Importance of Grit in Suceeding in Life - Angela Lee Duckworth Summarized

Your Success Depends on Grit
We are trained by social media, the internet, and technology to expect things to be instantaneous. Ask a question in Google and you’ll get an immediate answer or response to your question. Want to put in a stock trade? Instantly put in a order to your broker and within seconds you could be a shareholder of the world’s largest company. The benefit of this is obviously increased productivity, but the consequence is an increased expectation that everything else should work the same way.

For a while, I used to believe that success could happen overnight. You can build a website or an app and social media or someone will spread the world. Then you would be an overnight success like Flappy Bird. But that is only what it appears to be from the outsider looking in. But to those inside looking out, Flappy Bird became a success only after the creator made several other apps such as Super Ball Juggling and Shuriken Block. Rome was not built in a day and anything sustainable can’t be built in a day.

Being successful is not about being the smartest, best looking, or most socially intelligent. While those things do help create opportunities that may lead to success, without perseverance and hard work you won’t be able to get far.

Angela Lee Duckworth left management consulting at Mckinsey to teach seventh graders, but eventually her path led her to where she is now as an assistant professor at UPenn Her research has led her to understand that the reason people are successful or most likely to succeed is because of grit.

How do you cultivate grit? What can lead you to become more grittier?

The idea of a growth mindset is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed and it can change with effort. When students learn about the brain and how it can grow in response to challenges, they are much more likely to preserve because they view failure as a temporary thing.

In other words, be the tortoise and not the hare. Slow and steady does win the race.