Angela Duckworth's tips for avoiding procrastination & motivating teenagers | Homeroom with Sal

Hi everyone! Welcome to the Khan Academy Daily Homeroom live stream. For those of y'all who are wondering what this is, this is something that we started when we began seeing the school closures really around the world as a way to stay connected and have interesting conversations about things related to the crisis, education, or just frankly interesting conversations.

Before we get into today's conversation, which will promise to be interesting—I'm using that word a lot right now—I do want to make a special shout-out to several corporations that stepped up. We are a non-profit, and we only exist through philanthropic donations. We were running at a deficit even before the crisis, and now our server costs have gone up. We're trying to accelerate a bunch of programs, so special thanks to Bank of America, google.org, AT&T, Fastly, and Novartis for stepping up really in record time and helping us close that gap. We do continue to run a deficit, so any donation, even a three-dollar or five-dollar donation, those add up, and that's what allows Khan Academy to do what we do and make it free, non-commercial, and accessible to students all over the world, and teachers and parents all over the world.

So with that said, I'm eager to introduce our guest, Angela Duckworth. Angela, how are you?

I'm fine, Sal. How are you?

I'm doing all right! And Angela, you have the distinction of being our first repeat guest on the live stream. I'm so excited! I hope I don't blow it.

It might be based on something that—we don't just do that willy-nilly.

Okay, it is a compliment! So for those of y'all who did not see the first episode with Angela a few weeks ago, Angela's really one of the world leaders on talking about mindset, particularly grit, and how grit relates to things like resilience and growth mindset.

You can imagine in this COVID socially distanced world we're all living in, where we're trying to figure out how to keep people motivated, how do we keep learning, and how do we deal with everything going on with our lives? Angela is a really interesting person to talk with, and we have a bunch of questions already from our last session that I hope to get to some of them.

For any of y'all on Facebook or YouTube, feel free to add questions, and we have team members at Khan Academy who are going to be surfacing them to myself and Angela. But Angela, maybe a good place to start—last time we talked a lot about growth mindset and grit—and it’s kind of this notion that you can easily get into this view that like, "Look, if you have a growth mindset, you fail, you hit some adversity, you just keep chipping away at it, and eventually, you’ll get to the other side."

But how does that equate with the other notion that, you know, not everyone has the same starting point? Not everyone has the same tools at their disposal. So how do you reconcile that? There’s growth mindset and grit and resilience, and then there's equity, really.

Yeah, I have lately been—not just lately—I have been reading criticism of my work and also Carol Dweck's work on growth mindset. And when I get past the natural human reaction, which is total defensiveness, and I really listen, I hear something that's really valuable. I think the critiques are that if you talk about grit, resilience, and growth mindset and character, it sounds like it's all about the kid—it's all about the student—and the entire burden of responsibility falls on their shoulders.

There's no mention of equity and poverty, lack of opportunity—massive differences that we're all well aware exist, not only in our country but around the world. I think the reconciliation is this: it is not that these ideas about mindset and learning and grit are at odds with—you know, it's not an either/or; like it's either the situation or it's the person. It's both.

And, you know, very briefly, I’ll just say, Sal, that in psychology, there was like a war between people in psychology—psychological researchers who thought that, you know, so much of our behavior was about our personality and who we were—then there were the other psychologists who said, "No, it's really about the situation." And the war is over because everyone recognizes that they both matter.

I was once in a classroom in a public school that shall remain nameless, but these two boys were sitting at their desks. All the other kids were doing their work; they were all on these laptops, you know, pounding away on some assigned activity. These two kids are doing nothing. Now if you walked in just at that moment, you would say, "Well, those two kids don’t have grit; those two kids are doing nothing." But I walked in actually before the bell rang, and I saw all the students walk up to the laptop cart, and these two boys were last in line, and they got the two broken laptops. They couldn't do anything all period because they lacked opportunity.

And I think that's the mistake that I hear critics not wanting to make: not to mistake lack of opportunity for lack of grit. I, you know, have to say that I completely agree with that.

That's powerful! I mean your example is a good one; if you've got the broken laptop, I mean that's an extreme example. Of course, you're not going to be able to even apply your grit or your growth mindset, and it is fascinating how at many times in academic circles, people can get into these religious camps. But it's clearly not one or the other! To your point, that environment and opportunity for sure is going to make a difference, but whatever set of cards you are dealt, if you are able to approach that with a growth mindset given that context, you're going to get further—all else equal.

That's not to say that if two kids don't get to a certain place or the same place, that you can somehow blame the kid who didn't get there on their lack of mindset. It might have been other things; it might have been context. It makes all the sense in the world to me on that.

And, I mean, you know, just double clicking on that a little bit, this question from Facebook—Richie Gitler asked, and I think a lot of parents are wondering this, for at least one of their children—how do you help inspire a kid who wants to practice to want to practice something? Is it essential that we simply do things we like to do in order to be successful?

And we touched about that a little bit in our last conversation, but how do you motivate someone to practice maybe something that it's not obvious they love—or do you just say, "Well, only do the things that you love?" Or how can you learn to love things?

You know, since our last conversation, which is now a few weeks ago, so I've been thinking about what you said in that part of the conversation, which is you said that pretty much anything can become fascinating to you. And when you need to record a video, you like—you don’t record it until you can become fascinated. But gosh, like what couldn't be—what would fall outside of that category?

And I've been thinking about it because I wonder whether for you, as who you are at your core as a teacher, and so what excites you is being able to understand something and then being able to teach it and communicate it. You can certainly tell me, but let me respond first to that question directly.

I think that when kids are starting out in something, the thing to emphasize is interest and enjoyment, and to wait a little bit, if you can, to impose the hardest, most challenging, repetitive kind of practice. And that is because until a child gets engaged in something, it's a very romantic period. In fact, some scientists use the term "the romantic period" to describe that inertial kind of flirtation—you kind of have a joy to what you're doing, and then you love it so much that you can evolve into somebody who's willing to do more drills, more like really hard stuff.

Now, with school, something Sal, that you have much more experience with than I do—you might say that, you know, for math, for example, something I know that you know where Khan Academy all started, it's not necessarily like—if you think to yourself, "When is this romantic period gonna come?" because, you know, my kid really doesn't love it.

I think that even if you could just take it as a principle, right? Like how much enjoyment and interest and fun can there be? Maybe it won't be as fun as, you know, Minecraft, but the more the better! And the earlier you are in your development as a learner, the more you really need that, I think.

Yeah, the way I think you are right—I realize that my mindset towards certain things maybe isn't as mainstream as we would like that we would all, you know, I can get excited about almost anything. You know, this weekend, you know, I'm swiffering—the wet swiffering the house, and I'm fascinated by it! I feel like, "How does this work?"

Yeah, I love it! I love it! So, you know, I do try to convince myself that if there's something I'm gonna do, I might as well enjoy it; I might as well appreciate what I'm going to get out of it.

And you know, a good example—you know kids for the most part don't complain if they're working out at the gym and they gotta run on a treadmill for 30 minutes, or, you know, they’re trying to weight lift, and they're doing these really weird exercises that work on their forearms—or something like that because they know that it's all—well, first of all, they oftentimes will enjoy it because they're like, "Hey, I'm working on something! I'm building a habit that's going to make me better in some way—more prepared for battle with the world, or understand the world, or be able to engage with the world in a stronger way!"

So that's my gut sense is that the more people just appreciate that, the more that even some of the little hairy things that you have to deal with in academics, you can kind of power through them because you're like, "Oh, this is going to make me better at being a holistic person."

You know, my son is, you know, takes piano lessons, and he loves playing piano. And famously when you play piano, you have to practice your scales. Scales in a vacuum, you know, just going up and down—that's obviously not composing, you're obviously not going to make friends at a party by just playing your scales—it might not be particularly that fun. But when you recognize that by building that muscle memory and getting better and better at your scales—and even professional pianists practice their scales—the scales actually kind of become fun and become interesting, and you know you're becoming better every time you do them.

Yeah, I think you're reminding us, Sal, that you know what's interesting and fun isn't just objectively what the activity is. There are piano teachers—I specifically know of one named Cindy Lamb in Pasadena, California—who makes scales fun! She makes games out of them. Her students actually enjoy doing scales.

So it's not just like is it enjoyable or not enjoyable, but it's in a way like how it's framed. One thing that makes things really boring for kids is when we don't give them a purpose or a point to it. Like "Do this worksheet." "Do this." Why? Just do it! You're not giving the student any reason to feel like this activity is connected to any larger goal.

And actually, there is a science of boredom, and one of the ways things can be boring is because it lacks any obvious purpose. Another—and I actually just wrote about this, and I actually mentioned Khan Academy specifically as an antidote to this.

So one other way to be bored is—so I just said one way to be bored is like, "What's the point of this?" Another way to be bored is if things are too easy or too hard, and either of those create the psychology of boredom.

And the reason I mentioned Khan Academy in this little essay is because I think this is why, among other reasons, Khan Academy is so great. Because it allows students to self-kinda calibrate, and also, through your backend algorithms, to deliver to students like what they need in their sweet spot.

But anyway, as parents and as educators, I think the principle is, you know, can you make things more enjoyable and interesting? Can you, you know, give kids the bigger picture? Like, "This is why we’re doing these push-ups," or "This is why we’re doing scales," and also, "Can you calibrate so things are neither too easy nor too hard?"

Yeah, and I have to remind myself of that all the time. I mean especially with—I've talked on this livestream—our older two, my 11-year-old and 8-year-old, for the most part, have been quite good in this socially distanced remote learning, whatever you want to call it, world. But our five-year-old has been difficult, and it's very easy to fall into that frustrated parent trap of like, "Look, you just need to do this one worksheet! You just have to do this one exercise in it!"

You know, but they kind of get entrenched because—and then if you just—and then you both escalate, right? At some point, you're like giving them a timeout because they're screaming at you—or they, you know—and I've had to learn some—oftentimes the hard way—you have to sometimes take a step back and say, "Okay, how do I put this in a context that in this case my youngest, my son, will have fun?"

Like, can we turn this into a game? This— even a five-year-old will rebel if they feel like they're being forced or coerced versus if they are invested in the project. And even if they don’t see, you know—they, you know, it’s hard to convince a five-year-old that like, "Hey, by writing better, you know, you’re going to have this ability to communicate in the world, and you’re going to do that the rest of your life!" But even just to say, you know, "It's building a muscle, it's fun, it's a game," I think is a start.

So one thing I forgot to introduce you—what people saw you on your title on the screen is that you have started something called the Character Lab. Many people here have asked about it from YouTube: Sean number—what is Character Lab? James Liu—question for Angela a bit about resources in Character Lab? Arcade Jack—what is Character Lab? So people want to know, Angela, what is Character Lab?

Thank you for those three questions because I’m so in love with Character Lab! It's a non-profit I started with two educators, and its mission is to advance scientific insights that help kids thrive. Now, character is a word that Aristotle and Maria Montessori and Martin Luther King used, but I think commonly it’s called social emotional learning or 21st-century skills—call it whatever you want.

The list is the list that all parents and educators want kids to develop: gratitude, curiosity, empathy, social intelligence, grit, growth mindset—there's a science behind any of those things that I mentioned. And I think the idea that we're living in exciting times that rather than just sermonizing to our kids about these things that we hope they'll develop, we can actually draw on random assignment experiments that show how to improve growth mindset, and ditto for gratitude, etc.

So if you go to that website, it's all like Khan Academy—philanthropically supported. So if you are a parent or an educator in particular, I hope that you find direct dialing scientists through this website as it were because every word on that website is written by a scientist, not by an intermediary. And I highly recommend it! We've used the work at Character Lab. I look at sometimes a reference myself as family, and we have a lab school we started, and we've leveraged a lot of the work at Character Lab to think about—because one of the things we try to do at the lab school is not just kids are developing academically but social emotional development is a very explicit part.

We've used a lot of the taxonomies and frameworks from the Character Lab to think about how do we even, you know, what dimensions matter, and how do we even measure or think about measuring some of these things? So from YouTube, we have a teacher here, Daniel Kinriss, asks, "How can teachers encourage grit during remote learning with students out of reach? It seems easier than ever for students to give up."

Ah, this is a question that is near and dear to my heart. I have an 18-year-old and a 17-year-old at home— a little bit farther down the track than you, so in terms of how old my kids are. But, you know, when there's not only distance learning but there's also this like very blurry line between morning, afternoon, and evening; between weekday and weekend—it’s just very easy for, like, suddenly nine days to slip away and like nothing really got done. So it’s a terrific question.

I think the person that I've turned to the most during this distance learning period for wisdom is Ron Berger. Sal, you know about the Expeditionary Learning schools, and Ron in particular, as the Chief Academic Officer, is such a sage on these things. And I think what his advice would be is to actually take the opportunity of distance learning and this, you know, enforced strangeness that we have as educators, and use it to move more aggressively toward project-based learning.

Towards, toward things where, like, you know, it’s not just like do this worksheet or fill out this thing—it's like we have a project! Like, we're going to try to figure out, you know, how to make recycling work in this neighborhood, or you could do something that’s very COVID-specific, like there are lots of older people in our neighborhood.

How can we take on as a project, like, getting them their groceries? Now, some of the stuff you're thinking—how does this have to, you know, what does it have to do with like reading, writing, and arithmetic? And I think there it’s not easy to like always draw the line, but that's the challenge!

In other words, when you do projects that are authentic, you do have to do a little more work as an educator to think how you're going to integrate some of the basic skills that we need students to learn, but the tilt, I think, is really powerful. Because when you do have a project that you're excited about, you're not dragging yourself out of bed to force yourself to do it—you’re excited to do it! And you’re kind of thinking about it frankly like all the time!

So to learn more, I think if you google Expeditionary Learning and Ron Berger, you'll find that he's writing a lot of wise things right now. And you bring up an interesting point—we talked about these kind of camps, these dogmatic camps that sometimes form in academic circles. Before we were talking about, you know, is it about context and equity, or is it more about mindset?

And to your point, it’s not an either/or—it’s that both matter. And you know I've seen a similar—because we were talking about project-based learning, I've seen a similar type of dogmatic battle in education circles where there’s—I guess you could say the traditionalists who would say, "No, you've got to learn those skills; you've got to learn, you know, practice your scales, so to speak, before you become a great pianist." And then you would have the more—you could say progressive educators, project-based oriented programs, who are like, "No, you should start composing on day one!"

So it becomes interesting, but what I heard you say is it still is a bit of a both—you shouldn’t—you shouldn’t—it's not all or nothing on one side or the other!

Yeah, absolutely! You know, both! That is pretty much the answer to so many questions. And I think that is because there are trade-offs, right? And in project-based learning, you get certain advantages, but, you know, maybe you don’t get the, you know, super densely packed, like, you know, repetitive skill part, right? But then when you just do that, then maybe you lose a little bit of the intrinsic motivation and the purpose—and we were just talking about how that can be really demotivating.

So I think with project-based learning and maybe more traditional instruction—I’m not an expert or veteran educator, but it does seem to me that they are complementary. And when you see the best schools and the best classrooms, and frankly just the best learning environments more generally, there tends to be both rigor and autonomy. There tends to be, you know, both creative projects and like a systematic approach.

And this is, again, why it’s not easy to do, but I do think it’s what we’re all aiming for.

Yeah, completely agree! You know, just using a sports analogy, if you’re a football player, you obviously have to practice playing football; like you have to play in games, like those are real games, and that’s kind of the projects. But you’ll also do sprints and weight lifting and, you know, drills catching or throwing up—you know, just different random exercises that feel a little bit—and you’ll perfect those exercises.

But once again, if you just did that, you’d be like, "What’s the point?" But when you know that, "Hey, this is making me more prepared for a game," and I may or may not use some of these skills in a given game, but it's a useful toolkit for the rest of my life, then all of a sudden that too can be motivating.

And that’s what I tell kids: I was like, "Look, you know, I’m not sure whether you're going to have to use this method for factoring a quadratic in some point in the next five years. I am genuinely not sure. But I am sure that understanding this is going to be—you can build on it so that you can learn things like statistics; you can learn things like trigonometry. And I can’t tell you how many areas—I mean statistics—you talk about a project! Almost any project, if you want to do it legitimately at a kind of an impact-the-world level, statistics is going to be a piece of that.

You know, almost anything that you're making, designing, creating, trigonometry, geometry in some basic level of algebra is going to be a part of it. You know, anything you do in this world, being able to have reasonable reading comprehension and writing capability is going to be kind of table stakes in this world.

So it’s good to make sure that you don’t have that one spelling error that, you know, that you're like, “Wow, what is this?” You know, is he illiterate? which I'm guilty of sometimes! I always blame it on typos!

But it's having that conversation in a—like, you know, sometimes people ask me like, "Well, how old do your kids need to be before you can talk to them at a level of sophistication about, you know, some of these issues like the metacognition? Is it too beyond them to like, you know, really understand why they're doing this?"

And I’m like it’s pretty much never too young, really, honestly. Just start! I mean, you know, kids are smarter than you! So they’ll, you know, don’t use jargon—they don’t understand. Try to explain it another way, but I think, you know, one of the big changes in education—I wonder if you agree, Sal—is, well, I hope it’s a change in education—that, you know, I’m not saying that like the student and the teacher are interchangeable and there’s no reason why we even have to—I’m not saying that.

I’m just saying that students are remarkably perceptive and intelligent, and they can understand when you say like, "This is why we’re doing this!" Like, you know, the scope and sequence looks like this, and like we have to get through this part, so you can get to this part, and we don’t get this part.

You know, so I think they're not too young to understand any of those things, and we should never assume that they're too young to understand those things. We should always at least try to communicate to them like the why of what they’re doing.

I agree 100%! I think it’s so easy for us to assume our five, six, seven, eight-year-olds, you know, that they don’t think about how the world works, but they do! And if you talk to them about jobs and the competitive workplace and how—and what skills you need to be able to participate, it’s funny—I think there was—was this was many years ago, like five or six years ago? I got an email from a mother, and she had a picture of her child, and he was working like diligently as a seven-year-old! I felt that!

So there was some interview like this where I was talking about the future of work and that, you know, the future of work is going to be defined by your ability to keep learning—that you’re not just going to have a set of skills that you can apply until you get your pension—that automation and some, you know, it’s going to make labor artificial intelligence, robotics, so you want to be able to participate at the top of that pyramid in the knowledge economy and get as many people there.

And so this mother, I guess saw that interview with her seven-year-old son, and then immediately after that interview, he went to his room, and like she didn’t like see him for another hour. And like she went to the room, she’s like, "What are you doing?" He's like, "I’m working on Khan Academy." And he—she’s like, "Why?" And he's like, "I need to make sure I don’t get economically marginalized."

And I think he uses words like “almost economically marginalized.” So clearly a precocious kid using words like that at age seven! But he said something that felt like, "I want to make sure that I don’t get like, you know, automated out of the economy."

So he definitely understood! And that—that's kind of that. I remember there's, you know, I'm dating myself; I'm, you know, there's a Carl Malone quote—famous basketball player for the Utah Jazz—and he used to imagine—he used to say, "Whenever I get tired, I imagine that my competitors are at the gym."

And I don’t want that to be, you know, to stress people out that you have to always be like on top of it, but that can also be a little bit of a motivator! That, like, you know, look, you don’t want your kids to get stressed out, but you also don’t want them to live in a reality where they think that, you know, actually, I see this—the fire—I grew up not so wealthy, so I had a little bit of a fire in my belly because, you know, I could say, "Look, I want a different standard of living!"

Oh no! My mom, you know, we were—you know, she raised us by herself, and she was a cashier at some convenience stores, and you know, so she was the year I went to apply to college; she was making $16,000 a year.

But that, you know, for me that created kind of a little bit of a fire in my belly! You know, I would see friends whose parents were doctors and engineers and lawyers. I was like, "That's a good life! They're living in a nice house, they are able to go on vacations, they go to restaurants; they don't reuse paper towels! Like that’s the life I want!"

I still reuse paper towels every now and then, but that's the life I want. But you know, you oftentimes worry about I think kids who grow up middle class or even upper middle class—they kind of say, "Oh, my parents did this. This must be kind of easy! This is just the way it is!"

But then they later get a bit of a rude awakening that, no, the world sometimes can be a pretty—you know, these jobs just don’t fall in your lap! That you—you need to prepare for them! And there are kids with that fire in their belly who are preparing for it from a very young age because they, you know, they see the reason at an early age; they say, "Wow! If I if I stay on track with my studies and graduate from high school and do well in college, I can live over there and I can go on vacations and I can support my family! And if I don't, I might be living under financial stress for a very, very long time."

And, you know, to your only point about equity, it’s not like it’s just all about the kid’s mindset; for sure it is a lot about support! You know, even though I didn’t grow up particularly that well off, I had a lot of support! You know, I had supports from teachers who believed in me and who took extra attention with me. I had—I was exposed to people who did make it that way, so I was able to even see that side of the world.

But yeah, it is fascinating how we can kind of keep that motivation by letting people know a little bit about the realities of the world, but without them getting too stressed about it.

Yeah, absolutely! And, you know, use your judgment, but I think one of the through lines of what you’re saying and what I agree with is that, you know, kids don’t need to be sheltered from like—my dad, who was not so great at, you know, thinking about how to talk to kids—he like just talked to me like I was an adult, and that wasn’t always great, but it mostly was, right?

So, you know, I learned about supply and demand; I learned about his particular view of the economy, and I learned about thermodynamics. Anyway, I think kids are so much smarter and so much more ready than we often give them credit for, and if we try, we can have conversations with them about, you know, what it means to be marginalized in the knowledge economy.

And maybe we can find words that are like a little more intuitive for them, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to have those conversations!

I think I’m a little bit like your dad. I’m guilty of actually—all my kids, like all of the lullabies I sing to them are like classic rock songs that I happen to know the lyrics for. So like my kids like—my their nighttime lullaby, like I still just last night for, you know, Azad, who’s five and a half years old, we— I sing "Hotel California" with him.

So he’s like, "What does it mean that her mind is tiffany twisted? What’s a Mercedes Benz? What’s Calitas? Why does it have a warm smell?" By the way, if you can explain to me "Hotel California," then maybe I could listen in because, like, I honestly—it’s a deep song! Is it literal, or is it figurative? You can check out any time you like, but you just can never leave.

That’s led to a lot of conversations with my kids! What does it mean to check out but not to leave?

Goodwill! If you ever get to a really succinct unpacking of the "Hotel California," I would appreciate that because, you know, I’m still—there's a few times I have to kind of, you know, my five-year-old's like, "Why do they stab it with their steely knives? And what beast are they trying to kill?" And I’m like, "No, let's not go there right now, okay? But yeah, time for bed! Why aren’t you asleep?"

Okay, so here’s a good question from Facebook: Steven Catrell—before people start getting on my horrible parenting habits! So, from Steven Catrell, "What are tips on developing a sense of purpose among teenagers?" Great question!

You know, one of the like less-known but I think really important facts about adolescence is that, you know, teenagers are maybe more purpose-driven during that period of life than any other time. And so we have a stereotype of teenagers being selfish and even narcissistic, and really to the contrary, they’re extremely motivated by fairness, by equity, by social change.

I’ve witnessed this myself with my own 17 and 18-year-old. I often get like mini lectures on how I have to—I think of myself as someone who’s like reasonably feminist and like they—they update me and correct me when they think that that’s needed.

So then the question is like, "How do we channel all that adolescent, you know, purpose-driven motivation?" And I think one real challenge this particular summer is that a lot of things that I would typically suggest, like volunteer for this or, you know, do that, are, you know, those are foreclosed.

So it’s going to take a little more creativity and proactivity this summer to channel purpose appropriately for teenagers. One thing that I just heard of is that there are—and I’ll send you the links—so, you know, it’s not perfect, but honestly, I think it’s still a great way for teenagers to tutor younger kids all throughout the summer.

As you well know, Sal, what the pandemic has done is not only shine the light on lack of equity, but also increased lack of equity. And I think there are a lot of people, including you and me, who are terrified at the learning losses, particularly for less advantaged kids.

So if you’ve got a purpose-driven teenager in the house, I’ll send some links over for ways that they could plug in as tutors. One of the silver linings is, like, it doesn’t matter where you live; like you can find a kid who’s in your time zone! And, you know, a starfish theory, right? Like prevent at least one child from falling behind this year.

Yeah, I’ll just doubly underline what you just said! You know, for any teenager or young person who says, "You know, what do I do with myself right now?" There’s never been—and at least in our lifetimes—a bigger opportunity where even a very young person from their bedroom could actually do a lot of good in the world.

To your point, you could tutor other people; you know, you could start a new organization that connects with maybe elderly who are living by themselves or just people who are living by themselves—helps with mental health issues—and all these things are set up to be able to do remotely.

And if you need to get out of the house, you know, getting groceries for folks, especially elderly, being able to do services for them, you know, help with their gardens! You can—any teenager, any young person out there, if you brainstorm for half an hour, you’re going to think of 30 really fascinating ways that you could really support a lot of folks right now.

Actors who are like writing their cell phone number on a piece of paper and then just like shoving it in mail slots, right? And by the way, as you might imagine, like not all the elderly are heavily into texting or, you know, any other.

So just like saying, "Call me! Call me! This is where I live! I would love to like pick up groceries or go to the pharmacy for you."

Yeah! Like you said, Sal, when you just sit down and start to make a list, like, you know, you realize that there’s so much to do—and I think actually that’s when teenagers are happiest when they’re being useful. And it’s an antidote to the kind of despair that I think a lot of teenagers are feeling—like an aimlessness and like, "Oh, all these things are taken from me."

But when you start going out and spending most of your day helping other people, like all of that basically evaporates.

Yeah, I think there’s another theme here, which is, you know, there’s this thing like teenage angst and then rebellion, and my belief is that that comes from the fact that they are proto-adults—that in most of human history they actually would be kind of on the hunting parties—they would be helping out with all the different things that the village has to take care of and the cooking, the cleaning, the teaching, the hunting, the fighting, whatever it might be.

But in our modern system—and we would do it in a multiple, multiple age groups—they would be with their uncles and their cousins and their aunts. But now we group them into these very, you know, fairly narrow age bands and they only—we tell them to only work, yeah, your GPA, your scores, your college admissions, your extracurriculars—that's where the box comes from!

Exactly! We’re going to rank you! Sorry—I mean for most of human history, it’s actually what you said—people, kids included, ran around in multi-age packs.

The five-year-olds are with the seven-year-olds; the seven-year-olds with the 12-year-olds. And by the way, when you see kids who are 5'7" and 12, you spontaneously see—or you see spontaneous collaboration, right?

12-year-olds take care of seven-year-olds; seven-year-olds take care of five-year-olds. Now we’re in this really weird era where we’re like, "Let’s take a thousand fifteen-year-olds and put them together!"

So they spend all their time and then we’re going to rank order them, right? So you’re just competing—they have no tangible responsibility other than these abstract, like, I believe you have to learn all the stuff—obviously, I’m a big believer in you gotta learn your biology, your chemistry, your writing, your reading, your math!

But it's all abstract, and it's all about their own performance in it—it isn’t about a collective! It isn’t about making it! And to your point, they are the most idealistic! I mean, you know, part of the reason, you know, a lot of soldiers and things are on the younger side—obviously, your body is very physically able there—but these are some of the more idealistic people.

And, you know, in history, sometimes people have taken not-so-great advantage of that, but they believe that change can happen, and they want the adventures in the world! They don’t want to just kind of fall into the day-to-day grind!

And so, yeah! 100% agree with you!

Wow! Whenever we chat, Angela, the time goes by very, very fast!

So maybe—

Yeah, did you have time for one more?

I have time for one more!

Yes! Okay, sounds good!

Let me see. Let me find a good one. These are all great! So there’s a couple of questions here, you know, I’ll group these together. Carly Angstrom, "What do you think is the best way to teach kids to break down their own large tasks?"

And by extension, all of us to break down—we’re talking a big problem you want to solve—loneliness? How do you say, you know, to our earlier point, you know, from YouTube? Audrey O'Mari, "Are there any strategies that you recommend for staying on task to be productive?"

And then Brielle Lee asked, "How can you connect the lack of motivation towards online learning with staying at home? I’ve noticed that many struggle to stay on task."

So, yeah! Just any parting thoughts on how do you break things down, stay motivated, stay on task, stay focused?

So I’ll just give one suggestion, and that is this intuition that you have—that a big thing needs to be broken up into small things—is exactly right!

And there was research actually not very far away from where Sal Khan lives by Al Bandura at Stanford, now many years ago, where he actually had elementary school kids who were learning math, and in one condition, they had to learn a lot of math, and in another condition, all he did was he helped break down the math—the same math—into sub-goals, into smaller parts.

And there was a dramatic benefit, and those kids did better! And I think the life lesson, as you say, Sal, not only for kids but for us is that when you have big things, you break them into small things!

And when you take those small things and you break them even further, that’s when I think you really get momentum! And I’ll just give one personal example: the hardest thing I ever did professionally was to write my book!

And when I thought about writing a book, it was like too big! Then I thought, well just work on Chapter One—still too big! Then I thought, well just work on like the first half of Chapter One—still too big! And I found myself procrastinating and just never feeling like I wanted to get started!

Then finally, I broke down the small things! Like today, I’m going to write a sentence—maybe! And what I meant by maybe is that I might throw out that sentence! Now, I had broken down the big thing, a book, into smaller things—a chapter into smaller!

So the thing that I had to do that day was tiny! And actually, I think that was a great strategy because once I wrote that sentence, I was like, well since I’m sitting here, I may as well write another one!

And in general, I think if we can help kids learn the skill of breaking down the big into small and getting started, then we’ll be actually a long way towards helping them finish what they begin!

Yeah, I couldn’t agree more! You know, that’s a lot of my narrative too—if you know, just so these tasks that you can take half an hour, hour, chip away at them—but then you look back on it, and you’re like, "Oh, there’s a lot!"

Yeah, it adds up—it’s better than nothing, which is basically what happens when you procrastinate is that then you’re doing nothing—just get moving! Just get moving!

So Angela, thank you so much! I mean, there continue to be so many great questions coming in, but, yeah! Thank you for all the research you’ve done and helping us think about how we can ourselves have more grit and how we can think about working with our children to get that going!

Thank you!

I so enjoyed this conversation!

Likewise! So thank you everyone for joining! As always, Angela Duckworth has, you know, informative and entertaining, and it’s always a pleasure to chat with about all topics.

We have several other really interesting folks coming on. We're going to have Tom Friedman later this week just talking about the world in this COVID world.

We’re going to have Stu Schmill from MIT admissions to talk about how college admissions or even the nature of college may be changing because of this crisis. And we have many, many more guests over the next couple of weeks.

So look forward to seeing you all; and don’t forget—we are non-profit! If you’re in a position to do so, please think about making a donation to Khan Academy.

Thanks, everyone!