Changing Your Situation Can Matter More Than Resisting Temptation

When Russ Roberts installed the One Sec app after reading Situated, he found that his use of X had already fallen over the previous day and a half. The app did not forbid him from opening the platform; it inserted a delay. Roberts compared that pause to Odysseus binding himself to the mast: he knew what would tempt him, so he made an arrangement in advance.

That small adjustment captures Angela Duckworth’s central claim. People often try to change behavior at the moment of choice, by telling themselves to resist. But agency can also mean changing the conditions that make an impulse easy to act on. Putting a phone across the room, choosing a different seat, or adding friction before opening an app can matter more than demanding greater self-control from yourself in the moment.

Duckworth describes Situated as an expansion of her earlier work on grit, not a repudiation of it. She still believes that progress depends on the quality and quantity of time spent learning. Her research on West Point cadets and spelling-bee competitors examined people who sustained effort even when they were not the most talented by measures such as SAT scores, IQ, or physical ability. She also studied factors associated with persistence, including growth mindset and deliberate practice.

What she adds is attention to what surrounds a person: the people nearby, the culture of a place, and even the objects within reach. Those influences can change what people notice and do. They can also make it easier—or harder—to keep going.

That distinction helps separate grit from willpower. Duckworth describes willpower as the everyday capacity to suppress or elevate an impulse: getting up when the alarm rings, flossing when you would rather not, or holding back an angry response. She says people differ in this capacity, that it is shaped by both genetics and environment, and that it may be difficult to build substantially if someone does not have much of it to begin with.

But she does not see sustained achievement as a long sequence of white-knuckled refusals. Great performers, she argues, are also motivated by interest and by a sense that their work expresses their values. She points to swimmers Katie Ledecky and Michael Phelps: training may involve moments when the body resists, but their commitment cannot be explained as continuous self-coercion. As Duckworth puts it, people who stay on a learning curve and show passion and perseverance “are not paragons of willpower.”

Roberts agrees that “try harder” can be frustrating advice when someone is already trying. His concern is that this account complicates a familiar picture of agency. Economic reasoning often begins with preferences and constraints: people choose among options to pursue what they value. That picture can include meaning and charity, but it still suggests that the chooser is in control. Duckworth does not discard agency; she shifts attention to where it can be exercised. A person may have less control over an impulse once it arises than over the situation that repeatedly cues it.

The framework she uses to make this shift has three boxes. Duckworth credits Stanford psychologist James Gross, whom she heard describe the model at a 2011 conference on behavior change. Gross’s example was anger at Thanksgiving dinner. Imagine sitting near a brother-in-law whose views provoke you. You feel your temper rise and want to enjoy the meal rather than start an argument.

Box one is the objective situation: where you are, who is there, and what is happening around you. Box two is your mental reality: the thoughts and interpretations the situation prompts. Box three is your emotion and action: what you feel and how you respond. At box three, you might try to calm down or stop yourself from snapping. Duckworth does not say that this never works, but argues that it can be the least effective place to intervene.

At box two, you might try to interpret your brother-in-law differently or turn your attention to the pecan pie. At box one, you might sit somewhere else or volunteer to wash dishes. The point is not that moving seats guarantees a good dinner. It is that the situation can help produce the thoughts and feelings you are then trying to manage.

Roberts gave a version from his own work. Outside his role as a host, he can be animated; when interviewing a guest, he puts on what he calls his “EconTalk hat.” He tries to stay calm, show respect, and consider that a person he disagrees with might be right. Duckworth identified the effort to take another perspective as work on box two. The exchange illustrates that changing your interpretation can help when you cannot or do not want to change the external circumstances. The three boxes are options to consider, not a ranking in which changing the situation is always best.

If an environment is part of the problem, changing it can carry costs. Roberts noted that the implication might be cleaning up a desk, changing jobs, moving cities, or finding different colleagues. Duckworth agreed that people often cling to the familiar. Moving involves small but persistent friction; changing jobs means making a bet whose outcome is uncertain.

There is also a threat to self-image. People may want to be the kind of person who can concentrate, eat well, or control their temper without needing a carefully arranged environment. Duckworth said that, in her research, this was the most common explanation adults gave when they acknowledged that they would be better off keeping a phone or junk food out of reach but did not do so: they wanted to prove they could handle the temptation.

Duckworth described doing this herself. When working on something difficult, such as a book manuscript or a newspaper opinion piece, she has continued to leave her phone near her laptop, even though her research led her to expect that a phone within reach is more tempting than one across the room. Changing the setup can feel like conceding that the object has power over you. Her account treats it instead as a deliberate adjustment to make the desired action more likely.

The situation need not be changed by a major life decision. It might mean working in a coffee shop, or deciding not to work there if the setting is unhelpful. Roberts told a story about an “anger coat,” a coat kept upstairs for someone to put on when angry. The trip to get it might interrupt the impulse to shout. His father’s comic version complicates the idea: a man goes upstairs for the coat, cannot find it, and gets angrier because he suspects his wife moved it. The anecdote makes the point without promising that a tactic will work every time. A device for changing your response can itself become part of the situation.

Sometimes, Duckworth suggested, people stay in an unhelpful environment because they have not imagined an alternative. She offered the example of a graduate student whose work is going only moderately well, who repeats the same morning routine without considering whether to talk with another mentor or spend more time with other students. The student may not have chosen the current situation as best; it may simply be the only one they have pictured.

Changing circumstances is not always possible. Duckworth’s framework allows for that limit: when a person cannot modify the situation, they can try to work on box two—how they interpret it—or box three—how they act or feel. The point is not that people can always leave, or that leaving is always the right answer. It is that self-control is not the only place to look.

Duckworth’s examples of the phone and the Thanksgiving table point toward a broader question: what has been made easy to do? She described what she called the “Vietnam heroin mystery.” According to her account, young American soldiers in Vietnam used heroin at unusually high rates, while many who returned to civilian life saw their use fall back toward earlier, much lower levels. She discussed the stress of war and the surrounding social norms as part of the explanation, but also emphasized access. In Vietnam, she said, heroin could be easier to obtain than a bottle of Coca-Cola.

The change in setting mattered in more than one way. Returning home meant leaving a war zone and a group in which heroin use was common; it also meant losing the drug’s extraordinary convenience. Duckworth sees convenience as a subject for further research. Often, she suggested, it means that an action has become frictionless: available at the moment of impulse, without much effort.

She applied that idea to online gambling. Going to a casino required driving, parking, and walking inside; buying a lottery ticket meant going somewhere and waiting in line. Online gambling removes those steps. It can be available late at night or early in the morning without getting up from the couch. Duckworth criticized this ease of access, arguing that a phone puts the activity close at hand and removes barriers that might otherwise interrupt the impulse.

Convenience can also help an activity a person wants to do. Roberts recalled a time-management instructor asking a roomful of people who wished they read more books. Every hand went up. The instructor’s explanation for why they did not: “Because books don’t ring.” Books sit quietly, while phones deliver notifications. Roberts leaves books he is reading in visible places so that they can attract his attention without requiring him to remember to retrieve them.

Duckworth added that a physical book can be harder to ignore than a PDF attached to an email. She described novelist Ann Patchett finding a book by Tom Hanks among the books in her study and picking it up when she was having trouble sleeping. The example is not an argument that print is always better. It shows how visibility, physical presence, and ease of access can change what someone does next.

The point is not simply to make every desired activity effortless or every unwanted activity impossible. Rather, it is to notice the different amounts of friction surrounding them. A pause before opening an app, a book placed within reach, or a tempting object moved farther away can shift the decision out of the most pressured moment. Roberts’s One Sec example makes that shift concrete: the app leaves the choice available but changes how quickly he can act on the impulse.

Situations shape more than immediate behavior. Duckworth argues that cultures can also affect preferences over time. Her shorthand for culture is “the way we do things around here.” Any group that spends time together develops norms, she says, and taking a job or joining an organization means entering a culture, whether or not that culture is explicitly described.

Roberts warned that someone joining an unhealthy workplace may become accustomed to its practices and start treating them as ordinary. The risk is not only that a particular boss will be difficult. What colleagues accept and reward can change what seems normal—and what the person comes to value.

Duckworth illustrated the point with Anthony, whom she interviewed for the book. He entered Harvard Law School with idealistic ambitions to fight poverty and improve economic mobility. By his third year, he was headed into corporate law. Duckworth emphasized that the school’s culture was not one-dimensional and that some students retained ambitions like his. But the prevailing routes and milestones—including the internships and choices associated with successive years of law school—pulled him toward a familiar path. Roberts observed that Anthony was proud of it. Only later did he have what Duckworth called an “allergic reaction” to the direction his life had taken, and returning to the public sector required work.

The story complicates the idea that preferences are fixed and behavior simply reflects them. Duckworth says preferences are malleable, though not infinitely so. The culture a person enters can shape present behavior and leave more enduring effects. A person can begin with one set of aims and, through repeated exposure to a workplace’s routines and rewards, come to pursue different ones.

This is one way Duckworth’s argument presses on the economic picture Roberts raised at the outset. Preferences and constraints still matter, but preferences are not necessarily untouched by experience. Surroundings can affect not only which options a person chooses, but which goals remain salient and which futures seem desirable.

That claim has implications for achievement, too. Duckworth says her earlier work on grit emphasized alignment among a person’s goals: a high-level aim organizes smaller goals, with less conflict and ambivalence. Situated adds a question about the environment: can the people, coach, and culture around someone support the direction they want to go? Roberts raised Michael Phelps’s coach, Bob Bowman, and a French swimmer who left France to train with Bowman at Arizona State University. The example points to the contribution of a training environment and a coach, not just an athlete’s individual effort.

Duckworth defines success as achieving a goal, which she describes as a desired future. The definition covers large ambitions and small practical aims; she does not equate success with happiness or moral goodness. Roberts’s question was different. He asked whether the book could help a reader become a more effective person in ordinary life—not necessarily more accomplished by conventional measures, but better able to achieve what they want, such as getting along with a brother-in-law and not spoiling Thanksgiving dinner.

The distinction matters because a person can achieve a goal without deciding whether it is worth pursuing. Duckworth’s definition describes success as goal attainment; Roberts was asking what kinds of goals make for a life one wants. They are related questions, but not interchangeable.

Duckworth connected the broader question to her own ambitions. She described a career spent trying to be great: to become the best psychologist she could, publish in leading journals, and make each new piece of work better than the last. After devoting her 50s to writing Situated, she said she had recently written in her journal that perhaps it was time to try to be good. She was not presenting a settled plan to abandon ambition. One possibility she described was to “cede the spotlight” and help someone else become great, without a byline or even an acknowledgment. She was considering a quieter form of achievement, not claiming to have resolved what she wanted next.

The idea also connects to alignment. Duckworth described grit as an inner alignment: goals, intentions, and subgoals working in the same direction, with relatively little conflict or ambivalence. She drew on psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s contrast between flow and “psychological entropy,” which she understood as the disorder that comes when one’s aims pull against each other. Situated, she said, asks how to align the arrows outside oneself as well: to find people, a coach, or a culture that support the direction one wants to go.

That outer alignment does not settle the deeper question of what direction to choose. Duckworth said that promoting her book sometimes felt misaligned with her values: she was asking people with little attention to spare to look at her and buy something. The discomfort is a reminder that a supportive situation can help someone pursue a goal, while reflection on values may lead them to reconsider the goal itself.

Duckworth’s claim is not that surroundings determine everything. People cannot always change where they are, and changing jobs, relationships, or routines can be costly. Nor are preferences infinitely malleable. But situations can shape what people do and, over time, what they want. Choosing where to be and who to be with is one way to influence the conditions of a life; deciding which goals deserve that support remains a separate question.