Striving is exhausting. Sometimes I do say things like, ‘I wish I were not quite this driven to be excellent.’ It’s not a comfortable life. It’s not relaxed. I’m not relaxed as a person. I mean, I’m not unhappy. But… it’s the opposite of being comfortable.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHI do think that whatever ambition I may have had natively was amplified by my father’s clear valuing of it. I knew that was what my dad really cared about.
More Angela Duckworth Quotes
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If you are a young person who is wanting to develop a passion, you cannot expect anyone else to tell you what that passion would be.
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And I’ve discovered a strikingly consistent pattern: grit and age go hand in hand. Sixty-somethings tend to be grittier, on average, than fifty-somethings, who are in turn grittier than forty-somethings, and so on.
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Substituting nuance for novelty is what experts do, and that is why they are never bored.
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Negative feelings are typical of learning, and you shouldn’t feel like you’re stupid when you’re frustrated doing something. You might say to yourself, ‘I can’t do this,’ but you should say, ‘That’s great.’ That means you really have the potential to learn something there.
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At various points, in big ways and small, we get knocked down. If we stay down, grit loses. If we get up, grit prevails.
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We have found a direct correlation between grit and positive emotions, but the fact that I have no evidence that grit is bad for you doesn’t mean it’s not. It’s always a possibility that in the future researchers will discover a downside to grit.
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Nobody gets to be good at something without effort, no matter what your aptitude is.
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One of the challenges of commencement speeches is that you have this older, wiser person who is accomplished talking to young, not-yet-so-wise, not-yet-accomplished adults or, in high school or middle school, even younger.
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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.
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I believe kids should choose what they want to do, because it’s their life, but they have to choose something, and they can’t quit in the middle unless there’s a really good reason.
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Is it ‘a drag’ that passions don’t come to us all at once, as epiphanies, without the need to actively develop them?
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There are so many things that kids care about, where they excel, where they try hard, where they learn important life lessons, that are not picked up by test scores.
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So when my daughter told me on the second track meet that she was done with it because she discovered she didn’t like competing, I made her finish the season.
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Being gritty doesn’t mean not showing pain or pretending everything is O.K. In fact, when you look at healthy and successful and giving people, they are extraordinarily meta-cognitive. They’re able to say things like, ‘Dude, I totally lost my temper this morning.’ That ability to reflect on yourself is signature to grit.
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Psychologists call this the maturity principle. My own life experience fits this principle to a T.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH