Psychology professor Angela Duckworth led a book discussion at the Penn Museum last week.
Wharton School professor Adam Grant facilitated the Sept. 29 event, which marked the Authors@Wharton series’ first programming of the academic year. Duckworth spoke about the writing process for her newest book — “Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best.”
In an interview, Duckworth explained that she became interested in “widening the aperture and trying to explore in a systematic way” the situational distinctions for successful people that enable them “to multiply their effort as opposed to divide it.”
She argued that by changing their situation, one can “reverse-engineer” their own behavior. During the event, she broke the framework behind “Situated” into four key elements: peers, mentors, space, and culture.
Duckworth compared her own experiences while writing the book to the principles she discussed in “Situated,” describing herself as “burned-out” and “absolutely discouraged” during the initial phases of writing.
While Duckworth’s initial reaction was to “be gritty” and work harder, she instead found that her stress amplified and eventually led to insomnia. She added that writing this book “was the hardest thing I ever did.”
She emphasized the importance of having a strong support network. Rather than focusing on working harder while writing, Duckworth assessed her situation and reached out for help from her editor, Rick Kot, who she explained “loved me back into being.”
“From all the evidence we have in behavioral science, people do better together,” she explained in an interview.
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During the event, Duckworth addressed the importance of collaborating with mentors, arguing that they help create “mental representations of what you can’t yet do” and “help you identify that goal.” She expressed the belief that people cannot produce “high-quality effort” without putting themselves into a situation “where there is somebody who's guiding you at every step.”
When discussing the theme of space, Duckworth emphasized that the physical space that one occupies is “consequential and path dependent.” She added that “the choice of where you live will change everything.”
She spoke about creating physical reminders in a space to help people remember and reaffirm their goals. As an example, she referenced Olympic gold-medalist Michael Phelps, who kept a list of his goals by his bed, so that it was “the last thing he saw at night and the first thing he saw in the morning.”
Duckworth described her newest book as a “completion” rather than a correction of her previous book — “Grit.” In the first work, she emphasized the importance of sustained effort in achievement. Now, while she does not discredit the frameworks established in “Grit,” she regards them as “incomplete” in isolation.
The event also served as the ninth spot on Duckworth’s “Situated” book tour, which began last month, and copies of the work were distributed to attendees.
College senior Arjun Kishore, who attended the event, expressed that he was “a bit disappointed” by the talk because he wished Duckworth “dove a little more into the research.”
Regardless, he praised Duckworth’s previous book and described its embedded research as “incredibly fascinating.”
“The way that she quantifies and creates these proprietary metrics that hold up under both theoretical and then scientific frameworks for how hard work operates is super interesting,” Kishore said. “She describes consistent work over an extended period of time as being more valuable than any one given amount of really high effort.”
In an interview, Duckworth said that the next time she teaches her popular “Grit Lab” course, it will “incorporate all the insights from both books,” — including themes on growth mindset and deliberate practice from the former publication and those about mentors, peer groups, and environmental design from the latter.
Grant founded the Authors@Wharton speaker series in 2012 and has featured a variety of authors to speak about their latest book. Events are free and open to Penn community. A limited number of the speaker’s books are distributed on a first-come first-serve basis.
