Angela Duckworth Quotes

“Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare.”

“Nobody wants to show you the hours and hours of becoming. They’d rather show the highlight of what they’ve become.”

“Without effort, your talent is nothing more than your unmet potential. Without effort, your skill is nothing more than what you could have done but didn’t. With effort, talent becomes skill and, at the very same time, effort makes skill productive.”

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

“To be gritty is to resist complacency.”

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

“Passion begins with intrinsically enjoying what you do.”

“One form of perseverance is the daily discipline of trying to do things better than we did yesterday.”

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

“In the most general sense, talent is the sum of a person’s abilities—his or her intrinsic gifts, skills, knowledge, experience, intelligence, judgment, attitude, character, and drive. It also includes his or her ability to learn and grow.”

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

“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.”

“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 smartest person in the room, but I’ll strive to be the grittiest.”

“Optimistic young adults stay healthier throughout middle age and, ultimately, live longer than pessimists.”

“Staying on the treadmill is one thing, and I do think it’s related to staying true to our commitments even when we’re not comfortable. But getting back on the treadmill the next day, eager to try again, is in my view even more reflective of grit. Because when you don’t come back the next day—when you permanently turn your back on a commitment—your effort plummets to zero. As a consequence, your skills stop improving, and at the same time, you stop producing anything with whatever skills you have.”

“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.”

“...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.”

“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.”

“We told them that trying to do things they can’t yet do, failing, and learning what they need to do differently is exactly the way experts practice.”

“...as much as talent counts, effort counts twice.”