Grittier students are more likely to earn their diplomas; grittier teachers are more effective in the classroom.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHYou know, the things that I want my own daughters to develop – the idea that we’re going to get there through rewards and punishments seems completely at odds with the idea of character itself.
More Angela Duckworth Quotes
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Most teachers, when surveyed, say that it is part of their job to help students develop things like grit. This is especially true at the elementary and middle school levels. They feel it’s part of their vocation to teach other things that are not formally academic content.
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The focus on just thinking about standardized test scores as being synonymous with achievement for teenagers is ridiculous, right?
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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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Nobody gets to be good at something without effort, no matter what your aptitude is.
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Every day, parents and teachers ask me, ‘How do I build grit in kids? What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic? How do I keep them motivated for the long run?’ The honest answer is, I don’t know.
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People who are really gritty – they’re still interested.
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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 don’t think that every child in America is going to necessarily aspire to, you know, a four-year degree from a liberal arts college or a certain kind of life. I think that people should learn to be excellent in the thing that they choose to do.
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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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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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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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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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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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I was a good novice teacher, but I did the things that were obvious.
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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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There haven’t been genetic studies on grit, but we often think that challenge is inherited but grit is learned. That’s not what science says. Science says grit comes from both nature and nurture.
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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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I think the very idea of character, of developing not just grit, but empathy and curiosity, emotional intelligence.
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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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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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Everybody knows that effort matters. What was revelatory to me was how much it mattered.
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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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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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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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Really, what matters in the long run is sticking with things and working daily to get better at them.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH