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.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHAt various points, in big ways and small, we get knocked down. If we stay down, grit loses. If we get up, grit prevails.
More Angela Duckworth Quotes
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Many, many individuals will report starting to form their lifelong interests around adolescence. Why that is, researchers don’t fully know. But if you can take a trip down memory lane and see what interested you, that’s at least a clue as to where your interest may begin to develop.
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Negative feelings are typical of learning, and you shouldn’t feel like you’re stupid when you’re frustrated doing something. You might say to yourself, ‘I can’t do this,’ but you should say, ‘That’s great.’ That means you really have the potential to learn something there.
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I do feel it’s hard to be modest and humble and egoless when people are telling you you are so great and wanting to give you prizes and energy. I’m trying hard not to be an awful, narcissistic human being.
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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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Grittier soldiers are more likely to complete their training, and grittier salespeople are more likely to keep their jobs. The more challenging the domain, the more grit seems to matter.
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It is important to realize that the process of ‘fostering’ a passion takes trial and error. It takes experience; you cannot do it all in your head. And it takes a long time.
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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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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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You cannot will yourself to be interested in something you’re not interested in. But you can actively discover and deepen your interest.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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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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.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH






