote it during World War II, interestingly. I think if you believe his daughter and those who knew him well, he actually was writing it during a time where he wanted people to take action. The name, the Serenity Prayer, suggests that, oh, this is a way of just not doing things and finding peace in not doing things, but it was quite the opposite. He wanted people to take action in the atrocities that he could see that were happening on the other side of the world and that we should feel some ethical responsibility to our fellow man and woman.
I put it into the book because I think when people hear that, they sometimes think, "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change." They think of that as the situation. You're like, "You know what? Can't change circumstances. Oh, but God grant me the courage to change the things I can." That's the inside stuff. I can change my attitude. I can change my mindset, my beliefs, the wisdom to know the difference. I think real wisdom is to recognize that in the situation, there are things that you cannot change and there are things that you can. Just like you said, there are some things that are fixed and some things that are flexible.
We almost never have a situation where there's nothing that you can change in your own circumstances. When it comes to the inside game, I think it's equally important to say there are some things inside you that you can change. I do agree. You can change your goals. You can change your mindsets. If you think about people's genetic dispositions towards certain kinds of weight, thoughts, proclivities, you might have some genetic cards with you or against you when it comes to overeating or exercise, et cetera. Again, on the inside, you should acknowledge there are some things you can change and some things you can't.
In other words, it's a lot more complicated, and the wisdom of knowing the difference isn't just situation can't change. Inside can. It goes both ways for both of them. I think a wise life, a life that is full of grace and also full of achievement and fulfillment, is when you look both outside and inside, at both what you cannot change and what you can, and then make a choice to change what you can on the inside and the outside. Situational agency is not infinite. There are limits. It's not meted out equally. Some people are rich. Some people are poor. Some people are privileged. Some people are oppressed.
I think all of us have some agency, and if the book helps to open up the possibility that we can change more than we think outside of us as well as inside of us, then I guess I will have been successful.
Lisa: I am so excited for everybody to get a copy of this book and then, once they get it, to buy many more for their family members. That is certainly what I am going to be doing because I love what you say at the end of that passage. You say, "Understanding the nuances brings humility and hope in equal measure." That is so much what this book does. Angela, thank you for being with us on How We Future. I cannot wait for this book to get out into the world. You are a treasure. Here's to more situations ahead where we get to be together and learn together and bring forward new possibilities.
Angela: Thank you. Thank you, Lisa. I love that you use future as a verb. I think that we should have the same agentic view towards our situations. I have so enjoyed this conversation. I appreciate it so much.
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Lisa: What an amazing way to finish Season 4. Angela's new book is so powerful. She really wants us to break the mindset that willpower or discipline alone will get us to our goals. Instead, we can change our situation, the cues around us, who we spend time with, and the environments we create. All season, we've been asking what big ideas can help us imagine and build better futures. I want to leave you with one final question. What's one situation in your life that you could change to make your future a little more possible and even a little more joyful? Maybe it's your workspace, your schedule, your relationships, or your community. If you try it, I'd love to hear what you discover.
Leave a comment and tell us what you've learned this season. Thank you for spending this season of How We Future with us. I'm Lisa Kay Solomon, and I'll see you soon.
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