The Four Essential Elements of Successful Situations
An excerpt from Angela Duckworth’s Situated that moves past grit toward what she calls situational agency. The argument is that effort has a multiplier and the multiplier is environmental — some ways of trying are structurally better than others — and that four levers sit within an individual’s control: arranging your space, selecting your peers, attracting mentors, and choosing your culture.
A counterweight to development models that locate capability entirely in the individual or entirely in the organisation, naming four environmental levers a person can pull without waiting for a programme to arrive. Worth pairing with any resilience or self-discipline intervention, which typically asks people to try harder inside a situation nobody has thought to examine.
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