Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
“When only the survivalists succeed, that’s an attrition model,” he explained. “There’s another kind of leadership. I call it a developmental model. The standards are exactly the same—high—but in one case, you use fear to get your subordinates to achieve those standards. And in the other case, you lead from the front.”
Angela Duckworth • Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
If you have a team that is not performing, lead from the front.
“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.”
Angela Duckworth • Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
I love this quote from Ira Glass:"Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through."
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 pa
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Damn son. If you're not doing what you want to be doing, you're teaching your children helplessness.
By senior year, Anson’s athletes know all twelve by heart, beginning with the first core value—We don’t whine—and its corresponding quote, courtesy of playwright George Bernard Shaw: “The true joy in life is to be a force of fortune instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itse
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Forced memorization of literary passages can bring people together, allow them to speak the same language with things that matter. We should all do this more.
When the essays were collected, David discovered that about 40 percent of the students who’d received the placebo control Post-it note decided to turn in a revised essay, compared to about twice that number—80 percent of the students—who’d received the Post-it note communicating wise feedback.
Angela Duckworth • Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
This experiment is a crazy reminder of how the tone of your feedback impacts the quality of the outcome. People are resilient when you ask them to become better, but they are shallow petty creatures when you try to just "provide feedback" on how you would do it.
And, finally, the Hard Thing Rule states that you get to pick your hard thing. Nobody picks it for you because, after all, it would make no sense to do a hard thing you’re not even vaguely interested in.
Angela Duckworth • Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
- You pick what you do.
Gritty people do more deliberate practice and experience more flow. There’s no contradiction here, for two reasons. First, deliberate practice is a behavior, and flow is an experience. Anders Ericsson is talking about what experts do; Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is talking about how experts feel. Second, you don’t have to be doing deliberate practice a
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Deliberate practice makes flow possible. The technical becomes natural and automatic.
Talent is how quickly your skills improve when you invest effort. Achievement is what happens when you take your acquired skills and use them.
Angela Duckworth • Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
I’ve met many young people who can articulate a dream—for example, to be a doctor or to play basketball in the NBA—and can vividly imagine how wonderful that would be, but they can’t point to the mid-level and lower-level goals that will get them there. Their goal hierarchy has a top-level goal but no supporting mid-level or low-level goals: This i
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Emphasizes a need yet again to connect the micro to the macro via an ongoing matrix of achievement. Wouldn't it be great if there were highly accomplished people who put these together in a way that would help you replicate whatever parts of their success you wished to have? Sounds like a really interesting, and very difficult, visualization challenge. It would be a living and breathing "secrets of my success" that you could use to develop your own.
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 th
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Love the development of craft before seeking the dazzling whole.