“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.”

There are going to be peaks and valleys. You don’t want to let kids quit during a valley.

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.

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.

Very few people can keep going their whole life doing something and feel like it’s merely personally fascinating.

Grit, in a word, is stamina. But it’s not just stamina in your effort.

I think it’s very important to send the message that, while parents are needed to remind you to practice and occasionally force you to finish things… they also need to learn to respect you. You as an individual, ultimately, are the captain of where you’re going.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nobody gets to be good at something without effort, no matter what your aptitude is.

Really, what matters in the long run is sticking with things and working daily to get better at them.

The words that we use I think are symbolic of the values that we hold.

Everybody knows that effort matters. What was revelatory to me was how much it mattered.

And I’ve discovered a strikingly consistent pattern: grit and age go hand in hand. Sixty-somethings tend to be grittier, on average, than fifty-somethings, who are in turn grittier than forty-somethings, and so on.

If the quality and quantity of continuous effort toward goals matters as much as I think it does, we may actually get more productive, not less, as we get older – even if we can’t pull all-nighters like we used to.

Health care is one-sixth of our economy. If the government can control that, they can control just about everything. We need to understand what is going on, because there are much more economic models that can be used to give us good health care than what we have now.

The only difference between men and women is that women are able to create new little human beings in their bodies while simultaneously writing books, driving tractors, working in offices, planting crops – in general, doing everything men do.

Things seem to take so much longer for me to do. I have to say things 10 times instead of once. I have to knock on 10 different doors instead of two. For everything.

life is short and information endless: nobody has time for everything

Everyone dreamed past and future dreams, of slavery and redemption, of improbable paradises, of equally mythical and improbable enemies; cosmic enemies, perverse and subtle, who pervade everything like the air.

Doctor, you don’t know what it is to doubt everything, even yourself. No, you don’t; you couldn’t with eyebrows like yours.

I was just a big fan of tattoos always growing up, and I wanted something cool that symbolizes what I’ve been through in my life, and everything on my chest and my back is like a collage.

My wrists are crooked and don’t go all the way back. I’ve been practicing and working on them. You can’t do everything good.