INTERVIEW WITH Angela Duckworth, professor of psychology and best-selling author OF Grit

Q: Can you give teenagers some tips on how we could be more resilient during this tough time?

A: My model of human nature is that we exist in an objective situation like quarantine, or not quarantine, or you could be rich, you could be poor, you could have a disease, you could not have a disease. I don’t want to say the objective situation doesn’t matter, but what you pay attention to in that situation is really selective. What I mean by that is you can’t actually pay attention to all the positives and all of the negatives at once. Human beings have a tiny, little capacity for attention, so if you’re thinking about the good things that happened to you today, it is likely you are neglecting in some ways the negative things. If you are thinking about the negative things, you are neglecting some of the positive things. My sense is that people that tend to be optimistic and resilient, which are things that go together, tend to have a bias in their attention towards the positive. The pessimists and those who are more prone to depression because those do go together, tend to see the other things. They are both right. The thing is its not like one is delusional and the other is not, there is selection and what you pay attention to, which then of course changes everything because your interpretation is a catastrophe or is this potentially a historic moment where you have the opportunity to learn and demonstrate character. It really does change everything.

Q: Do you think gratitude, if and how people are expressing it during quarantine, might affect one’s experience during this time?

A: Gratitude is like sleep and exercise, it is kind of like a miracle drug. It just seems to mostly be good and it is very hard to do it to the point that it is bad. I guess in theory it might be. Gratitude is directing your attention to things that other people have done for you or the universe, sometimes people are grateful to the universe for something. I do think it is kind of back to that idea of attention because when you do this gratitude journal, it’s not like those things weren’t true that you wrote down before you wrote them down, it also may be the case that you didn’t know at some level, a gratitude journal is a reminder, an attention mechanism. It is like I am going to have a discipline of thinking intentionally about these things which are true, I know they are true, but I might not be thinking of them. I do think that gratitude is, some would say, it is a key virtue because it leads to other things. When you are grateful, you are more likely to be honest. When you are grateful, you are more likely to be kind. It is a wonderful practice and I have to say, as a professor, the students that I have that are genuinely grateful, I really don’t worry about them because I know in life, a genuinely grateful person is going to be a happy person, is going to be a person that other people are going to help, and is going to be a person that is a team player. Gratitude has, of course, its opposite, which is a lack of gratitude. I have had those students who are not spontaneously or authentically grateful, and I do worry about those people, all those opposites would ensue.

Q: Is there anything in particular you’ve been doing alone or with your family to maintain a

positive, happy mindset during quarantine?

A:  I think I was reminded during this pandemic that I must really be an optimist. For me, I didn’t really need to do a lot to keep my spirits up because it wasn’t really getting me that down, although it is horrible and probably much more horrible for other people than you and me because you and I are in the category of the privileged. So, I will say this, when most people are the happiest, there is definitely pleasure, pleasure is like games, really good bread, coffee in the morning, those are like pleasures and I don’t think there is anything wrong with them at all. But I also think that there is a special kind of satisfaction in being helpful and I think most people are the happiest when they are doing something that they know how to do really well that helps another person. For example, my talking to you, I was going to give you advice on psychology, but now we are just talking about psychology, which is really fun for me by the way. It is like, “Oh, I can do this. I can maybe uniquely do this because it is stuff that and I know about and Caroline wouldn’t be able to get other places and I feel helpful”. That is a high point for my day. So, I think specifically during quarantine, but maybe in general in life, I think people are happiest when they are being useful. That is one of the reasons why I think with grit and becoming very good a something, gives you a way to be useful, you know if you are a chef and you really know how to cook, you have a way to be useful to other people that is really rewarding. Young people I think when they feel angst it is often because they are not really being useful. It is hard for me to have a mental picture of somebody who is truly useful and really helping other people because of their unique capabilities and then also be despondent and unhappy. It is hard for me to imagine. I don’t think those things go together very often.

Q: Is there anything you are currently researching and has Covid-19 catalyzed any new initiatives?

A: Well, I am teaching a lab called “Grit Labs”, which is an undergraduate class that I was teaching anyway. Last class, which was yesterday, the topic was already in the syllabus, which was stress and resilience. I ended up being more specific about Covid-19 and losses or challenges that different people might be feeling. I think it was helpful to my students because it was where they were, people are where they are, so you can take them where you want to go, but you have to start with where they are. I think for them, probably the most powerful thing was, you know, people do learn by example, especially when the example is somebody who has not been perfect the whole time, so I of course wanted to highlight for myself, times during the beginning of quarantine where I was procrastinating, super disorganized, missing appointments, getting used to the new routines, and I think for me that was something that could be helpful to the students. Research wise, I am involved in a couple of studies that are COVID specific, but I think mostly my research is probably not hugely changed because of the nature of what I study.

Q: What’s a book you’ve read recently that opened your mind to new concepts around psychology or something else? 

A:  Actually, I’ll tell you this one. I was going to say Man’s Search for Meaning, which I read a couple of times by Victor Frankl and very appropriate for the current times, you know, finding the why. I will recommend another book to you. If you have ever read Charlotte’s Web or any E.B. White stories, then you know he is this wonderful writer and you may know he has written this manual style called Strunk and White. Strunk was his college professor. Anyway, I got so interested in him. Who was E.B. White? He is pretty much the reason why The New Yorker has that distinctive New Yorker tone and feel because he wrote for The New Yorker for the first thirty years. I got really interested in him. I read his biography, which was written by a Cornell professor and I just loved it. I thought it was a page turner, even though it was kind of a literary biography. I rushed to the computer to send a thank you note to the author of the biography and I realized the biography was written a long time ago and even the author of the biography has passed. It was just an interesting experience because in a way I feel like my final class is going to be on paying it forward, legacy, and not just being a recipient, but becoming a giver. I think in many ways, the people like E.B. White who are no longer with us, I googled E.B. White’s son because I read about him, and even he has passed, you know time passes and people pass, but if you live your life in a way that is useful, grateful, and looking for the positive and looking for ways to be helpful, like your family has,  I really do think there is a way in which you achieve a certain kind of immortality. So, these people who will never even know my name, I can’t even write a thank you note to E.B. White or to his biographer, or even his son, but I am touched by them, so there is a kind of strange connection there.