“Many, many individuals will report starting to form their lifelong interests around adolescence. Why that is, researchers don’t fully know. But if you can take a trip down memory lane and see what interested you, that’s at least a clue as to where your interest may begin to develop.”

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.

I would be surprised if my girls ended up as women without grit. I really would.

If you’re never able to tolerate a little bit of pain and discomfort, you’ll never get better.

I now have Grit Scale scores from thousands of American adults. My data provide a snapshot of grit across adulthood.

There is a fluency and an ease with which true mastery and expertise always expresses itself, whether it be in writing, whether it be in a mathematical proof, whether it be in a dance that you see on stage, really in every domain. But I think the question is, you know, where does that fluency and mastery come from?

Substituting nuance for novelty is what experts do, and that is why they are never bored.

I know a lot of CEOs who are looking for three- to four-year varsity athletes – not necessarily because these people are going to be doing pushups or spiking volleyballs in the workplace, but because they’re looking for that continuity, that person who was gritty about something.

It’s a very good thing to teach kids to finish what they started in the sense of fulfilling their commitments.

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.