Is it ‘a drag’ that passions don’t come to us all at once, as epiphanies, without the need to actively develop them?
ANGELA DUCKWORTHI 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.
More Angela Duckworth Quotes
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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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If you’re never able to tolerate a little bit of pain and discomfort, you’ll never get better.
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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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As our knees and hips and eyesight deteriorate, we become more dependable, less impulsive, kinder, and less moody.
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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.
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People who are really gritty – they’re still interested.
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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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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.
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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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Longitudinal studies following thousands of people across time have shown that most people only begin to gravitate toward certain vocational interests, and away from others, around middle school.
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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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To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows, about building it.
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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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Negative feelings are typical of learning, and you shouldn’t feel like you’re stupid when you’re frustrated doing something. You might say to yourself, ‘I can’t do this,’ but you should say, ‘That’s great.’ That means you really have the potential to learn something there.
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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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Many things matter other than our measured intelligence, so let’s get to work on 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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I stayed for lunch for extra tutoring, gave kids my cell phone, and was available. In my first year of teaching,
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I was a good novice teacher, but I did the things that were obvious.
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Some people prefer a world where we’re all equally talented in everything. Whether you prefer that world or not, I don’t think that world exists.
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Nobody gets to be good at something without effort, no matter what your aptitude is.
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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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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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Being gritty doesn’t mean not showing pain or pretending everything is O.K. In fact, when you look at healthy and successful and giving people, they are extraordinarily meta-cognitive. They’re able to say things like, ‘Dude, I totally lost my temper this morning.’ That ability to reflect on yourself is signature to grit.
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Maybe. But the reality is that our early interests are fragile, vaguely defined, and in need of energetic, years-long cultivation and refinement.
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Psychologists call this the maturity principle. My own life experience fits this principle to a T.
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