Grit and self-control are related, but they’re not the same thing.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHOne 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.
More Angela Duckworth Quotes
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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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When I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding: teaching. I went to teach seventh graders math in the New York City public schools.
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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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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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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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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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Everybody knows that effort matters. What was revelatory to me was how much it mattered.
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One thing that’s true of gritty people is they love what they do, and they keep loving what they do. So they’re not just in love for a day or a week.
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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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If you’re never able to tolerate a little bit of pain and discomfort, you’ll never get better.
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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.
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Nobody gets to be good at something without effort, no matter what your aptitude is.
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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.
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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 don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my genes because I can’t do anything about them.
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