Angela Duckworth Quotes
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I now have Grit Scale scores from thousands of American adults. My data provide a snapshot of grit across adulthood. 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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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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I think it's very important to send the message that, while parents are needed to remind you to practice and occasionally force you to finish things... they also need to learn to respect you. You as an individual, ultimately, are the captain of where you're going.
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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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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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Most people who are really, enduringly interested in something eventually find that it's important, too - and important to other people. Very few people can keep going their whole life doing something and feel like it's merely personally fascinating.
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To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows, about building it. Every day, parents and teachers ask me, 'How do I build grit in kids? What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic? How do I keep them motivated for the long run?' The honest answer is, I don't know.
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The words that we use I think are symbolic of the values that we hold.
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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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Really, what matters in the long run is sticking with things and working daily to get better at them.
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Substituting nuance for novelty is what experts do, and that is why they are never bored.
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There are no shortcuts to true excellence.
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I think the very idea of character, of developing not just grit, but empathy and curiosity, emotional intelligence - 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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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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Grit and self-control are related, but they're not the same thing.
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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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I will say that if my wildest dreams come true, I will, like, wake up one day, and I will be Carol Dweck, right? Because she is like everything I want to be.
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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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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 may carry risk because it's about putting all your eggs in one basket, to some extent.
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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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It's a very good thing to teach kids to finish what they started in the sense of fulfilling their commitments. So when my daughter told me on the second track meet that she was done with it because she discovered she didn't like competing, I made her finish the season.
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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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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?