Most people who are really, enduringly interested in something eventually find that it’s important, too – and important to other people.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHAs our knees and hips and eyesight deteriorate, we become more dependable, less impulsive, kinder, and less moody.
More Angela Duckworth Quotes
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Is it ‘a drag’ that passions don’t come to us all at once, as epiphanies, without the need to actively develop them?
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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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Why do some people try, try again, and why do some people not? That’s what I’m after.
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I don’t think that every child in America is going to necessarily aspire to, you know, a four-year degree from a liberal arts college or a certain kind of life. I think that people should learn to be excellent in the thing that they choose to do.
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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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It’s a very good thing to teach kids to finish what they started in the sense of fulfilling their commitments.
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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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It is important to realize that the process of ‘fostering’ a passion takes trial and error. It takes experience; you cannot do it all in your head. And it takes a long time.
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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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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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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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So when my daughter told me on the second track meet that she was done with it because she discovered she didn’t like competing, I made her finish the season.
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Everybody knows that effort matters. What was revelatory to me was how much it mattered.
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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.
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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.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH






