60+ Angela Duckworth Quotes On Achieving Success

Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and habits.

Success is how much uncertainty you can deal with.

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

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

Really, what matters, in the long run, is sticking with things and working daily to get better at them.

Nobody wants to show you the hours and hours of becoming. They’d rather show the highlight of what they’ve become.

The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority.

As much as talent counts, effort counts twice.

When it comes to how we fare in the marathon of life, effort counts tremendously.

When people tell me I can’t do something, I have a visceral reflex to say, ‘Yes, I can.’

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.

Optimistic young adults stay healthier throughout middle age and, ultimately, live longer than pessimists.

Everybody knows that effort matters. What was revelatory to me was how much it mattered.

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

Consistency of effort over the long run is everything.

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.

Someone twice as talented but half as hardworking as another person might reach the same level of skill but still produce dramatically less over time.

If you’re never able to tolerate a little bit of pain and discomfort, you’ll never get better.

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

With efforts, talent becomes skill and, at the same time, effort makes skill productive.

Nobody gets to be good at something without effort, no matter what your aptitude is.

Gritty people train at the edge of their comfort zone. They zero in on one narrow aspect of their performance and set a stretch goal to improve it.

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

Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare.

Substituting nuance for novelty is what experts do, and that is why they are never bored.

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

Without effort, your talent is nothing more than unmet potential.

Do things better than they have ever been done before.

Grit may carry risk because it’s about putting all your eggs in one basket, to some extent.

What I mean is that you care about that same ultimate goal in an abiding, loyal, steady way.

Some people prefer a world where we’re all equally talented in everything. Whether you prefer that world or not, I don’t think that world exists.

Without effort, your skill is nothing more than what you could have done but didn’t.

Stop reading so much and go think.

A lack of grit can come from having less coherent goal structures.

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

The parenting style that is good for grit is also the parenting style good for most other things: Be really, really demanding, and be very, very supportive.

I would be surprised if my girls ended up as women without grit. I really would.

Even the most accomplished of experts start out as unserious beginners.

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

I have a feeling tomorrow will be better different from what I resolved to make tomorrow better.

Every successful person has to decide what to do in part by deciding what not to do.

Morally, there was no ‘right decision,’ only a decision that was right for me.

Grit holds special significance for the achievement of excellence.

Do not let temporary setbacks become permanent excuses.

No whining. No complaining. No excuses.

You need ONE internal compass – not two, three, four, or five.

You cannot will yourself to be interested in something you’re not interested in. But you can actively discover and deepen your interest.

There’s something about taking the path of least resistance that makes a lot of sense. But at the same time, we have to figure out which things in life are worth struggling through.

If the quality and quantity of continuous effort toward goals matter as much as I think it does, we may actually get more productive, not less, as we get older – even if we can’t pull all-nighters like we used to.

I learned that being a ‘promising beginner’ is fun, but being an actual expert is infinitely more gratifying.

To be gritty is to resist complacency.

Success is never final; failure is never fatal. It’s courage that counts.

There are no shortcuts to excellence.

Our early interests are fragile, vaguely defined, and in need of energetic, years-long cultivation and refinement.

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.

What ripens passion is the conviction that your work matters. For most people, interest without purpose is nearly impossible to sustain for a lifetime.

Grit has two components: passion and perseverance.

Kids whose parents let them make their own choices about what they like are more likely to develop interests later identified as passion.

At the start of an endeavor, we need encouragement and freedom to figure out what we enjoy.

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

You may choose to write. your top-level goal in indelible ink, but until you know for sure, work in pencil.

Grit is about working on something you care about so much that you’re willing to stay loyal to it.

Passion begins with intrinsically enjoying what you do.

We all recognize effortless entertainment is the enemy of long-term passion and perseverance.

Developing passion and perseverance is possible for anyone and everyone.

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

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

You can want to be a top dog and, at the same time, be driven to help others.

You can go from job to career to calling – all without changing your occupation.

How you see your work is more important than your job title.

Just about any occupation can be a job, career, or calling.

I have found that only a minority of workers consider their occupations a calling.

I have to admit that, yes, it is possible to be a gritty villain… but my research suggests that there are many more gritty heroes.

If you keep practicing at the same time and place, what once took conscious thought to initiate becomes automatic.

HABITS: Routines are a godsend when it comes to doing something hard.

Wishing you did things better is extremely common during learning.

Every effortless performance on YouTube is hours and hours of unrecorded, invisible-to-outsiders, mistaken-ridden practice.

Many people are cruising through life doing precisely zero hours of deliberate practice.

Mindlessly ‘going through the motions’ without improvement – can be its own form of suffering.

Why do some people try, try again, and why do some people not? That’s what I’m after.

I do think that whatever ambition I may have had natively was amplified by my father’s clear valuing of it. I knew that was what my dad really cared about.

If you are a young person who is wanting to develop a passion, you cannot expect anyone else to tell you what that passion would be.

Grit and self-control are related, but they’re not the same thing.

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.