I do feel it’s hard to be modest and humble and egoless when people are telling you you are so great and wanting to give you prizes and energy. I’m trying hard not to be an awful, narcissistic human being.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHGrittier soldiers are more likely to complete their training, and grittier salespeople are more likely to keep their jobs. The more challenging the domain, the more grit seems to matter.
More Angela Duckworth Quotes
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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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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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I would be surprised if my girls ended up as women without grit. I really would.
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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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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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During 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.
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Nobody gets to be good at something without effort, no matter what your aptitude is.
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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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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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As our knees and hips and eyesight deteriorate, we become more dependable, less impulsive, kinder, and less moody.
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There haven’t been genetic studies on grit, but we often think that challenge is inherited but grit is learned. That’s not what science says. Science says grit comes from both nature and nurture.
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Maybe. But the reality is that our early interests are fragile, vaguely defined, and in need of energetic, years-long cultivation and refinement.
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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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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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When people tell me I can’t do something, I have a visceral reflex to say, ‘Yes, I can.’
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Most people who are really, enduringly interested in something eventually find that it’s important, too – and important to other people.
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Grit, in a word, is stamina. But it’s not just stamina in your effort.
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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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There’s something about taking the path of least resistance that makes a lot of sense. But at the same time, we have to figure out which things in life are worth struggling through.
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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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To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows, about building it.
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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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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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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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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 is living life like it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
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