Sustained Effort Depends on the Conditions Around It

The instinct to try harder is sometimes right. Angela Duckworth says that if someone is not making progress, a little more effort can make a difference: a person lifting weights may exert themselves more and complete another repetition. But “try harder” is an incomplete rule. If effort keeps increasing without producing the result someone wants, they have to consider whether they are in the right situation.

That question did not come naturally to her. For much of her career, she focused on the importance of individual effort in achieving excellence. She still stands by the central claim of Grit, the book she wrote about a decade ago: becoming great requires consistency over time. But her research led her to ask what else contributes to persistence, and what makes persistent effort pay off. Those questions took her beyond the individual to the people, places, and circumstances around high achievers.

The distinction matters because trying harder can feel like the most responsible response. Duckworth describes her own old reflex: wake up earlier, work later, and turn up the volume. Looking outward—to the task, the workplace, or the people around her—felt less natural. Asking for help could feel embarrassing or even cowardly, as if needing support meant she could not do the work on her own.

Chris Williamson put that reluctance in a cultural frame. When success is treated as proof that someone deserves their outcomes, changing one’s circumstances can feel like giving up the right to claim credit. The self-made figure who depends on no one is an appealing ideal. Duckworth agreed that the impulse to own the result entirely can be powerful.

The same impulse can distort the advice people take. Williamson called some listeners “advice hyper responders”: people who already worry that they are not doing enough, and who intensify advice to work harder rather than asking whether effort is actually the problem. Someone who pushes themselves relentlessly may hear an exhortation to work harder as confirmation. Someone who avoids effort may not be moved by the same advice at all.

Duckworth suggested that this pattern may reach beyond grit. Strengths can be overused, leaving other capacities underdeveloped. She compared it to a physical-therapy problem in which someone relies on strong muscles and neglects others. Williamson offered confidence advice as another example: men who already disregard boundaries may ignore warnings not to be pushy, while men who could use more confidence may take the same warning as evidence that they should hold back further.

Neither speaker claimed to know how many people need more effort and how many need different conditions. Williamson’s point was that people drawn to personal-development books and podcasts may already be unusually disposed to act on advice to push harder. That audience may not represent everyone. The useful question is not which piece of advice is universally correct, but what it will reinforce in the person hearing it.

Duckworth’s alternative is not to dismiss individual effort. She describes the newer argument as a counterweight to the personal-development message she and Williamson summarized as “just do it” or “fuck your feelings, just work harder.” Behavioral scientists, she says, recognize that people can change their actions directly, but they can also change their thoughts. Someone can force themselves to go to the gym; they can also reconsider the gym until they want to go. Her further point is that thoughts are shaped by circumstances: what is visible, what is within reach, and who someone has just been talking to.

That gives a practical way to approach the choice between trying harder and changing the conditions. First, ask whether the effort is producing progress. If it is, increasing effort modestly may help. If it is not, look for a mismatch: a demand that exceeds current capacity, a missing source of support, a setting that makes the desired action difficult, or a goal that feels important but not possible. The answer may still involve working harder. But if the effort has to be sustained, the question becomes how to make it repeatable.

Duckworth describes behavior as a sequence: situation, thought, response. A situation shapes the thoughts that come to mind; those thoughts help shape what someone does. People often feel that they act directly from their intentions, she says, but their circumstances can influence their thoughts more than they realize.

Her example of gym clothes shows how small that influence can be. At home, the clothes are in a particular drawer. Reaching into it takes only a few seconds, yet Duckworth finds it much easier to go to the gym when she lays out her clothes the night before. The clothes become a visual cue: seeing them reminds her that she could go. Leaving them in the drawer adds small steps—open it, find the clothes, decide again. That minor friction can be enough to change what happens, especially when travelling disrupts her usual routine.

The point is not that a drawer is a major obstacle. It is that decisions are often affected by several small demands at once. Duckworth describes the difference between taking clothes from a drawer and finding them already laid out as “micro friction.” The effort saved is trivial in isolation, but removing it changes what is in front of her when she gets up. It gives the intended action a cue and removes a moment in which she might abandon it.

Duckworth says that people often understand this principle but do not act on it. In her research, she says, Americans asked how best to control behavior commonly answer that they should control the situation. Asked what they actually do, they say they use willpower. One reason may be that people want to be the kind of person who can act through will alone, rather than someone who needs an environmental aid or support. Duckworth gives the example of wanting to reach a goal without needing a medication or other help. The desire to prove independence can make people reluctant to arrange useful conditions.

For Duckworth, the point is not that surroundings remove the need to act. It is that a repeated behavior should not depend entirely on overcoming the same avoidable obstacle every time. The clothes still have to be put on, and the person still has to go to the gym. But laying them out changes the situation that precedes that decision.

She also cautions against removing every obstacle. Duckworth agrees that a life without friction could produce weak character: people develop skills by meeting challenges. The aim is to make hard things easier, not to remove the hard thing. Triathlete Alistair Brownlee, whom she discusses in her research, chose a house close to places where he could swim and run. He also made sure his training clothes were clean and dry. Those choices reduced barriers around training without replacing the training itself.

That distinction separates friction that blocks the start from resistance that belongs to the task. A long drive to the pool may make training harder to begin without making the training more valuable. A demanding workout, by contrast, may be central to the goal. Brownlee could reduce the first kind of difficulty while preserving the second. Likewise, Duckworth’s gym-clothes example does not make exercise effortless; it clears away a small obstacle between intending to exercise and starting.

Duckworth makes the same distinction at the scale of a training environment. A swimmer joining Bob Bowman’s team would face very demanding practices, but the coach, teammates, and pool would all be there. The environment can make it easier to show up and harder to drift from the goal, while the work itself remains difficult. Situational support is not a substitute for exertion; it can make the exertion more likely to happen consistently.

Willpower still exists, Duckworth says. People can suppress impulses or make themselves do something they do not want to do. She says humans are better than dogs and chimpanzees at delaying gratification and forcing themselves to act against an immediate preference. That capacity can be useful in a moment. The limitation is expecting it to carry a repeated behavior indefinitely.

Duckworth’s account of successful people turns on this difference. People who go to the gym, get their work done, and follow through on longer-term goals may look as if they have enormous willpower. But she argues that many highly successful people arrange their lives so they need less of it. Rather than treating behavior as a contest of brute force, they make decisions about cues, routines, and surroundings that help them act as they intend.

That is also why changing thoughts does not end the inquiry. If someone wants to go to the gym, they might reframe the gym as a place they want to be. But Duckworth says the thoughts that support action are themselves affected by circumstances. What books are visible? What reminders are in the room? Who is nearby? Those conditions can influence what someone thinks, which can influence what they do.

Duckworth learned about the power of situations as a graduate student through The Person and the Situation, by psychologists Dick Nisbett and Lee Ross. She recalls the Good Samaritan study, conducted with seminarians preparing for ministry. Participants encountered a person who appeared homeless and in distress. Some had been told to hurry to another appointment; others had not. Duckworth describes a substantial difference in whether they stopped to help. The situation had changed, though their character had not been deliberately altered.

She says the important extension is that people can exert some agency over their situations. They can decide what to put in front of them, who to be around, and how to arrange their routines. Once they see that changing a situation can help, they may become more willing to do so again. In Duckworth’s account, that agency can build on itself.

The question, then, is not whether a person should have to overcome difficulty. It is which difficulty belongs to the task and which one is an unnecessary barrier to doing it. A good setting does not promise an easy result. It can make it easier to return to demanding work.

The case Angela Duckworth makes through Michael Phelps shows the difference between a hard task and avoidable friction. Phelps’s achievements required enormous physical and mental effort. His coach, Bob Bowman, described him training extensively and mentally rehearsing races. Phelps did not only imagine how he wanted a competition to go; he also imagined what could go wrong and how he would respond. Duckworth says that preparation helped him be ready to stay in the moment.

But effort alone cannot explain what Phelps achieved. Duckworth describes a particular set of conditions: the North Baltimore Aquatic Center, a team of strong swimmers, a demanding training environment, and Bowman, who became a central figure in his development. Phelps’s mother also recognized that he struggled in some settings but could focus intensely in the pool. He had been diagnosed with ADHD as a child, and Duckworth recalls school reports describing him as disruptive and doubting his potential. His mother understood that the right setting could bring out a different response.

Phelps’s own decisions were part of that situation. When Bowman later moved from Baltimore, Phelps followed him. Williamson emphasized that the crucial part of Phelps’s setting was not an abstract advantage: it could be a particular person. Duckworth’s point is not that Phelps’s effort should be credited to Bowman instead. It is that the two worked together. Phelps’s work was directed and supported by a setting that suited it.

The example also shows why circumstances should be described specifically. “A good environment” can sound vague. Duckworth’s account names the pool, the teammates, the coach, and the mother who recognized where Phelps could concentrate. The circumstances that support effort may be concrete and narrow. In this case, one of the linchpins was a coach Phelps was willing to follow.

Amanda, Duckworth’s daughter, illustrates the same relationship at a different scale. Amanda was in an advanced seventh-grade math class and failing tests. Duckworth initially suggested that she move to a less demanding class. Her husband objected: he did not want their daughter to learn that she was a failure. He brought home scrap paper, and the family worked through the mathematics with her.

Amanda’s teacher offered her another chance to take a test—not to replace the original grade, but to show what she could do. Amanda worked mornings and evenings, and the family made room for that effort. She put her phone inside a coat pocket and left it in a closet. She passed the retest, stayed in the class, earned an A, and later graduated from Harvard as a mathematics major.

An early reader called the story one of grit. Duckworth sees the grit, but says that description leaves out the father who learned difficult mathematics to help, the teacher who allowed a retest, the household that made room for study, and the phone Amanda put away. None of those conditions did the work for her. They supported the work she had to do.

Phelps and Amanda are different examples, not versions of the same story. Phelps’s case concerns a high-level athletic environment built around a coach and a team. Amanda’s involves family support, a teacher’s decision, and an individual attempt to master difficult material. Both show why a story of effort can be incomplete when it leaves out the conditions that made effort more effective.

The same is true of Coleman, whom Duckworth first encountered through an email in 2013. He told her he had watched her TED Talk and believed her account of grit explained something about his life. He had been born while his mother was in prison and had grown up amid severe instability, including domestic disturbances and serious asthma. Duckworth says his early circumstances were chaotic; he would later graduate from MIT.

What made Coleman’s email stand out was not simply his story. He showed curiosity and preparation: he had watched Duckworth’s talk and read some of her work. He asked for a conversation, and he offered to be useful. He did not ask her to become his mentor. Duckworth replied, met him, and later found a way for him to contribute to a project she was already working on: recording a video for a programme intended to teach children about perseverance. They worked together for about three months.

Duckworth describes this as moving from a mentor “for a reason”—a short conversation—to a mentor “for a season,” working together on something concrete. Her account suggests a practical approach to seeking guidance: show why the conversation matters, prepare for it, and look for a way to contribute to work already underway. That is different from asking someone to take on an open-ended responsibility for one’s progress.

Coleman’s subsequent path, as Duckworth recounts it, included graduating from MIT with a 4.9 out of 5, working at Google, earning a PhD in computer science at Stanford, and becoming the CEO of an AI startup. In a TED Talk of his own, he showed a graph that represented his life not as a steadily rising line but as an exponential curve. He described thinking in five-year chapters, with each situation better than the one before it, and said that his improvement could be explained only by understanding those situations and how they changed.

When Duckworth read his dissertation, she did not understand the mathematics and skipped to the acknowledgements. They ran to three single-spaced pages and named more than 200 people, including 17 administrators in Stanford’s computer science department. For her, this made visible the network of people who had contributed to his path, including people who might otherwise go unmentioned.

The three examples illuminate different parts of the same argument. Phelps’s surroundings aligned with an exceptional athletic ambition. Amanda’s family and teacher made a difficult academic challenge more workable. Coleman’s relationships and successive opportunities helped his situation improve over time. None of these accounts makes effort irrelevant. They show why effort is not the only thing worth examining when trying to understand a result.

Duckworth says one underappreciated way to improve the odds of reaching an individual goal is to pursue it with other people. She does not mean only joining a formal team. Someone who wants to run a marathon, become a better public speaker, start a company, or improve as a marketer may benefit from finding others with related aims, even if they are working on different projects.

That recommendation runs against the do-it-yourself ideal. People may try to improve their time management or confidence on their own without asking who else is working toward a similar goal. Duckworth says research suggests people are more successful on average when they pursue goals as part of a group. A group can offer support and company that make individual effort more sustainable.

A group need not be organized around the exact task. Runners can join a running club; aspiring writers can find other people who want to write; founders can meet peers building different companies. The common feature is that members are trying to move toward comparable aims. They do not have to work on the same project to learn from one another or make it easier to keep going.

Duckworth’s example is a group of orthopedic surgeons who met at a conference while completing specialized training. Their professional work was demanding, but they had another goal: to become good fathers and husbands. They lived in different cities and were initially strangers. They kept meeting at conferences, started a group text, and eventually spent more time together.

When Duckworth later asked the men, now near retirement age, what their lives would have been like without the group, they described the relationship as transformative. They had seen one another through serious personal difficulties as well as professional life. The group was not formed to help them become better surgeons; they were already pursuing demanding careers. It helped them think about how to show up for their families while living with those careers.

Duckworth says the group developed from a dinner at a conference into a text thread and then more frequent contact. Its value did not depend on a formal structure. It gave the men a continuing way to support one another through challenges that could otherwise have remained private. Duckworth compares the idea to making a personal version of a mutual-aid society.

The example made her assess her own circumstances. She has collaborators and a team in her lab, but did not have a group of peers navigating similar professional and personal questions. She said she was trying to start one. If a suitable group already exists, Duckworth recommends joining it. If not, a person might start one, looking for people at a similar stage of life and with a similar outlook. A mentor is usually further along and the relationship is asymmetric; peers are more likely to be facing comparable questions at the same time.

Peers can also help through the act of giving advice. Williamson suggested that explaining what another person should do may reveal something to the adviser about their own choices. Duckworth connected this to Alcoholics Anonymous, where giving help is part of the process. She also described a randomized study in which students were asked to give advice to other students about avoiding procrastination. The advice was actually given to other students. Duckworth said the students assigned to give advice did better themselves than a control group that did not take part.

She offered two possible explanations. Giving advice may prompt reflection; the student has to articulate what could help someone else. And once they have given the advice, they may feel pressure to act consistently with it. Duckworth did not claim that this brief exercise can replace other forms of support. Its relevance is that helping another person can also change the helper’s own thinking.

Mentors, too, are important. Duckworth mentioned research indicating that the likelihood of becoming an award-winning scientist can be two to four times greater with mentorship from an award-winning scientist. She does not think most people need persuading that a mentor can matter. Her less familiar claim is that people can become more likely to attract mentors by showing that they are prepared to make use of the relationship.

Coleman’s email illustrates what Duckworth means by a “mentor magnet.” He had watched her talk, read her work, asked for a short conversation, and offered to help. Duckworth says mentor magnets often do not start by asking someone to take on the open-ended role of mentor. They ask for a conversation, show gratitude, and may find a way to work with the person on an existing project. The request is more specific, and the relationship has a chance to develop through shared work.

Duckworth’s point is that a relationship becomes more possible when the person seeking guidance brings curiosity, preparation, and a concrete reason to talk. The same principle applies to groups: support is not merely something received from above. It can be built through mutual attention, shared effort, and continued contact.

Duckworth had taught burnout as a psychologist before experiencing it herself while writing Situated. She describes the state as involving exhaustion, detachment from work, and helplessness: the feeling that nothing one does is working. While writing the book, she says, she worked seven days a week, from before dawn until after midnight. She felt exhausted, strangely absent from the work, and increasingly powerless. Her response was to try harder, which she believes only deepened the problem.

For much of that period, she worked at home in her pajamas, largely alone. She describes it as extending the pandemic lifestyle by choice: she thought staying home would help her concentrate, but she had isolated herself. She did not ask for help early or often enough, and turned down invitations that could have brought her out of the routine.

Three years into a five-year writing process, she was not sleeping well. She said stress would wake her about an hour after she went to bed, and she would then remain awake through the night. She told her husband she was going to retire and fantasized about becoming a pastry chef, although she did not even eat pastry. A friend tried to persuade her to go for a walk. Duckworth could not accept an hour away from work, even as she was becoming less able to work.

Help came through Rick Kot, a recently retired editor she had met. Their Saturday conversations were meant to focus on her writing, but Duckworth would arrive without pages and apologize for wasting his time. Kot kept meeting with her. Eventually he suggested that the problem might be the structure of the book. He proposed a new one; Duckworth recognized that it was wrong, and explaining why helped her find the structure she needed. The research was already there, she says. The change helped her organize it.

Duckworth believes that earlier support might have reduced her suffering, or perhaps prevented the burnout. Her practical lesson comes from Christina Maslach’s work: burnout is often treated as a problem located in the person, when the mismatch between a person and their work situation may need to be addressed. Workload is one possible mismatch, but not the only one. Duckworth also names lack of autonomy, misalignment of values, and a sense that the system is unfair.

The first step, in her account, is to identify the mismatch. A person who is overloaded may need a change in workload; someone who lacks autonomy may need a way to exercise more control. Sometimes changing the situation includes leaving a position, but not always. Duckworth does not offer a single remedy because the relevant mismatch will differ from one person to another. Her central claim is that someone cannot will or think themselves out of burnout; the situation has to change.

She also rejects treating burnout as a permanent personal characteristic. It is an emotional state, she says, not a fixed feature of someone’s identity. Duckworth says she is no longer burnt out, though it could happen again. The state can feel permanent while it lasts, but it is not.

Williamson described a different experience, which he was careful not to generalize. He said his own exhaustion and cognitive difficulties followed years in a house he believed had toxic mold, alongside other possible health factors. He recalled becoming unusually tired, sleeping for long periods without feeling rested, and struggling with sounds, social contact, memory, and concentration. At first, he interpreted the problem as mood or insufficient discipline and tried to push harder. He said that made things worse because his capacity was being reduced by what he understood as illness; effort drew on the resources he needed to recover.

He recalled feeling tired by early evening, despite having once been accustomed to late nights, and waking from long periods of sleep feeling more tired than before. Sounds that had not bothered him became difficult to tolerate; he wanted neither conversation nor silence, and music was uncomfortable. He also remembered forgetting names and struggling with familiar tasks. He described trying to identify a cause among possibilities including mold exposure, COVID, and other health factors, and finding it difficult to know which ones explained how he felt.

The experience changed how he thought about the advice to be gentler with oneself. During the period when more effort made him worse, he reduced his demands. Over time, however, he felt that some of his habits had loosened: he was exercising less, eating more, and had gained weight. He now sees himself as having to relearn how to do hard things after a period in which doing them had carried a cost.

Duckworth did not dispute his account, but distinguished grit from the command to “just do it.” In her view, grit is not simply a voice ordering someone to push through. It is closer to having work that feels interesting and important, believing it is possible, and knowing what to try next. Those conditions help align effort with a workable path rather than forcing effort against confusion or depletion.

The difference matters in practice. Reducing demands can be necessary when someone’s capacity is compromised; treating every loss of routine as proof that they should push harder would repeat the mistake Williamson described. But once capacity changes, a person may have to rebuild habits. The first task is to understand what is happening and whether the problem is effort, the setting, or a mismatch between the two.

Duckworth uses “alignment” to describe what makes effort more sustainable. Internally, a person is better positioned to persist when the work feels interesting and important, when they believe they can do it, and when they know what to try next. Misalignment can take different forms: work that matters but feels uninteresting; an activity that is interesting but seems impossible; or something a person believes they could do but does not know how to approach.

In her metaphor, the arrows of motivation point in the same direction. “Just do it” tries to force one arrow into line. Duckworth connects her account to a framework associated with Stanford professor James Gross: situation shapes thoughts, which shape a response. She extends that idea beyond an individual’s immediate surroundings. Mentors, peers, physical space, routines, and culture can all support an aim or work against it.

That broader alignment is why she asks about more than willpower. If someone wants to do better work, the question is not only what response they want from themselves, but what conditions might produce thoughts that support that response. What books should be visible? What conversations would help? Who might be a useful mentor or peer? What changes to physical space or routine could make the intended behavior easier to repeat?

Duckworth has applied the idea to her own office by putting poems and quotations on the walls. She has long wanted to memorize lines, including Rudyard Kipling’s “If” and the poem “Pity the Beautiful.” Now she prints them and places them at eye level. She also keeps a handwritten quotation from Nelson Mandela—“I never lose. I win or I learn”—where she will see it when she leaves her office. She believes the line, she says, but still feels like a loser when she loses. The note puts a different thought in front of her.

Duckworth has noticed that people she studies, including Coleman, use Post-it notes throughout their spaces. The purpose is not only to remove temptation. The environment can also make useful ideas visible. What someone repeatedly sees can influence what they think about, and what they think about can influence what they do.

Asked when to work harder and when to change circumstances, Duckworth resists treating the choices as entirely separate. If someone is burnt out, exhaustion and helplessness are signs that increasing effort may be digging the hole deeper. They may need support or a temporary adjustment in challenge. But even a person who decides they have been giving 70 per cent and wants to give 75 per cent will need more than an instruction to do so if they want to sustain the change.

Duckworth recommends trying for a modest increase rather than leaping directly from 70 to 100 per cent. More importantly, she argues that repeated effort cannot depend on willpower alone. Someone who needs to show up every day, week after week, has to find thoughts that make the work feel worthwhile and possible—and conditions that help those thoughts arise. That may involve a coach, therapist, mentor, peer group, changed routine, or different physical setting.

Willpower has a place when a person needs to act once. Duckworth says people can force themselves through an immediate reluctance. But if the aim is excellence, the work has to be repeated. The distinction is between spending effort to get through a single moment and building conditions that make it possible to return to the work over time.

Duckworth distinguishes a person’s immediate environment from culture. Someone can move an object closer, remove a distraction, or put a reminder on a wall. Culture is less tangible and more encompassing, but, she says, can be more powerful.

A culture of excellence makes continued improvement normal. Excellence, in this account, is not a fixed level of achievement; it is the expectation that people will keep trying to improve. Duckworth points to Bob Bowman’s team as an example. Phelps was an exceptional swimmer, but Bowman created a culture in which demanding training and improvement were expected.

Williamson contrasted that with Tall Poppy Syndrome: a social environment in which conspicuous success or ambition attracts derision. He described the British version as allowing people to be successful only if they treat it as an accident and apologize for it. Duckworth recognized the pattern as the opposite of a culture that treats striving as normal. The difference is not simply whether people are modest. It is whether a group encourages improvement or makes it socially costly to stand out.

Duckworth says that someone seeking a different culture might consider moving. She recognizes that people may not be able to move and that doing so can be expensive. But she also points to status quo bias: the tendency to cling to current circumstances. People can build long lists of reasons to stay, including family, work, and friends, even when they are uncertain whether staying is the right choice.

She recounts research by economist Steven Levitt in which people identified difficult decisions and used a coin flip to help choose whether to change. Duckworth says people were especially reluctant to follow the result when the decision was where to live. She used this to illustrate how strongly people can resist moving, not as a rule that someone should relocate whenever a coin points that way.

A move can change more than an address. Duckworth argues that it can alter a person’s peers, mentors, physical surroundings, and access to opportunity at once. She referred to research described in The Economist as identifying a move to a neighbourhood with greater opportunity as a particularly consequential way to change one’s life. Her point was that location can shape the conditions around a person.

Williamson described moving from the UK to Austin as frightening but ultimately fitting. He said that he had met many people through his work in nightclubs but still felt culturally out of place in the UK. Austin, by contrast, felt like a community of people who had come from elsewhere. He said that he moved for the city’s podcasting community and felt more at home in the United States.

He connected that sense of fit to the movement of people through Austin: in his account, social groups had not had as much time to settle into fixed patterns. He also acknowledged that linking his move to British attitudes about ambition could sound self-aggrandizing. The exchange does not turn his experience into a general case for leaving one’s home country. It shows how a change of place can be a decision about the community and culture someone wants around their work.

The setting worth seeking depends on the aim. Williamson said Austin suited his work; Duckworth suggested that an aspiring artist might likewise consider whether their location puts them near people and opportunities relevant to that ambition. She did not identify one city or culture as best for everyone. Her claim is that a person’s location can shape which relationships, opportunities, and expectations become part of daily life.

That larger setting matters alongside more immediate changes. A note on a wall may alter what comes to mind; a peer group may make a personal goal less solitary; a move may change the culture, mentors, and opportunities surrounding several parts of life at once. These are different scales of situational change, not alternatives to effort. Duckworth says she now asks the people she studies about their mentors, training partners, desks, refrigerators, and routines because she wants a fuller account of what supports achievement.

After studying the “inside game” of success in Grit and the situations around achievement in Situated, Duckworth says she wants to study how technology is changing the conditions in which people live. She named phones, social media, AI, and screens as forces affecting how people spend time, socialize, exercise, and live. Her next question is how people can succeed in that changing environment.