Very few people can keep going their whole life doing something and feel like it’s merely personally fascinating.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHI would be surprised if my girls ended up as women without grit. I really would.
More Angela Duckworth Quotes
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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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Everybody knows that effort matters. What was revelatory to me was how much it mattered.
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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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If you are a young person who is wanting to develop a passion, you cannot expect anyone else to tell you what that passion would be.
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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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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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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 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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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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I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my genes because I can’t do anything about them.
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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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I would be surprised if my girls ended up as women without grit. I really would.
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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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There are no shortcuts to true excellence.
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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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Psychologists call this the maturity principle. My own life experience fits this principle to a T.
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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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Why do some people try, try again, and why do some people not? That’s what I’m after.
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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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We have found a direct correlation between grit and positive emotions, but the fact that I have no evidence that grit is bad for you doesn’t mean it’s not. It’s always a possibility that in the future researchers will discover a downside to grit.
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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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My dad was not super-intentional in his parenting. He was very self-absorbed. I won’t say mean or selfish per se, but very self-absorbed. I think he was just thinking out loud.
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Nobody gets to be good at something without effort, no matter what your aptitude is.
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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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I now have Grit Scale scores from thousands of American adults. My data provide a snapshot of grit across adulthood.
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Many things matter other than our measured intelligence, so let’s get to work on them.
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