Sarahritchie17 
With a book club at work, I recently read the book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth. I don’t like to mark up my books, and I think taking notes is too much work and is disruptive and makes reading unenjoyable. Instead, I take pictures on my phone of any page that piques my interest. I use the markup tool to highlight the sentence that caught my eye. Something like this:
Usually my “note-taking” process stops here, quick and easy. This time, I went one step further and actually typed all the quotes into a word doc. What I ended up with was a 5-page book summary; my own sort of Spark Notes. Today, I thought it might be interesting to share a few of those quotes and insights with you.
Here are 20 of my takeaways: (Citation is chapter title and page number)
- “Our potential is one thing. What we do with it is quite another.” (Showing Up, 14)
- “By shining our spotlight on talent, we risk leaving everything else in the shadows.” (Distracted by Talent, 31)
- “‘Greatness is many, many individual feats, and each of them is doable.’” (Effort Counts Twice, 38)
- Talent x Effort = Skill -> Skill x Effort = Achievement (Effort Counts Twice, 42)
- “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.” (Effort Counts Twice, 50)
- “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. Without effort, talent becomes skill and, at the very same time, effort makes skill productive.” (Effort Counts Twice, 51)
- Grit is not just falling in love; it’s staying in love (How Gritty Are You?, 54)
- “Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare.” (How Gritty Are You?, 58)
- “It’s as if the highest-level goal gets written in ink, once you’ve done enough living and reflecting to know what that goal is, and the lower-level goals get written in pencil, so you can revise them and sometimes erase them altogether, and then figure out new ones to take their place.” (How Gritty Are You?, 69)
- Psychological Assets of Grit Paragons: Interest, Practice, Purpose, Hope (Grit Grows, 91-92)
- “When I first started interviewing grit paragons, I assumed they’d all have stories about the singular moment when, suddenly, they’d discovered their God-given passion… And I think this is also what young graduates—roasting in their caps and gowns, the hard edge of the folding chair biting into their thighs—imagine it must be like to discover your life’s passion… But, in fact, most grit paragons I’ve interviewed told me they spent years exploring several different interests, and the one that eventually came to occupy all of their waking (and sometimes sleeping) thoughts wasn’t recognizably their life’s destiny on first acquaintance.” (Interest, 99-100)
- “Passion for your work is a little bit of discovery, followed by a lot of development, and then a lifetime of deepening.” (Interest, 103)
- “Nobody wants to show you the hours and hours of becoming. They’d rather show the highlight of what they’ve become.” (Practice, 135)
- “Optimists… are just as likely to encounter bad events as pessimists. Where they diverge is in their explanations: optimists habitually search for temporary and specific causes of their suffering, whereas pessimists assume permanent and pervasive causes are to blame.” (Hope, 174)
- Growth mindset -> Optimistic self-talk -> Perseverance over adversity (Hope, 192)
- “This brings me to the second part of the Hard Thing Rule: You can quit. But you can’t quit until the season is over, the tuition payment is up, or some other ‘natural’ stopping point has arrived. You must, at least for the interval to which you’ve committed yourself, finish whatever you begin. In other words, you can’t quit on a day when your teacher yells at you, you lose a race, or you have to miss a sleepover because of a recital the next morning. You can’t quit on a bad day.” (The Playing Fields of Grit, 241)
- “‘Look, when I started studying Olympians, I thought, ‘What kind of oddball gets up every day at four in the morning to go to swimming practice?’ I thought, ‘These must be extraordinary people to do that sort of thing.’ But the thing is, when you got to a place where basically everybody you know is getting up at four in the morning to go to practice, that’s just what you do. It’s no big deal. It becomes a habit.’” (A Culture of Grit, 246-247)
- “‘I simply wasn’t going to fail because I didn’t care or didn’t try. That’s not who I am.’” (A Culture of Grit, 250)
- “‘Our opponent,’ Pete explained, ‘creates challenges that help us become our best selves.’” (A Culture of Grit, 262)
- “‘Compete comes from Latin,’ explains Mike Gervais, … ‘Quite literally, it means strive together. It doesn’t have anything in its origins about another person losing.’” (A Culture of Grit, 265)
Most of these quotes speak for themselves, but I did want to share one point of personal reflection I had in reading this. A lot of these insights seemed like common sense to me, and I think that’s in part due to how I was raised. My parents were tough but supportive. As a competitive swimmer for 18 years, my family and I had a keen understanding of grit, even if that’s not what we called it. I know what it’s like to be part of a culture where it’s “normal” to get up at 4 AM for practice during the school year and 6 AM six days a week over the summers. I know what it’s like to keep showing up day after day and year after year, even if it meant only dropping milliseconds off a race time at the end of a long, grueling season. I always knew that my work ethic and stick-to-it-ive-ness have propelled me to where I am today, but it was fascinating for me to learn that there is science behind it too. And I’m not saying I didn’t learn anything new from the book or that I am already a super-gritty person. I think grit is something that you have to channel and grow and nourish. It’s not something that’s just there or not. I think this book helped me to be more mindful of how I am using my grit and gave me a better understanding of finding passions worthy of perseverance.
If you are interested in learning more about grit and how you can get grittier but don’t want to read the whole book, here’s a link to the TED talk by the author: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H14bBuluwB8
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Cheers!
Sarah
