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

Very few people can keep going their whole life doing something and feel like it’s merely personally fascinating.

Grit, in a word, is stamina. But it’s not just stamina in your effort.

I think it’s very important to send the message that, while parents are needed to remind you to practice and occasionally force you to finish things… they also need to learn to respect you. You as an individual, ultimately, are the captain of where you’re going.

The most important thing parents can do, although it’s not the only thing they should do, is model the behavior they want from their kids.

It’s also stamina in your direction, stamina in your interests. If you are working on different things but all of them very hard, you’re not really going to get anywhere. You’ll never become an expert.

I 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.

I worked hard as a teacher. But those are completely different career paths. And the lack of direction is why I didn’t get far enough in any of those things.

Nobody gets to be good at something without effort, no matter what your aptitude is.

Really, what matters in the long run is sticking with things and working daily to get better at them.

The words that we use I think are symbolic of the values that we hold.

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

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.

If the quality and quantity of continuous effort toward goals matters as much as I think it does, we may actually get more productive, not less, as we get older – even if we can’t pull all-nighters like we used to.

I think the very idea of character, of developing not just grit, but empathy and curiosity, emotional intelligence.

Many things matter other than our measured intelligence, so let’s get to work on them.

I ended up doubling the math time that a conventional school would have. But I don’t think any of these things were path-breaking or unusual.

Wherever you look there’s meanness and corruption. This room, this bottle of grape wine, these fruits in the basket, are all products of profit and loss.

Man, anytime the ball goes through the basket. It doesn’t matter if it’s a jumper or a drive.

Every time I see you under the basket for a game, I feel confident. No matter how the game is going, I look at you – I say, if our owner’s behind us, we can do it all. I thank you so much for giving me this opportunity.

I was a basket case, you know? When I got mad, I threw clubs, you know? And if things weren’t going well.

Eliminate the referees, raise the basket four feet, double the size of the basketball, limit the height of the players to 5 feet 9 inches, bring back the centre jump, allow taxi drivers in for free and allow the players to carry guns.

No easy baskets.

What is there in a name? It is merely an empty basket, until you put something into it.

Put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket.