Grit to Great: How Perseverance, Passion, and Pluck Take You from Ordinary to Extraordinary

Working just a little harder than someone else who might be just as talented (or even a bit more) is what will win the day.

Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work. —STEPHEN KING

I’m not the smartest guy, but I can outwork you. It’s the one thing I can control.

You’d be surprised at the edge you can develop by applying yourself for an extra half hour on something—a goal, a skill, a job. Pick the time of day when you are most productive (early morning, after a jog, or in the quiet of a Sunday evening) and instead of watching a sitcom, devote yourself to whatever “it” might be. A half hour each day adds up to 180 hours of extra practice a year!

Failure is how we learn—it’s how we develop and acquire grit.

When confidence becomes a muscle memory, panic is replaced by peak performance.

The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will.

What this tells us is that children who are outperformed may give up rather than fight to improve, and those who do win may not feel compelled to keep trying as hard if even the losers get praise and a trophy.

Aristotle, writing about the virtues of hard work, said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit.

Happiness is not the absence of problems. It’s the ability to deal with them.

Hard work is good for the soul,” she would say. “And it keeps you from feeling sorry for yourself, because you don’t have time.

The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will. —VINCE LOMBARDI Steve

At the age of ninety-two, James spent months hunched over the kitchen table, learning the alphabet, practicing his signature, and slowly progressing to reading simple children’s books. Then his wife died, sending him into a tailspin and robbing him of his motivation to learn to read. But his story doesn’t end there. At the age of ninety-six, Henry became determined to try to learn to read again. This time he not only dove back into reading, but, with the help of a retired English teacher, he began to write, longhand, about his life, his time at sea, a man he lost overboard on one voyage, and what his grandfather’s farm was like in the Azores. He finished his memoir, and when he was ninety-eight it was published and became a bestselling book called In a Fisherman’s Language. It was optioned to become a film, and his success triggered a congratulatory letter from President Obama. Henry was working on his second book when he died at age ninety-nine in 2013. Henry’s story is remarkable on many levels. First, it took a tremendous amount of grit just to get by in today’s world as an illiterate adult. Even more remarkable was his determination to overcome it later in life.