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.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHWhen people tell me I can’t do something, I have a visceral reflex to say, ‘Yes, I can.’
More Angela Duckworth Quotes
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I now have Grit Scale scores from thousands of American adults. My data provide a snapshot of grit across adulthood.
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Very few people can keep going their whole life doing something and feel like it’s merely personally fascinating.
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I think the questions on the grit scale about not letting setbacks disappoint you, finishing what you begin, doing things with focus, I think that those are things I would aspire to or hope for for all our children.
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I worked hard when I was a consultant. I worked hard when I was in graduate school looking at neuroscience.
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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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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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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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People who are really gritty – they’re still interested.
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I think the very idea of character, of developing not just grit, but empathy and curiosity, emotional intelligence.
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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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When people tell me I can’t do something, I have a visceral reflex to say, ‘Yes, I can.’
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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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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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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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Everybody knows that effort matters. What was revelatory to me was how much it mattered.
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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.
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Childhood is generally far too early to know what we want to be when we grow up.
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Grittier students are more likely to earn their diplomas; grittier teachers are more effective in the classroom.
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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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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 was a good novice teacher, but I did the things that were obvious.
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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.
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Some of the things we do are great, but they often have these iterations that are not great. We screw up sometimes. We get rejected.
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You cannot will yourself to be interested in something you’re not interested in. But you can actively discover and deepen your interest.
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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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I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my genes because I can’t do anything about them.
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