“Psychologists call this the maturity principle. My own life experience fits this principle to a T.”

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?

I was a good novice teacher, but I did the things that were obvious.

Gritty people train at the edge of their comfort zone. They zero in on one narrow aspect of their performance and set a stretch goal to improve it.

Some people prefer a world where we’re all equally talented in everything. Whether you prefer that world or not, I don’t think that world exists.

It takes a long time to bring excellence to maturity.

Now I truly believe that we in this generation must come to terms with nature, and I think we’re challenged, as mankind has never been challenged before, to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature but of ourselves.

Youth ends when egotism does; maturity begins when one lives for others.

A woman of mystery is one who also has a certain maturity and whose actions speak louder than words. Any woman can be one, if she keeps those two points in mind. She should grow up-and shut up.

Every new experience brings its own maturity and a greater clarity of vision.

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. It may not be difficult to store up in the mind a vast quantity of facts within a comparatively short time, but the ability to form judgments requires the severe discipline of hard work and the tempering heat of experience and maturity.

A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.

I don’t feel like a 27-year-old; I feel I am way mature than someone that age.