Nobody gets to be good at something without effort, no matter what your aptitude is.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHNobody gets to be good at something without effort, no matter what your aptitude is.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHIf you’re never able to tolerate a little bit of pain and discomfort, you’ll never get better.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHGritty 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.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHThe 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.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHIt’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.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHI 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.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHSome 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 DUCKWORTHSubstituting nuance for novelty is what experts do, and that is why they are never bored.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHI know that instructional time is a zero-sum game, but if we want kids to do well academically, it’s hard to imagine that happening if they don’t have some control over their attention.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHGrit is living life like it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
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.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHEverybody knows that effort matters. What was revelatory to me was how much it mattered.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHI’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.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHI worked hard when I was a consultant. I worked hard when I was in graduate school looking at neuroscience.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHPeople’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.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHThere 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?
ANGELA DUCKWORTH