Drive is something that can be encouraged by a wonderful teacher, by a terrific classroom environment, by an awesome soccer team that you are on, and it can be squashed as well.
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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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.
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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.
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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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When people tell me I can’t do something, I have a visceral reflex to say, ‘Yes, I can.’
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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 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.
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You know, the things that I want my own daughters to develop – the idea that we’re going to get there through rewards and punishments seems completely at odds with the idea of character itself.
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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 don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my genes because I can’t do anything about them.
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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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Grittier students are more likely to earn their diplomas; grittier teachers are more effective in the classroom.
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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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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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To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows, about building it.
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Every day, parents and teachers ask me, ‘How do I build grit in kids? What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic? How do I keep them motivated for the long run?’ The honest answer is, I don’t know.
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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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Striving is exhausting. Sometimes I do say things like, ‘I wish I were not quite this driven to be excellent.’ It’s not a comfortable life. It’s not relaxed. I’m not relaxed as a person. I mean, I’m not unhappy. But… it’s the opposite of being comfortable.
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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 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.
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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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Really, what matters in the long run is sticking with things and working daily to get better at them.
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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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I do feel it’s hard to be modest and humble and egoless when people are telling you you are so great and wanting to give you prizes and energy. I’m trying hard not to be an awful, narcissistic human being.
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Boredom is a very self-conscious emotion by definition. Interest is not. So you can actually be completely absorbed in something and, at certain points in your development, not even realize that you’re into it.
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There are so many things that kids care about, where they excel, where they try hard, where they learn important life lessons, that are not picked up by test scores.
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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