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.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHI 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.
More Angela Duckworth Quotes
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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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Drive is something that can be encouraged by a wonderful teacher, by a terrific classroom environment, by an awesome soccer team that you are on, and it can be squashed as well.
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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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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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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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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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There are going to be peaks and valleys. You don’t want to let kids quit during a valley.
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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 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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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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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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You 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.
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Grit and self-control are related, but they’re not the same thing.
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I think the questions on the grit scale about not letting setbacks disappoint you, finishing what you begin, doing things with focus, I think that those are things I would aspire to or hope for for all our children.
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At various points, in big ways and small, we get knocked down. If we stay down, grit loses. If we get up, grit prevails.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH