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.
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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There are going to be peaks and valleys. You don’t want to let kids quit during a valley.
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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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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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My dad was not super-intentional in his parenting. He was very self-absorbed. I won’t say mean or selfish per se, but very self-absorbed. I think he was just thinking out loud.
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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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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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Psychologists call this the maturity principle. My own life experience fits this principle to a T.
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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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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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Very few people can keep going their whole life doing something and feel like it’s merely personally fascinating.
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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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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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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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I worked hard when I was a consultant. I worked hard when I was in graduate school looking at neuroscience.
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