Dr. Angela Duckworth on Developing Character

Angela, the US Surgeon General said a couple months ago that we have a mental health crisis on our hands. How are young people doing these days? I think Vivick Murthy as an observer of young people had been making very important comments on how important mental health is to physical health long before the pandemic.

And now, I think we’ve seen with teenagers and the rest of us over the last couple of years is that, wow, these things are really intertwined, like our mental health, our physical health, our academic engagement if we’re students. Here’s what I found in research, Tom, that I did by using data on high school students. We had survey responses from a large sample of a diverse sample of high school students

before the pandemic. And then also, sort of midway through the pandemic when students were either in remote schooling entirely, meaning they were pretty much isolated from not only their peers, but also like anybody else outside their nuclear family. And then in the same school district, we had high school students who were doing full-time

in-person schooling. And it’s a little bit of a natural experiment, if you will, not a perfect one. But here’s what we found, that compared to the students who were in school and therefore seeing people outside of their family, friends and teachers and so forth, students who were isolated in this remote schooling context suffered emotionally, socially, and academically.

I just want to redo a question, like in your school, do you feel like you fit in? How happy have you been feeling these days? Do you feel like you can succeed in your classes if you tried? Those kinds of questionnaire items, 201, students who were truly isolated, declined compared to where they were before the pandemic.

So in some, I think Vivek Murthy and every teacher and parent who has noticed that there’s been a lot of stress in the last couple of years and continuing, if not worse, right now, I think they’re spot on. And if there’s any message I would like to underscore is just that this is a complicated issue, of course, but I do think we are understanding how these are intertwined, that when a child

or an adolescent is not feeling happy, not feeling accepted, not feeling confident, not feeling connected, that this is intimately intertwined to their academic performance, their everything. You’re listening to the Getting Smart Podcast. I’m Tom Van Der Rijk and today I’m joined by Dr. Angela Duckworth.

She’s a professor at Penn. She’s the co-founder of the Character Lab, the author of Grid, a bestseller that reveals the secrets of achievement as being passion and persistence. And she is the co-host of a fabulous podcast called No Stupid Questions with her co-host, Stephen Dubner.

Welcome, Angela. Hi, Tom. It’s really good to be here with you. I love that podcast. You have a ball doing it with Stephen, don’t you?

Yeah, I think Stephen and I, like in another life, we must have been brother and sister. You were. You guys have a great time and you take on beautiful questions. Thank you. I think one thing that Stephen and I share in common is curiosity and I think that’s

something you and I share as well. I love that you did a great episode with his sidekick, Steve Lebed, on people I mostly admire. Steve is also a social scientist. He’s an economist.

And so I’m a psychologist. He’s an economist. He’s a journalist. But we are all fascinated with human nature. And so we never run out of things to talk about.

I love how Lebed is so wonderfully awkward and odd. I will tell him you said that. And beautifully curious, right? I think you guys do. I’ll share that in common.

Yeah. Well, I recommend his podcast for sure. It’s awesome. He’s been racking up some extraordinary guests. I love Lebed’s.

And I appreciate no stupid questions. Angela, you and I both had the chance to be around some real human beings last week in Austin at South Byte. Super appreciated the session that you did on creating an R&D infrastructure for education. R&D and the human development is arguably the most important thing that we could study.

But it’s really been under-invested for decades. Maybe you could comment on why is that and why is it important to really have a strong infrastructure for studying how we grow human beings? For all of us interested in kids, and that’s anybody who’s with us in this conversation, you might ask the straightforward question, why is education, and I’m thinking about

K-12 education, but you could extend this to education earlier or later. Why isn’t there more innovation in education? Most of us, the way we went to school, the way we learned, the sorts of books that we were using, the rhythm of our year, isn’t all that different from I’ll speak as a mother. I have an 18-year-old and a 20-year-old, and high school for them was pretty much what

high school is like for me. I could say that again, if I think about what high school was like for my dad and mom, not that different. There’s not a lot of innovation. There’s not a lot of really good research.

The contrast I would like to give is medicine. The life expectancy for an average human being has nearly doubled in the last century. Why? Because there’s been innovation and there’s been research and development in medicine. I’m astonished that we haven’t kept up.

As you point out, Tom, what could be more important than how our young people are growing up? I think to me, the big barriers are multiple, but I’ll just name the one, which is it’s really hard, I think, to take an institution that wasn’t built for research. If you think about most hospitals and how medicine is transacted and medical schools and so forth, the whole business, if you will, was built on R&D from the very beginning,

at least in modern times. That’s a big paradigm shift for education. It is. You could also notice this at South by EDU and the South by the Follows. In healthcare and biotech, almost every startup is linked to basic science.

Innovation starts in science and then it’s monetized through a startup. In education, most ed tech companies start because some dude’s sister is a teacher and she complained at Thanksgiving about something in her class, so he coded solutions. It’s anecdotal and disconnected from the historically thin basic research that we have about human development.

That’s what I so appreciated about your session was that we need a stronger link to basic research. I couldn’t agree more and that’s a very interesting observation that you’ve made. You’ve made thought of this longer than I have. I don’t know fully why there are so many apps and other exciting things in media or entertainment or games, but not in learning or development, if you think broadly about what children are doing.

No, it’s just this has been a terrible market. It’s challenging from a lot of respects for the people that have tried to build solutions in ed tech. Anyway, it’s exciting to see a lot more investment going both into R&D infrastructure as well as into ed tech, but I want to talk about character. You’ve really devoted your professional life to the study of character.

How do you define what that is and why is it important? It’s a great pivot to make in this conversation, Tom, in part because when I was at South by, as you know, I was talking about a research platform called Character Lab Research Network. It was really the brainchild of a young scientist named Sean Talamus who grew up in Miami, Florida and himself benefited from a few psychologically wise adults in his life.

And then he grew up to get his own PhD in psychology. And his idea was, you know what, we need more of these insights into how kids need to be talked to, how they need to be supported. Let’s actually create a platform where world-class scientists can work with educators everywhere and anywhere and actually conduct more research on growth mindset or on belonging or curiosity

or humility, honesty and so forth. And I think that’s what character is, all of the things that every caring adult wants young people to develop for the good of themselves and for others. That’s Aristotle’s definition of character, everything you can think of that you want your own son or daughter, that you want your own students to develop for their good and for the good of

others. And the list is so long that we can’t spend the rest of our time just, you know, rattling off like, oh, here’s another character strength. And you’re going to say, Angela, what about this one? But I think the place that so many young people do develop these strengths is school. You know, I think there’s a controversy about whether school is or isn’t an appropriate place

for these strengths, which I should just say some people prefer the term social emotional competencies. Some people say life skills. Some people say personal qualities. I personally don’t care what they’re called. But I think there’s remarkable consensus among all of these adults, you know, parents, uncles, aunts, teachers, principals, superintendents and policy makers, you know, it’s kind of a no no brainer that, you know, when I rattle off those things,

we can all agree like, yeah, that sounds like a good thing for the kid, a good thing for society. And at least my position is that schools are a big part of the development of these strengths. I want to come back and talk about how we how we describe these strengths and the role that school has. But you you wrote recently about the the conversation that’s going on between ourselves and our circumstances, right? And that character is really what emerges from

our own development. But it’s it’s heavily influenced by this dialectic with our context, right? Oh, my gosh, Tom, you know, I hope we don’t get too, too nuanced here. I hope we don’t lose everyone. But this to me is such an important conversation to have. And and I do think that the context, you know, the situations, the homes, the neighborhoods, the places where kids grow up are really important. The reason I have to say that loudly as somebody who studies grit,

and somebody who studies character is that I think there’s a mistaken either or mindset about these things. It’s like, Oh, it’s either a kid’s character, or it’s their context. And nothing could be more both and I mean, again, let me speak as a mother, if not as a scientist, you know, when I think about my daughter is Amanda Lucy, whom I super love, and I really enjoy, you know, and I asked myself, like, Well, how is it that my daughter can be majoring in math

right now, as a 20 year old, but really actually failed her first three tests in math, when she was in eighth grade, right? I could say, Well, it’s because she has grit. That’s because, you know, she’s tough. You know what, that’s such an incomplete and actually misleading answer. The real answer is that when she failed those three tests, she was in a context of 100% support. And I say that because my husband’s a really great dad. So, you know, he sat with her, you know, we had these

reams of scrap paper. I mean, my husband learned a lot of math that year, right? You know, they were doing math, like, you know, like, you know, at church, like, we’re supposed to be like listening to the pastor, like there. And the reason was not because, you know, my husband’s a tiger dad, it was really because he felt like he had a young person in his life that he loved that was going to learn the wrong lesson. And the lesson was going to be I’m stupid. And the lesson is that

girls aren’t good at math. And the lesson is like, you know, I’m not a math person. And he didn’t care what she did afterward. He wanted her not to come out of that as like failure being the end of the story. So my daughter Amanda grew up in a context of support and encouragement, personalized learning, if you will, because she had her dad as her tutor. When I think about character and context, I really do think of them as you say, in a dance together and a conversation together,

because one leads to the other leads to the other leads to the other. And so either or thinking when it comes to children, when it comes to policy, when it comes to education is to me so, you know, damaging, because if we don’t embrace the complexity of both and, then we end up saying stupid things like, oh, kids just need more grit. Or I think equally inaccurate is to say, oh, it’s all about context. You know, we shouldn’t worry about the development of kids personal strengths

either. It’s both and. Given the both and our mutual friend, Dr. Pamela Cantor has been helping me understand the importance of context specific measures. She really believes that we need to collect more specific information about the context that are influencing youth development. Do you buy that proposition? But a couple years ago, Tom, I began to ask myself a question, which is, you know, where as a researcher, can I actually get a measure of what is the context of kids and are

they getting some of the basic necessities that they need to learn and grow? And I asked my economist friends, I asked my psychologist friends, I asked my sociologist friends, I asked my public policy friends, of course, I asked my educator friends, and nobody had a list. Nobody had even a simple index of, you know, do you have somebody who can take you to the doctor if you’re sick? Nobody had an index that, you know, said something about like whether a kid has, you know,

basic reliable transportation to and from school. If they wanted to play an instrument or play a sport, would that be possible in their life? So I made a list of what I call the necessities index. And it has 10 items. I was writing them down and again, getting feedback from all the kinds of people that I mentioned, including teenagers now, when I started to actually get items on a page, and teachers, my daughter, Amanda, the one I mentioned, she looks over my shoulder,

and she was to have been on break or something. And she said, Oh, what are you doing? Like she just read the 10 items. And I said, you look at these, what would you score? And it took her a half second. She said 10, of course, who didn’t score 10. And I said, not every kid in this country scores a 10, right. And we’ve now collected data from a very large representative sample of 50,000 high school students. And I would say, you know, it’s, it’s true that half of students can say that

there are nine or 10. But that means that half of students are not getting, you know, two or more of these basic necessities. So I am increasingly interested in measuring context factors that are invisible, maybe to the classroom teacher, they certainly were invisible to me as a researcher. And it’s a crude, crude instrument. It’s a, you know, it’s a butter knife trying to be a scalpel. But, but I think it’s the first step. I mean, I’m, as I say, astonished that there isn’t something

better out there. You know, and it’s, it’s, it’s to me where I want to take my research. I, I want to say, you know, I can make some inroads in understanding the context that enable young people to thrive. And in my 20 years of being a scientist, I feel like I’ve made minimal inroads in that direction. In the last five years, particularly during the pandemic, we’ve seen schools around the world take what many of them call social emotional learning, sort of take that from the outside,

the fringe part of their agenda and move it into the heart of the matter. We’ve seen thousands of schools and school systems in America embrace a broader learning set of broader set of goals. They call it a learner profile or a graduate profile. And that increasingly incorporates a lot of things that you would call character strengths or character traits. One, is that a good idea? And two, assuming you agree with that, how would you recommend that schools

express those character goals as along with traditional academic goals? I want to say that I do think it’s a good idea. There’s a why and a how answer to this. So, yes, I think it’s a good idea to have a broader agenda for, for, you know, what schools feel like is, you know, the business of schools. And I want to say what the why is, and that’s pretty clear. And then I want to say something about the how schools should do that. And that’s less clear.

The why is that, let me just give the example of Jim Heckman and his research. Jim Heckman is a, an economist at the University of Chicago, and he won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2000. I’ve had the good fortune to work with him on what he sometimes calls character, and he sometimes calls non cognitive skills. Again, the list goes on, right, SEL, 21st century skills, personal qualities. But what they have as their distinction is they’re not the same thing

that’s measured as on IQ or standardized achievement tests. So there are distinct from those measures of basic cognitive ability. And what Jim found in his research actually subsequent to winning the Nobel Prize, if you ask me like, what has Jim been up to in the 22 years and see won the Nobel Prize, he’s been establishing as a labor market economist that these strengths, these aspects of character, they are as predictive of all the outcomes that economists and policymakers care about,

you know, long-term income, employment, physical health, longevity, not getting into crime, etc. Like they’re as predictive, if not more than, than standardized tests and measures of cognitive ability like IQ tests. So again, I want to say it’s both and it doesn’t mean that like, you know, we shouldn’t teach kids academic things, but it just, it just says that, you know, wow, when you think about navigating life, you know, it’s, it is, you know, your curiosity or humility, your

growth mindset, your optimism, you know, your ability to forge social relationships, etc. It’s not just I know how to do calculus, you know, I know grammar, you know, I know how to solve this puzzle on a piece of paper. So I think this revolution, this, you know, embracing and it’s not uniform, I think some schools and communities are embracing it, others are running away. But I vote yes on broadening the agenda for schools. I vote yes because of the why, you know, because

research is crystal clear that these personal qualities matter. The how you asked about to, Tom, and I think that’s a little harder because I don’t know that we have a really straightforward recipe yet. I don’t think the answer is entirely like, oh, like just buy this curriculum, you know, like set aside 45 minutes a week for character and you’re done. It can’t be that simple. But I’ll just leave you with one thought about this, which is that I think the

the direction to go in is intentional modeling. And it means that teachers and every other adult in that building, or in a student’s life is a role model for them. And so I think there is a kind of implicit curriculum of character when you grow up with kind people, when you see other people treated with genuine respect, you know, as a young person, like that’s all you know, to be kind and to be empathic and respectful. When you grow up with the opposite, it’s hard to learn those lessons.

So there is modeling, but I say intentional modeling, because I have seen the most successful coaches, teachers, and schools do this, not accidentally, but intentionally. And yes, they do sometimes say things explicitly, like, Hey, our three values are curiosity, kindness, and humility. So I think some explicit emphasis, and yes, I do think in some circumstances, a curriculum or learning can be extremely helpful. So intentional role modeling to me is directionally where the

how goes. Yeah, I love that. You, Angela, you just reminded me of DSST and Denver, sort of Denver School of Science and Technology. It’s now probably the biggest and best STEM, high-property STEM network in the country. They have a set of shared values that look a lot like character traits. And they have a common commitment to sharing feedback with each other on a regular basis, at least monthly, often more frequently around their shared values and how

they’re doing living into their shared values. So young people get feedback, but the adults in the building also get feedback on how they’re doing. And so I think that that’s a great example of enumerating important traits and then making it a commitment to bring those traits alive in the culture of the school. I’ve heard a lot about that school. And I, I think there’s so much there that we can learn from and feedback. I’m glad you brought that up, Tom, because if you ask me

as a psychologist, you know, what is missing from the learning cycle for character or anything else? And so often it really is feedback, you know, do you get feedback on when you’re, you know, more or less curious? Like, do you get feedback on when you’re more or less caring or kind? You know, do you get feedback on your English composition? I mean, there’s just not enough feedback in school. And as you know, Tom, my, my day job, if you will, is studying excellence, you know, reverse

engineering, you know, Olympic athletes and world-class achievers. And one thing that they have is a common feature is they are hungry for and, and blessed by feedback, you know, you can’t be an Olympic skier unless you can see your own film. And somebody says, Hey, you know, try to lean a little farther to the left. And so I love that example, because, you know, if we can move, you know, a lot of things in education, honestly, but if we could shorten the feedback cycle,

improve the feedback cycle, I think it would be enormously beneficial for character and everything else. One more comment that I’d love to have you reflect on our friend Karen Pittman often talks about the importance of a shared agenda between school and home and out-of-school providers. And she would argue that, that particularly character strengths are developed in all three of those locations. And, and some traits are more specific to being developed at home. Some in out-of-school settings,

she would say leadership traits, for example, that’s a great place to, to do that in extracurricular or out-of-school environments. I guess you, you by having a community agreement on traits that are most important and acknowledging that there’s an important role in and out of school. If we think about school, family and out-of-school commitments like sports, music, but, you know, also church and other things like that, or whatever was going on in a kid’s life, that’s neither their

family nor their school, but it’s still some kind of like formalized activities, not just hanging out. You know, those are the three spheres. Those are the three contexts of a young person’s life. And I 100% agree that these, you know, strengths are developed, you know, in all three contexts. And I also agree that, you know, there are some that just seem appropriately or, you know, like, how are you going to do leadership, you know, in, in, in your family? Like, that’s a little bit

easier to do on the playing field or at the school newspaper, etc. So I think the idea that we recognize that these are the three major spheres of young person’s life. And I think as a developmental psychologist, I will say, the more there is some consistency or harmony, you know, that, that, that when you, when you go to your calculus class or your, you know, your language arts class and your teacher talks about honesty in a certain way, and then, you know, you’re practicing

for, you know, your basketball game and your coach gives you that pregame and, and they talk about like not cheating during the game and what it means to like, you know, live a good faith, honest loss and like to be proud of yourself and hold your head high. Then you go home and, you know, your, your, your mom, your dad says like, Oh, we got this refund. And yeah, this refunds a mistake, you know, and, and we’re going to send it back. It’s not our money, right? That, that’s where

honesty comes from. Right. And when you have kids growing up and like two out of three, say this, one out of three, you know, it just, it doesn’t, it doesn’t take much more than common sense to realize that that’s not good. Angela, I just, I wanted to let you know the, the tips that you’ve been posted on character lab.org are fantastic. And what I love, given the conversation that we just had about the importance of school, home and, and out of school partners is that the tips,

those collections that you’ve posted on character lab seems super relevant to all three. Is that, that was your intent? If I could have like a soapbox, you know, for the, you know, just like a really tall one, and I could shout out anything I want, I’d say like, please go to characterlab.org and sign up for our tip of the week. And, and I say hour, not my, because what a tip of the week is, is a short, it’s a 60 second tip based on science about how your child, you know, the child in your

life, you know, your students, your son, your daughter can grow up to thrive. And so we have experts. And I say experts not, you know, I’m a, I guess I’m a snob, Tom, like, you know, like, you know, when we had to write a judgment playbook, I got Danny Kahneman to write it, like, it’s, it’s, it’s like, we’re like the best of the best in that domain. They write a tip specifically for parents. And they usually start with a little story of something in their own life that illustrates

it and it always ends with either a try this or a don’t and a do. So it’s very actionable. It’s linked to one scientific study. And I’ll just give you the example that we had a month of tips, so four tips in a row written by Bjork and Bjork. So this is a husband and wife team. And they are the world experts in the science of learning. And I begged them, I said, look, you know, you spent your whole life understanding how children learn and the mistakes that are commonly made in schools,

please write a tip of the week for four in a row so that parents can get smarter and teachers can get smarter and students can get smarter. And they did and they did a fantastic job. And we’ve had tips on kindness on emotions. I’ve written tips as well. But it’s free because everything that we do as a nonprofit is supported 100% philanthropically. So I wish I had a podium, but thank you, Tom. I’m very indebted to you for sharing. That’s, that’s kind of a, you know, it’s, it’s my baby,

right? I just, I would love for, for people to, you know, get our tip and hopefully learn something from them. Well, we, we love the tips and we’ve been happy to be able to share some, some of those tips on gettingsmart.com. But let’s draw this to a close with a quick lightning round. These are a couple of random topics that I have been thinking about this week. The first one is agency, this word that more of us are using these days. What is learner agency? Is it a big deal? How does it,

how do you develop it? In this lightning round, I’m not going to give a long answer on what agency is. It does mean different things to different people. But I think the best definition is when a child has agency, they have a sense of I can, you know, they say, they have a sense of I can if I try. Not I already did. Not, you know, it’s not, but I can if I try. I think learner agency is elemental to learning and to effort and to achievement. A young person who does not believe I can

is going to look bored in class. They’re going to make trouble. They’re going to not turn in their homework. They’re going to be a constant source of frustration. And it’s not really because they don’t care. It’s because they don’t think they can. So learner agency to me is enormously important. And in every high functioning classroom that I’ve seen, it’s palpable how the teacher is intentionally trying to, you know, work on learner agency in every aspect of their class.

I love that. I thought I discovered how important this was two years ago uniquely. And then I’d spent the weekend with Richard Lerner at Tufts. And he sent me a stack of books that he’s written over the years. Peer mentoring. Does peer mentoring work? And is it as valuable for the mentee as the mentor? I think peer mentoring works. I wish there were more evidence on it. It’s actually done more than it is studied. But some of my most favorite teachers are

champions of peer mentoring. Students helping other students learn. And if you ask me, okay, does it help both sides? So one student’s teaching another student how to do a certain kind of problem that the first student knows how to do, the second student’s kind of struggling. They both benefit. Why does a struggling student benefit? Because only another student gets you. You’re like, speaking the same language, they’re closer to where you are. So the student who’s getting the

help is benefiting. But the student who’s doing the tutoring or the mentoring, they’re benefiting enormously. I did a random assignment study with collaborators, including my own student, Lauren. What we found is that when students give each other advice, when they mentor each other in this way, when they say, you know, here’s a good way to not procrastinate. Here’s a good way to stay off your cell phone when you have an important assignment. Here’s how to handle your emotions

when you fail a test, right? When students give that advice, when they mentor others, we showed that it actually helps them themselves. We followed these students who were encouraged to do just a few minutes of mentoring by writing down answers to the questions that I just gave you and a few more. And they actually improved their report card grades the following marking period, according to official school records. And then we look to see, is it just the

girls, is it just the boys, is it just the rich kids, is it just the kids who are not rich? Across the board, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, just a little bit of mentoring other people can actually help yourself. We think because it reminds you of the things that you know you should do. It also increases your confidence. All right, next one is learning and cohorts. I spent 20 years arguing for personalized learning

and competency based learning and people ought to move at their own path and then MOOCs launched and it’s all about individual learning. And then Seth Godin started Alt MBA and then a Kimbo and sort of resurrected this idea of people learning in these small cohorts, these small groups of adding relationship. Does learning in cohorts make sense? I’ll tell you how I’m teaching my own class. So I have three classes that I’m teaching right now. I have a class of MBA students, so

Wharton MBA students. I have a class of undergraduate students and I’m teaching high school students. And so I’m teaching them all, you know, basically the metacognitive skills like growth mindset and more so that they can, you know, pursue their own goals. And I’ll tell you that my favorite class unit is the team. So typically education is just transacted as an individual, like your grades, your tests, your studying, your project, your term paper. But I intentionally put my students

in teams, especially because I feel like those social relationships are really the things that actually make people change in ways that are meaningful emotionally. You know, there’s only so much you can be influenced by that you can remember that you really feels like, you know, hey, this is part of who I am, that is just you as an individual human beings are social animals. So we were kind of designed to be in groups. And so I’m not saying that personalized learning is a

bad thing. Going back to both and I believe in personalized learning and I believe that we have to find a way to unlock the power of social networks and relationships and teams and just that feeling that all of us have had it anytime anybody’s been in a breakout room on zoom or the last two years, wasn’t that kind of emotionally more meaningful experience and watching a YouTube video by yourself? So so I’m a big fan. Yeah, I think you’ve expressed the new learning design

opportunity of our time of how you combine individual skill sprints with with team based cohort based, you know, community connected learning. It’s an and both. Yes, yes. And I haven’t figured it out, Tom, but I’m, you know, and anybody who’s working on it should let me know. I’d love to work alongside you. All right. Last one is robot manners. Should we teach kids to be nice to their digital assistants? You know, I have yelled at Alexa more than I’m, you know, probably prepared

to confess to you in a public conversation. But you know, I don’t it can never understand me. So I’m yelling at it all the time. I know. And you just say things chursely, right? I know. I think I’m setting up that example for my grandchildren. Should I be nice to? I will say this, I think that nobody really knows from a scientific research base. But I think there’s two things to keep in mind. One is that, you know, we are always modeling. So actually, my husband is very polite

to Alexa, you know, he actually literally says things like Alexa, please tell me the weather. Whereas I just say Alexa weather. And so, you know, there’s no harm, I think, in trying to model politeness, kindness and so forth. At the same time, I’ll say that children are very smart, and they figure out the things that are alive and things are not alive. And they, they won’t, I think, you know, go off into the world as gruff inhumane people, because they saw, you know, mom or dad

bark at the Alexa loudly because Alexa won’t, won’t hear otherwise. So kids are very smart, and they figure out these very context specific routines. So they understand like in this place, you know, I mean, anybody who’s taken their kid to, you know, a friend’s house, and suddenly you have this completely polite child who crosses their hands in their laps and, you know, doesn’t eat off of other people’s plates and, you know, asked to be excused from the dining table. You’re like,

who is this kid? You’re like, Oh, they figure it out that like in a different place, you act differently. So I have confidence in kids, their kids are smart. Thank you for that. I’m going to try to be nicer to my home assistants. I’m sorry for all of the digital assistants that we just set off. Hey, Dr. Angela Duckworth, thank you so much for joining us today. Tom, I want to tell you how much I enjoyed this conversation. I think these are exactly the questions. And, you know,

I got a little smarter on this. So thanks for having me. Everybody needs to go to characterlab.org and check out the tips sign up for your tip of the week. They are awesome. They’re useful. If you’re a parent, a teacher, or lead a community organization, there’s tips for you. Angela, thank you for being with us. Oh, you should also subscribe to those stupid questions. It’s an awesome podcast for Angela and Dubner dive into a question of the week. Thanks for joining

us. Thank you, Tom. Well, I look forward to our next conversation. And thanks to Mason Pasha, our producer. Thanks to the rest of the Getting Smart team for making this possible and keep innovating for equity. See you next week. Thanks for tuning in to the Getting Smart podcast today. We want this podcast to be actionable and insightful and a great way to learn about what’s next in learning. In order to stay on the cutting edge, we need people in the field to tell us what

they’re hearing, what they’re wanting, and what they’re needing to learn more about. Got a topic or a guest in mind? Send your recommendations to me, Mason at GettingSmart.com. And if you like what you’re hearing, don’t forget to leave a review in Apple podcasts or subscribe wherever you listen. Feel free to share the podcast on social media using the hashtag GS Podcasts. Thanks so much.