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.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHSome of the things we do are great, but they often have these iterations that are not great. We screw up sometimes. We get rejected.
More Angela Duckworth Quotes
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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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People who are really gritty – they’re still interested.
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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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There are so many things that kids care about, where they excel, where they try hard, where they learn important life lessons, that are not picked up by test scores.
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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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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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Childhood is generally far too early to know what we want to be when we grow up.
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I was a good novice teacher, but I did the things that were obvious.
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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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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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Grit, in a word, is stamina. But it’s not just stamina in your effort.
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I do think that whatever ambition I may have had natively was amplified by my father’s clear valuing of it. I knew that was what my dad really cared about.
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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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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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Most people who are really, enduringly interested in something eventually find that it’s important, too – and important to other people.
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