Forget Grit
Even the luminaries of the self-help genre have begun to recognize how little in life we can actually control.
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In retrospect, 2016, the year that Angela Duckworth published Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, may have been a high-water mark for the dogged go-getter‑ism she was selling. Her book landed just as Hillary Clinton, that avatar of tenacity, seemed poised to win the presidency and Alexander Hamilton was rapping on Broadway about not giving up his shot. You could still just barely discern within each of the billionaires who bestrode Silicon Valley the dork with unusual willpower who had made it. And among the books clustered near Grit in airport bookstores—where the American self is apparently at its most moldable—were other pitches for individual hardiness, including efforts to make Stoicism hot again.
When I read Grit now, it feels to me like a taunt. Economic mobility has stalled, nonhumans are encroaching on our jobs, and COVID has scarred us with the knowledge that the unforeseen can creep up at any moment. You can be as gritty as sandpaper and still feel trampled on.
Duckworth herself now seems ready to concede that our mind alone can’t control the direction of our life, that it doesn’t all happen “from the inside out,” as she put it in Grit. Back then, she arrived at the not-quite-mind-blowing conclusion that to be “the best of the best”—as accomplished as Olympic swimmers, Scripps National Spelling Bee champions, the president of Cinnabon—you had to really care about winning and work hard at it. “Today I wake up every day asking the same question that led me to psychology in the first place: Why are some people more successful than others?” she writes in her new book, Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best. “But I no longer believe that a complete answer begins and ends with the individual.”
Adam Grant, another best-selling psychologist, appears to have hit a similar wall. In Vibe: The Secrets of Strong Connections in a Lonely World, his sixth book, he departs from his relentless focus on self-transformation and looks instead at “the quality of connection between people.” For an author whose previous books are mostly about remaking yourself in the image of superachievers (he, too, has a thing for elite swimmers), this new endeavor feels like a departure: to consider that mercurial thing that happens between us and other people.
Duckworth and Grant are colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania (he is at the Wharton School). They are also both associated with positive psychology, the field created by Martin Seligman at the school in the late 1990s—Seligman was Duckworth’s dissertation adviser. He rejected psychology’s focus on mental illness and wanted to identify the conditions under which human “flourishing” happens. Positive psychology was, at least in its own self-understanding, trying to apply empirical science to the ancient philosophical question of how to live a good life; Seligman wanted, as he recently wrote, to see if the field could “make the world a better place.”
But the approach underwent something of a corporate transformation as it migrated into business schools and HR departments. One of Duckworth’s first grit studies examined the kind of cadet who thrives at West Point, and Grant looked at businesses such as Google and Facebook. Their evidence base, case studies, and examples continued to be drawn overwhelmingly from schools, companies, elite performers, and athletes (all those swimmers). What they were measuring was how you maximize performance, which is some distance from Aristotle.
By the time the psychologists each strapped on a microphone and took to the TED stage in the 2010s with compressed, bullet-point versions of their research, they were ready for the self-help-book section. Their arrival helped give a glow-up to an enterprise that has thrived from the start on the notion that your inner resources alone, properly unearthed and deployed, will propel you to become the most successful version of you. In Self-Help (1859), the book that gave the genre its name, the Scottish journalist Samuel Smiles wrote that “help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates.” What method did advice-givers deploy? Extract formulas for inner drive from vivid models of extraordinary achievement, and never mind how much gets left out—those pesky forces of genetics and upbringing, economics and history, not to mention luck. Duckworth and Grant joined in, and their best sellers got blurbed by the business and media elite (Mark Cuban, Oprah Winfrey, Sheryl Sandberg, Arianna Huffington).
Yet now they seem to be swerving onto more unruly terrain. Are their new books, I wondered, prepared to question some of the tenets of the venerable self-made-man myth? A person’s social world, the one outside their control that impinges on them at every turn, would seem to be key to understanding a rise or fall. Is that what Situated and Vibe, products of a disorienting moment, would do: look around and realize how little power we actually have over the course of our own lives?
That isn’t what these books do. Grant does acknowledge the “uncertainty, complexity, and conflict” that characterize most of our encounters once we leave the confines of our mind. “Like it or not,” Duckworth now pauses to observe, “our every thought and action is profoundly shaped by our peers and mentors, by our culture, and even by the objects in our personal space.” Entire centuries-old fields of social science, as the authors both know well, have detailed how such forces influence us. But recognizing constraint and limitation is not what this genre is about. Its goal is to reassure us that we have ultimate control over our fate.
Grant’s focus is on vibing, a word he uses to describe that ephemeral state when people or a group connect deeply—when “conversations pulse with energy. Thoughts soar. Trust grows. Time flies.” He insists that this is a “skill set that can be learned and taught,” and that it is crucial to one’s success. What follows is an assortment of studies to establish the ideal conditions for generating this crucial synergistic energy. In one of them, the same woman approached two different groups of male hikers trekking through a rainforest and, after asking them to fill out a questionnaire, she tore off a piece of paper, wrote down her number, and handed it to each of them. She met the first group on an ordinary bridge, and only one in eight men later called. But half of the men in the second group, which she encountered on a narrow suspension bridge swaying 230 feet above churning rapids, called her.
The takeaway? What deepens a relationship is being in an “emotionally intense situation.” Again and again, Grant plucks broad lessons from social-psychology experiments so odd that I came away wondering how big the sample size could possibly be, whether correlation and causation were getting confused—and, not least, how to apply the findings. Grant proposes engineering a group outing to such a bridge or a haunted house or, God help me, an improv-comedy class.
Unlike his earlier books, which are largely about shifting one’s mindset, there is only so much you can do to master your environment or other people, though Grant makes lots of suggestions. Throw dinner parties, but ensure that they are “carefully choreographed.” For example, ask guests to each throw one shoe in a pile and then take turns grabbing a shoe and holding it up for the owner to claim. “At dessert time, I prompted people to play musical chairs,” he proudly reports. I guess trust grew during these pre-K games? Often Grant slips into a style that reads like a manual for robots learning how to act like humans. “Laughing during and after disagreements,” he advises, “is one of the most effective ways to maintain a healthy bond.”
But you can’t really reverse engineer something like vulnerability or attentiveness or love. Grant’s attempt to script and quantify the ineffable connections among “associates, allies, pals, and companions”—his byzantine taxonomy of vibers—just seems condescending. Isn’t it the truest of truisms to say that “relying on our first impressions is shortsighted”? His tendency to end sections on a sententious note only adds to the patronizing tone. “A strong bond can last for years,” he intones, “but forming one doesn’t have to take years. Sometimes a little heat is enough to build a blazing fire.”
Duckworth’s approach is more schematic, conveyed succinctly by a “Three Boxes Model”: “Situation,” “Thoughts,” and “Response.” To take her most basic example, if you put your workout clothes where you can see them (situation), exercise will come to mind (thoughts), and because “changing your thoughts, in turn, automatically changes your behavior,” you’ll go for a jog (response). At a small scale, sure, this works: If you want to eat better, place carrots and apples around the house.
But Duckworth goes bigger. In Grit, she made the case for personal agency; here, she’s introducing “situational agency.” “Like the best of the best, you, too, can proactively seek out situations optimized to achieve your fullest potential,” she writes. If you don’t like the culture in which you’re embedded, if it’s cramping that potential, go elsewhere. Rearrange your environment for maximum grittiness.
Yet her guidance is strangely out of touch. Among her case studies, she focuses on, who else, an Olympic swimmer, Léon Marchand, and his decision to move from France to Tempe, Arizona, so that he could train with a world-renowned coach. Keep in mind that both of Marchand’s parents, as well as an uncle, were Olympic swimmers; that he had joined a swim club at age 6; and that he had already placed sixth in the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo before his move. From this fine-tuned trajectory—he went on to win four gold medals—Duckworth concludes that anything is possible for any of us if we just change our location: “In those moments when your challenge seems daunting, ask yourself, what would Léon do? And remember what he did do: Léon Marchand got on a plane.”
Never mind that relocating is hardly simple for anyone. Is our own situation always so clear to us? And if you change it, how do you know you’re making it better and not worse? Duckworth advises parents who want to improve their children’s opportunities to consider moving to school districts with better teachers and more resources, even if it means living in a smaller home. What if the child gets bullied at that new school? What if they resent having to share a room with their annoying sibling? Every circumstance in a person’s life is multidimensional. Describing the many factors at work is daunting enough, but pinpointing what can (and should) be changed is like trying to yank a tablecloth from a set table without breaking any dishes.
Duckworth doesn’t see the problem. She has yet more boxes, these for items labeled “uncontrollable” and “controllable,” as if the two can always and easily be parsed. The effects of “the modern world” and “your genes” (uncontrollable) get put in one category, and “the culture of where you work and live now” and “your mindset” (controllable) get put in another. I did a double take when I saw these neat divisions. Had Duckworth just cracked the great mystery of nature versus nurture?
One of the more nonsensical studies she cites found that growing up in a household with 500 books had the equivalent effect on a child’s “lifetime educational attainment” as having college-educated parents. How did this study even work? Can you isolate the effects of the books? Who else but college-educated parents would fill their house with that many books? Duckworth is not concerned with such details. The lesson lies in having books around (controllable), and she lectures parents accordingly: “Situationally wise parents don’t rush out to buy their children the latest iPhone. Instead, they purchase as many books as they can afford, line their walls with bookshelves and not TV screens, and take their children to the library on weekends.”
Duckworth and Grant have fallen into the same self-help trap. Situated and Vibe gesture at the realm beyond our immediate power, but they are still about how we can flex our willpower for the sake of more and more success. Duckworth refers approvingly to the Serenity Prayer, but she seems to miss what actually makes it meaningful. This is a prayer for people working on accepting their smallness and fallibility—it was popularized by recovering alcoholics. It is a prayer of realism, not ambition. The possibility of change exists, but only once you recognize and embrace the notion that many things will always be impossible to change.
Every self-help book is also an autobiography, even if unintentionally so. Why should we listen to such writers if they haven’t faced and overcome the problems they purport to solve? Both Duckworth and Grant reveal themselves as obsessive overachievers. Both went to Harvard. Duckworth was a consultant at McKinsey, then had stints teaching middle and high school before getting her Ph.D. in psychology. Grant’s friends called him Mr. Facts as a kid—he was the boy who fired off baseball statistics when they were just trying to trade cards. Despite his fear of heights, in high school he became a springboard diver good enough to be in the Junior Olympics. He got his master’s and doctorate in three years.
There’s nothing wrong with being driven. But compulsively performance-oriented people—in my experience, at least—find it hard to resist monitoring their behavior until there are zero unknowns. Grant hinted at this internal struggle in a 2013 New York Times Magazine profile: “For me, in my moments of idleness, I experience the most existential anxiety, so I like that every moment is scheduled, even when it’s having on my calendar that I’m going to watch a television show with my wife. It means my brain is engaged in other things, and it’s not going to be a terrifying evening.”
This frantic need to conquer uncertainty comes through in his books. He starts with humility, but what follows is an intense self-surveillance, a search for objective measures of how he’s doing. As he began writing for a popular audience, he has recalled, he pined for his diver days, when he was meticulously rated on the size of the splash as he entered the water. So he assembled colleagues to rate every new article and book chapter he produced on a scale of zero to 10.
Look around at all that resists being easily tweaked toward “excellence”—not least other people and reality itself—and the limits of self-help appear unavoidable. Duckworth reveals this at one point in Situated, in a way that I’m not sure she even realizes. In a genuinely vulnerable moment, she recounts a marital crisis after a lifetime of assuming that, with enough grit, she could manage everything. When her husband’s real-estate-development company encountered hard times, their relationship frayed; she cried herself to sleep every night and contemplated separation. Following the advice of her book, Duckworth reports that much of the solution lay in shifting the elements in box one, altering their schedules and restructuring their work life to create a new situation: Now they could “sleep, exercise, and laugh a little every single day.”
But that doesn’t seem to be what really saved them. She also describes all the therapy they undertook, with “tremendous reluctance” on her part—and with three therapists: one for her, one for her husband, and another for both of them. This is not changing the situation. Therapy is about better understanding yourself within a situation, tracing your patterns, learning to see others better as well. The work entailed is not optimization. It’s about dropping illusions. For Duckworth and her husband, it meant articulating the “messy bits,” the “sadness, confusion, fear, and doubt that each of us had been carrying in silence.” Doing what Léon Marchand would do—get on a plane to another city—was precisely not the point.
Every time I toggled between reading these books and opening the newspaper, I was reminded of just how inadequate their self-help message feels for this moment. When Duckworth and Grant talk about “culture”—which they do, a lot—they’re often referring to the highly controllable, measurable, top-down cultures of sports teams, tech companies, consulting firms. Their books’ neatness does not leave room for the feeling of being completely stuck, individually and collectively, and also buffeted by a world swirling out of our control. Most days, I feel like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, strapped into a chair, eyelids held open, forced to watch norms collapse, economies rupture, ecosystems crumble.
Personal or situational agency sounds great, but maybe what we really need is moral agency. Grant has occasionally garnished his stories of start-up successes with mentions of such leaders as Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela, to curiously dispiriting effect: The struggle to reshape values and society blurs into having a good pitch deck and some move-fast-and-break-things gumption. It’s the abiding ethos of expediency and mastery that limits the self-helpfulness of these new books—their emphasis on getting somewhere quickly and knowing with total certainty that you have arrived. Is that the point of fulfilling work, of satisfying family life, of friendship, of really anything worth doing?
This article appears in the December 2026 print edition with the headline “Self-Help Needs Help.”
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