51 Thought-Provoking Angela Duckworth Quotes

Angela Duckworth is one of the board members and the chief scientist at Character Lab, and she is also currently co-hosting the podcast 'No Stupid Questions'.

Before fame, Duckworth was a teacher in many schools in New York City, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. She taught mathematics and science.

Angela was born in 1970 and has a degree in Neurobiology from Harvard University. Alongside being a recipient of multiple awards, she has also won the MacArthur Fellowship. She worked at McKinsey & Company before becoming a math teacher.

Angela Duckworth has also authored a book called 'Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance'. Her guidance for teachers and parents is very thoughtful and properly researched.

Angela Duckworth's contribution to Science and Research has led several children to have an easier life. Many people in their middle age and optimistic young adults follow her work.

“'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.'”

- Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, 2016.

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

"Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"People with grit don’t believe that failure is a permanent condition."

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

"You can at once want to be the most successful person while at the same time helping others. People who have both self-oriented and other-oriented motives tend to be the most productive."

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

"Most of us become more conscientious, confident, caring, and calm with life experience."

"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."

"In the most general sense, talent is the sum of a person's abilities—his or her intrinsic gifts, skills, knowledge, experience, intelligence, judgment, attitude, character, and drive. It also includes his or her ability to learn and grow."

"Do not let temporary setbacks become permanent excuses."

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

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

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

"Experts are more interested in what they did wrong – so they can fix it – then what they did right."

"Gritty people do more deliberate practice and experience more flow."

"Wishing you did things better is extremely common during learning."

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

Through these quotes, Duckworth conveys a message on the importance of countless individual elements for a positive result. She believes that if talent counts, then effort counts twice more!

"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."

"Greatness is many, many individual feats, and each of them is doable."

"Grit depends on hope that you have the power to improve things. Hope sustains passion by giving optimism that one day you can achieve your goals, and thus they're worth holding for long periods of time."

"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."

"When it comes to how we fare in the marathon of life, effort counts tremendously. Optimistic young adults stay healthier throughout middle age and, ultimately, live longer than pessimists."

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

"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."

"We told them that trying to do things they can't yet do, failing, and learning what they need to do differently is exactly the way experts practice."

"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."

"Do things better than they have ever been done before."

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

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

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

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

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

Many of Angela Duckworth's quotes talk about passion and how it helps in bringing about dazzling human achievements. Keep reading to know how among many different things, to be passionate.

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

"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."

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

"Passion begins with intrinsically enjoying what you do."

"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."

"Passion begins with intrinsically enjoying what you do. To be gritty is to resist complacency. Success is never final; failure is never fatal. It's courage that counts."

"As much as talent counts, effort counts twice."

"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."

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

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

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

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

"No whining. No complaining. No excuses."

"A girl who is told repeatedly that she’s no genius ends up winning an award for being one. The award goes to her because she has discovered that what we eventually accomplish may depend more on our passion and perseverance than on our innate talent."