Grit, in a word, is stamina. But it’s not just stamina in your effort.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHI worked hard as a teacher. But those are completely different career paths. And the lack of direction is why I didn’t get far enough in any of those things.
More Angela Duckworth Quotes
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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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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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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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If you’re never able to tolerate a little bit of pain and discomfort, you’ll never get better.
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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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Substituting nuance for novelty is what experts do, and that is why they are never bored.
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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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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.
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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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It’s also stamina in your direction, stamina in your interests. If you are working on different things but all of them very hard, you’re not really going to get anywhere. You’ll never become an expert.
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The most important thing parents can do, although it’s not the only thing they should do, is model the behavior they want from their kids.
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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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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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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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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.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH






