“I think what often happens to people is that the thing that is working for you becomes the only trick you have in the playbook.” Angela Duckworth · 3 Takeaways™
September 2026
Duckworth is telling the story of what she and her husband call the burnout act of their marriage: two children of striver families whose single method, try harder, worked for years and then stopped working. The line is the grit researcher naming the failure mode of grit itself. It arrives just before she says she had concluded the marriage was over.
Transcript
I think that's a fair question. You could argue it's a fair criticism of grit that the word grit just sounds like, oh, it's all about you against your situation. Your situation can be your enemy, but you can overcome it through force of will. I don't agree with that message. I think for me as a psychologist, this dawning appreciation for just how important the situation is and also how much it is under our control to make our situation not our enemy, but our ally has been maybe 10 or so years in the making. But it's more that I have expanded my field of view that I'm expanding my aperture to take in not only the person, the hero, the achiever themselves, but also everything around them.
You call the first act of your marriage, just try harder, and the second, burnout. How did two people nearly grit their way out of a marriage?
Both of us grew up in kind of Striver families. Our parents set very high expectations for us. I think our whole lives, we realized that we were not the most gifted or talented students in any classroom or on any team, but we tried hard. Each of us growing up in similar circumstances, but of course not meeting until we were grownups, couldn't make the chorus like try harder, you know, like want a solo in the chorus, don't have a great singing voice, like practice longer than everyone. It worked. It worked really well for Act 1, which was many years. And we today would say that that was an important lesson. But I think what often happens to people is that the thing that is working for you becomes the only trick you have in the playbook. And I think the fragility of that is to not recognize that sometimes life calls for a different tactic. And the burnout act was when Jason and I had been married for a few years and we had had kids and we were starting out our careers and all we knew was trying harder. We really did experience this emotional state of burnout. And for me, I was so unhappy that I thought it was the end of our marriage. I thought that the only reasonable thing to do was to end the marriage.
And then you essentially had three therapists for the two of you and you both changed your lives, changed your situations.
That's exactly right. He needed a therapist and I needed a therapist. And then the two of us went to see a marriage therapist. To me, there was a very important lesson and one that Jason, I hope our daughters take this lesson that trying hard is great. And we did raise our daughters to try hard at everything. But that is not the only trick you have in your playbook. Sometimes you're in a losing situation and trying hard is just like being in the ocean and kicking harder and flailing your arms where you have to fundamentally change the situation itself. And going back to that story, what saved my mom and saved me was not kicking harder. It was not trying harder. It was waving my hand in the air. I asked for help. I changed the situation. There was a snorkeling instructor who saw, and then that changed everything. And I want my daughters to be people who have at least two tricks in their playbook: one, to try harder than anyone believes that you can try. And second, to be in a winning situation, not a losing situation, so that your effort pays off. Jason and I didn't stop trying, but we fundamentally changed the situation. So we tried hard in a better situation and stayed married. And raised our daughters together.
That is so harrowing that your marriage almost came apart because of the two of you who were so focused on working harder. Is it a mistake to put willpower on a pedestal?
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