I ended up doubling the math time that a conventional school would have. But I don’t think any of these things were path-breaking or unusual.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHDuring all my undergrad years and in high school, I was involved in tutoring and public service. At Harvard, I spent over 35 hours a week doing service. I was a Big Sister, I worked for the homeless, the elderly; it was the epicenter of my focus.
More Angela Duckworth Quotes
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I 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.
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Longitudinal studies following thousands of people across time have shown that most people only begin to gravitate toward certain vocational interests, and away from others, around middle school.
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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.
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So when my daughter told me on the second track meet that she was done with it because she discovered she didn’t like competing, I made her finish the season.
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Substituting nuance for novelty is what experts do, and that is why they are never bored.
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Is it ‘a drag’ that passions don’t come to us all at once, as epiphanies, without the need to actively develop them?
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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.
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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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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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I worked hard when I was a consultant. I worked hard when I was in graduate school looking at neuroscience.
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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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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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Most teachers, when surveyed, say that it is part of their job to help students develop things like grit. This is especially true at the elementary and middle school levels. They feel it’s part of their vocation to teach other things that are not formally academic content.
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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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I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my genes because I can’t do anything about them.
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