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.
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.
More Angela Duckworth Quotes
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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.
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Substituting nuance for novelty is what experts do, and that is why they are never bored.
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People who are really gritty – they’re still interested.
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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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I was a good novice teacher, but I did the things that were obvious.
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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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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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Everybody knows that effort matters. What was revelatory to me was how much it mattered.
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Grit, in a word, is stamina. But it’s not just stamina in your effort.
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I didn’t tell my kids, ‘You have to play viola, and you have to play piano.’ They chose these things on their own, and I don’t think we have to give kids every choice, but we do have to give them some choice because that autonomy is crucial for fostering passion.
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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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There are going to be peaks and valleys. You don’t want to let kids quit during a valley.
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I believe kids should choose what they want to do, because it’s their life, but they have to choose something, and they can’t quit in the middle unless there’s a really good reason.
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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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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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Grit may carry risk because it’s about putting all your eggs in one basket, to some extent.
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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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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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The focus on just thinking about standardized test scores as being synonymous with achievement for teenagers is ridiculous, right?
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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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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 you’re never able to tolerate a little bit of pain and discomfort, you’ll never get better.
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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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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.
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I do think that whatever ambition I may have had natively was amplified by my father’s clear valuing of it. I knew that was what my dad really cared about.
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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.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH