Top 40 Angela Duckworth Quotes

Grit and self-control are related, but they’re not the same thing.

Negative feelings are typical of learning, and you shouldn’t feel like you’re stupid when you’re frustrated doing something. You might say to yourself, ‘I can’t do this,’ but you should say, ‘That’s great.’ That means you really have the potential to learn something there.

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.

If you’re never able to tolerate a little bit of pain and discomfort, you’ll never get better.

At various points, in big ways and small, we get knocked down. If we stay down, grit loses. If we get up, grit prevails.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my genes because I can’t do anything about them.

When I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding: teaching. I went to teach seventh graders math in the New York City public schools.

Really, what matters in the long run is sticking with things and working daily to get better at them.

You cannot will yourself to be interested in something you’re not interested in. But you can actively discover and deepen your interest.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I know a lot of CEOs who are looking for three- to four-year varsity athletes – not necessarily because these people are going to be doing pushups or spiking volleyballs in the workplace, but because they’re looking for that continuity, that person who was gritty about something.

Grit may carry risk because it’s about putting all your eggs in one basket, to some extent.

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.

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. People who are really gritty – they’re still interested.

I think the questions on the grit scale about not letting setbacks disappoint you, finishing what you begin, doing things with focus, I think that those are things I would aspire to or hope for for all our children.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Striving is exhausting. Sometimes I do say things like, ‘I wish I were not quite this driven to be excellent.’ It’s not a comfortable life. It’s not relaxed. I’m not relaxed as a person. I mean, I’m not unhappy. But… it’s the opposite of being comfortable.

When people tell me I can’t do something, I have a visceral reflex to say, ‘Yes, I can.’

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?

I know that instructional time is a zero-sum game, but if we want kids to do well academically, it’s hard to imagine that happening if they don’t have some control over their attention.

When people think of the word ‘drive,’ they often think you have it or you don’t, and that’s where we’re wrong. 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.

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.

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.

There are no shortcuts to true excellence.

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.

Grittier students are more likely to earn their diplomas; grittier teachers are more effective in the classroom. 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.