I stayed for lunch for extra tutoring, gave kids my cell phone, and was available. In my first year of teaching,
ANGELA DUCKWORTHMy dad was not super-intentional in his parenting. He was very self-absorbed. I won’t say mean or selfish per se, but very self-absorbed. I think he was just thinking out loud.
More Angela Duckworth Quotes
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There haven’t been genetic studies on grit, but we often think that challenge is inherited but grit is learned. That’s not what science says. Science says grit comes from both nature and nurture.
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Grit is living life like it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
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When people tell me I can’t do something, I have a visceral reflex to say, ‘Yes, I can.’
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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.
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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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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.
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If you’re never able to tolerate a little bit of pain and discomfort, you’ll never get better.
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The words that we use I think are symbolic of the values that we hold.
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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.
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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.
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Grittier soldiers are more likely to complete their training, and grittier salespeople are more likely to keep their jobs. The more challenging the domain, the more grit seems to matter.
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I know that instructional time is a zero-sum game, but if we want kids to do well academically, it’s hard to imagine that happening if they don’t have some control over their attention.
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There are going to be peaks and valleys. You don’t want to let kids quit during a valley.
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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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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.
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