Top 15 Angela Duckworth Quotes

Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare.

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

...there are no shortcuts to excellence. Developing real expertise, figuring out really hard problems, it all takes time — longer than most people imagine....you've got to apply those skills and produce goods or services that are valuable to people....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.

as much as talent counts, effort counts twice.

It soon became clear that doing one thing better and better might be more satisfying than staying an amateur at many different things:

I won't just have a job; I'll have a calling. I'll challenge myself every day. When I get knocked down, I'll get back up. I may not be the smartiest person in the room, but I'll strive to be the grittiest.

I learned a lesson I'd never forget. The lesson was that, when you have setbacks and failures, you can't overreact to them.

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

...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.

...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.

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

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.

I have a feeling tomorrow will be better is different from I resolve to make tomorrow better.

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

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