Between Thoughts -Intellectual Musings

When Grit Is Not Enough and the Situation Is Heavier.

Reading Angela Duckworth’s Situated with learners who did not choose where they stand.

One of my learners at African Men Care is a sea sponge. Whatever I am reading, she wants to know about it, and she wants to know now. So when I started Angela Duckworth’s Situated, published ten years after Grit, I sent the circle a photo of the cover and two cheat sheets: one for Grit, for those who never read it, and one for the new book.
The questions came down like Mosi-oa-Tunya, the Smoke That Thunders, the falls the colonial maps still call Victoria: wide, loud and unstoppable, a curtain of water 1.7 kilometres across dropping 108 metres into a basalt gorge. Some came down like the Tugela instead, falling in five tiers from the Amphitheatre in the Drakensberg, nearly a kilometre from lip to pool, a contender for the tallest waterfall on earth. Narrow, tall, piercing.

I picked four of them to wrestle with. Before I get to them, the two books, and why my learners pushed back.

Two books, ten years apart
Grit in one breath: outstanding achievement is not mainly about talent, genius or IQ. It is about grit, a blend of long-term passion and perseverance toward one important goal. Duckworth gave us two equations:
Talent × Effort = Skill        Skill × Effort = Achievement
Effort appears in both, so effort counts twice. She named four assets you grow from the inside out (interest, deliberate practice, purpose and hope) and conditions that grow grit from the outside in: parenting that is demanding and warm at the same time, the family “hard thing” rule, and gritty cultures that pull you up to their standard.

The book helped some of our learners. It also drew a fair criticism, one Duckworth has acknowledged hearing: that it seemed to tell people to work harder while ignoring that some people do not have the same opportunities to thrive, no matter how hard they work.

Situated is her answer, or the start of one. It begins from her own admission that grit, while necessary, is sometimes not sufficient. Instead of spending willpower overriding your environment, change the environment so that the right thing becomes the easy thing. Her research points at the objects within arm’s reach, your peers and mentors, even your zip code. The way I read it, situation comes first, then thought, then action, and most self-help tries to fix the last two while leaving the first untouched. We are told to make the best of a bad situation. Duckworth says it is far better to make the situation better first.

One idea in the book matters more to my learners than any other, and it is not the one on the cover. She calls it situational responsibility: changing situations for other people, most of all for those who cannot change their own. Children first. A two-year-old does not choose the food on the table, the books in the house, or whether anyone takes her to the library. Duckworth’s example is Debbie Phelps, a mother who saw that her restless son was a different boy in the right setting, and took him to the pool seven days a week. Hold on to that idea. Everything that follows hangs on it.

A product of opportunity
I did not arrive at this from a book. I am a product of it. Someone gave me a scholarship to study Conflict Resolution and Mediation under Dr. Dudley Weeks at American University and African Studies at Howard. Someone gave me a full scholarship to UCT. And one lecturer, Prof Tim Dunne, looked at a young man fed Bantu education, a young man who had never properly been taught the foundations of high school Maths, and gave up two hours of his own day, every day, to teach me what the system had refused to. Because of him I majored in Statistics.
The brain was mine. The situation was his gift.

At African Men Care (AMC.- http://www.africanmencare.com) we say it plainly: to be young, gifted and free without opportunity is a devil’s gift, and to deny that gift is evil. (I have long credited the thought to Noam Chomsky, but I cannot trace it to his writing, so hold the attribution loosely and the idea tightly.) Talent is not enough if it is not matched with opportunity. What the situation requires from AMC is opportunity. Twenty-two years in, that is still the job.

Umthwalo: the weight they carry
My learners reminded me of something I should never need reminding of. They were born into situations built for survival, not for thriving. They did not choose parents who are poor and time-poor, absent for economic reasons rather than because they are bad people. Seven in ten of them did not choose a biological father who is not there. They did not choose the poverty and inequality that cut deepest in the Western Cape and Gauteng, where most of them live. They did not choose schools where teachers are not always subject experts and the foundation phase is so broken that children move up the grades unable to read for meaning or count with confidence.

So when I share a book, I must remember their situation. Otherwise a book about situations becomes one more lecture blaming the victim for not gritting hard enough. Here is how I explain the weight. Poverty, inequality, absent parents, noise, violence, poor schooling and hunger are objects with more mass. Put a child carrying them next to a child with both parents present and educated, good food, a peaceful suburb and a good postal code. Both children can be knocked down. The first falls harder, because heavier objects feel a stronger pull, and it takes more to get up. There is no material or emotional safety net underneath. The ones who made it out, and I am one, are outliers.
Our existence is not proof that the system works. It is proof that the system sometimes fails to hold us all down.

(I made the case in Broke Is Not the Same as Behind that poverty and inequality are two different weights, pressing on two different parts of the brain.)

Adopt, Adapt, Invent.
The first thing I told them: wisdom from anywhere is wisdom. Our job is to adopt, then adapt, and one day invent. Japan, China, Singapore and Cuba each borrowed, bent what they borrowed to their own conditions, then made something new. Deng Xiaoping said it does not matter whether a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice. Evidence is the cat. But be honest about the bathwater. Duckworth’s research, like most behavioural science, was built largely in rich countries, where even poverty looks different from poverty in Mzansi(South). “Organise what is within arm’s reach” assumes you control the space within arm’s reach. In a one-room shack shared by eight people, next door to a shebeen, that rule cannot simply be applied. It has to be reinvented. So we do not throw the baby out with the Western bathwater. We change the water. We bathe the baby in the Senqu, which rises in the mountains of Lesotho, becomes the Orange as it crosses South Africa, and empties into the Atlantic at Alexander Bay. All water finds the sea. It is one water.

How I situate my own weak spot?
Let me show before I tell. Running, I do not need to situate. I love the road, I have run for decades, and it comes naturally. Resistance training is different. The iron is heavy, and I grew up with enough heavy things. Why torture myself? Intellectually I know strength training matters more with every birthday. The gap between what I know and what I do is wide. So I stopped relying on myself and built a situation instead:
A team. I joined a fight club, because I am consistent in a group and inconsistent alone.
Less friction. I lay out my training clothes the night before. The decision is made while I am rested, and the clothes on the chair are the first cue I see.
A public promise. When I leave, I say out loud: “See you guys tomorrow.” A promise made in a room is harder to break than one made in my head.
A nudge I chose. I joined the club’s WhatsApp group, so the group reminds me when I slack.

None of that is willpower. It is design. Wendy Wood and her colleagues found that roughly 43% of everyday behaviour is performed almost daily, in the same setting, while we are thinking about something else. If close to half of what you do is habit cued by your surroundings, then changing the surroundings is not a trick. It is half the game. (For the full, unrepentant rant on the gym, see Koze Kubenini?)

What I took from the book.
From the book, and from Duckworth’s conversation with Adam Grant and Brené Brown on The Curiosity Shop about why grit is not always enough, I took five things. The first is simple: we all have places where we do our best work. The rest:
1. Situational awareness. Audit your situation. Under stress we turn inward, grow loss-averse and discount the future, and we stop seeing how much of the situation we could change, manage or improve. Look for the cues that trigger the behaviour you want less of.
2. Situational control. Much of what we praise as willpower is really good control of the environment. The disciplined person often just has fewer temptations in reach.
3. Ask for help. Community is a situation. Nobody situates themselves alone.
4. Know when to quit and when to grit. Keep your eyes on the lighthouse, but change course when the storm demands it. Ask where you are really trying to get to. Get an opinion from someone with emotional and psychological distance. Be steadfast about the north star and quick to change the route.
5. Grace and mercy. Give them to yourself. You will need them.

The four questions
The questions below are in my learners’ own words, lightly edited, with details changed so that no one can be identified.
Question 1: The score
“I did my ACE test and most of us in the group scored very high. We are situated in a dump, in a mess. If you stay in poverty long enough, until 16 or 25, you are more likely to die in poverty. The odds are against us. How can this book help us?”
First, a correction that is also a comfort. ACE stands for Adverse Childhood Experiences, from the 1998 study by Vincent Felitti, Robert Anda and colleagues at Kaiser Permanente and the CDC. They counted categories of abuse, neglect and household dysfunction and found that the more of them a person had lived through, the higher their risk of a long list of problems in adulthood. The finding is real and it has held up. But the ACE score was built to describe risk across populations, not to write the future of one person. Anda himself, with colleagues, has warned against using it as an individual prediction tool. The same score lands very differently in two lives, and the questionnaire never counts what protects you. It never asks whether a grandmother held you, whether a teacher saw you, whether a coach believed in you. Research on positive childhood experiences, led by Christina Bethell in 2019, found those experiences linked to better adult mental health even among people with high ACE scores. And the Harvard Center on the Developing Child puts it simply: the most common factor among children who do well despite serious hardship is at least one stable, committed relationship with a supportive adult. A high ACE score is a diagnosis of the situation you were given. It is not a verdict on your soul.

Is the poverty trap real? Yes. South Africa is among the most unequal countries on earth, and mobility here is low. I will not lie to you about the odds. But odds describe a crowd. They do not decide which member of the crowd gets out. What Situated offers:
Situational responsibility belongs to adults first. You were children. By the book’s own argument, the adults (parents, teachers, government, business, organisations like AMC, HeartLines, Sisonke Gender Justice, What About the Boys-PrimeStars) owe you better situations. That is not charity. It is the duty the book assigns to us.
Borrow situations you cannot yet build. If home is chaos, borrow a quiet place: a library, a classroom after hours, an AMC session, a church hall. You do not have to own a good situation to use one.
Choose your peers on purpose. It is the cheapest situational change there is. Sit near the learners who do the work. Their standard becomes your default.
Count the other column. If the ACE test counts the damage, count the protection too. Every adult who holds you to a high standard with warmth is a protective factor. Go and find them. Let them find you.

Remember Prof Tim Dunne, blessed his soul. He was my protective factor, and he did not appear on any questionnaire.

Question 2: The pile-up
“What should you do when you are situated in poverty and inequality, with an absent biological father or both parents absent, poor education, an illiterate parent, poor nutrition, an informal settlement, and 65% youth unemployment?”
This is what developmental scientists call cumulative risk. Michael Rutter showed in 1979 that children with a single risk factor did about as well as children with none, but that the danger climbed steeply as risks piled up. Gary Evans and others have found the same pattern across poverty research since: the pile-up does more damage than any one weight. That sounds like bad news. Turn it around. If risk accumulates, so does protection. Every weight you lift off the pile, or cushion, counts. You do not have to fix everything. You have to change the count.
– Recruit surrogate scaffolding. Where the biological scaffolding is missing, build it from elsewhere: an uncle, a neighbour, a social father, a coach, a deacon,  a pastor, a mentor. This is why AMC, Heartlines Fathers Matter, Prime Stars-What About the Boys?, The Mankind Project exists. The absent father is a real wound (I wrote about it in Ubaba Akekho and Ufile Kimi), but manhood and womanhood can be taught by more than one teacher.
– Protect the fuel. A hungry brain cannot plan. Use every feeding scheme you are entitled to, and do not be ashamed to eat. Shame is a situation too, and it is one you can refuse.
– Treat learning as an insurgency. If the system gave you a poor education, get a better one behind its back. A cheap phone and a little data reach free courses, textbooks and past papers. Teach each other: explaining a concept to a peer is one of the best ways to learn it.
– Become the reader in the house. If your parent cannot read, read aloud and bring them along. A child who teaches a parent changes two situations at once.
– Widen the rooms you are in. Official figures put unemployment among 15 to 24 year olds above 60%. You cannot fix that labour market alone, so get into more rooms where work is discussed: volunteer, join programmes, show up. Most jobs travel through people before they travel through adverts. (See Isandla Sihlamba Esinye – Social Capital,  on bridging and linking capital.)

Question 3: The noise and the fear
“How do you grit and situate yourself when there is no electricity, there is a shebeen next door with noise day and night, yesterday a stone’s throw from my house there was a shoot-out and twelve people died, and every day we hear stories of a serial killer and women found dead? As a girl I am scared all the time.”
First, to her: your fear is not weakness. It is your body doing its job in a place that is genuinely dangerous. No book should tell you to think your way out of a real threat. Living with constant threat keeps the body’s stress system switched on. When that goes on for a long time without a buffering adult relationship, researchers call it toxic stress. It makes concentration harder, sleep lighter and the future feel far away. That is not a character flaw. It is biology answering a situation. So we adapt Duckworth. Her examples are about moving a phone out of reach. Here the situation is gunfire. The principle holds; the tools change.
– Co-regulation before self-regulation. The nervous system settles in the presence of safe people. That is why group sessions, study circles and running clubs matter: you borrow the calm of the group until you can make your own.
– Claim a sovereign hour. You cannot control the shebeen, but you can find the hour it goes quiet, often very early in the morning, and make it yours: no phone, no visitors, one task. I call this situational sovereignty, taking back time and space the environment has occupied, even before you can leave it.
– Change the sound, not just the room. Foam earplugs cost very little. So does studying at school or in a library. Where there is no electricity, a small solar lamp is a situational intervention, and daylight is a study plan.
– Safety is collective. Walk in groups, share your location, agree on check-ins. But hear me clearly: these are tactics, not blame. If anything happens to a woman, the fault belongs to the man who did it, never to the route she walked. (I made that distinction in Uyaziwa.)
– Do not carry it alone. Living near a mass shooting is trauma. Talk to someone. Childline and SADAG take calls from young people, and AMC mentors can connect you to counselling. The numbers are below.

Question 4: The man in the house
“How do you situate yourself when your stepfather stabbed your mum, you had to take her to hospital, and now he is out on bail and terrorising everyone at home? I am scared to death.”
This is not a question about productivity. It is an emergency, and I want to answer it as one. Duckworth tells us not to make the best of a bad situation but to change it. Here, changing the situation means safety, and safety comes before exams, homework and every goal I have ever written about. Grit is useless against a violent man in your house.
You do not owe loyalty to a situation that is trying to kill you.
Tell an adult outside the home, today. A teacher, a priest, a deacon, a community safety officer, a social worker, an AMC mentor, a relative you trust. Abuse survives on silence, and silence protects him, not you.
– Report the threats. Tell the police and the investigating officer on the stabbing case what he is doing. Bail usually comes with conditions, and intimidating the complainant or witnesses can breach them. A court can cancel bail.
– Get a protection order. Your mother can apply under the Domestic Violence Act at a magistrate’s court or with help from the police. Children can be covered by it, and a social worker or another trusted adult can help with the application.
– If home is not safe, leave it for now. A relative, a shelter or a place of safety. Social workers at the GBV Command Centre can help arrange it.
– Look after yourself too. You carried your bleeding mother to hospital. That is trauma. Ask for counselling for yourself, not only for her.

Where to get help today
Police emergency: 10111 (or 112 from any cellphone)
GBV Command Centre (24/7, social workers): 0800 428 428, please-call-me *120*7867#, or SMS “Help” to 31531
Childline South Africa (free, for children and teenagers): 116
SADAG (counselling and referrals): 0800 567 567


Grit is the engine. The situation is the road.
You can have a V8, but if the road ends at a cliff you will go over it. Grit without a situation is a good engine on a broken road. A situation without grit is a good road with nobody driving. My learners need both, and so did I. So what did I say to the four of them? Be unreasonable. George Bernard Shaw wrote that the reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable one keeps trying to adapt the world to himself, and so all progress depends on the unreasonable man. My learners are constantly asked to be reasonable about situations nobody should accept. Adapting to them normalises the unacceptable. Refuse the boundaries of your postcode, even while you are still living inside them.

And now a word to the adults reading this, because the most important idea in Situated is addressed to us. If you are a parent, a teacher, an uncle or aunt, a manager, a funder or an official: the children in these four questions cannot change their situations alone. We can. A lecturer’s two hours a day changed mine. What will yours change?

The study I would run with SALDRU & J-PAL
AMC could test this properly. Take learners who want a place to study and randomly assign them either to immediate access to a quiet, lit, supervised study space with a weekly mentor, or to a waitlist that gets the same access one term later. Measure homework completion, school attendance, sleep, self-reported stress and end-of-term marks. If borrowed situations work for children who cannot change their own, we should be able to see it. Then we can ask business and government to pay for it at scale.


The Umthwalo Audit
Q1. Which weights in my situation can I lift, which can I cushion, and which can I only carry for now?
Q2. Where is the one place I do my best work, and how can I get there more often?
Q3. Who are the five people I spend the most time with, and whose standard am I absorbing?
Q4. Which adult can I ask for help this week?
Q5. Where is my sovereign hour?
Q6. Is this a goal to grit through or a route to change? Who, at a distance, can help me decide?
Q7..Am I unsafe right now? If the answer is yes, stop reading and tell someone.


Make the circle bigger
I promised my learners I would not moralise. I hope I kept the promise. If you have more thoughts or insights, share them. The circle gets bigger every time someone speaks. It takes a village to raise a child, and it takes a village to change the situation a child is raised in.
My name, Mzamo, means try. This book taught me something about my own name: trying needs somewhere to stand. Someone gave me somewhere to stand. Now it is our turn to give it.

Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. We are situated through each other.
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Dr. Mzamo Masito

Between Thoughts- Intellectual Musings

Where the uncomfortable questions get a seat at the table.