Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There are no shortcuts to true excellence.
Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint.
Grit and self-control are related, but they're not the same thing.
The words that we use I think are symbolic of the values that we hold.
I would be surprised if my girls ended up as women without grit. I really would.
Nobody gets to be good at something without effort, no matter what your aptitude is.
Many things matter other than our measured intelligence, so let's get to work on them.
Everybody knows that effort matters. What was revelatory to me was how much it mattered.
When people tell me I can't do something, I have a visceral reflex to say, 'Yes, I can.'
Substituting nuance for novelty is what experts do, and that is why they are never bored.
Grit may carry risk because it's about putting all your eggs in one basket, to some extent.
I don't spend a lot of time thinking about my genes because I can't do anything about them.
If you're never able to tolerate a little bit of pain and discomfort, you'll never get better.
Really, what matters in the long run is sticking with things and working daily to get better at them.
At various points, in big ways and small, we get knocked down. If we stay down, grit loses. If we get up, grit prevails.
If you are a young person who is wanting to develop a passion, you cannot expect anyone else to tell you what that passion would be.
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.
You cannot will yourself to be interested in something you're not interested in. But you can actively discover and deepen your interest.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As our knees and hips and eyesight deteriorate, we become more dependable, less impulsive, kinder, and less moody. Psychologists call this the maturity principle. My own life experience fits this principle to a T.
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 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.
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.
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.
There's this really awesome theory of human motivation - that human beings all want three things. One is to be competent, one is to belong, and one is be free, as in to have choice: to not be told what to do but to choose what to do.
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.
During all my undergrad years and in high school, I was involved in tutoring and public service. At Harvard, I spent over 35 hours a week doing service. I was a Big Sister, I worked for the homeless, the elderly; it was the epicenter of my focus.
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.
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.
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.
Is it 'a drag' that passions don't come to us all at once, as epiphanies, without the need to actively develop them? Maybe. But the reality is that our early interests are fragile, vaguely defined, and in need of energetic, years-long cultivation and refinement.
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.
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.