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.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHPsychologists call this the maturity principle. My own life experience fits this principle to a T.
More Angela Duckworth Quotes
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Really, what matters in the long run is sticking with things and working daily to get better at them.
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The focus on just thinking about standardized test scores as being synonymous with achievement for teenagers is ridiculous, right?
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Every day, parents and teachers ask me, ‘How do I build grit in kids? What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic? How do I keep them motivated for the long run?’ The honest answer is, I don’t know.
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I’m not a policy oriented person. I’m constrained to what I study. But educational policy has not yet taken adequate note of the whole child. Kids are not just their IQ or standardized test scores. It matters whether or not they show up, how hard they work.
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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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As our knees and hips and eyesight deteriorate, we become more dependable, less impulsive, kinder, and less moody.
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Everybody knows that effort matters. What was revelatory to me was how much it mattered.
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Boredom is a very self-conscious emotion by definition. Interest is not. So you can actually be completely absorbed in something and, at certain points in your development, not even realize that you’re into it.
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Many things matter other than our measured intelligence, so let’s get to work on them.
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What we reliably find is that people’s perseverance scores are actually higher than their passion scores, and I think it really does get to the fact that working hard is hard, but maybe finding your passion is even more difficult.
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When people think of the word ‘drive,’ they often think you have it or you don’t, and that’s where we’re wrong.
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When I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding: teaching. I went to teach seventh graders math in the New York City public schools.
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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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I didn’t tell my kids, ‘You have to play viola, and you have to play piano.’ They chose these things on their own, and I don’t think we have to give kids every choice, but we do have to give them some choice because that autonomy is crucial for fostering passion.
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Very few people can keep going their whole life doing something and feel like it’s merely personally fascinating.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH






