Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance – Angela Duckworth
My cousin bought me this book and asked me to check it out! The book is a lucid and informative review of the latest research on grit and how it can be developed, and how we can help support grit in others. It’s about moving in a direction with consistency and endurance; having a clear inner compass that guides all your decisions and actions.
Grit is a good reminder that an exclusive focus on ability and potential can distract us from the importance of other variables important for success. By shining our spotlight on talent, we risk leaving everything else in the shadows. We inadvertently send the message that these other factors – including grit – don’t matter as much as they really do.
Although it was a bit repetitive, the book does give you a chance to reflect on ways that you could be more passionate about what you do and develop your potential. Grit is about working on something you care about so much that you’re willing to stay loyal to it. It’s doing what you love, but not just falling in love – staying in love. And, while it’s naive to think that any of us could love every minute of what we do, interest still matters. Just because you love something doesn’t mean you’ll be great at it. Not if you don’t work for it. Also, I think it’s important to note that you need to learn that there’s a contingency between your actions and what happens to you. You can change the way you think, feel, and, most importantly, act when the going gets rough.
Highlights
- Some people are great when things are going well, but they fall apart when things aren’t.
- 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, but they also had direction.
- Our potential is one thing. What we do with it is quite another.
- And, why do we assume that it is our talent, rather than our effort, that will decide where we end up in the very long run?
- Americans endorse “being hardworking” nearly five times as often as they endorse “intelligence.”
- What we say we care about may not correspond with what – deep down – we actually believe to be more valuable. It’s a little like saying we don’t care at all about physical attractiveness in a romantic partner and then, when it comes to actually choosing whom to date, picking the cute guy over the nice one.
- The “naturalness bias” is a hidden prejudice against those who’ve achieved that they have because they worked for it, and a hidden preference for those whom we think arrived at their place in life because they’re naturally talented. We may not admit to others this bias for naturals; we may not even admit it to ourselves. But the bias is evident in the choices we make.
- Talent: In the most general sense, talent is the sum of a person’s abilities – his or her intrinsic gifts, skills, knowledge, experience, intelligence, judgment, attitude, character, and drive. It also includes his or her ability to learn and grow.
- The most dazzling human achievements are, in fact, the aggregate of countless individual elements, each of which is, in a sense, ordinary.
- There is nothing extraordinary or superhuman in any one of those actions; only the fact that they are done consistently and correctly, and all together, produce excellence.
- It is as if talent were some invisible “substance behind the surface reality of performance, which finally distinguishes the best among our athletes.”
- Greatness is doable. Greatness is many, many individual feats, and each of them is doable.
- Talent is how quickly your skills improve when you invest effort. Achievement is what happens when you take your acquired skills and use them.
- At the very same time, effort makes skill productive.
- Eighty percent of success in life is showing up.
- Without effort, your talent is nothing more than your unmet potential. Without effort, your skill is nothing more than what you could have done but didn’t. With effort, talent becomes skill and, at the very same time, effort makes skill productive.
- Most of your actions derive their significance from their allegiance to your ultimate concern, your life philosophy.
- Try, try again, then try something different.
- But against intuition, talents are not entirely genetic: the rate at which we develop any skill is also, crucially, a function of experience.
- A good place to start is to understand where you are today. if you’re not as gritty as you want to be, ask yourself why.
- Foster a passion.
- Nobody is interested one everything, and everyone is interested in something.
- Passion for your work is a little bit of discovery, followed by a lot of development, and then a lifetime of deepening.
- But the reality is that our early interests are fragile, vaguely defined, and in need of energetic, years-long cultivation and refinement.
- Don’t be afraid to erase an answer that isn’t working out. At some point, you may choose to write your top-level goal in indelible ink, but until you know for sure, work in pencil.
- Kaizen is Japanese for resisting the plateau of arrested development. Its literal translation is continuous improvement.
- The idea of purpose is the idea that we do matters to people other than ourselves.
- We’re all hardwired to pursue both hedonic and eudaimonic happiness.
- The gritter people are dramatically more motivated than others to seek a meaningful, other-centered life.
- In the most profound way, we’re social creatures. Because the drive to connect with and serve others also promote survival. Because people who cooperate are more likely to survive than loners. Society depends on stable interpersonal relationships, and society in so many ways keeps us fed, shelters us from the elements, and protects us from enemies. The desire to connect is a basic human need as our appetite for pleasure.
- A genuinely positive, altruistic purpose is not an absolute requirement of grit.
- You’ll realize that the goals you achieved were connected in some way, shape, or form to the benefit of other people.
- A calling is not some fully formed thing that you find. It’s much more dynamic. Whatever you do – you can continually look at what you do and ask how it connects to other people, how it connects to the bigger picture.
- I don’t think I have a calling – at this moment – except to be me.
- You never know who will go on to do good or even great things or become the next great influencer in the world – so treat everyone like they are that person.
- 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.
- It seems as though they’d learned to interpret failure as a cue to try harder rather than as confirmation that they lacked the ability to succeed.
- Language is one way to cultivate hope.
- Race your strengths and train your weaknesses.
- The reality is that most people have an inner fixed-mindset pessimist in them right alongside their inner growth-mindset optimist. Recognizing this is important because it’s easy to make the mistake of changing what we say without changing our body language, facial expressions, and behavior.
- You need to learn that there’s a contingency between your actions and what happens to you: “If I do something, then something will happen.”
- A growth mindset leads to optimistic ways of explaining adversity, and that, in turn, leads to perseverance and seeking out new challenges that will ultimately make you even stronger.
- But there was always something who, in one way or another, told me to keep going. I think everyone needs somebody like that.
- If you’ve got something to say, go ahead and say it and finish it.
- They appreciate that children need love, limits, and latitude to reach their full potential.
- Neglectful parenting creates an especially toxic emotional climate, but I won’t say much more about it here because it’s not even a plausible contender for how parents of the gritty raise their children.
- If you want to bring forth grit in your child, first ask how much passion and perseverance you have for your own life goals. then ask yourself how likely it is that your approach to parenting encourages your child to emulate you. If the answer to the first question is a “great deal” and your answer to the second is “very likely,” you’re already parenting for grit.
- Culture has the power to shape our identity. Over time and under the right circumstances, the norms and values of the group to which we belong become our own. We internalize them. We carry them with us.
- It sometimes feels like we have nothing left to give, and yet, in those dark and desperate moments, we find that if we just keep putting one foot in front of the other, there is a way to accomplish what all reason seems to argue against.
- Failures are going to happen, and how you deal with them may be the most important thing in whether you succeed.
- Do not let temporary setbacks become permanent excuses.
- The world will not devote itself to making you happy.
- The moment you’ve created that vision, you’re on your way, but it’s the diligence with which you stick to that vision that allows you to get there.
- If you want to communicate effectively, you need to be clear with the words you use.
- Compete: It means to strive together. It doesn’t have anything in its origins about another person losing.
- You can learn to hope when all seems lost.
- While happiness and success are related, they’re not identical.
- We all face limits – not just in talent, but in opportunity. But more often than we think, our limits are self-imposed. We try, fail, and conclude we’ve bumped our heads against the ceiling of possibility.
- To be gritty is to keep putting one foot in front of the other. To be gritty is to hold fast to an interesting and purposeful goal. To be gritty is to invest, day after week after year, in challenging practice. To be gritty is to fall down seven times, and rise eight.
There's no reserve in me - whatever I have, I'm willing to give.
*I take no credit for any of these points.