Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
Aristotle was among the first to recognize that there are at least two ways to pursue happiness. He called one “eudaimonic”—in harmony with one’s good (eu) inner spirit (daemon)—and the other “hedonic”—aimed at positive, in-the-moment, inherently self-centered experiences. Aristotle clearly took a side on the issue, deeming the hedonic life primiti
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Pete’s idol, basketball coach John Wooden, was fond of saying, “Success is never final; failure is never fatal. It’s courage that counts.”
Angela Duckworth • Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
I also want to read a book on Wooden.
“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."
Csikszentmihalyi goes on to share a personal story that helps explain his perspective. In Hungary, where he grew up, on the tall wooden gate at the entrance to the local elementary school, hung a sign that read: The roots of knowledge are bitter, but its fruits are sweet. This always struck him as deeply untrue: “Even when the learning is hard,” he
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Nobody wants to show you the hours and hours of becoming. They’d rather show the highlight of what they’ve become.
Angela Duckworth • Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
What does Earl Thomas have to say about being a Seahawk? “My teammates have been pushing me since day one. They’re helping me to get better, and vice versa. You have to have a genuine appreciation for teammates who are willing to put in hard work, buy into the system, and never be satisfied with anything but continuing to evolve. It’s incredible to
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Earl Thomas. We love you. You're a Seahawk through and through.
In homage to the earlier work of Seligman and Maier on learned helplessness, where the inability to escape punishment led animals to give up on a second challenging task, Bob dubbed this phenomenon learned industriousness. His major conclusion was simply that the association between working hard and reward can be learned. Bob will go further and sa
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It is always nice to know that growth can occur. Learned industriousness is possible and happens all the time, with appropriate, non-shock based motivation and goals.
I’m still thinking when Pete jumps up and says, with genuine excitement: “First of all, there is absolutely no way you give that game to your brother. You got him motivated. Okay, that’s a start. That’s a beginning. Now what? He needs some coaching! He needs someone to explain what he needs to do, specifically, to get back to good grades! He needs
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This was about a player that had bought an XBox for his younger brother to try and get him to focus on school. The motivation originally had worked but the grades were starting to trail off. Carroll's response is brilliant, setting an example of how you need to do more than reward excellence, you have to work with people to instill it.
Warren Buffett—the self-made multibillionaire whose personal wealth, acquired entirely within his own lifetime, is roughly twice the size of Harvard University’s endowment—reportedly gave his pilot a simple three-step process for prioritizing. The story goes like this: Buffett turns to his faithful pilot and says that he must have dreams greater th
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This insight is one of my favorite in the book, and the exercise sounds incredibly valuable to perform. Most of us want to be good at too many things, and lack the focus to be great at the things that would drive the largest amount of satisfaction.