At various points, in big ways and small, we get knocked down. If we stay down, grit loses. If we get up, grit prevails.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHI worked hard when I was a consultant. I worked hard when I was in graduate school looking at neuroscience.
More Angela Duckworth Quotes
-
-
One thing that’s true of gritty people is they love what they do, and they keep loving what they do. So they’re not just in love for a day or a week.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH -
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.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH -
If you’re never able to tolerate a little bit of pain and discomfort, you’ll never get better.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH -
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.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH -
Very few people can keep going their whole life doing something and feel like it’s merely personally fascinating.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH -
I was a good novice teacher, but I did the things that were obvious.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH -
Childhood is generally far too early to know what we want to be when we grow up.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH -
To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows, about building it.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH -
Nobody gets to be good at something without effort, no matter what your aptitude is.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH -
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.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH -
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.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH -
Grittier 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.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH -
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.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH -
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.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH -
If you are a young person who is wanting to develop a passion, you cannot expect anyone else to tell you what that passion would be.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH -
There’s this really awesome theory of human motivation – that human beings all want three things. One is to be competent, one is to belong, and one is be free, as in to have choice: to not be told what to do but to choose what to do.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH -
It’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 DUCKWORTH -
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.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH -
People who are really gritty – they’re still interested.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH -
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.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH -
I would be surprised if my girls ended up as women without grit. I really would.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH -
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 DUCKWORTH -
Drive is something that can be encouraged by a wonderful teacher, by a terrific classroom environment, by an awesome soccer team that you are on, and it can be squashed as well.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH -
There 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 -
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.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH -
Many things matter other than our measured intelligence, so let’s get to work on them.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH