Childhood is generally far too early to know what we want to be when we grow up.
ANGELA DUCKWORTHMany, 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.
More Angela Duckworth Quotes
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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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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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People who are really gritty – they’re still interested.
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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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Really, what matters in the long run is sticking with things and working daily to get better at them.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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Nobody gets to be good at something without effort, no matter what your aptitude is.
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Grit, in a word, is stamina. But it’s not just stamina in your effort.
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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 now have Grit Scale scores from thousands of American adults. My data provide a snapshot of grit across adulthood.
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As our knees and hips and eyesight deteriorate, we become more dependable, less impulsive, kinder, and less moody.
ANGELA DUCKWORTH