People who are really gritty – they’re still interested.
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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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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Grit is living life like it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
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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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Very few people can keep going their whole life doing something and feel like it’s merely personally fascinating.
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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.
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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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Grit, in a word, is stamina. But it’s not just stamina in your effort.
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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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There is a fluency and an ease with which true mastery and expertise always expresses itself, whether it be in writing, whether it be in a mathematical proof, whether it be in a dance that you see on stage, really in every domain. But I think the question is, you know, where does that fluency and mastery come from?
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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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Everybody knows that effort matters. What was revelatory to me was how much it mattered.
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I was a good novice teacher, but I did the things that were obvious.
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My dad was not super-intentional in his parenting. He was very self-absorbed. I won’t say mean or selfish per se, but very self-absorbed. I think he was just thinking out loud.
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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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Psychologists call this the maturity principle. My own life experience fits this principle to a T.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH






