Imagine you’re at Thanksgiving dinner and your brother-in-law starts spouting opinions you find objectionable. It’s almost impossible, Duckworth argues, to will yourself not to feel anger—that is, to change your emotional response (Box Three). It might be more effective to change your thinking (Box Two) by mentally reframing the situation. “Instead of thinking, My brother-in-law is an idiot,” Duckworth writes, “you might consider, I don’t have the same view. What does he see that I don’t?” But the best strategy is an earlier intervention: engineer a situation (Box One) that circumvents this battle entirely. Choose a seat far from your brother-in-law or excuse yourself to help with the dishes. The problem with will power, Duckworth writes, is that it attacks the problem “at the last possible moment.” The goal is to create a system that automatically elicits the desired response “without any (Box Two) thinking at all.”
Duckworth’s advice to avoid temptation is sound enough. Few of us have the steely resolve of Dwight Eisenhower, who kept his pockets stuffed with cigarettes long after he’d quit, because handing them out to others gave him “a feeling of accomplishment and superiority.” But self-binding tactics are hardly foolproof. Thomas Schelling, the economist who pioneered commitment devices, wrote about the “tortured reasoning” that led him to create work-arounds to his own rules when trying to quit smoking: having promised himself tobacco only after the “evening meal,” he quickly found loopholes—international flights, a token midafternoon sandwich. Once, in the throes of a news addiction, I deactivated my phone’s browser only to discover that I could access the Times home page by locating the paper’s headquarters on Google Maps.
What about more drastic changes to your environment? The most surefire way to spur growth, Duckworth asserts, is to change where you work and live. She looks to high achievers such as Taylor Swift and the Olympic swimmer Léon Marchand who, as teen-agers, moved to different cities (Nashville, Tempe) so they could pursue their dreams among like-minded strivers. She cites studies suggesting that people who move to more walkable towns take more than a thousand additional steps per day. She and her husband made a move of this sort, from the suburbs of Philadelphia to a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood in the city. “We’ll move if priorities change again, and if, in a different place, getting what we want most out of life is easier,” she writes.
For all its attempts to disavow the cult of effort, “Situated” will likely rankle the same critics who accused “Grit” of advocating a crude bootstrap logic. “Very often, the greatest obstacle to getting situated has nothing to do with money or privilege or power,” Duckworth writes. “Rather, it’s assuming it can’t be done.” A major impediment to goal fulfillment, she contends, is “status quo bias,” our preference for things to stay the same. She cites David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, “This Is Water,” which opens with a parable in which a young fish is asked “How’s the water?” and replies, “What the hell is water?” The story, she argues, illustrates how difficult it is to practice “situational awareness,” the art of seeing how our environment, and other people, inflect our behavior. Duckworth peppers her book with aphorisms about the importance of collaboration and community: “the real hero’s journey is from ‘I’ to ‘we.’ ” Or: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” She also suggests that personal growth requires constantly uprooting oneself and challenges the common wisdom that you cannot run away from your problems. Duckworth considers this objection, but her response is tautological: “Wherever you go, there you are—so choose where you go wisely.”
This tautology arguably lies at the very heart of Duckworth’s book. If motivation is conditioned by environment, then all you have to do is change your situation to get what you want out of life. But the decision to change one’s environment is presumably itself subject to some previous desire. “A man can do what he will, but not will what he will,” Arthur Schopenhauer wrote. We can pursue our desires, in other words, but our desires themselves are shaped by our environment and our personal history—a problem that extends backward ad infinitum. Duckworth sees this recursiveness as a virtuous circle that can be harnessed to one’s advantage: change your situation, and you change your thoughts and desires—which changes your actions, leading to better situations, better thoughts and desires, and so on. This framework, which she calls a “flywheel,” is presented with utter authority and an accompanying diagram, and no acknowledgment that it can also work in reverse.
