Header image: KF in Midjourney
- help to get as RTBF law passed in Canada
- what we eventually accomplish may depend more on our passion and perseverance than on our innate talent.
- Her parents are Chinese immigrants, but she didn’t get lectured on the salvation of hard work. Against stereotype, she can’t play a note of piano or violin.
1. SHOWING UP Beast at West Point
- They not only had determination, they had direction.
2. DISTRACTED BY TALENT
- I imagined them clapping.
- as much as talent counts, effort counts twice.
3. EFFORT COUNTS TWICE
- “With everything perfect,” Nietzsche wrote, “we do not ask how it came to be.” Instead, “we rejoice in the present fact as though it came out of the ground by magic.”
- “No one can see in the work of the artist how it has become,” Nietzsche said. “That is its advantage, for wherever one can see the act of becoming one grows somewhat cool.”
- “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.’ ”
- A theory is an explanation. A theory takes a blizzard of facts and observations and explains, in the most basic terms, what the heck is going on. By necessity, a theory is incomplete. It oversimplifies. But in doing so, it helps us understand.
- when you permanently turn your back on a commitment—your effort plummets to zero.
4. HOW GRITTY ARE YOU?
- “Grit is about working on something you care about so much that you’re willing to stay loyal to it…. it’s doing what you love, but not just falling in love—staying in love.”
- “Pitching is what makes me happy. I’ve devoted my life to it. . . . I’ve made up my mind what I want to do. I’m happy when I pitch well so I only do things that help me be happy.”
5. GRIT GROWS
- Named after Jim Flynn, the New Zealand social scientist who discovered it, the Flynn effect refers to startling gains in IQ scores over the past century: As a species, we’re getting better and better at abstract reasoning.
- According to Flynn, what happened was television…basketball…by getting better, each kid inadvertently enriched the learning environment for the kids he or she was playing against.
- Flynn called this virtuous cycle of skill improvement the social multiplier effect, and he used the same logic to explain generational changes in abstract reasoning.
- as novelist John Irving did, that “to do anything really well, you have to overextend yourself,”
- the research reveals the psychological assets that mature paragons of grit have in common. There are four.
- interest.
- capacity to practice.
- purpose.
- hope.
Part II GROWING GRIT FROM THE INSIDE OUT