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.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHBeing gritty doesn’t mean not showing pain or pretending everything is O.K. In fact, when you look at healthy and successful and giving people, they are extraordinarily meta-cognitive. They’re able to say things like, ‘Dude, I totally lost my temper this morning.’ That ability to reflect on yourself is signature to grit.
More Angela Duckworth Quotes
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Striving is exhausting. Sometimes I do say things like, ‘I wish I were not quite this driven to be excellent.’ It’s not a comfortable life. It’s not relaxed. I’m not relaxed as a person. I mean, I’m not unhappy. But… it’s the opposite of being comfortable.
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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.
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Grit and self-control are related, but they’re not the same thing.
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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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Why do some people try, try again, and why do some people not? That’s what I’m after.
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Psychologists call this the maturity principle. My own life experience fits this principle to a T.
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Nobody gets to be good at something without effort, no matter what your aptitude is.
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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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I know a lot of CEOs who are looking for three- to four-year varsity athletes – not necessarily because these people are going to be doing pushups or spiking volleyballs in the workplace, but because they’re looking for that continuity, that person who was gritty about something.
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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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Being gritty doesn’t mean not showing pain or pretending everything is O.K. In fact, when you look at healthy and successful and giving people, they are extraordinarily meta-cognitive. They’re able to say things like, ‘Dude, I totally lost my temper this morning.’ That ability to reflect on yourself is signature to grit.
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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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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.
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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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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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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 people tell me I can’t do something, I have a visceral reflex to say, ‘Yes, I can.’
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Boredom is a very self-conscious emotion by definition. Interest is not. So you can actually be completely absorbed in something and, at certain points in your development, not even realize that you’re into it.
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It’s a very good thing to teach kids to finish what they started in the sense of fulfilling their commitments.
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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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We have found a direct correlation between grit and positive emotions, but the fact that I have no evidence that grit is bad for you doesn’t mean it’s not. It’s always a possibility that in the future researchers will discover a downside to grit.
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Everybody knows that effort matters. What was revelatory to me was how much it mattered.
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I think the questions on the grit scale about not letting setbacks disappoint you, finishing what you begin, doing things with focus, I think that those are things I would aspire to or hope for for all our children.
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Grit is living life like it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
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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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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.
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