Grit Made Angela Duckworth Famous. Now She Says the Secret to Success Is Something Else Entirely.

The psychologist behind the bestseller Grit has a new theory: white-knuckling your way to your goals is not just exhausting, it’s the wrong approach altogether

Angela Duckworth built a career studying people who grind it out, the passionate, persevering strivers she famously labeled “gritty.” So it is a little surprising to hear her now arguing that grit alone was never quite the point. On The Happiness Lab, Duckworth tells Dr. Laurie Santos that her new book, Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best, is essentially a correction. Achievement, she now argues, has less to do with sheer force of will than with the situation a person builds around themselves.

The Cookie Problem

Duckworth traces her skepticism of willpower back to reading her daughters the Arnold Lobel classic Frog and Toad Together. In the story, the two friends bake cookies, resolve to stop eating them, and immediately fail using willpower alone. Their fix isn’t more resolve. It’s scattering the cookies on the lawn for the birds to eat, so there’s nothing left to resist. “Better than forcing themselves in the moment to resist temptation, they can change their situation,” Duckworth says. She later ran her own version of that experiment with real teenagers, testing willpower pep talks against lessons in what she calls “situational agency,” simply learning that you can proactively redesign your circumstances. Only the situational-agency group showed a measurable bump in reaching their goals a week later.

Fish Don’t Notice Water

Part of the reason people default to grinding it out, Duckworth says, is that we barely register the situation shaping us in the first place. She points to the “fundamental attribution error,” a concept from Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett’s The Person and the Situation: we chronically overcredit personality and undercredit circumstance when explaining behavior. “We are fish in water where how cold the water is and the direction the water is going is not something we pay attention to,” she says. “But it really matters, especially because we can change the water.”

Redesigning Your Three-Foot Radius

The most immediate lever, Duckworth argues, is the space within arm’s reach. She cites a hospital cafeteria study that boosted healthy eating simply by moving water bottles to eye level and fruit within reach, no willpower required, and Adrian Ward’s “brain drain” research, which found that people scored measurably lower on cognitive tests when their phone merely sat on the desk beside them, even untouched. Duckworth has banned phones, tablets, and laptops from her own Penn classroom as a result. She also points to the value of physical reminders, noting that Michael Phelps taped his handwritten goal times above his bed as a kid, a habit she says mirrors what she found in a study with the College Board: the single best predictor of SAT prep success was writing down concrete goals and putting them somewhere visible.

Choosing Your People, and Your Zip Code

Duckworth’s third lever is who surrounds you. Citing anthropologist Joseph Henrich’s theory of the “collective brain,” she argues humans succeed not through raw intelligence but by learning constantly from each other. She describes tracking down swim coach Bob Bowman, who mentored Michael Phelps from age eleven through retirement, to understand why elite mentorship matters so much: “A world-class coach had to be a world-class mentor.” Duckworth’s final lever is culture, which she says people wrongly treat as fixed. She recounts a designer telling her to simply move when she felt stuck in her career; she and her husband ended up relocating only four miles, from Philadelphia’s suburbs into the city itself, and found the shift, new schools, new neighbors, new daily culture, transformative anyway. “We think of culture as where we’re from, not where we can go,” she says.

Duckworth is careful not to dismiss grit entirely. Situation and self-discipline, she says, reinforce each other rather than compete: “It’s not either you get gritty or you get situated. The ideal is that you get both.”

Listen to the full episode on The Happiness Lab.