Willpower Is Overrated. Your Situation Is Not.
Tuesday night I was in a sold-out crowd at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, on a rainy launch night for Angela Duckworth's new book, Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best. She was interviewed on stage by Brad Stevens, President of Basketball Operations for the Boston Celtics, and the two of them spent an hour on a question I think about every day in the clinic: why do some people follow through and others stall?
Brad opened with a softball. What matters more, grit or situation? Angela refused the either-or. Both, she said: individual effort, and the people and places that make individual effort pay off. And then the line that stuck with me all the way home: when you just try harder in a losing situation, you feel like a loser, and you do not realize the situation itself needs to change.
Many of you know Angela from her first book, Grit. What you may not know is that she has been a client of ours. She was kind enough to write about it, and she has been a friend of the practice for years. So this one was personal.
The Big Idea
Grit was about effort. Situated is about where that effort happens.
Angela's argument is that willpower is a terrible long-term strategy. It works for a day, maybe a week, and then it runs out. What actually changes behavior is changing the situation around you: the objects within reach, the people you spend time with, the mentors you learn from, and the culture you work and live in.
As she puts it in the book, "Effort pays off when you make your situation your ally."
Anyone who has ever been handed a sheet of home exercises knows exactly what she means.
Why This Matters for Rehab
Almost nobody fails physical therapy because they did not care. They fail because the situation was set up for them to fail. The band is in a drawer. The exercises live on a crumpled printout. The gym is 25 minutes away and the day got long.
We built PT Progression around the opposite idea, years before I had the vocabulary for it. Every visit is one-on-one for the full hour in a space designed for the work. No aides, no waiting for a machine, no phone buzzing on a shared table. When you walk in, the situation is already doing half the work for you.
Angela's four elements map almost perfectly onto what we see turn a stalled recovery into a finished one.
Set Up Your Space
"You may not be able to control the world at large, but you reign supreme over your immediate surroundings."
On stage Angela called it the three-foot rule. Whatever is within three feet of you, within view and within reach, exerts a gravitational pull on what you think and do. You are more likely to eat or drink what is three feet away than what is four feet away. Psychological distance, she said, is a function of physical distance.
She keeps a two-inch yellow Post-it at eye level in her office with a Nelson Mandela line she has long since memorized: I never lose. I win or I learn. Brad's version is simpler. He does not keep any app on his phone that gives him immediate feedback.
This is the cheapest, most effective change most of our clients ever make. Put the band on the kitchen counter, not in a drawer. Leave the foam roller where you watch TV. Set your sneakers by the door the night before. Move the good stuff closer and the bad stuff farther away.
Pick Your Peers
"Whether or not you're blessed with siblings who are soulmates, you can find a tribe that shares your values and interests."
One of the quiet advantages of our studio is who else is in it. When you train next to someone who just got back to walking 18 holes after a hip replacement, or a college athlete rehabbing a knee, you stop wondering whether it can be done. You are surrounded by people doing it.
Attract Mentors
"You don't get to choose your parents, but you do get to choose your mentors."
Angela shared a number that surprised the room: more than half of Americans say they have no mentor at work, and most of them want one. Her advice was to start small. Find someone a little farther down the path, ask for five minutes of advice, and offer to be helpful in return. She told the story of a student who did exactly that with a cold email and ended up with a mentor who was there for his PhD defense years later. Mentors for a reason, mentors for a season, and occasionally mentors for life.
That is how I think about my role with clients. For a season, I am the person who knows the path out of this injury. My job is to get you far enough down it that you no longer need me.
Choose Your Culture
"You can't change where you were born, but you can change where you work and live."
Angela put it as bluntly as I have heard anyone put it: she would rather have the worst job in the best organization than the other way around, because she would choose culture over role every time. You will figure out the role. Get to a great culture first.
Brad answered with a story from the 2020 NBA bubble. He called Angela before the Celtics went into Orlando for what turned out to be 85 straight days in the same hotel room. She told him three things. It will be really hard at first. Then there will be good days and hard days, back and forth, like everything else. And it is what you will tell your grandkids about. Nothing about the situation changed, he said. What changed was the lens.
Culture is just the situation, multiplied. Ours is simple: rehab that does not stop at good enough. We do not discharge you at "pain-free." We keep going until you are strong enough that the problem is unlikely to come back.
The Three Boxes
The most practical tool in the book is what Angela calls the Three Boxes. Every behavior has three parts: the situation, the thoughts it triggers, and the response. Most of us try to change the response with willpower. Angela's advice is to work backwards and change the situation instead.
Try it on the exercise you keep skipping. Box three: I skip my hip exercises. Box two: by the time I remember, I am tired and on the couch. Box one: the band is in the other room and nothing reminds me. Now redesign box one. Band on the coffee table, exercises attached to something you already do every day, like brushing your teeth or the first cup of coffee.
Angela is honest that about half of well-designed plans fail on the first try. The point is not to get it right the first time. The point is to keep changing the situation until one version sticks.
A Room of Her Own
The story that got the biggest reaction of the night was about Angela's mother, who came to this country at 24 with almost no English and a passion for painting, and then spent decades putting the paintbrush down for everyone else. At 87 she walked down the hallway of her retirement home, knocked on the manager's door, and asked for a second apartment. A room of her own, with a lock on the door, so she could paint and make a mess. She got it. She is 91 now and, in Angela's words, at her most prolific.
I hear a version of that story in the clinic every week. Someone who decided it was too late to fix the knee, the back, the shoulder, and then changed one thing about their situation and found out it was not.
Make Your Situation Your Ally
If you take one thing from this book, take this: stop blaming yourself for not trying hard enough. You are trying. Change the situation, and the trying gets easier.
That is what we are here for. If you have been putting off dealing with a nagging injury because the last attempt fizzled, the answer is probably not more willpower. It is a better situation. Come see us and we will build one with you.
Situated Is Out Now
A signed copy now lives at the studio. Ask to borrow it.
Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best is out now from Scribner. You can find it at Harvard Book Store, which hosted Tuesday's event, or wherever you buy books. Angela closed the night by thanking everyone for coming out in the rain. Worth it.
Learn More From Us!
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