Angela Duckworth Quotes

When it comes to how we fare in the marathon of life, effort counts tremendously.

Being a "promising beginner" is fun, but being an actual expert is infinitely more gratifying.

As soon as possible, experts hungrily seek feedback on how they did. Necessarily, much of that feedback is negative. This means that experts are more interested in what they did wrong - so they can fix it - than what they did right. The active processing of this feedback is as essential as its immediacy.

But if, instead, you define genius as working toward excellence, ceaselessly, with every element of your being - then, in fact, my dad is a genius, and so am I, and so is Coates, and, if you're willing, so are you.

Grit depends on a different kind of hope. It rests on the expectation that our own efforts can improve our future. I have a feeling tomorrow will be better is different from I resolve to make tomorrow better. The hope that gritty people have has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with getting up again.

At its core, the idea of purpose is the idea that what we do matters to people other than ourselves.

figure out when and where you're most comfortable doing deliberate practice. Once you've made your selection, do deliberate practice then and there every day. Why? Because routines are a godsend when it comes to doing something hard. A

...interests are not discovered through introspection. Instead, interests are triggered by interactions with the outside world. The process of interest discovery can be messy, serendipitous, and inefficient. This is because you can't really predict with certainty what will capture your attention and what won't...Without experimenting, you can't figure out which interests will stick, and which won't.

as much as talent counts, effort counts twice.

whatever your occupation, you can maneuver within your job description - adding, delegating, and customizing what you do to match your interests and values.

Staying on the treadmill is one thing, and I do think it's related to staying true to our commitments even when we're not comfortable. But getting back on the treadmill the next day, eager to try again, is in my view even more reflective of grit. Because when you don't come back the next day - when you permanently turn your back on a commitment - your effort plummets to zero. As a consequence, your skills stop improving, and at the same time, you stop producing anything with whatever skills you have.

In other words, we want to believe that Mark Spitz was born to swim in a way that none of us were and that none of us could. We don't want to sit on the pool deck and watch him progress from amateur to expert. We prefer our excellence fully formed. We prefer mystery to mundanity.

Whether you think you can, or think you can't - you're right.

...grit grows as we figure out our life philosophy, learn to dust ourselves off after rejection and disappointment, and learn to tell the difference between low-level goals that should be abandoned quickly and higher-level goals that demand more tenacity. The maturation story is that we develop the capacity for long-term passion and perseverance as we get older.

A girl who is told repeatedly that she's no genius ends up winning an award for being one. The

A calling is not some fully formed thing that you find," she tells advice seekers. "It's much more dynamic. Whatever you do - whether you're a janitor or the CEO - you can continually look at what you do and ask how it connects to other people, how it connects to the bigger picture, how it can be an expression of your deepest values.

Yes, but the main thing is that greatness is doable. Greatness is many, many individual feats, and each of them is doable.

There are no shortcuts to excellence

Consistency of effort over the long run is everything

Which is more important to success - talent or effort? Americans

In sum, no matter the domain, the highly successful had a kind of ferocious determination that played out in two ways. First, these exemplars were unusually resilient and hardworking. Second, they knew in a very, very deep way what it was they wanted. They not only had determination, they had direction.

Thing Rule: You can quit. But you can't quit until the season is over, the tuition payment is up, or some other "natural" stopping point has arrived. You must, at least for the interval to which you've committed yourself, finish whatever you begin. In

When you keep searching for ways to change your situation for the better, you stand a chance of finding them. When you stop searching, assuming they can't be found, you guarantee they won

Our potential is one thing. What we do with it is quite another.

Over time, we learn life lessons we don't forget, and we adapt in response to the growing demands of our circumstances. Eventually, new ways of thinking and acting become habitual. There comes a day when we can hardly remember our immature former selves. We've adapted, those adaptations have become durable, and, finally, our identity - the sort of person we see ourselves to be - has evolved. We've matured.

The challenge of writing
Is to see your horribleness on page.
To see you terribleness
And then to go to bed.

And wake up the next day,
And take that horribleness and that terribleness,
And refine it,
And make it not so terrible and not so horrible.
And then to go to bed again.

And come the next day,
And refine it a little bit more,
And make it not so bad.
And then to go to bed the next day.

And do it again,
And make it maybe average.
And then one more time,
If you're lucky,
Maybe you get to good.

And if you've done that,
That's a success.

Without effort, your talent is nothing more than unmet potential. Without effort, your skill is nothing more than what you could have done but didn't.

It isn't suffering that leads to hopelessness. It's suffering you think you can't control.

trying to do things they can't yet do, failing, and learning what they need to do differently is exactly the way that experts practice.