Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare.

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

...there are no shortcuts to excellence. Developing real expertise, figuring out really hard problems, it all takes time―longer than most people imagine....you've got to apply those skills and produce goods or services that are valuable to people....Grit is about working on something you care about so much that you're willing to stay loyal to it...it's doing what you love, but not just falling in love―staying in love.

as much as talent counts, effort counts twice.

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

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.

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

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

...grit grows as we figure out our life philosophy, learn to dust ourselves off after rejection and disappointment, and learn to tell the difference between low-level goals that should be abandoned quickly and higher-level goals that demand more tenacity. The maturation story is that we develop the capacity for long-term passion and perseverance as we get older.

...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...Without experimenting, you can't figure out which interests will stick, and which won't.

Without effort, your talent is nothing more than unmet potential. Without effort, your skill is nothing more than what you could have done but didn't.

Yes, but the main thing is that greatness is doable. Greatness is many, many individual feats, and each of them is doable.

I have a feeling tomorrow will be better is different from I resolve to make tomorrow better.

It isn't suffering that leads to hopelessness. It's suffering you think you can't control.

At its core, the idea of purpose is the idea that what we do matters to people other than ourselves.

Three bricklayers are asked: “What are you doing?” The first says, “I am laying bricks.” The second says, “I am building a church.” And the third says, “I am building the house of God.” The first bricklayer has a job. The second has a career. The third has a calling.

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

most dazzling human achievements are, in fact, the aggregate of countless individual elements, each of which is, in a sense, ordinary.

Passion for your work is a little bit of discovery, followed by a lot of development, and then a lifetime of deepening.

Stop reading so much and go think.

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.

Well okay, that didn’t go so well, but I guess I will just carry on.’

As soon as possible, experts hungrily seek feedback on how they did. Necessarily, much of that 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.

No whining. No complaining. No excuses.

Passion begins with intrinsically enjoying what you do.

Our vanity, our self-love, promotes the cult of the genius,” Nietzsche said. “For if we think of genius as something magical, we are not obliged to compare ourselves and find ourselves lacking. . . . To call someone ‘divine’ means: ‘here there is no need to compete.

In other words, we want to believe that Mark Spitz was born to swim in a way that none of us were and that none of us could. We don’t want to sit on the pool deck and watch him progress from amateur to expert. We prefer our excellence fully formed. We prefer mystery to mundanity.

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.

When I am around people,” Kat wrote, “my heart and soul radiate with the awareness that I am in the presence of greatness. Maybe greatness unfound, or greatness underdeveloped, but the potential or existence of greatness nevertheless. You never know who will go on to do good or even great things or become the next great influencer in the world—so treat everyone like they are that person.

There’s a vast amount of research on what happens when we believe a student is especially talented. We begin to lavish extra attention on them and hold them to higher expectations. We expect them to excel, and that expectation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.