Top 20 Quotes From Grit By Angela Duckworth

Best Quotes From Grit By Angela Duckworth – Discover the Power of Passion and Perseverance: 

1. Why were the highly accomplished so dogged in their pursuits? For most, there was no realistic expectation of ever catching up to their ambitions. In their own eyes, they were never good enough. They were the opposite of complacent. And yet, in a very real sense, they were satisfied being unsatisfied. Each was chasing something of unparalleled interest and importance, and it was the chase–as much as the capture–that was gratifying. Even if some of the things they had to do were boring, or frustrating, or even painful, they wouldn’t dream of giving up. Their passion was enduring.

2. In sum, no matter the domain, the highly successful had a kind of ferocious determination that played out in two ways. First, these exemplars were unusually resilient and hardworking. Second, they knew in a very, very deep way what it was they wanted. They not only had determination, they had direction.

3. Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills and activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then are fitted together in a synthesized whole. There is nothing extraordinary or superhuman in any one of those actions; only the fact that they are done consistently and correctly, and all together, produce excellence.

4. How often do people start down a path and then give up on it entirely? How many treadmills, exercise bikes, and weight sets are at this very moment gathering dust in basements across the country? How many kids go out for a sport and then quit even before the season is over? How many of us vow to knit sweaters for all of our friends but only manage half a sleeve before putting down the needles? Ditto for home vegetable gardens, compost bins, and diets. How many of us start something new, full of excitement and good intentions, and then give up–permanently–when we encounter the first real obstacle, the first long plateau in progress?

5. 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.

6. What I mean by passion is not just that you have something you care about. What I mean is that you care about that same ultimate goal in an abiding, loyal, steady way. You are not capricious. Each day, you wake up thinking of the questions you fell asleep thinking about. You are, in a sense, pointing in the same direction, ever eager to take even the smallest step forward than to take a step to the side, toward some other destination. At the extreme, one might call your focus obsessive. Most of your actions derive their significance from their allegiance to your ultimate concern, your life philosophy. You have your priorities in order.

7. One form of perseverance is the daily discipline of trying to do things better than we did yesterday. So, after you’ve discovered and developed interest in a particular area, you must devote yourself to the sort of focused, full-hearted, challenge-exceeding-skill practice that leads to mastery. You must zero in on your weaknesses, and you must do so over and over again, for hours a day, week after month after year. To be gritty is to resist complacency.

8. The four psychological assets of interest, practice, purpose, and hope are not You have it or you don’t commodities. You can learn to discover, develop, and deepen your interests. You can acquire the habit of discipline. You can cultivate a sense of purpose and meaning. And you can teach yourself to hope. You can grow your grit from the inside out.

9. Kaizen is Japanese for resisting the plateau of arrested development. It’s literal translation is: ‘continuous improvement.’ A while back, the idea got some traction in American business culture when it was touted as the core principle behind Japan’s spectacularly efficient manufacturing economy. After interviewing dozens and dozens of grit paragons, I can tell you that they all exude kaizen. There are no exceptions.

10. This is how experts practice: First, they set a stretch goal, zeroing in on just one narrow aspect of their overall performance. Rather than focus on what they already do well, experts strive to improve specific weaknesses. They intentionally seek out challenges they can’t yet meet…Then, with undivided attention and great effort, experts strive to reach their stretch goal. Interestingly, many choose to do so while nobody’s watching.

11. As soon as possible, experts hungrily seek feedback on how they did. Necessarily, much of the feedback is negative. This means that experts are more interested in what they did wrong–so they can fix it–than what they did right. The active processing of this feedback is as essential as its immediacy…Then experts do it all over again, and again, and again. Until they have finally mastered what they set out to do. Until what was a struggle before is now fluent and flawless. Until conscious incompetence becomes unconscious competence.

12. Search YouTube for the many rehearsals that preceded it–or, for that matter, footage of anyone doing effortful, mistake-ridden, repetitive deliberate practice–and my guess is you’ll come up empty. Nobody wants to show you the hours and hours of becoming. They’d rather show the highlight of what they’ve become.

13. My guess is that, if you take a moment to reflect on the times in your life when you’ve really been at your best–when you’ve risen to the challenges before you, finding strength to do what might have seemed impossible–you’ll realize that the goals you achieved were in some way, shape, or form to the benefit of other people.

14. One kind of hope is the expectation that tomorrow will be better than today. It’s the kind of hope that has us yearning for sunnier weather, or a smoother path ahead. It comes without the burden of responsibility. The onus is on the universe to make things better. 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. The hope that gritty people have has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with getting up again.

15. 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. Or as Henry Ford is often quoted as saying, ‘Whether you think you can, or think you can’t–you’re right.’

16. The scientific research is very clear that experiencing trauma without control can be debilitating. But I also worry about people who cruise through life, friction-free, for a long, long time before encountering their first real failure. They have so little practice failing and getting up again. They have so many reasons to stick with a fixed mindset. I see a lot of invisibly vulnerable high-achievers stumble in young adulthood and struggle to get up again. I call them the ‘fragile perfects.’ Sometimes I meet fragile perfects in my office after a midterm or a final. Very quickly, It becomes clear that these bright and wonderful people know how to succeed but not how to fail.

17. 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.

18. Identity influences every aspect of our character, but it has special relevance to grit. Often, the critical gritty-or-not decisions we make–to get up one more time; to stick it out through this miserable, exhausting summer; to run five miles with our teammates when on our own we might only run three–are a matter of identity more than anything else. Often, our passion and perseverance do not spring from a cold, calculating analysis of the costs and benefits of alternatives. Rather, the source of our strength is the person we know ourselves to be.

19. We all face limits–not just in talent, but in opportunity. But more often than we think, our limits are self-imposed. We try, fail, and conclude we’ve bumped our heads against the ceiling of possibility. Or maybe after taking just a few steps we change direction. In either case, we never venture as far as we might have. To be gritty is to keep putting one foot in front of the other. To be gritty is to hold fast to an interesting and purposeful goal. To be gritty is to invest, day after week after year, in challenging practice. To be gritty is to fall down seven times, and rise eight.

20. If anything, the bells and whistles of the future will be louder than those of the present. Amid the cacophony, some individuals will nevertheless learn to pursue depth over breadth. How? Rules imposed by others (no texting while practicing your viola) eventually become cherished personal principles (I don’t let distractions get in the way of my work). And for those who become true paragons of grit, there will eventually be the singular satisfaction of loving what you do and continually working to get better at it.

Effort Counts Twice – Develop a Daily Habit of Challenge-Exceeding-Skill Practice:

Most people fail at trading because they’ve never developed an actual training process for it. In other words, they’re just winging it – essentially gambling. I see it every single day – and as much as I preach about building skills – it doesn’t seem to change.

The reality is that everyone wants the results (fancy cars, vacations, and the “lifestyle” that trading can potentially afford if approached correctly), but very few are actually willing to put in the work (thousands of hours of deliberate practice building legitimate skills).

But you can’t cheat cause and effect. There are no naturals when it comes to trading. Every consistently profitable trader I know, including myself, started off consistently losing – and had to make major changes to eventually become consistently profitable.

The “holy grail” that most new traders search for simply doesn’t exist. There are no magical indicators or setups that will produce millions without end. Markets are in constant flux, so strategies go in and out of favor. The only “holy grail” is skill and experience.

This all relates back to Grit because it’s critically important to realize that effort counts twice – not just in the training phase in order to build skills, but it also impacts execution and your ultimate level of success (Talent x Effort = Skill, then Skill x Effort = Achievement).

In the end, so-called “smart people” (with high IQs and degrees from prestigious universities, for example) aren’t always the best traders – typically because they don’t know how to properly handle risk, loss, and failure.  Aptitude alone isn’t enough in the markets.

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Written by Matt Thomas (@MattThomasTP)

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