It’s a very good thing to teach kids to finish what they started in the sense of fulfilling their commitments.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHIf you’re never able to tolerate a little bit of pain and discomfort, you’ll never get better.
More Angela Duckworth Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Childhood is generally far too early to know what we want to be when we grow up.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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Many things matter other than our measured intelligence, so let’s get to work on them.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH