Angela Duckworth Quotes

One biographer describes Darwin as someone who kept thinking about the same questions long after others would move on to different — and no doubt easier — problems: The normal response to being puzzled about something is to say,"I'll think about this later," and then, in effect, forget about it. With Darwin, one feels that he deliberately did not engage in this kind of semi-willful forgetting. He kept all the questions alive at the back of his mind, ready to be retrieved when a relevant bit of data presented itself.

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

Interest without purpose is nearly impossible to sustain for a lifetime.

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

Consistency of effort over the long run is everything

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't.

The bottom line on culture and grit is: If you want to be grittier, find a gritty culture and join it. If you're a leader, and you want the people in your organization to be grittier, create a gritty culture.

"The separation of talent and skill," Will Smith points out, "is one of the greatest misunderstood concepts for people who are trying to excel, who have dreams, who want to do things. Talent you have naturally. Skill is only developed by hours and hours and hours of beating on your craft."

Most of us become more conscientious, confident, caring, and calm with life experience.

And what about talent? Nietzsche implored us to consider exemplars to be, above all else, craftsmen: "Do not talk about giftedness, inborn talents! One can name great men of all kinds who were very little gifted. They acquired greatness, became 'geniuses' (as we put it). . . . They all possessed that seriousness of the efficient workman which first learns to construct the parts properly before it ventures to fashion a great whole; they allowed themselves time for it, because they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole."

"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."

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

There's a vast amount of research on what happens when we believe a student is especially talented. We begin to lavish extra attention on them and hold them to higher expectations. We expect them to excel, and that expectation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A fixed mindset about ability leads to pessimistic explanations of adversity, and that, in turn, leads to both giving up on challenges and avoiding them in the first place. In contrast, 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.

We change when we need to. Necessity is the mother of adaptation.