Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best

by Angela Duckworth

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

From the #1 bestselling author of Grit, a new book that reveals the hidden power of situations and how you can shape them to bring out your best.

In Angela Duckworth’s first book, she showed that a common denominator of successful strivers is a blend of passion and perseverance she dubbed “grit.” This second book springs from her deepening realization that grit, while necessary, is sometimes not sufficient. How you situate yourself to meet a challenge can be crucial.

Duckworth’s in-depth research reveals the enormous influence wielded by the objects within arm’s reach, your peers and mentors, and even your zip code. Though you’re often told to make the best of your situation, it is far, far better to make your situation better first.

In Situated, you’ll
-Why your personality changes, sometimes dramatically, from one situation to another—and how you can harness that shift
-The secret to conquering temptation without willpower
-Why taking the less effortful path can feel like cheating but often solves a stubborn problem
-How the company you keep shapes the person you become
-The most effective ways to help others succeed

Highlighting four essential elements of successful situations, Duckworth shows how high performers like Taylor Swift, Michael Phelps, and Jerry Seinfeld create situations that make it easier to excel. And, with disarming honesty, she shares her own struggles with burnout and marriage—and how learning to change her situation, not herself, made all the difference. Whatever it is you want to achieve, there’s a situation that can make your journey easier.

It takes effort to make your situation your ally—but a little effort goes a long way...when you get situated.

Genres: Nonfiction, Self Help, Psychology, Business, Leadership, Audiobook, Personal Development

352 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 1, 2026

About the author

Angela Duckworth, PhD, is a 2013 MacArthur Fellow and professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. An expert in non-I.Q. competencies, she has advised the World Bank, NBA and NFL teams, and Fortune 500 CEOs. Prior to her career in research, she taught children math and science and was the founder of a summer school for low-income children that won the Better Government Award from the state of Massachusetts. She completed her BA in neurobiology at Harvard, her MSc in neuroscience at Oxford, and her PhD in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. More recently, she founded Character Lab, a nonprofit whose mission is to advance scientific insights that help kids thrive. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance is her first book.

Reviews

[Chris M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's an okay book. It looks into environment and external circumstances and how they shape your potential. A lot of what is discussed has already been discussed by other authors and researchers. It doesn't offer anything new or interesting, but does provide some good insights about the fundamental attribution error and how we often attribute mistakes or faults to the individual without considering external factors. This is very common in western culture. If anything, it makes you think about environment and circumstances and can help you identify between the things that you can change and the things that you cannot change.

[Meredith]

This ARC was sent to me free for review by Simon and Schuster. Situated builds upon Grit. Depending on how you feel about Grit, you may have different opinions.

Overall, I found this to be an easy read, but that is at the sacrifice of depth and research reporting. I, personally, am not a huge fan of very familial personal anecdotes in nonfiction books, especially of research. I find these sort of anecdotes to bias the research. Like it’s great you see your concept exhibited in your kid, but it is still a bias. I’d rather see examples of the principle in even more people that are not familial relations.

It seems like she is building upon some of the critiques myself and others developed of Grit because this is about the power of situation. While it does have a part devoted to situational agency, there are a lot of factors that inhibit the power of personal agency are not really mentioned or considered.

The theme of this book is 3 boxes - situation, thoughts, response.

I’m also nervous posting this review. Please be kind. 😅

[Jon Barr · Rating 5 out of 5]

Duckworth goes a couple steps back to ask if our environment can have just as much impact on our success as our effort. Her three-box model (or 6 box, if you include the aspirational version as well) is the perfect blend of simple and effective. Sure to be the nonfiction book of the season.

[Kim · Rating 1 out of 5]

If situations matter so much, then access to better situations also matters. People cannot necessarily change their workplace, neighborhood, school, social network, mentors, or economic circumstances simply because they recognize that those environments are limiting them. At times, “situational agency” begins to sound like another form of individual responsibility: if your environment is not bringing out your best, engineer a better one. That works far better for people who already possess mobility, money, autonomy, and social capital.

The book also simplifies a complicated interaction among person, context, history, culture, power, and structural constraint into a highly accessible situation-thought-action framework. Useful, certainly, but not particularly novel, and sometimes too tidy for the phenomena it is meant to explain.

Situated is engaging and worthwhile, especially as a correction to the message of Grit. I just wish Duckworth had pushed harder on the implications of her own premise. Once we concede that context powerfully shapes human behavior, the question cannot only be how individuals can choose better situations. We also have to ask who gets to choose, who does not, and why.

[Helen Wu ✨ (Loves audiobooks) · Rating 4.25 out of 5]

4.25

Love me an informative, digestible, and timely book. I’ve stopped looking for mentors for a few years now. Great reminder to continue looking for mentors but also giving back. In the past, you would think the 10,000 hours of grit is enough, not necessarily true anymore. Who do we surround ourselves with and how we spend our time…and how we perceive things, equally important. Finished this book in one day. I like it!

[Sebastian Gebski · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've pick this one up, because the previous Duckworth's book ("Grit") resonated with me very strongly. Unfortunately, some things can't be replicated easily.

Retrospectively "Grit" didn't bring up any major discovery, there wasn't any deep scientific research there, no tremendous new method. It was the power of the mental shift (on what matters when it comes to achieving success) and the considerations on origins of grit (where is it coming from, how to sustain it, can everyone be gritty) that made it such a great book. Duckworth tried to re-use the same formula, but it didn't work that well.

"Situated" is dedicated to another ingredient of success - circumstances, context, environment around. It's about how it supports, nudges, eases certain things. I was kinda afraid she may drive it towards "privilege" (those who have easier circumstances vs those who don't) - but fortunately she didn't. The problem with that topic though is that it's nihil novi - nothing new and it's vastly explored since ... the times of ancient philosophers, e.g., consider Aristotle's Kairos.

But it's not just that - nearly every book on building good habits has this one covered as well. That the first thing is to re-shape the environment to make certain behaviors easier and certain harder (healthy things easily reachable in the fridge, sweets either at the highest shelf or not at all).

Another thing is that the previous book had the perfect anchor-word: very well representing the topic and still with some depth (grit is a mixture of "passion" and "perseverance") - it made the impression of intellectual clarity: we're exploring this very crispy, yet not sufficiently explored phenomenon. In this case ("Situated") there's no such term - that creates the impression the author didn't really know what precisely she wants to capture.

Long story short: it's OK if you just want to nod to things. But it doesn't create any urge to adopt any practice, it didn't convince me of anything, I didn't feel like I've learned anything - it was a bit of easy-listening stuff for running.

[Blake · Rating 4 out of 5]

🌟🌟🌟🌟
Situated argues that we dramatically underestimate how much our environment controls our behaviour. Rather than constantly fighting temptation with willpower, we should deliberately design our spaces, relationships, mentors, and cultures to make desirable behaviour easier. In short: Grit focuses on how passion, perseverance, and sustained effort help people achieve long-term goals despite setbacks.

Duckworth argues that behaviour follows a chain of situation → thoughts → response. Instead of relying primarily on willpower, deliberately design your surroundings, relationships, and culture so that the behaviour you want becomes easier and more natural.

Chapter-by-chapter — very short

The published contents are organized more broadly into situational awareness, situational agency, and situational responsibility, rather than providing a conventional chapter-title list in the publicly available contents.

Prologue — Why situation matters
Introduces the realization that grit alone isn't enough. Our surroundings can strongly influence what we think and do.

Part 1 — Situational awareness
Learn to notice how your physical and social environment is influencing you before trying to change yourself.

The Three-Box Model
Situation → Thoughts → Response. Change the upstream situation and the downstream behaviour may change with it.

Personal space
Arrange the things immediately around you so good choices are obvious, and temptations are harder to access.

Peers
The people around you influence what seems normal, desirable, and achievable. Choose relationships that provide accountability, knowledge, and support.

Mentors
Find people who know more than you do and can accelerate your development—and become a mentor to others.

Culture
Workplaces, communities and places you live create powerful behavioural norms. Sometimes changing your culture or even your location can matter enormously.

Part 2 — Situational agency
Move from recognizing your environment's influence to deliberately changing it. Duckworth identifies four major levers: space, peers, mentors and culture.

Part 3 — Situational responsibility
The idea expands beyond improving yourself: parents, teachers, leaders and citizens can create environments that help other people flourish.

From Grit to Great
The book returns to Grit: perseverance still matters, but the best results come when perseverance is combined with an environment that supports it.

Epilogue
The ultimate goal isn't simply personal achievement; it is creating situations that bring out the best in yourself and other people

I feel the book is not just about trying harder, but about changing the situation that shapes your behaviour, so those circumstances shape you.

I will recommend it to anyone interested in psychology, behaviour, habits, self-improvement, or personal development, and I recommend following this with Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones.

[Tamara Hansen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I listened to the audio and loved Duckworth’s passion and excitement about her research, but what I liked the most was the personal connections she included in the this fairly research-driven book. Stories about her children, her marriage, her mother - all felt like a retrospective thesis studies of personal trajectories.

Proximity to knowledge, experience, privilege and small kindnesses ARE what shape who we become. And to live our passion often times means to make ourselves uncomfortable to do it. Acknowledging those who mentored us, supported us and encouraged us is a vital part of life — my favorite chapter was the chapter on self actualization. I talked to my children about self actualization all the time. I fully believe that until you are able to hold the perspectives of people outside of yourself, —you can’t be truly great at anything.

I think this is a great book for any junior or senior to read — and likewise any person stuck in a transition of how to transition to a place to be their best selves or achieve their passion.

[Daorsa Kamberi · Rating 0.25 out of 5]

I had to read this for a class, you’ll never catch me reading this trash.

I don’t know how privileged you have to be in life to not know that your circumstances matter a lot to your success. And, then, for “change your situation!” to be a meaningful advice, is so insensitive to probably 95% of the entire population who SIMPLY CANNOT!!! Citing Frankl’s words while in a concentration camp, just to follow them by: oh true, sometimes you can’t do anything, but if you CAN change your situation, you absolutely should — is one of the most insensitive things I’ve ever read. How can you change your situation when science even proves how biased we are to know that our situation needs change in the first place?! Especially if this is written by a psychologist, doesn’t that deserve some recognition? Doesn’t any complexity, both normative and descriptive of this predicament, deserve more careful consideration?!

Absolutely horrible book, where I learned nothing new, nothing that the five minute introspection of a five-year old couldn’t teach me. I can’t imagine the kind of person that would find this book helpful, but whoever you are, good luck in life. It seems like you need it.

[Katy O. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Entertaining on audio, and it contains several points that I have been using as advice for years (basically: hate your job/house/life? Do everything in your power to enact change).

Ultimately, this book still doesn't answer the question of how to succeed when grit itself simply isn't enough (the question I have been asking since reading Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, given that situating oneself positively still is not always achievable. This is a book of privilege, and as a public educator and parent sending my kids to public schools, my hackles were raised in the part about parents situating their children positively by choosing the best neighborhood and best schools. I could go on and on and on about that, but won't.

Duckworth attempted to articulate what Grit couldn't help people with, but still fell short.

Source: Libro.fm audiobook

[Steve Granger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Situated is to social psychology what grit is to personality psychology. The message of the book is an inspiring set of stories built on ideas about thinking beyond oneself in shaping your future for the better. Duckworth's call to action doesn't set aside personal effort and tenacity (aka grit, as she famously popularized), but rather augments or enables it. It's not a new message, but this book beautifully packages it into highly digestible and accessible prose.

[Sam Funk · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an excellent book. Changed my life! So obsessed with it and grateful for the ideas it has inspired in my life.

[Natalie Park · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

[Mirek Jasinski · Rating 2 out of 5]

Old Wisdom in New Packaging

I had high expectations for Angela Duckworth’s new book, having read Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance years ago. Unfortunately, this one offers remarkably little that is new.

Duckworth’s central argument is that passion and perseverance alone are not enough to succeed. We also need good mentors, supportive colleagues, the right environment, and a bit of luck in being in the right place at the right time. Fair enough, but hardly a revelation.

The first 40 pages offer some useful reflections on reframing our thinking and exercising greater control over our responses to difficult situations. After that, the book becomes increasingly predictable. We are advised to set clear goals, choose the right workplace, surround ourselves with talented people, find inspiring mentors, work in teams, and avoid burnout.

By page 184, we discover that mentors can open doors, colleagues can help us succeed, and supportive relationships matter. By page 208, we are encouraged to choose an organizational culture that suits us, even if that means changing jobs or moving to another city. The discussion of situational responsibility adds little beyond familiar ideas from Maslow.

As someone who has spent decades working with organizations, executives, and management teams, I found myself wondering who exactly the intended audience was. Most of these ideas have been circulating in management literature and popular psychology for decades. They may be useful to someone encountering them for the first time, but I expected more from a scholar of Duckworth’s standing.

The book is accessible and well-intentioned, but it feels like an extended collection of conventional career advice rather than a meaningful contribution to our understanding of human achievement.

If you have read widely in psychology, leadership, or organizational behaviour, you can probably save yourself both the time and the money.

And if you are worried about missing out, don’t be. You aren’t.

[Rachael | Booklist Queen · Rating 3 out of 5]

In 2016, Angela Duckworth's Grit captivated reads with it's look at how perseverance is one of the biggest determinants of success. In her follow-up book, Duckworth answers valid criticism that sometimes grit is not enough. Situated adds insight into how your environment, culture and peers and mentors can create situations to enable you success that would not be possible with grit alone. Although I appreciated the nuanced look and think there are some great insights, I just didn't find the writing or the anecdotes in Situated to be very interesting and felt the book fell flat.

My Review: https://www.booklistqueen.com/reading...

[Amy]

I appreciate Angela Duckworth's ability to synthesize research and present it in an interesting, accessible, and relatable way. Although her first book, Grit, was a dive into tenacity and where it can take us, her omission of the impact of context in that book was kind of a case study on Fundamental Attribution Error. In Situated, Duckworth explores the importance of one's circumstances and agency within, and she presents compelling examples of the power we have over our situation (and the power that offers us). I was a little disappointed, though, that she stops short of acknowledging the impact of systemic oppression, let alone offering examples for how we can better navigate those situations to our advantage. She's right that we small changes can lead to larger ones, and that we conceivably CAN change jobs or geography or fill-in-the-blank situation, but those changes are a lot more feasible for some than others, some of which is a direct result of our cultural values related to identity.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was originally recommended to me by a friend who had read Grit but she told me I didn’t need to read Grit because I already had it. Well I enjoyed this one so much that I might just have to go back and read Grit as well. I loved the variety of examples she shared in the book, always giving the reader an opportunity to see parts of themselves.

There were some aspects of the book where I thought, yeah duh, but even then, how she reframed ideas was extremely thought provoking.

Would definitely recommend, especially if you’re feeling stuck in certain parts of your life.

[Soquel · Rating 5 out of 5]

PG

An excellent book. I enjoyed Duckworth's book Grit and this one has a similar feel to it. I really like the three box idea, the idea of committing to others, being mentored and mentoring, and changing situations when they don't suit you. There are many good take aways from this book. It is definitely worth the read.

[CreativelyRed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting with some good nuggets. I think it missed some things but overall, the situations your in and the people who influence you there is a good reminder.

[Elizabeth Chan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a highly enjoyable read and in some ways felt like a memoir by Angela Duckworth. This also felt highly complimentary to Grit.

[Madalina Vlasceanu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Situated is a brilliant and deeply important book, making a compelling case that understanding human behavior requires looking beyond our individual willpower to the situations and systems in which we are embedded. Our environments shape what feels possible, desirable, normal, and worth pursuing, and changing those environments can therefore be one of the most powerful ways to change behavior and improve society.

I found this framework especially resonant for thinking about climate change. For decades, much of the climate movement has asked how we can persuade individuals to care more, know more, or behave differently. Instead, Situated suggests asking - how can we create social, institutional, and physical environments in which climate action becomes easier, more normative, more rewarding, and ultimately self-sustaining? Rather than treating people as the problem to be fixed, the framework directs attention to the conditions that enable people and communities to act.

Overall, the book is honest, accessible, rigorous, optimistic, and useful, and I could not recommend it more!

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a great book - it’s accessible and provides concrete examples. Make a paradigm shift in your thinking. It’s common sense.

[Laurel Zeisler · Rating 2 out of 5]

I saw an interview with the author on youtube, and thought she made a lot of sense. So I got her latest book from the library. It was pretty disappointing. It's common sense that could have been summed up in one article and not 300 pages of repetition.

[Elizabeth]

As heard on The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos (Stop Doing Things the Hard Way with Dr. Angela Duckworth)

When we’re struggling to reach a goal, most of us assume the answer is to buckle down and try harder. But what if all that white-knuckling is actually making things more difficult than they need to be?

Dr. Laurie speaks with psychologist Angela Duckworth, best known for her groundbreaking work on grit, about a surprising new approach to achievement. In her new book, Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best, Angela explains why changing what’s around us can sometimes be more effective than trying to change ourselves.

Experts Mentioned:

Angela Duckworth, Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania  Lee Ross, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University  Richard Nisbett, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Michigan  James Gross, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University  Adrian Ward, Associate Professor of Marketing at University of Texas at Austin Joseph Henrich, Professor of Biological Anthropology and Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University Bob Bowman, Director of Swimming and Diving and Head Men’s Coach at University of Texas at Austin Martin Seligman, Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania Anders Ericsson, Professor of Psychology at Florida State University Walter Mischel, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Columbia University Reinhold Niebuhr, Protestant theologian Viktor Frankl, Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist

Resources Mentioned:

Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best, by Angela Duckworth (2026) Grit: The Power and Passion of Perseverance, by Angela Duckworth (2016) The Person and the Situation: Perspectives on Social Psychology, by Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett (1991) Frog and Toad Together, by Arnold Lobel (1972) Man's Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl (1946) “The Serenity Prayer,” by Reinhold Niebuhr The Art of War, by Sun Tzu The Golden Rules: 10 Steps to World-Class Excellence in Your Life and Work, by Bob Bowman (2016) “A Stitch in Time: Strategic Self-Control in High School and College Students,” by Angela Duckworth, Rachel White, Alyssa Matteucci, Annie Shearer, and James Gross (Journal of Educational Psychology, 2016) “Self-Control and Academic Achievement,” by Angela Duckworth, Jamie Taxer, Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, Brian Galla, and James Gross (Annual Review of Psychology, 2019) “Self-control and SAT outcomes: Evidence from two national field studies,” by Chayce Baldwin, Kyla Haimovitz, Priya Shankar, Robert Gallop, David Yeager, James Gross, and Angela Duckworth (PLoS One, 2022) “Situational Strategies for Self-Control,” by Angela Duckworth, Tamar Szabó Gendler, and James Gross (Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2016) “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One's Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity,” by Adrian Ward, Kristen Duke, Ayelet Gneezy, and Maarten Bos. (Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2017) “A 2-Phase Labeling and Choice Architecture Intervention to Improve Healthy Food and Beverage Choices,” by Anne N Thorndike, Lillian Sonnenberg, Jason Riis, Susan Barraclough, and Douglas E Levy (American Journal of Public Health, 2012) “Innovation in the collective brain,” by Michael Muthukrishna and Joseph Henrich (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2016)

Related Episodes:

“Your Environment Affects Your Happiness More Than You Think with Dr. Leidy Klotz” “How to Spend Your Time and Money Better (with Nobel Prize Winner Richard Thaler)” “The Man Who Invented Happiness Science: Marty Seligman” “How Our Screen Habits Impact Our Stress Levels”

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

https://omny.fm/shows/the-happiness-l...

[Jun Ri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Angela Duckworth spent a career answering one question: why are some people more successful than others? Her first answer was grit, the combination of passion and perseverance she found in West Point cadets and national spelling bee champions. This book is, in a sense, a correction to the first one. Grit is necessary, she now argues, but nowhere near sufficient. What she had been measuring in her strivers was never just what was inside them. It was also where they stood.

The clearest illustration is Michael Phelps, who grew up ten minutes from the North Baltimore Aquatic Club, a facility with two fifty meter pools and a culture built for world class performance, and a coach, Bob Bowman, who happened to be there. Phelps never claims credit for the location of his childhood home. But the more interesting case is Léon Marchand, Phelps's successor as the sport's defining swimmer, whose situation was not handed to him but built. His lesson, as Duckworth frames it, is that your situation isn't fixed. You don't need wealth or power to change it. Duckworth's own summary of the distinction, performance is individual, success is collective, is the kind of sentence that sounds almost too clean until you sit with how often we get it backwards. We tell the story of Diana Nyad swimming from Cuba to Florida as a story about her. She had thirty six people in the water and on the boats around her, and by her own account it took her decades to stop being embarrassed to say so.

I recognized this pattern before I had language for it. There is a particular confidence I feel asking questions of my own team as their supervisor, and a different, smaller version of myself that shows up when I am the one presenting to management. Duckworth would say the situation changed, not my competence. And there is a related idea buried in her chapter on willpower that I keep returning to: the belief that using a tool or an app to stay consistent is somehow a confession of weak character. I think the opposite. Someone who knows they lack consistency and builds an external system to compensate has actually understood themselves. That is not a workaround for a character flaw. It is what self knowledge looks like when it is put into practice.

If the first half of the book is about recognizing the situation's power, the second half is a fairly specific instruction manual for using it, and the chapters on peers and mentors are where I found myself underlining the most. Duckworth's research on close friendship is blunt about the mechanism: your five closest friends absorb something like forty percent of your social time, and their habits, without your noticing, become the water you swim in. Our peers define what feels normal, which is a sentence I wrote in my own margin before I ever got to Duckworth's version of it. The De La Salle football team's Commitment Cards, where each player states a goal aloud and hands the card to a teammate who will report back publicly the following week on whether it was achieved, is peer accountability made almost uncomfortably literal.

Mentorship gets the same treatment, stripped of its sentimentality. The Pygmalion effect, where students randomly labeled as likely to bloom intellectually then genuinely outperformed their peers, is not really a story about teachers being kind. It is a story about how thoroughly a label becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. What struck me more was Duckworth's account of sponsorship, of mentors who use their own standing to open a door you couldn't have opened yourself. Her mentor Marty Seligman introducing her to West Point is the textbook version, and it reframed something I do often without thinking of it as a discrete act.

The book's quietest argument arrives near the end, when Duckworth turns to Maslow's late concession to Viktor Frankl, that self actualization was never the summit he first thought it was, and that the people who reach it almost always did so in service of something outside themselves. Frankl's own proposal, a Statue of Responsibility to stand as a companion to the Statue of Liberty, asking not what freedom protects but what it obligates, comes directly from that same book. Nearly eighty years later it is still just a proposal, tied up in site approval in Utah. Duckworth calls situation multiplication a flywheel, the idea that a slightly better response today produces a slightly better situation tomorrow, compounding like money in the bank.

But it's the leadership chapter where the book stopped being descriptive and started feeling like an instruction I was actually being given. Performers deliver their own best. Leaders are responsible for bringing out the best in others. High support without challenge produces complacency, high challenge without support produces burnout, and the sweet spot is both at once, which is a harder needle to thread than it sounds when you are the one setting the conditions rather than just working inside them. It reframes the job. You are not managing outputs. You are building the room other people will eventually credit or blame for who they became in it.

"A leader's habits become a team's traditions. A leader's purpose becomes a team's mission. And a leader's character becomes a team's culture."

[Jezzeri · Rating 4 out of 5]

How you think about your goals and what you're willing to do to achieve them depends on both you and your situation. Grit is one thing; a great situation is another---and fully realizing your potential requires both. Heroic grit and situational awareness are compatible.

Your situation isn't fixed. You have choices. You don't have to be wealthy or powerful to change your situation for the better. You can proactively seek out situations optimized to achieve your fullest potential. Instead of commanding ourselves to work harder, we should seek mentors, peers, physical spaces, and cultures that inspire us to work harder. Instead of urging ourselves to make the best of a situation, we can improve the situation itself.

All emotions take time to develop. They do so in stages:
1. Situation: You are in a certain place and with certain people. This is your objective reality.
2. Thoughts: You notice some aspect of your situation, and your mind immediately interprets it. This happens so fast that you're typically unaware of the countless judgments that take place beneath conscious awareness. You experience your brain's interpretation of reality. Thoughts are subjective.
3. Response: Response to the situation in which you feel an emotion regarding it.

The most direct way to change how you feel is to modify the way you respond to your thoughts using willpower. It's more effective to intervene earlier, by changing your thoughts. When you change your thoughts, you automatically change your response. You can change yourself by changing your situation. By changing your situation, you automatically change your thoughts, which automatically change your response. Attempts at making big life changes are more successful when aimed earlier in the process than downstream. When we are able to change our situation for the better, we absolutely should.

Fundamental attribution error: underestimating the impact of the situation on behavior.

Look for situations that are both challenging and supportive. Avoid situations that are low challenge and low support which creates apathy. Challenge plus support raises the ceiling on your expectations and builds the floor so you can reach them. You have situational agency. The people you know and the places you go are, to some extent, up to you. Changing ourselves by changing our situations is an honest, hopeful, and even heroic endeavor. This is a strategy; use it for your strength.

Situational agency has four essential elements:
1. Set up your space: What will you choose to add or subtract, once you become aware of the gravitational pull of objects within sights and reach?
2. Pick your peers: Find a tribe that shares your values and interests.
3. Attract mentors: Mentors are a need-to-have
4. Choose your culture: You can change where you work and live.

Situational agency means taking charge of your circumstances, choosing to be with people and in places that bring out your best.

Habits link situational cues to automatic responses, so building a habit requires repeating the same behavior in the same situation.

Physical distance creates psychological distance. So what you want to do more, draw near. And what you want to do less, push away.

Pick your peers who are like-minded strivers who share similar goals, values, and interests.

The most important qualification for mentors is that they derive satisfaction from making a difference. Mentors teach you what you can't learn on your own. They believe in you when you've lost faith in yourself. They open doors you may not even know exist.

Research shows that where you grow up powerfully influences what you achieve professionally.

Status quo bias: the visceral urge to stick with our current situation when a better option is available

[Kimball · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. I love being on the leading edge of doing reviews when a book is released. This book is a good sequel. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance was about being inside the minds of high achievers while Situated is about everything and everyone around them. What we think is influenced by where we are. This book almost pits willpower (grit) and environment (situation) against one another. But for me, it was lacking. Maybe it had to do with waiting 10 years for her to write another book or what. The first half was great then it fizzled out in the second half. Also the cover could have been better. Wished I had the bonus PDF. I also wish I had her as a teacher for my MBA.

She's prolly very excited about the success of the Odyssey this past summer since she refenced the story a few times. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that was intentional and she's riding that wave.


Let's get to the Notes:


How you think about your goals and what you're willing to do to achieve them depends on both you and your situation.

Performance is individual, success is collective.

She says focusing on willpower is the worst way to change behavior. Changing your situation makes doing hard things easier.

I liked her bit on chapter 3 about multiple personalities. People have several identities or personalities. Flexibility in personalities is broadly a marker for mental health and wellness.

Poem by Portia Nelson:

Autobiography in Five Short Chapters

Chapter I:
I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in. I am lost. I am helpless.
It isn't my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.

Chapter II:
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I still don't see it. I fall in again.
I can't believe I am in the same place.
It isn't my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.

Chapter III:
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it there, I still fall in.
It's habit. It's my fault. I know where I am.
I get out immediately.

Chapter IV:
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.

Chapter V:
I walk down a different street.


Effort pays off when you make situation your ally.

Struggling with following through on our intentions is because we lack empathy for ourselves.

The word Idiot is Greek and means on one's own. So don't do things alone or you're an idiot.

The opposite of addiction is connection.

I would love to have a good mentor in my life and be a mentor to someone but sadly I have neither.

Moving (like to a new neighborhood/city) is the single most important thing a person can do improve their prospects for a better life. It works. I did that.

When learning is meaningful and authentic a child will sit forever.

The Statue of Responsibility still isn't built. Odd that the site is on Utah. You'd think it'd be like on Alcatraz Island. That'd be much better since it's meant to compliment the statue of Liberty, one on one coast and the other on the other coast.

[Aaron Mikulsky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Situated is Angela Duckworth’s companion to Grit. I loved this read and highly recommend it!

Duckworth argues that while grit (passion + perseverance) is necessary for success, it is rarely sufficient. Over-relying on sheer willpower is a flawed, “downstream” strategy that eventually leads to burnout. Instead, Duckworth reveals that lasting achievement and behavioral change happen “upstream” through environmental design. High performers do not just try harder; they deliberately curate their physical spaces, peer groups, and cultural norms so that doing the hard thing becomes the easiest option. Her argument is not that perseverance was a mistake; it is that effort pays off differently depending on the space, peers, mentors, and culture surrounding the person making it. The Michael Phelps story shows what that support can look like for an individual. The Cleveland Clinic story shows how a leader can build it into an institution.

Duckworth describes three levels of the idea: situational awareness—noticing how circumstances shape behavior; situational agency—changing circumstances within your control; and situational responsibility—creating better circumstances for other people, especially those with less power to do it themselves. She says she added the final, other-directed portion because a book concerned only with improving one’s own performance would miss what she considered its most important implication.

Duckworth’s core distinction: “Grit is one thing. A great situation is another. Fully realizing your potential requires both.”
Her practical challenge: “How situated are you?”
Her reason for widening the book beyond individual achievement: “It’s more important to make the world a better place for other people.”
Her statement of the method: “Effort pays off when you make your situation your ally.”
“We too often ask ‘What's wrong with me?’ when instead we should be asking, ‘Where, and with whom, can I be better?’”
“Better situations can reduce the need to win every internal battle through willpower.”
“The people one spends time with are not background conditions; they actively shape the person one becomes.”
“When a challenge persists, improve the surrounding situation rather than relying only on individual resolve.”

Situated makes a persuasive and useful change in emphasis. It preserves the value of hard work while asking a better diagnostic question than “Why won’t this person try harder?”—namely, “What situation is their effort entering?” Its strongest examples work at different scales: Debbie Phelps adapts conditions for one child; Cosgrove attempts to make a patient-centered priority routine across a large healthcare organization. The necessary caution is one Duckworth acknowledges herself: people do not have equal freedom to change their circumstances. The book is most valuable when its account of personal agency is paired with its insistence on responsibility for the situations we create for others.

[Jimmy Oddo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Are you lengthening your shadow?
 
This first sentence easily could have read: Angela Duckworth has done it again. 
 
Allow me to explain. 
 
A decade after her mega best-selling book, “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance,” psychologist, researcher, and the University of Pennsylvania professor is back with another blockbuster: “Situated.” 
 
In “Grit,” Duckworth studied high-achievers across various domains and age groups and concluded all had a combination of passion and perseverance. “Sometimes very talented, and sometimes less so,” writes Duckworth, “the successful strivers in my studies worked harder, longer, and more constantly than their less successful peers.”
 
Since influencing a generation to becoming grittier, Duckworth has come to believe that it alone is insufficient, and has moved from *inside* the heads of these gritty wonders to explore “what might be special on the *outside*, too.”
 
“Your situation must be your ally,” she asserts “Personal space where you can work without interruption. Caring mentors and like-minded peers. A culture of excellence for that craft that is your calling.”
 
Duckworth doesn’t consider “Situated” to be a sequel to “Grit.” She also doesn’t believe it’s a correction of her earlier work. I think the Next Big Idea Club podcaster and entrepreneur Rufus Griscom said it best on a recent podcast when he concluding that relative to Duckworth's first tome, “Situated” is the equivalent to the old improv mantra of “Yes, and…”
 
There are so many good things to leverage in “Situated,” but for this week’s Boom Quote, I return to a subject that so often is the focus of mySituated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best posts:  leadership.
 
In a subchapter entitled, “Lengthen Your Shadow,” Duckworth relates the manner in which she presents a slide to her leadership class of a rightly updated and corrected iteration of a famous line from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “An institution is the lengthened shadow of [its leader].”
 
Let me end with Duckworth’s Boom Quote:
 
“A leader’s habits become a team’s traditions. A leader’s purpose becomes a team's mission. And a leader's character becomes a team's culture. How? Not by magic or mandates or wishful thinking—but by structural changes to the objective situation: physical space. Peers. Mentors. Culture carriers who ensure the organization’s evolution. For the situationally wise leader, these elements aren’t happenstance; they’re responsibility. Work and work to make them better. Because when you do, the way *you* do things around there becomes the way *we* do things around here, too.”

[Pratik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Duckworth answered the criticism of 'Grit', which raised this book's quality. I’m a big fan of her work. I met her and went to a conference at her Character Lab before it shut down. Researchers and practitioners who work with low-income groups criticized her ideas after 'Grit' became successful. I think this feedback led her to rethink her views and look at success more broadly; her book Situated shows this shift. She claims that willpower and persistence matter, but the environment also plays a role. Her research says:

"of all the ways you can change your behavior, willpower is the absolute worst."

In a study of almost twenty thousand high school students, those who used force to study got lower SAT scores than those who set up a visible schedule.

This theme appears often in housing research. The economist Raj Chetty argued that a zip code is a strong predictor of life outcomes. Duckworth builds on this by looking at how much control people have over their environments and social circles. She notes that ambitious people are rare. When people are mixed together at random, ambitious individuals have few peers like them. They do better when they are grouped together. Duckworth moves her focus away from internal thoughts to emphasize the physical situation. She follows a rule: "Physical distance creates psychological distance." Her advice is to get closer to desired influences and distance yourself from unwanted ones.

She writes in a clear and simple style. She adds many stories, including personal details about a difficult period in her marriage that she has not discussed before. She stresses the importance of finding mentors and using professional networks. One specific suggestion is to volunteer to help with projects that are already in progress.

Social capital will not always benefit you. The book advises that you should change the parts of your situation that you can control. Your thoughts and outcomes will change as a result.

I'll leave you with this interesting tidbit - people who moved to a more walkable town walked over a thousand more steps each day. They did not need to use additional willpower to achieve this.