It's 1725, and an 18-year-old named Ben from Boston is working in London. He's broke, but he's found a job as a printer's apprentice. Most nights, his fellow apprentices would head out together after work to a pub For pints of beer, roasted meats, all the comforts a teenager far from home might crave. And naturally, Ben wanted to join. But he didn't go. Instead, he saved his hard-earned money, ate cheaper meals, plain bread or gruel, and instead of beer, he drank water. Why? Because he wanted something bigger. He was hoarding every shilling, not for beer tonight, but for books tomorrow. Books that would feed a different kind of hunger. That choice, bread instead of beer, books instead of banquets, helped shape the young man who would become Benjamin Franklin, printer, inventor, diplomat, and founding father. In this episode, we look at the power and challenge of exerting the kind of self-control that Ben Franklin embodied, whether that's at the pub, in the checkout line, or on the baseball diamond. There's a high, high, going deep, deep. It is a format. I'm Dr. Katie Milkman, and this is Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. It's a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. We bring you true and surprising stories about high-stakes choices, and then we examine how these stories connect to the latest research in behavioral science. We do it all to help you make better judgments and avoid costly mistakes. He makes his debut. Opening day at first base. This is really something. On April 15th of 1947, a rookie in a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform walked out onto Ebbets Field and changed the course of history. He was fast, consistent, and agile. But what number 42 accomplished that day wasn't measured in hits or stolen bases. It was measured in something much greater, ending the exclusion of black players from Major League Baseball. What will the highly publicized Jackie Robinson do today? Will organized baseball's first Negro player make good, or will he fail? Jackie Robinson exists in this moment of 1947, when he becomes the first African American to play professional baseball in the modern era. It was a whirlwind debut with record-breaking attendance, a symbol of progress. It's this celebratory tale about American accomplishment, about achievement. Jackie's success made the unthinkable possible for other Black athletes. But that's only partly the story of Jackie Robinson. This is Yuhuru. My name is Yuhuru Williams. I'm a professor of history and founding director of the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. Yahuru co-wrote with Michael Long the book Call Him Jack the story of Jackie Robinson Black freedom fighter We really wanted to break through that mythology and capture for the first time a historical Jack for young readers The popular mythology was in fact a sanitized legacy one that showed Robinson as being passive, as someone who endured racism without a response They represented that old attitude of submission that really is stuck in a way that people think about Jackie Robinson and that 1947 moment. But the kind of man that it took to do what Robinson did, to be part of integrating American baseball, required something very different than a passive character. He was actually outspoken on civil rights, and he was strategic and disciplined about his role in advocating for equality. When he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, Dr. Martin Luther King wrote a public letter stating that Robinson was a sit-inner before the sit-ins and a freedom rider before the freedom rides. Jack Robinson was born in Georgia in 1919, at the height of segregation. He was raised by a single mother who moved his family to the West, eventually settling in Pasadena, California. Pasadena in the early 1900s offered a Black family more freedom and opportunities than the South. But it was far from perfect. Still, it was possible for Robinson's mother to buy a home and for Jack to attend integrated schools. Jack grows up in a neighborhood which is multicultural in a lot of ways. In his autobiography, he talks about the collection of Asian and white Jewish Mexican students who make up the community in which he's reared. and it becomes an integral part of how Jack sees the world. He thinks of himself as an equal to everyone, and he doesn't carry with him this sense that he should shy away from what he believes is his right to have the same opportunities as any American. In Pasadena, Jack's athletic talents began to shine. He attended UCLA and became the university's first four-sport letter winner. Jack is a tremendous athlete, and he is gifted in so many ways. And it's interesting that baseball was actually his least favorite sport. He was gifted at track. He was a phenomenal football player. Literally, any sport that you put in front of him, Jack could master. Jack had another quality that we often see in history's most legendary athletes. Very rarely is it simply a reflection of what they can do with their bodies. It's the way that they master their minds, the way that they can overcome pressure, the way that they're students of the game. And you can almost see that when you look back at their careers and you can see the decisions that they're making on the field and off the field that ultimately influence the way that we think about their legacy. And there's no better example of that than Jack Robinson. Robinson's deep faith and conviction in his birthright as an American also shaped his actions. But he was human, and he had the same impulses the rest of us have when we're angry. There's a story that we tell in the book about an incident that Jack has with a young neighbor who's throwing rocks at him. And Jack throws the rocks back at this young neighbor, gives as good as he gets. And the father of this young girl comes out and begins to hurl rocks at Jack as well. And the takeaway there for Jack is not just how he's feeling in that moment, but the advice that he gets from his mother about really channeling that anger in ways that are more positive, that are directed toward bettering himself and looking for ways to disprove those who discount him because of the color of his skin. In July of 1944, Jack is on a civilian bus operating on the base on which he's stationed. Robinson served in the U.S. Army during World War II. And the bus driver on that bus sees Jack speaking with a light-complected woman whom he assumes is a white woman, who actually is a black woman. The driver is offended by this, and at the insistence of another passenger, demands that Lieutenant Robinson, who's sitting near the front of the bus conversing with this woman, immediately remove himself to the back of the bus. Jack had closely followed federal directives that banned segregation on U.S. Army bases. These directives were put in place in part because America was fighting an ideological war against fascism abroad Racial injustice at home stood in stark contrast to the values the Allies claimed to defend The directives Jack had followed so closely prohibited the treatment he was getting on this bus. Jack is aware of this, and so he refuses to give up his seat when he is directed by the driver to do so. The driver becomes irate and says he'll pull the bus over if Lieutenant Robinson doesn't comply, Robinson doesn't comply. The police come and the driver says that Robinson cursed him, said, you know, essentially stop effing with me. Lieutenant Robinson is arrested and he's scheduled to be court-martialed as a result of his decision not to abide by what the driver has demanded of him in that moment. In that moment, Jack couldn't have known that if things didn't go his way, there would be no future in professional baseball. His name forever branded as difficult and defiant. But it's Jack's testimony during this court-martial that ultimately demonstrate the strength of his convictions, his fortitude, and his inner strength. During the trial, for example, Jack is asked why, when the driver refers to him as the N-word, why he does not respond. And Jack says, because my grandmother told me that that was a low person. I do not consider myself low. And it's partly because of the way that he carries himself in response to those questions, but it's also because he was so knowledgeable about the Army regulations that Jack actually beats the charge and successfully defends himself against the allegations. The story would follow Jack. After returning home from the military, he joined baseball's quote-unquote Negro Leagues in 1945, playing shortstop for the Kansas City Monarchs. Later that year, the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Branch Rickey, called Jack to his office. Rickey was looking for the first black player to enter the majors, not only out of moral conviction, but because he knew it made good business sense. And he wasn't just searching for talent. Ricky needed someone strong enough to withstand the abuse that would inevitably spill out onto the field. This is new territory, and it is incredibly dangerous. And Jack, therefore, has to be very thoughtful about the way that he's going to navigate this intersection. It isn't just the personal danger. It's also the potential harm that can be done if there's a misstep, that if Jack loses his temper, if Jack somehow gives into the pernicious stereotypes about Black people, that this could have harm beyond his own personal experience. And he weighs all those things very carefully. But 1947 is a moment that is both ripe with opportunity and fraught with challenges that Jack's going to have to navigate. From day one as a Dodger, Robinson was tested in ways that went well beyond baseball. Fans hurled slurs and death threats from the stands. Opposing pitchers aimed fastballs at his head. Base runners tried to spike him with their cleats. Some players refused to take the field when they were playing against him. And even teammates initially bristled at his presence. Every game brought an onslaught of taunts, jeers, and cheap shots designed to provoke him. One set of taunts nearly did. So it's April 22nd, 1947, and the Dodgers are playing Philadelphia. And they're managed by a gentleman by the name of Ben Chapman. I use the title gentleman loosely here. And Ben Chapman decides that he is going to test the rookie by using some of the most vile language that Jack had encountered on the field up until that point. He'd certainly heard things like that from the stands. But this really is an assault on Jack's person in the form of this verbal barrage that he's receiving from Ben Chapman. Chapman really goes in on Jack in a way to force him in some ways to respond. He's actually questioning his masculinity. He's threatening him and charging him with these words in a way that it would be hard for any person not to respond. And so Jack goes back to the dugout. He's so frustrated by his inability to respond in a way that he wants to. He smashes his bat. But at the same time, because he doesn't retaliate in the way that people expect, he really short circuits this narrative about the supposed angry nature of black people. I mean, this literally is a slap in the face because Jack behaves with such dignity, such resolve, such courage, that even those who might have been inclined to support Ben Chapman in the beginning, at the end kind of find his behavior rude, crass, and quite frankly, beneath the standards of the game. It would have been very easy for anyone to understand how he would have wanted to haul off and to slug Ben Chapman. The fact that he doesn't do it becomes one of these great moments in the story of Jackie Robinson. But again, a story that isn't just about his strength not to fight back, but the conscious choices he makes in every instance to think about the consequences of those actions and to act accordingly. Robinson challenged segregation, racial stereotypes, and societal expectations in many ways. But one particularly remarkable way was by resisting the impulse to fight cruelty with anger and focusing on what he could control. The best way to disprove those who are challenging you is to simply perform at a level that exceeds not only their expectations, but really shatters everyone's expectations of what is possible. That first year, Robinson was named Rookie of the Year. and he went on to win the National League's Most Valuable Player Award. He posted a 311 batting average over his career. He hit 137 home runs, drove in 734 runs, and stole 197 bases. He was a key part of the Dodgers' first World Series win over the Yankees in 1955. And in 1962, he was the first Black player ever inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. After retiring from baseball, Robinson broke yet another barrier. He became the first Black vice president of a major American company. He worked at Chock Full of Nuts to improve employee conditions. And he remained a tireless advocate for civil rights. speaking at rallies, writing columns, and participating in activism. He also co-founded institutions like Freedom National Bank and the Jackie Robinson Construction Company to provide more economic opportunities and housing to Black communities. It's in those ways that we can kind of see the broad complexity of Jack Robinson, the man, who is far more interesting than Jackie, the myth. Dr. Yuhuru Williams is a professor of history and the founding director of the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. He's the co-author, along with Michael Long, of Column Jack, the story of Jackie Robinson, Black freedom fighter. You can find links to his work and book in the show notes and at schwab.com slash choiceology. Jackie Robinson's story. is a testament to the power of self-control. Dr. Williams' telling reveals that Robinson's success can be measured in both his exceptional athletic accomplishments, but also in his emotional regulation. Robinson demonstrated an incredible capacity to resist short-term impulses in service of a greater long-term purpose. By choosing not to lash out, even when lashing out would have been more than justified, He helped dismantle negative stereotypes. And he became a role model by showing everyone watching that true strength often lies not in reaction but in showing poise and composure in the face of hate My next guest has spent much of her career studying self-control and related traits. Angela Duckworth is a psychologist, professor, and author best known for her groundbreaking research on grit. Angela is my colleague at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the Rosa Lee and Egbert Chang professor, and she has appointments in the Department of Psychology and in the Wharton School. She and I also co-founded and co-direct a research center called the Behavior Change for Good Initiative. Angela, welcome to Choiceology. I'm so excited to get to talk to you today about self-control. Katie, we hang out a lot, but I'm particularly excited to be here right now. Could we just start with how we define self-control, what it means to a behavioral scientist? What's your favorite definition? So self-control, as I define it, is the successful resolution of an internal conflict where one choice is clearly better and the other choice is nevertheless more attractive. So you have a conflict between what you know is better for you in the long run, typically, and a temptation of some kind that typically is more pleasurable in the moment. So, you know, potato chips are calling to me, but I should eat fruit. A kale salad. Yes, yes. So how do scientists typically measure self-control as a trait? So Walter Mischel was a great psychologist, one of the greatest psychologists who ever lived. He created a paradigm called the marshmallow test. And I think it's widely misunderstood. The real test is how many seconds can that child wait for a larger delayed reward. And the test quantifies in seconds your ability to delay gratification. When Walter originally published his data, he was interested in the conditions under which you could wait longer or shorter. But then he soon, you know, these subjects grew up and, you know, these kids are now four, they're five, they're six, they're seven. Now they're in high school. He followed some of his subjects all the way into adulthood. And the striking finding, which is a little more complicated than it at first appeared, was that the number of seconds that you could delay gratification in this simple little experiment at age four predicted your SAT scores, your general academic performance, the quality of your social relationships, your likelihood of being delinquent versus a good citizen, etc., etc. Of course, we both know that the robustness of the marshmallow test, this measure that Walter created of how long a kid can wait to get two marshmallows instead of just one before they give in to temptation and eat the one sitting in front of them, it's a bit fraught. But my understanding of the research is that there are other ways to measure self-control, too, that do support the general takeaway, that self-control as a trait is an excellent predictor of many important life outcomes like financial stability as an adult and educational achievement. Could you give us a sense of the other ways of measuring self-control? Yeah, I think that the best way to measure things, honestly, I don't want to say best because what does that mean, but maybe the high signal to noise ratio is actually something that gets poo-pooed a lot, which is a questionnaire. When you ask somebody, overall, Katie, on a scale from zero to 10, how self-controlled are you? Maybe a seven. Overall, Katie, when it comes to resisting impulses and doing things that are better for you in the long run versus feel good right now, how do you do on that zero to 10? Probably a six. By the way, I think your answers reveal something else that I study called reference bias, which is, Katie, you are no seven and you are no six. I'm comparing myself to you, Angela. Your whole life is delay of gratification. I would say that even though we have our own standards that make questionnaires imperfect, right, what you are doing is your brain is cataloging all of the times in your life that come to mind when you think of self-control and impulsivity. it's opposite. And then you are giving me some summary score. And if you think about that pitted against a single marshmallow test event, you know, I've got now this concatenation of sort of like everything I've done versus just one measure. So I will say that questionnaires, though they have their limitations, including reference bias, I think they are a great way of getting at self-control. I want to pivot a little bit from talking about the trait aspect of it, which we're going to come back to, but you're talking about the topic we love because we- Change? Yes. We study change together. We're always trying to help people make their lives better and figure out how do I do more with what I've got. What can people do with their fixed self-control to improve? How can they have better outcomes? For those who are listening, some examples that might come to mind are sort of, you know, put your phone away, which is something you're thinking about constantly. I'm like telling teenagers across America, I'm like, put your phone in another room, put it in a drawer. I've done a national study with Gallup, right? So it's a nationally representative sample of teenagers across the United States. And the summary insight is the farther your phone, the higher the GPA. So we ask young people like, you have a big test, where do you keep your phone? And one answer is, well, I keep it face up next to me with the sound on so I could like make sure I don't miss any notifications. Then there's a, well, I keep it next to me, but it's, you know, face down and it's sound off. So all these gradations. And the last one is I keep it in another room altogether. And that's where we can graph distance from your phone and GPA. And it's a monotonic relationship. Monotonic meaning consistently increasing. So the further I am from having access to my phone while I'm working, the better my grades. Of course, it's correlation, so we don't know what's causing it, but it's a striking correlation. Yes. And so this trick of situation modification that you can learn when you're four, but you can certainly learn when you're, you know, 54. I think this is actually one of the most important things that we should learn from Walter's discoveries. So important and hopefully really useful to everyone listening. And not just with your phone, right? You can do it with the food in your house that you don't want to see. You can do it at work. Push it away. Hide it. Right. With the people you don't want to text in the middle of the night, take them off your contacts list, right? It creates friction, so it's everywhere. I want to talk a little bit about differences across domains in life and self-control. I certainly know people who are incredibly self-controlled at work, but really struggle with self-control maybe in their personal lives. And one question I have is sort of how common is that? Is self-control a trait that we should think of as, you know, I'm a seven in everything? Because I took the marshmallow test or I took your questionnaire, or is it something that varies and we can think of as differing across parts of our lives? Early in my career, I had a graduate student named Eli Tsukuyama, and he had the exact same question. He said, you know, if you're a seven, are you a seven everywhere? Or are you sometimes a four and sometimes a 10? And so we did something very simple, which is we made a very long questionnaire about all the places that one needs self-control. And we did this by asking people, like where do you fail in your own self-control? And then we made this catalog for a while. We called it the Seven Deadly Sins Study because it looked like there were seven categories and I think it ended up being eight. Very inconvenient. But anyway, there are categories that are familiar to us like food, like alcohol and drugs, porn. There's gambling. There's impulse shopping. There's also emotion dysregulation, right? Like something, okay, confession here. My domain of greatest struggle is probably my temper. So there are these different domains. And when we ask people like, oh, do you do this? Do you do that? What we find is that people vary so much between one domain and another. I really do struggle with my temper. So when I'm really mad, it's like wild horses. However, if you ask me like, well, how hard is it for you to regulate eating or drinking, right? I don't think you've ever seen me finish a glass of wine. I don't have any desire, really. And that's what Eli and I discovered. So not only do people vary considerably across the domains of life, how self-controlled they are, but the key is, is that it's not that they're better at suppressing impulses in some domains than others. It that the very impulses themselves are weaker or stronger for them And it can be very idiosyncratic So the name of the game when it comes to self is that not only can you change it and learn strategies that you can apply to every domain of life, there is inherently a lot of variability within your current situation. And one way to have more self-control is to simply avoid certain temptations or domains like you know that your Achilles heel lies in a certain domain and you just kind of arrange your life so that you're not. And I'll just use one example that's not personal, but alcoholics try not to hang out in bars. If you are really struggling with drinking, struggling with drinking in a bar is not the location where you can be successful. Okay. I have to ask you questions about how do we apply this? So what do you do differently in your life? In particular, after studying self-control, What are some of the big takeaways that you use as a parent, as a mentor, as a leader of organizations, as a spouse? How do you behave differently? My husband hates this, but I really wanted to get to bed at a regular time. So all the sleep specialists tell you, and you know I don't sleep very well. I'm like, is it because I'm middle-aged? Is it because I do not sleep very well? So I need every advantage, right? So one of the things that all sleep specialists tell you is that you should have a consistent bedtime. But like many people, when it comes to bedtime, I'm like, oh, I'll just check 25 more emails. You know, I'll just like tidy up the counter and I'll just like look. So, you know, 10 o'clock becomes 1030 and, you know, suddenly it's 1130 and now I'm off my schedule. So I programmed Alexa to say like, Angela, it's time for bed at exactly 10 p.m. It goes off seven days a week. And do I, you know, hop out of my seat and like, you know, start brushing my teeth? Like, no, but I will tell you that little nudge works. So that's a kind of really obvious and simple thing. And I think other people have their other tricks. Almost everybody I know now knows about temptation bundling, that work that you've done showing that, well, if you have trouble working out, you know, go watch Jennifer Aniston's latest Netflix series or your favorite podcast or like get into your gym clothes before you do anything else. Because once you're in your gym clothes, you're like, OK, fine, I'll go work out. So I have a lot of situational hacks that way. From the trivial to, you know, the most important things in my life, I am trying to use my situation as my ally. I love that. And I hope that's a good takeaway for everyone listening. It's sort of I hear the clinical psychology training in there coming out, too. And it comes out in your research and in the way you live your life. You've taught me so many of the things I know about this, which is still very limited, but so much more than I used to. But it feels like that self-awareness, seeing the patterns, studying yourself using your scientist hat. Introspection. Yeah, and understanding what are the triggers and how to get out of those situations is really important. If you could offer one final piece of advice to our listeners, what would your advice to them be? For a lot of my life, when things weren't going well, I would say, you know, what is wrong with me? I'm not getting this work done. What's wrong with me? And now I say, what's wrong with my situation, right? Like, this isn't getting done. Like, I keep procrastinating. What's wrong with my situation? Is the task undefined? Do I need more advice? Am I not sleeping enough? Like, what's wrong with my situation? And I feel like it is a much more productive question to ask because it leads you to solutions, right? Whereas what's wrong with me tends to lead you with just a lot of self-hatred and a lot of I'll use more willpower next time. And that, of course, as we both know, doesn't work. I love that as a place to wrap. I just want to thank you for taking the time to do this. As always, it's such a pleasure to talk. There's no one I enjoy talking with about science more, Angela, and I really appreciate you spending the time with me today. Thank you. I love this conversation. Let's do it again. I look forward to it. Angela Duckworth is my colleague at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is the Rosa Lee and Egbert Chang professor at Wharton and in the psychology department. She's also the number one New York Times bestselling author of Grit, the winner of a MacArthur Genius Grant, and the co-founder and co-director with me of the Behavior Change for Good Initiative. If you'd like to see and hear my full interview with Angela, where we also explore the relationship between self-control and grit, you can watch the video on YouTube or Spotify. You can find links to the full video, along with links to Angela's work, in the show notes and at schwab.com slash choiceology. Self-control is often a factor when we consider making a big purchase, and even when we decide how to pay for one. To learn more about preparing for major expenses, check out the recent Financial Decoder episode, How Should You Pay for Big Purchases? You can find it at schwab.com slash financial decoder or in your favorite podcast app. In this episode, we've looked at the degree to which self-control as a trait can be an enormous asset. We've seen how Jackie Robinson showed extraordinary self-control. In his career, he time and again resisted the impulse he must have felt to react with anger to relentless cruelty. and by showing so much grace, he achieved a reputation that was arguably far more extraordinary than it might have been if he'd been just as exceptional at baseball but behaved more like most of us would have in the same situation. And Angela Duckworth shared the ways self-control is measured and what helps us exhibit more of it. In doing so, she touched on the famous marshmallow test, which is often misunderstood as a predictor of destiny. I think it's most useful for illustrating just how hard temptation can be to resist, and that our context often shapes whether we give in. While four-year-olds' marshmallow test scores became famous for predicting things like their future SAT scores and behavioral challenges, recent research shows that these scores actually aren't very predictive after you control for things like a child's socioeconomic status. Still, the ability to self-regulate measured more broadly through questionnaires given to people at ages 17 to 37 really does predict a lot, including a person's net worth, income, years of education, and general financial health in their late 40s. The thread that ties all of this together is that success, whether in sports, in social change, or in our personal lives, can be predicted by our ability to manage short-term impulses in service of long-term goals. That's as true in our financial decisions as it is anywhere else. Choosing to save instead of to spend To eat kale instead of potato chips To ignore your cell phone and focus on work instead And to keep your cool rather than losing your temper at an obnoxious comment Will serve you well But your genes are not your destiny And being self-controlled when it comes to your health Doesn't mean you'll nail it when it comes to your finances Which makes it crucial to know your own areas of strength and weakness And to try to set yourself up for success by changing your situation so temptations are out of sight and out of mind. You've been listening to Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. If you've enjoyed the show, we'd be really grateful if you'd leave us a review in Apple Podcasts, a rating on Spotify, or feedback wherever you listen. You can also follow us for free in your favorite podcasting app. And if you want more of the kinds of insights we bring you on Choiceology, about how to improve your decisions, you can order my book, How to Change, or sign up for my monthly newsletter, Milkman Delivers, on Substack. That's it for this season of the podcast. We'll have new episodes for you in the new year. Did you know we have over 100 episodes of Choiceology now? You can explore our back catalog of episodes on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and other podcasting platforms. I'm Dr. Katie Milkman. Talk to you soon. For important disclosures, see the show notes or visit schwab.com slash choiceology.
