“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.”

Why do some people try, try again, and why do some people not? That’s what I’m after.

People’s lives really do turn out differently. And it certainly can’t be explained by how intelligent you remember them being when they were sitting next to you in organic chemistry class.

There’s something about taking the path of least resistance that makes a lot of sense. But at the same time, we have to figure out which things in life are worth struggling through.

Is it ‘a drag’ that passions don’t come to us all at once, as epiphanies, without the need to actively develop them?

I was a good novice teacher, but I did the things that were obvious.

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.

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.

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.

I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my genes because I can’t do anything about them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you are asking me if I would advocate that the Chinese go to greater flexibility in their exchange rate, I certainly would.

People learn at the rate they are going to learn.

Could you let me have the 3 weeks due to me now and if I work again before August I must of course repay you at the rate of exchange you let me have it at now if you kindly will.

True, governments can reduce the rate of interest in the short run. They can issue additional paper money.

I am also deeply concerned with the widespread, often undiagnosed, incidents of PTSD and the alarming suicide rates amongst our returning soldiers.

This notion of universal Windows apps is a very powerful concept because we’re now aggregating the 300-plus-million-socket run rate of Windows into one opportunity for our developers.

But I should be very sorry if an interpretation founded on a most conjectural scientific hypothesis were to get fastened to the text in Genesis…

The rate of change of scientific hypothesis is naturally much more rapid than that of Biblical interpretations, so that if an interpretation is founded on such an hypothesis, it may help to keep the hypothesis above ground long after it ought to be buried and forgotten.