Angela Duckworth

I came to a fundamental insight that would guide my future work: Our potential is one thing. What we do with it is quite another.

Eventually, if you keep practicing in the same time and place, what once took conscious thought to initiate becomes automatic. ‘There is no more miserable human being,’ observed William James, than the one for whom ‘every beginning of every bit of work’ must be decided anew each day.

Interest is one source of passion. Purpose—the intention to contribute to the well-being of others—is another. The mature passions of gritty people depend on both.

In my ‘grit lexicon,’ therefore, purpose means ‘the intention to contribute to the well-being of others.’

Author and activist James Baldwin once put it this way: ‘Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

To be gritty is to keep putting one foot in front of the other. To be gritty is to hold fast to an interesting and purposeful goal. To be gritty is to invest, day after week after year, in challenging practice. To be gritty is to fall down seven times, and rise eight.

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.

The bottom line on culture and grit is: If you want to be grittier, find a gritty culture and join it. If you’re a leader, and you want the people in your organization to be grittier, create a gritty culture.

There’s an old Japanese saying: ‘Fall seven, rise eight.’ If I were ever to get a tattoo, I’d get these four simple words indelibly inked.

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

Life is relatively short, so don’t labor under the delusion that you can keep switching your focus from goal to goal and get anywhere.