Angela Duckworth Quotes

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.

A vivid - if somewhat melodramatic - firsthand description of what deliberate practice can feel like comes from dancer Martha Graham: 'Dancing appears glamorous, easy, delightful. But the path to the paradise of that achievement is not easier than any other. There is fatigue so great that the body cries even in its sleep. There are times of complete frustration. There are daily small deaths.

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 was this combination of passion and perseverance that made high achievers special. In a word, they had grit.

you can, in fact, modify your self-talk, and you can learn to not let it interfere with you moving toward your goals. With practice and guidance, you can change the way you think, feel, and, most important, act when the going gets rough.

You must zero in on your weaknesses, and you must do so over and over again, for hours a day, week after month after year. To be gritty is to resist complacency. "Whatever it takes, I want to improve!" is a refrain of all paragons of grit, no matter their particular interest, and no matter how excellent they already are.

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.

When I am around people," Kat wrote, "my heart and soul radiate with the awareness that I am in the presence of greatness. Maybe greatness unfound, or greatness underdeveloped, but the potential or existence of greatness nevertheless. 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.

Stay positive," Cody said. "Go past those negative beliefs in what's possible and impossible and just give it a try.

"With everything perfect," Nietzsche wrote, "we do not ask how it came to be." Instead, "we rejoice in the present fact as though it came out of the ground by magic."

My longitudinal studies show these three virtue clusters predict different outcomes. For academic achievement, including stellar report card grades, the cluster containing grit is the most predictive. But for positive social functioning, including how many friends you have, interpersonal character is more important. And for a positive, independent posture toward learning, intellectual virtue trumps the others.

Of his early attempts at writing, Irving has said, "Most of all, I rewrote everything . . . I began to take my lack of talent seriously.

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

I had this grit," Scott recalls. "I said, 'I'm going to do it. I don't care. I'm going to find a way to study what I want to study.

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."