Angela Duckworth Quotes
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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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I would be surprised if my girls ended up as women without grit. I really would.
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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 is important to realize that the process of 'fostering' a passion takes trial and error. It takes experience; you cannot do it all in your head. And it takes a long time.
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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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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.
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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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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 define talent as the rate at which you get better at something when you try. To be very talented means you get better faster and more easily than other people or other things that you try.
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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.
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I don't spend a lot of time thinking about my genes because I can't do anything about them.
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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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When people tell me I can't do something, I have a visceral reflex to say, 'Yes, I can.'
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Boredom is a very self-conscious emotion by definition. Interest is not. So you can actually be completely absorbed in something and, at certain points in your development, not even realize that you're into 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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What we reliably find is that people's perseverance scores are actually higher than their passion scores, and I think it really does get to the fact that working hard is hard, but maybe finding your passion is even more difficult.
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Childhood is generally far too early to know what we want to be when we grow up. 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.
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Everybody knows that effort matters. What was revelatory to me was how much it mattered.
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Nobody gets to be good at something without effort, no matter what your aptitude is.
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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. There are going to be peaks and valleys. You don't want to let kids quit during a valley.
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Grit, in a word, is stamina. But it's not just stamina in your effort. 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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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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You cannot will yourself to be interested in something you're not interested in. But you can actively discover and deepen your interest.