Psychologist Angela Duckworth explains why 99% of people taper off effort after reaching a baseline threshold of success.
Insight
Duckworth: Teaching grit cannot fix severe systemic educational barriers
“If you are asking questions about, like, you know, underachievement and, you know, closing the achievement gap, etc., and you know, the antidote that's offered is like, well, we should teach kids about growth mindset and grit and agency. Then you might be over…”
Opinion
Duckworth: Most unconscious thoughts can be made conscious, refuting Freud
“Freud was like, you'll never know. It's under the floorboards, and you can't pry open the floorboards in the basement of your mind. I think that this dialogue that happens below the surface of consciousness can be raised, most of it, To conscious awareness”
Insight
Duckworth: Develop passions through iterative experimentation rather than following them
“I would say to you, like, if you change the verb from follow to develop, right, it gives you a little bit of a clue as to what you need to do, which is you need to like Start dating some things, right? And then like, you know, go on a second date with the ones…”
Assertion Supported
Angela Duckworth: Situation modification improves goal attainment more than willpower
“What we found is that the condition that increased academic Goal attainment best was the one where you just explained to kids like, hey, you can modify your situation.”
Insight
Duckworth: Overcoming difficult struggles is the primary source of human confidence
“The number one thing is that people develop confidence When they have struggled to overcome something and they have come out victorious.”
Assertion Supported
Duckworth: Mischel found cross-situational behavioral correlations top out around 0.3
“The correlation that he observed across situations had like a maximum of about .3. And sometimes people call this like the .3 ceiling, right? So if I observe somebody at home versus at work, you know, the correlation in a data set of lots of people who are obs…”