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.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHOne 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.
More Angela Duckworth Quotes
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Grit is living life like it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
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When people think of the word ‘drive,’ they often think you have it or you don’t, and that’s where we’re wrong.
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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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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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When I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding: teaching. I went to teach seventh graders math in the New York City public schools.
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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.
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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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People who are really gritty – they’re still interested.
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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.
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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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Everybody knows that effort matters. What was revelatory to me was how much it mattered.
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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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I stayed for lunch for extra tutoring, gave kids my cell phone, and was available. In my first year of teaching,
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Substituting nuance for novelty is what experts do, and that is why they are never bored.
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To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows, about building it.
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