Angela Duckworth: Where There’s a Will There’s a Way Out

On a Zoom call in late April, Angela Duckworth, one of the world’s leading researchers on motivation and achievement, told me that her mother recently made a painting of her. In it, she’s staring at her smartphone.

“She told me she painted it because that’s the way she sees me,” Duckworth said. It turns out that even the MacArthur “genius” fellow and author of the 2016 bestseller Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance—which argues that success depends less on talent than on sustained persistence—is on her phone more than she’d like to be. “I’m certainly not above any of this.”

None of us are. When Duckworth asks audiences whether they’d be better off spending more or less time on their phones, “all the hands go up for less.” National surveys show the same thing: People know they want to change their behavior. They just can’t seem to do it. 

So, what’s getting in the way? 

For decades, Duckworth, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has studied why some people are able to reach their goals while others fall short. One of her more counterintuitive conclusions of late is that willpower, on its own, isn’t as powerful as we think it is. The idea of forcing yourself through sheer discipline—resisting your phone when you’re trying to focus on schoolwork, for example, or choosing not to sit next to the friends who tend to distract you in class—can feel appealing, or even heroic. But in practice, her research finds, the most successful people in the world don’t rely on willpower alone; they deliberately structure their environments so they don’t have to.

Duckworth calls this situational agency: the ability to shape your surroundings in ways that make the right choices become, if not effortless, at least easier. It includes things like leaving your phone out of reach during study time, writing down specific goals and placing them somewhere you’ll see them often, or using simple organizational tools like calendars to plan ahead for assignments, quizzes, and tests.

Lately, Duckworth has been applying the idea of situational agency to two converging anxieties in American schools: smartphones, and more recently, students’ fast-evolving relationship with laptops and generative AI. I recently spoke with her about what her newest research and her national survey of 100,000 teachers reveals about the effectiveness of different phone policies, how her thinking on willpower has evolved over the years, and why Gen Z's growing use of AI—and their increasing ambivalence about what it’s doing to them—may point to the next frontier that schools must navigate. 

ANDREW BORYGA: During a college commencement speech last year, you told graduates that where they decide to physically place their phone each day is “one of the most consequential decisions” they’ll make in life. Why do you believe that? 

ANGELA DUCKWORTH: Just pause and look around wherever you might be—a restaurant, the airport, a lecture hall—and count the number of people who don’t have phones in their hands. It’s shocking. Phones have not only become a pervasive element of everyone's lives—they are also impeding our ability to interact with each other like humans and our ability to engage with meaningful content. 

I know what I said was a little exaggerated, but I wanted these young people to sit up and think about whether they’re going to live their lives with their phones in their hands for most of their waking hours—and even some of their sleeping hours according to survey data—or whether they want to have a different relationship with their phones. 

BORYGA: Lately, you’ve also been looking closely at how schools are responding. Last year you launched a national survey of teachers on school cell phone policies, for example. What was your goal there?

DUCKWORTH: We wanted to know: What are the phone policies being adopted right now? And, how's it going? Our goal was to hear from 20,000 teachers. We’ve now heard from 100,000. We've had enormous enthusiasm because teachers care about this issue, and they want to share what’s going on in their schools.  

BORYGA: In the survey you don’t just ask teachers about how their policy dictates when students are allowed to use phones, but also where they’re allowed to keep them. What’s the distinction there? 

DUCKWORTH: Those are two key questions, with two interesting findings so far. On the “when” question more and more schools are moving toward bell-to-bell policies. We can see a clear shift in our data from last year to this year of schools who previously had no formal policy around cellphones, or who only allowed them to be used during recess or lunch, now embracing a strict bell-to-bell policy. I think that can only be chalked up to Jonathan Haidt and the attention that his book, The Anxious Generation, has brought to this issue. 

On the “where” question there’s a lot more variety. You could be a bell-to-bell school that allows kids to keep their phones on their person, even in their hand while they walk down the hallway, as long as they aren’t actively using it. There are bell-to-bell schools that want the phone out of sight: your pocket, or your bookbag. These are popular. About 50 percent of teachers in our sample say that whether the policy is bell-to-bell or not, kids are allowed to keep their phones on them, just not in sight. 

Then there are a series of progressively stricter policies used by fewer schools. There are schools that say you have to keep the phone in a locker all day, or a Yondr pouch. There are schools that collect the phones before school or before each class. There are even a small number of schools saying, you cannot bring your phone to school at all. 

BORYGA: What are you learning about how these different approaches actually play out in classrooms and cafeterias? What approach seems to be best?

DUCKWORTH: In the survey we ask teachers to report what percentage of kids are distracted by phones in their classroom—even with the phone policy. You might think, well, if it’s a bell-to-bell school, it should be zero. But it’s often not, because kids can violate the policy, and, as we’re learning from teachers, policies aren’t always enforced consistently. 

What we are hearing from teachers is that the stricter the policy is—both on when students can use the phones and where they’re kept—the less in-class distraction there is. To answer why that is, I’ll add to the data some insights I’ve learned as a psychologist who studies delay of gratification, self-control, grit and achievement—which is that when we keep things that we are trying to avoid close by it’s going to be a lot harder to resist them. 

If you’re trying to eat less junk food, it’s obvious that you wouldn’t keep cupcakes and potato chips on your desk, right? We can apply that same principle to phones. The further away phones are being kept from kids, the more effective the policy seems to be at increasing focus and attention, according to our data. 

BORYGA: What do teachers say these more focused classrooms and schools look and feel like as a result of stricter phone policies? 

DUCKWORTH: Teachers say kids are less likely to be distracted by phones in class, of course, but also in the hallways and at lunch—which is something they are paying attention to. Many teachers in the open-ended responses say they’re concerned that social skills and social connection are on the decline. They’re reporting kids not making eye contact with each other, not speaking to each other in the lunchroom and staring at their phones instead. 

BORYGA: OK. And this year, your survey started asking teachers to report how many students are distracted by laptops in class, too. What are you learning? 

DUCKWORTH: We’re finding that about one in three students are using their laptops for personal reasons that are not related to academics. I look at those numbers and I see the next frontier for technology policies in schools. How are we going to deal with that, since, of course, so many of the activities that we’re asking students to do in school are on their laptops? 

BORYGA: Right. Let’s talk about how students might exert some self-control. In a fascinating recent New York Times op-ed, you make a bold claim: “willpower is overrated.” Why do you believe that?

DUCKWORTH: As a scientist, I describe willpower as when we force ourselves to do something—even when we really don’t want to—because we know it's for the best. You can use willpower to force yourself to get up early in the morning, or to not have a second helping of dessert. It's a unique capability that humans have, and it’s an important capacity for young people to develop. But one of the things that social scientists have discovered in the last 20 years is that very successful people rely on willpower as little as possible. 

Take an elite athlete. Do they just force themselves to do hard things all day long? No. That would be exhausting. They make the hard things easier. Their workout clothes are laid out each day. They have a team they look forward to seeing at practice, a coach they admire. These are things that can draw you into an activity so that instead of only using willpower, you create a situation where it is easier to do the things you want to do. When it comes to phones, for example, kids could force themselves not to look at their notifications or texts in class, but it’s going to be a lot easier if their phone is not even there. 

BORYGA: Your research frequently demystifies the nature of success: it’s not genius that makes people elite in a field, it’s hard work. It’s not the SAT or general intelligence tests that predict college completion, it’s the more workaday GPA. I’m curious: Is willpower another concept like this—something that needs to be demystified?

DUCKWORTH: When people are wrong about things, it's often because something has attracted them as an easy explanation and they haven't gotten to the more nuanced explanation yet. In many ways my mission as a psychologist is to keep digging. When I got to grit for example, I was like well, what else? Because not everybody who's gritty is able to be successful. We have to start looking at the situation, too. 

Now, some people don't like to go there because they think: you're crossing the boundary between what somebody can change and what they can't. You can't change a kid's family. You can't change their zip code. And while that is true, that isn’t everything. There is agency in this. A student can change where they put their phone at home. They can change the kids they hang out with at school. They can change whether they go see their teacher at lunch time. This is something that I want young people to learn. I don't want them to just have stronger willpower muscles by age 18. I want them to have an arsenal of situational strategies so that—throughout their life—they can make the hard things that they want to do easier.

BORYGA: How does this concept of situational agency connect to other strategies you’ve studied in the past, like academic goal-setting and planning, for example?

DUCKWORTH: You can divide these strategies into inside strategies and outside strategies. Inside strategies are things like goal setting and planning. They happen in your head. We can imagine what it will be like to have a certain life that we don't yet have—a future desired state. That’s a goal. We can also make plans on how to get there, and imagine future actions we’ll need to take to reach those goals. That’s all inside work.

But there are outside strategies, too. Say your goal is to get into a selective college, and your plan is to study so you can get a better SAT score. In a study I did with the College Board surveying thousands of teens about how they motivated themselves to study for the SAT, we found many of them use internal strategies like reminding themselves how important college is or just forcing themselves to study using willpower. 

But the outside strategies turned out to be more predictive of success. One of them is to set a concrete study schedule and place it somewhere you’ll regularly see it, like the bathroom mirror or your bedroom door. This lines up with what I’ve learned interviewing everyone from successful tech entrepreneurs to Olympic athletes. So many of them are like, oh you want to see my goals, I have them written down on this post-it note on my desk, or they’re engraved into this wooden block, or this paperweight. 

BORYGA: While we’ve been re-evaluating phones in schools, you’ve also pointed to AI as the next frontier. Recently, you even surveyed Gen Z about how they’re using it, and how they feel about it. What stands out to you so far? 

DUCKWORTH: One reason to be especially interested in how young people are using AI is that, with every technological innovation that has made its debut in society, it's always the young people who take it up first, figure it out, and who start using it. And one of the things we found is that young people are really using AI. We asked them how often in the last month they’ve used it, and for many it’s daily. 

Interestingly enough though, we also asked them how they feel about using AI, and a lot of them have deep ambivalence about it. Many think it’s not good for them, and many worry it’s making them lazy and stupid.

BORYGA: Given that ambivalence—and new research pointing to some serious cognitive and skill-building trade-offs as a result of AI use—do you worry we’ll fall into the same pattern we’ve seen with phones, expecting students to rely on willpower alone to manage AI?

DUCKWORTH: Yes. I do. 

I recently looked up old footage of Steve Jobs when he was just introducing the iPhone. And of course it was such a positive, optimistic message about all the things you can do. I mean we now have all the world’s knowledge at our fingertips. We should be smarter, right? 

But I think the challenge is that we've tied virtue and vice together. Yes, you can learn physics from MIT on your phone, or you could scroll through old videos of Justin Bieber. Which are you going to do? The co-location is the challenge. Putting it all in one place is one reason why the smartphone became so popular, and what a lot of new tech aims to do. But I wonder whether we need to start separating again. A library has always been a library. You can’t eat or talk and there’s just books and tables. What else is there to do other than read and study? 

Can we separate that which we've already put together? I’m not sure. But we are going to have to figure out a way forward, because AI is not going anywhere. It is naive to say, I'll just raise my kid without AI until they’re 18. It's not possible to hermetically seal yourself off from this.

This interview has been edited for brevity, clarity, and flow.