Angela Duckworth
Psychologist and MacArthur Fellow, the Rosa Lee and Egbert Chang Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who studies the personal qualities and situational...
“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.”
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
…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?
…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…
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…
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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