It is important to realize that the process of 'fostering' a passion takes trial and error. It takes experience; you cannot do it all in your head. And it takes a long time.
Negative feelings are typical of learning, and you shouldn't feel like you're stupid when you're frustrated doing something. You might say to yourself, 'I can't do this,' but you should say, 'That's great.' That means you really have the potential to learn something there.
I don't spend a lot of time thinking about my genes because I can't do anything about them.
There haven't been genetic studies on grit, but we often think that challenge is inherited but grit is learned. That's not what science says. Science says grit comes from both nature and nurture.
I believe kids should choose what they want to do, because it's their life, but they have to choose something, and they can't quit in the middle unless there's a really good reason. There are going to be peaks and valleys. You don't want to let kids quit during a valley.
Childhood is generally far too early to know what we want to be when we grow up. Longitudinal studies following thousands of people across time have shown that most people only begin to gravitate toward certain vocational interests, and away from others, around middle school.
Grit, in a word, is stamina. But it's not just stamina in your effort. It's also stamina in your direction, stamina in your interests. If you are working on different things but all of them very hard, you're not really going to get anywhere. You'll never become an expert.
I would be surprised if my girls ended up as women without grit. I really would.
Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint.
At various points, in big ways and small, we get knocked down. If we stay down, grit loses. If we get up, grit prevails.
Grit and self-control are related, but they're not the same thing.
One thing that's true of gritty people is they love what they do, and they keep loving what they do. So they're not just in love for a day or a week. People who are really gritty - they're still interested.
Most people who are really, enduringly interested in something eventually find that it's important, too - and important to other people. Very few people can keep going their whole life doing something and feel like it's merely personally fascinating.
The focus on just thinking about standardized test scores as being synonymous with achievement for teenagers is ridiculous, right? There are so many things that kids care about, where they excel, where they try hard, where they learn important life lessons, that are not picked up by test scores.
Everybody knows that effort matters. What was revelatory to me was how much it mattered.
I do feel it's hard to be modest and humble and egoless when people are telling you you are so great and wanting to give you prizes and energy. I'm trying hard not to be an awful, narcissistic human being.
Substituting nuance for novelty is what experts do, and that is why they are never bored.
When people tell me I can't do something, I have a visceral reflex to say, 'Yes, I can.'
Some of the things we do are great, but they often have these iterations that are not great. We screw up sometimes. We get rejected.
What we reliably find is that people's perseverance scores are actually higher than their passion scores, and I think it really does get to the fact that working hard is hard, but maybe finding your passion is even more difficult.