Grit

Interests may form and reform many times over the course of a lifetime. What is not ephemeral is the courage to follow your interests wherever they lead.

As much as talent counts, effort counts twice.

Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare. The simple secret to lasting change is to make sure you prepare for both the enthusiasm and the disappointment, the excitement and the boredom.

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.

Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working really hard to make that future a reality.

Grit can be cultivated. Having a growth mindset, finding purpose and passion in your work, and maintaining self-control helps develop grit.

Talent and IQ are not sufficient for high achievement. Grittier people achieve more in various domains than their less gritty peers, even if they have lower innate abilities.

Grit is defined as perseverance and passion for long-term goals. It involves working diligently towards challenges and maintaining effort and interest over years despite setbacks.

Many of us, it seems, quit what we start far too early and far too often. Even more than the effort a gritty person puts in on a single day, what matters is that they wake up the next day, and the next, ready to get on that treadmill and keep going.

It was this combination of passion and perseverance that made high achievers special. In a word, they had grit.

Talent is how quickly your skills improve when you invest effort. Achievement is what happens when you take your acquired skills and use them.

Character is plural. One way to think about grit is to understand how it relates to other aspects of character.

Grit scores bore absolutely no relationship to the Whole Candidate Scores.

Deliberate practice is experienced as supremely effortful.

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

When our parents are loving, respectful, and demanding, we not only follow their example, we revere it.

You can quit. But you can’t quit until the season is over... You can’t quit on a bad day.

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

Grit isn’t just working incredibly hard. That’s only part of it. Grit is about working on something you care about so much that you’re willing to stay loyal to it.

By shining our spotlight on talent, we risk leaving everything else in the shadows.

If you want to be grittier, find a gritty culture and join it.

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.

The hope that gritty people have has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with getting up again.

One central character strength that emerges again and again in the lives of gritty people is self-control.

One form of mental toughness invoked by every one of the grit paragons is having a high pain threshold. For some the main vehicle for learning to manage pain, discomfort, and fear was sport. For others it was surviving illness in childhood.