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.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHVery few people can keep going their whole life doing something and feel like it’s merely personally fascinating.
More Angela Duckworth Quotes
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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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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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Childhood is generally far too early to know what we want to be when we grow up.
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I think the very idea of character, of developing not just grit, but empathy and curiosity, emotional intelligence.
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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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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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Grittier soldiers are more likely to complete their training, and grittier salespeople are more likely to keep their jobs. The more challenging the domain, the more grit seems to matter.
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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 stayed for lunch for extra tutoring, gave kids my cell phone, and was available. In my first year of teaching,
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There’s this really awesome theory of human motivation – that human beings all want three things. One is to be competent, one is to belong, and one is be free, as in to have choice: to not be told what to do but to choose what to do.
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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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Really, what matters in the long run is sticking with things and working daily to get better at them.
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I 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.
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I would be surprised if my girls ended up as women without grit. I really would.
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The parenting style that is good for grit is also the parenting style good for most other things: Be really, really demanding, and be very, very supportive.
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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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Many things matter other than our measured intelligence, so let’s get to work on them.
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Grit, in a word, is stamina. But it’s not just stamina in your effort.
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There are no shortcuts to true excellence.
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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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People who are really gritty – they’re still interested.
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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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There are going to be peaks and valleys. You don’t want to let kids quit during a valley.
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I define talent as the rate at which you get better at something when you try. To be very talented means you get better faster and more easily than other people or other things that you try.
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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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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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