“Many things matter other than our measured intelligence, so let’s get to work on them.”

You cannot will yourself to be interested in something you’re not interested in. But you can actively discover and deepen your interest.

Why do some people try, try again, and why do some people not? That’s what I’m after.

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.

There’s something about taking the path of least resistance that makes a lot of sense. But at the same time, we have to figure out which things in life are worth struggling through.

Is it ‘a drag’ that passions don’t come to us all at once, as epiphanies, without the need to actively develop them?

I was a good novice teacher, but I did the things that were obvious.

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.

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.

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.

I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my genes because I can’t do anything about them.

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.

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.

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.

There are going to be peaks and valleys. You don’t want to let kids quit during a valley.

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.

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.

Many people are in despair because their dreams didn’t come true, and they despair even more that they did not make them come true.

Many roads lead to the Path, but basically there are only two: reason and practice.

September 2001. A sunny day in New York. Many of us who are writers were at work on the transformation of life into a poem, story, a chapter of a novel, when terror pounced from the sky, and the world made witness to it.

So that such ideas are opposed both to physical principles and to the authority of the Holy Writ which many time: confirms the stability of the Earth (as we shall discuss more fully elsewhere).

I failed so many times and got back up. I got through the toughest times with my family, but I’m still standing.

Many people talk much, and then very many people talk very much more.

In many ways doth the full heart reveal The presence of the love it would conceal.

There are, for example, so many kinds of tongues in this world; and none is without voice. If then I know not the power of the voice, I shall be to him to whom I speak a barbarian; and he that speaketh, a barbarian to me.