Angela Duckworth
Rejection is hard for me, even though I study it. I'm not the kind of person who's just like, "Oh, I love critical feedback; telling me what I did wrong is like whipped cream." It's really not. It's like a sour lemon.
Angela Duckworth is one of the most successful psychologists of our generation. She is famous for developing the theoretical framework around "grit": the combination of passion and perseverance for a long-term goal.
When I spoke with Duckworth over the phone, I learned she also has a good sense of humor. We had arranged the interview through Duckworth's assistant, Jamie, who had written polite, friendly e-mails like "Happy to help find a time for you and Angela to talk!" and "Let me check in with Angela and I'll get back to you as soon as I can."
When we finally got on the phone, I let Duckworth know that I appreciated her assistant setting up our conversation. "I don't know if Jamie told you," I said, "but you and I have a mutual friend, Andy Sokatch."
"Yes! Andy is such a good guy." Duckworth laughed. "But I have to tell you, Jamie is a robot. A very smart robot." I had been e-mailing back and forth with her virtual assistant as if it was a person.
Duckworth is on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, and she co-founded Character Lab, which uses psychological science to help children thrive. She studies grit and self-control, which she says are not the same-more like first cousins. Self-control is the ability to resist fun temptations in the moment in order to do something less fun but good for you-even ten minutes later. Grit is about the ability to work toward goals you really care about that are further out.
In 2013, she received a MacArthur Fellowship-the prize often known as the MacArthur Genius Grant-a large sum of no-strings-attached funding given to the recipient out of the blue. Duckworth may be the first Genius Grant recipient I have ever spoken to, and she was extremely down-to-earth and open.
Lessons I've Learned
When you tell someone a new idea, you are looking for approval-we all are. But that doesn't always mean you need it in order to move forward.
One of my early research projects in graduate school examined middle schoolers and self-control. I was familiar with "the marshmallow test," and you may be too-a researcher in the 1980s would put a marshmallow in front of a preschooler and tell the child that she'd be right back. The researcher would mention that if the child could wait and not eat the marshmallow, then the prize would be two marshmallows when she returned. The children who waited turned out to have more self-control than peers across multiple non-marshmallow contexts, such as at school.
I wanted to test self-control in middle schoolers, so I wondered: What's the marshmallow test for older kids? Early piloting told me that it would not be something that I could do easily. Middle schoolers didn't want toys; they didn't care about snacks. They were not about to get all excited about an Oreo. Plus, the school administrators were not thrilled about food as a reward. They were like, "You don't know who is going to be allergic to it, and we don't want to be liable." I wondered, "What is something that everybody wants at some level?" It didn't take long to realize that the teenagers in my studies would all appreciate a little pocket money.
I took this idea to my doctoral advisor. "I'm going to do this thing where I give kids a dollar," I told him. "Then I'm going to see if they want to keep the dollar-or give it back and in a week get two dollars. And that choice is going to be a measure of their self-control."
Right away, my advisor said, "That's a terrible idea." He began trying to poke holes in the plan, asking, for example, "How will the students know you'll come back?"
I was disappointed not to have his approval. There I sat, a newbie graduate student, and the person whose advice I most respected was telling me not to go ahead with my experiment. I had to question whose judgment was better-my own or the judgment of this super-famous person who had been doing psychology for forty-five years?
And maybe that's the difference between backing down and moving forward. How firm are your convictions? In my case, I thought it was a good experiment. The fact that he didn't think so actually motivated me. Plus, I didn't have a better idea. I decided to go with my judgment. I told him, "Even though you think it's a bad plan, I'm doing it anyway."
As a side note, at my twenty-fifth college reunion I asked one of my good friends, Tina, "Just candidly between you and me, I'm interested in what you think. I'm not the smartest one here; I'm not the prettiest. I'm not the richest or most athletic one here. Why do you think I've had the success that I have had?"
She replied, "You're not afraid."
I think that's true. I wasn't afraid for the experiment to not work out. What was the worst that was going to happen? I would blow a few hundred dollars. It wasn't the end of the world.
My advisor had been right about this experiment in that there were logistical issues to fix: Whereas the marshmallow test takes an hour to do each person, one-on-one, I wanted to be able to give the test to a whole classroom. Also, I was going to give the kids money, but I didn't want them to walk around knowing other kids' choices, whether they had kept one dollar or waited for two. I gave each kid an envelope, saying, "This has your name on it. Take out the dollar bill or put it back and you can have two dollars later." I had all of them pass back the envelopes, whether they took the dollar bill out or not.
My test ended up being essential to part of the measurement battery for self-control in middle schoolers, and in fact it predicted kids' grades as well as their IQ scores. I wrote up the experiment and submitted it to what is arguably the most prestigious journal in my field. It was accepted, and when my advisor found out, he was very proud of me.
What my early publication success meant, in part, was that I didn't know for a long time just how hard it is to get published. You get rejected most of the time, and it's a hard rejection, with reader comments to the effect of "Let me tell you all the reasons you are stupid and boring and this is unbelievable and somebody already did this." But I didn't know that. When I submitted my article, I received gentle peer reviews, like "It's pretty good, maybe you could change this one little thing?" Then it was published.
Sometimes I wonder whether early success is important to maintaining that beginner's drive. If I had received harsh criticism early in my career, I might not have proceeded with the same level of energy and enthusiasm. I think that with kids and people starting out, having some early wins helps to develop confidence.
I'm very open with my graduate students. I try not only to share with them my own failures, but also to correct the wrong ideas that they and others have about success. When you're starting out in academia and get rejected, you feel like an idiot. And you might look around and pay attention to someone else's successes. But failures are hidden. People don't put their failures and their errors into the public realm, so we walk around thinking that we're the only ones feeling insecure.
I try to read articles about things like that. Most recently, I read and sent around a study of academics who almost got a particular grant but didn't get it. So they were probably about as deserving of funding but didn't get it. The study examined what happened to them, and by some metrics, they ended up being more productive than their peers!
If you get defensive when people tell you things that you could do better, you're human. It's important to give ourselves a break.
There are times when people are rejected and it redoubles their motivation. I tend to have that response. When the MacArthur Foundation said they were giving away 100 million dollars a few years ago, I didn't really have much interest in it. Then a colleague said, "Oh, you'll never get it," and I was like, "Oh, now I want it." There was a kind of "I'll show you!" response, an underdog reaction that I recognize in myself and in others whom I study.
This particular MacArthur Fellowship was called the 100&Change. It was a 100-million-dollar grant given to researchers who aimed to solve "a critical problem of our time." In order to submit our project, Behavior Change for Good, we had to first compete within the University of Pennsylvania, which had something like fifty submissions from faculty. We were chosen out of dozens of professors in our university, but then we competed with applicants from other organizations in several more rounds. We had to make a video; we needed letters of support from every organization with whom we had worked. A couple of dozen world-class scientists from different universities around the world had to sign off, and so did their universities. This all meant a lot of time and effort. Of course, the idea itself also needed to be refined. Overall, applying for the MacArthur Fellowship was hours and hours of work every month before we finally submitted it.
My co-applicant was my colleague Katy Milkman, and we are like sisters. We love each other; we like each other. We fight with each other. I wear her sweaters; she wears mine. One day, after we had submitted the fellowship application and it had been sent on by our university, Katy called me. I was traveling for work, and I remember I was in the hotel gym, standing beside a weight rack.
"They didn't pick us," she said.
At first I thought I wasn't hearing her correctly; the gym was noisy. I asked, "What did you say?"
And she repeated, "They didn't pick us." Katy explained that there were still two hundred projects in the running, but we had been eliminated.
I was upset, but also-and this is not especially flattering-I was sort of surprised. I was like, "What?"
We were both devastated, partly because we had put in so much effort. Sometimes people are afraid to try because the harder you try, the harder you fall. And we had really tried.
When I think about grit, it isn't about being able to blow off a rejection or failure in the moment; it isn't about not crying. You can cry all you want. The question is, do you get up again? And we did. After we'd cried a little bit, we asked ourselves, how do we proceed? We were still doing the project we had submitted, because it was a good idea. We would just have a lot less money.
The feedback that we got from the MacArthur Foundation was actually useful. They said, "It's too early. There doesn't seem to be a high enough probability that you could solve the problem you're putting on the table." We actually thought that was good feedback. Maybe they were looking for a lower-risk grantee, and maybe that was a good thing. The proposal that won was submitted by Sesame Workshop and the International Rescue Committee, and their project aimed to educate refugee children in the Middle East-that is indeed a social problem of enormous significance.
When I get discouraged-which I honestly do; I get discouraged a lot-I remind myself that I'm in it for the long game. Sometimes I'm reminded of that by other people, like Katy or my husband. If you focus on one day, you can pack it up and go home. But you really do have to think of it as a long game. Not every day is going to be good.
People have different coping mechanisms; what I often do is called "support seeking" in psychology. When I have a problem, it's not long before a lot of people know about it. If things are not going well in my research, I whine about it to my husband, to my closest collaborators-and now they know about my problems, and they do what people do, which is to try to help me solve them. I know it varies for everyone, but in my case, my husband is a huge support. More tears have gone into his shirt collar than you can imagine.
I believe in resourcefulness and grit, but there is a lot of misunderstanding about grit. Just because humans are capable of overcoming adversity doesn't mean we shouldn't work as a society to change the ways in which adversity is meted out-to reduce inequality.
For all people, regardless of gender or origins, ideally life should be a series of experiences that are challenging in a way that is appropriate, not traumatic. People should be encountering things that they can almost do but that are not easy. At the same time, systemic support is so important. If we had equality of challenge and support, we wouldn't see these ridiculous gender imbalances at the top of many fields. I don't mean person-to-person support only; I mean structural supports, like parental leave policy, workday flexibility so people can take their kids or other family members to doctor's appointments, the ability to work from home if your kids are sick.
I've heard from so many women and individuals from underrepresented backgrounds who've reached the top of their fields and say that if you're at the top, you are sure as heck gritty because it was not an easy climb; there were many more obstacles in your way than there were for straight white men. I haven't looked into it myself, but it's a very reasonable proposition.
Angela Duckworth's Tips
TIP 1-When you get rejected, you feel like you're the only one to whom this has happened-but that's not true. Failure happens to everyone. There is actually a name for this phenomenon: pluralistic ignorance. You assume something about everyone else, but that assumption is inaccurate.
TIP 2-Passions are developed, not discovered. It can take a long time-even years-for you to develop a love for a certain career. So don't quit a job too early just because it doesn't immediately feel like a "calling."
TIP 3-I'm a big believer in vulnerability-sharing with people you care about and getting support from one another.
Angela Duckworth
Rejection is hard for me, even though I study it. I'm not the kind of person who's just like, "Oh, I love critical feedback; telling me what I did wrong is like whipped cream." It's really not. It's like a sour lemon.
Angela Duckworth is one of the most successful psychologists of our generation. She is famous for developing the theoretical framework around "grit": the combination of passion and perseverance for a long-term goal.
When I spoke with Duckworth over the phone, I learned she also has a good sense of humor. We had arranged the interview through Duckworth's assistant, Jamie, who had written polite, friendly e-mails like "Happy to help find a time for you and Angela to talk!" and "Let me check in with Angela and I'll get back to you as soon as I can."
When we finally got on the phone, I let Duckworth know that I appreciated her assistant setting up our conversation. "I don't know if Jamie told you," I said, "but you and I have a mutual friend, Andy Sokatch."
"Yes! Andy is such a good guy." Duckworth laughed. "But I have to tell you, Jamie is a robot. A very smart robot." I had been e-mailing back and forth with her virtual assistant as if it was a person.
Duckworth is on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, and she co-founded Character Lab, which uses psychological science to help children thrive. She studies grit and self-control, which she says are not the same-more like first cousins. Self-control is the ability to resist fun temptations in the moment in order to do something less fun but good for you-even ten minutes later. Grit is about the ability to work toward goals you really care about that are further out.
In 2013, she received a MacArthur Fellowship-the prize often known as the MacArthur Genius Grant-a large sum of no-strings-attached funding given to the recipient out of the blue. Duckworth may be the first Genius Grant recipient I have ever spoken to, and she was extremely down-to-earth and open.
Lessons I've Learned
When you tell someone a new idea, you are looking for approval-we all are. But that doesn't always mean you need it in order to move forward.
One of my early research projects in graduate school examined middle schoolers and self-control. I was familiar with "the marshmallow test," and you may be too-a researcher in the 1980s would put a marshmallow in front of a preschooler and tell the child that she'd be right back. The researcher would mention that if the child could wait and not eat the marshmallow, then the prize would be two marshmallows when she returned. The children who waited turned out to have more self-control than peers across multiple non-marshmallow contexts, such as at school.
I wanted to test self-control in middle schoolers, so I wondered: What's the marshmallow test for older kids? Early piloting told me that it would not be something that I could do easily. Middle schoolers didn't want toys; they didn't care about snacks. They were not about to get all excited about an Oreo. Plus, the school administrators were not thrilled about food as a reward. They were like, "You don't know who is going to be allergic to it, and we don't want to be liable." I wondered, "What is something that everybody wants at some level?" It didn't take long to realize that the teenagers in my studies would all appreciate a little pocket money.
I took this idea to my doctoral advisor. "I'm going to do this thing where I give kids a dollar," I told him. "Then I'm going to see if they want to keep the dollar-or give it back and in a week get two dollars. And that choice is going to be a measure of their self-control."
Right away, my advisor said, "That's a terrible idea." He began trying to poke holes in the plan, asking, for example, "How will the students know you'll come back?"
I was disappointed not to have his approval. There I sat, a newbie graduate student, and the person whose advice I most respected was telling me not to go ahead with my experiment. I had to question whose judgment was better-my own or the judgment of this super-famous person who had been doing psychology for forty-five years?
And maybe that's the difference between backing down and moving forward. How firm are your convictions? In my case, I thought it was a good experiment. The fact that he didn't think so actually motivated me. Plus, I didn't have a better idea. I decided to go with my judgment. I told him, "Even though you think it's a bad plan, I'm doing it anyway."
As a side note, at my twenty-fifth college reunion I asked one of my good friends, Tina, "Just candidly between you and me, I'm interested in what you think. I'm not the smartest one here; I'm not the prettiest. I'm not the richest or most athletic one here. Why do you think I've had the success that I have had?"
She replied, "You're not afraid."
I think that's true. I wasn't afraid for the experiment to not work out. What was the worst that was going to happen? I would blow a few hundred dollars. It wasn't the end of the world.
My advisor had been right about this experiment in that there were logistical issues to fix: Whereas the marshmallow test takes an hour to do each person, one-on-one, I wanted to be able to give the test to a whole classroom. Also, I was going to give the kids money, but I didn't want them to walk around knowing other kids' choices, whether they had kept one dollar or waited for two. I gave each kid an envelope, saying, "This has your name on it. Take out the dollar bill or put it back and you can have two dollars later." I had all of them pass back the envelopes, whether they took the dollar bill out or not.
My test ended up being essential to part of the measurement battery for self-control in middle schoolers, and in fact it predicted kids' grades as well as their IQ scores. I wrote up the experiment and submitted it to what is arguably the most prestigious journal in my field. It was accepted, and when my advisor found out, he was very proud of me.
What my early publication success meant, in part, was that I didn't know for a long time just how hard it is to get published. You get rejected most of the time, and it's a hard rejection, with reader comments to the effect of "Let me tell you all the reasons you are stupid and boring and this is unbelievable and somebody already did this." But I didn't know that. When I submitted my article, I received gentle peer reviews, like "It's pretty good, maybe you could change this one little thing?" Then it was published.
Sometimes I wonder whether early success is important to maintaining that beginner's drive. If I had received harsh criticism early in my career, I might not have proceeded with the same level of energy and enthusiasm. I think that with kids and people starting out, having some early wins helps to develop confidence.
I'm very open with my graduate students. I try not only to share with them my own failures, but also to correct the wrong ideas that they and others have about success. When you're starting out in academia and get rejected, you feel like an idiot. And you might look around and pay attention to someone else's successes. But failures are hidden. People don't put their failures and their errors into the public realm, so we walk around thinking that we're the only ones feeling insecure.
I try to read articles about things like that. Most recently, I read and sent around a study of academics who almost got a particular grant but didn't get it. So they were probably about as deserving of funding but didn't get it. The study examined what happened to them, and by some metrics, they ended up being more productive than their peers!
If you get defensive when people tell you things that you could do better, you're human. It's important to give ourselves a break.
There are times when people are rejected and it redoubles their motivation. I tend to have that response. When the MacArthur Foundation said they were giving away 100 million dollars a few years ago, I didn't really have much interest in it. Then a colleague said, "Oh, you'll never get it," and I was like, "Oh, now I want it." There was a kind of "I'll show you!" response, an underdog reaction that I recognize in myself and in others whom I study.
This particular MacArthur Fellowship was called the 100&Change. It was a 100-million-dollar grant given to researchers who aimed to solve "a critical problem of our time." In order to submit our project, Behavior Change for Good, we had to first compete within the University of Pennsylvania, which had something like fifty submissions from faculty. We were chosen out of dozens of professors in our university, but then we competed with applicants from other organizations in several more rounds. We had to make a video; we needed letters of support from every organization with whom we had worked. A couple of dozen world-class scientists from different universities around the world had to sign off, and so did their universities. This all meant a lot of time and effort. Of course, the idea itself also needed to be refined. Overall, applying for the MacArthur Fellowship was hours and hours of work every month before we finally submitted it.
My co-applicant was my colleague Katy Milkman, and we are like sisters. We love each other; we like each other. We fight with each other. I wear her sweaters; she wears mine. One day, after we had submitted the fellowship application and it had been sent on by our university, Katy called me. I was traveling for work, and I remember I was in the hotel gym, standing beside a weight rack.
"They didn't pick us," she said.
At first I thought I wasn't hearing her correctly; the gym was noisy. I asked, "What did you say?"
And she repeated, "They didn't pick us." Katy explained that there were still two hundred projects in the running, but we had been eliminated.
I was upset, but also-and this is not especially flattering-I was sort of surprised. I was like, "What?"
We were both devastated, partly because we had put in so much effort. Sometimes people are afraid to try because the harder you try, the harder you fall. And we had really tried.
When I think about grit, it isn't about being able to blow off a rejection or failure in the moment; it isn't about not crying. You can cry all you want. The question is, do you get up again? And we did. After we'd cried a little bit, we asked ourselves, how do we proceed? We were still doing the project we had submitted, because it was a good idea. We would just have a lot less money.
The feedback that we got from the MacArthur Foundation was actually useful. They said, "It's too early. There doesn't seem to be a high enough probability that you could solve the problem you're putting on the table." We actually thought that was good feedback. Maybe they were looking for a lower-risk grantee, and maybe that was a good thing. The proposal that won was submitted by Sesame Workshop and the International Rescue Committee, and their project aimed to educate refugee children in the Middle East-that is indeed a social problem of enormous significance.
When I get discouraged-which I honestly do; I get discouraged a lot-I remind myself that I'm in it for the long game. Sometimes I'm reminded of that by other people, like Katy or my husband. If you focus on one day, you can pack it up and go home. But you really do have to think of it as a long game. Not every day is going to be good.
People have different coping mechanisms; what I often do is called "support seeking" in psychology. When I have a problem, it's not long before a lot of people know about it. If things are not going well in my research, I whine about it to my husband, to my closest collaborators-and now they know about my problems, and they do what people do, which is to try to help me solve them. I know it varies for everyone, but in my case, my husband is a huge support. More tears have gone into his shirt collar than you can imagine.
I believe in resourcefulness and grit, but there is a lot of misunderstanding about grit. Just because humans are capable of overcoming adversity doesn't mean we shouldn't work as a society to change the ways in which adversity is meted out-to reduce inequality.
For all people, regardless of gender or origins, ideally life should be a series of experiences that are challenging in a way that is appropriate, not traumatic. People should be encountering things that they can almost do but that are not easy. At the same time, systemic support is so important. If we had equality of challenge and support, we wouldn't see these ridiculous gender imbalances at the top of many fields. I don't mean person-to-person support only; I mean structural supports, like parental leave policy, workday flexibility so people can take their kids or other family members to doctor's appointments, the ability to work from home if your kids are sick.
I've heard from so many women and individuals from underrepresented backgrounds who've reached the top of their fields and say that if you're at the top, you are sure as heck gritty because it was not an easy climb; there were many more obstacles in your way than there were for straight white men. I haven't looked into it myself, but it's a very reasonable proposition.
Angela Duckworth's Tips
TIP 1-When you get rejected, you feel like you're the only one to whom this has happened-but that's not true. Failure happens to everyone. There is actually a name for this phenomenon: pluralistic ignorance. You assume something about everyone else, but that assumption is inaccurate.
TIP 2-Passions are developed, not discovered. It can take a long time-even years-for you to develop a love for a certain career. So don't quit a job too early just because it doesn't immediately feel like a "calling."
TIP 3-I'm a big believer in vulnerability-sharing with people you care about and getting support from one another.
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