“Everybody knows that effort matters. What was revelatory to me was how much it mattered.”

There’s this really awesome theory of human motivation – that human beings all want three things. One is to be competent, one is to belong, and one is be free, as in to have choice: to not be told what to do but to choose what to do.

When people think of the word ‘drive,’ they often think you have it or you don’t, and that’s where we’re wrong.

I do feel it’s hard to be modest and humble and egoless when people are telling you you are so great and wanting to give you prizes and energy. I’m trying hard not to be an awful, narcissistic human being.

One thing that’s true of gritty people is they love what they do, and they keep loving what they do. So they’re not just in love for a day or a week.

Most teachers, when surveyed, say that it is part of their job to help students develop things like grit. This is especially true at the elementary and middle school levels. They feel it’s part of their vocation to teach other things that are not formally academic content.

I will say that if my wildest dreams come true, I will, like, wake up one day, and I will be Carol Dweck, right? Because she is like everything I want to be.

I define talent as the rate at which you get better at something when you try. To be very talented means you get better faster and more easily than other people or other things that you try.

Grit may carry risk because it’s about putting all your eggs in one basket, to some extent.

The parenting style that is good for grit is also the parenting style good for most other things: Be really, really demanding, and be very, very supportive.

Maybe. But the reality is that our early interests are fragile, vaguely defined, and in need of energetic, years-long cultivation and refinement.

At various points, in big ways and small, we get knocked down. If we stay down, grit loses. If we get up, grit prevails.

You cannot will yourself to be interested in something you’re not interested in. But you can actively discover and deepen your interest.

Why do some people try, try again, and why do some people not? That’s what I’m after.

People’s lives really do turn out differently. And it certainly can’t be explained by how intelligent you remember them being when they were sitting next to you in organic chemistry class.

There’s something about taking the path of least resistance that makes a lot of sense. But at the same time, we have to figure out which things in life are worth struggling through.

Is it ‘a drag’ that passions don’t come to us all at once, as epiphanies, without the need to actively develop them?

A fellow can’t live without giving his passive acceptance to meanness. Somebody wears his tail to a frazzle for every mouthful we eat and every stitch we wear-and nobody seems to know. Everybody is blind, dumb, and blunt-headed-stupid and mean.

I’ve advocated a proportional tax system. You make $10 billion, you pay a billion. You make $10, you pay one. And everybody gets treated the same way.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.

To my disappointment I now realized that to know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.

Everybody wants to be famous, but nobody wants to do the work.

As a woman of color, I always have to be at 150 percent and better than everybody in the room to be considered competent.

By the time the average Christian gets his temperature up to normal, everybody thinks he has a fever!

Everybody on our cast is very musically talented, except for me.