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another conclusion is that the focus on talent distracts us from something that is at least as important, and that is effort.
“No one can see in the work of the artist how it has become,” Nietzsche said.
Talent is how quickly your skills improve when you invest effort.15 Achievement is what happens when you take your acquired skills and use them.
It soon became clear that doing one thing better and better might be more satisfying than staying an amateur at many different things:
Harvard researchers knew that running hard was not just a function of aerobic capacity and muscle strength but also the extent to which “a subject is willing to push himself or has a tendency to quit before the punishment becomes too severe.”40
berlari itu lebih ke mental di kepala kita bukan fisik berdasarkan pengalaman pribadi
As any coach or athlete will tell you, consistency of effort over the long run is everything.
the important thing is the idea itself: Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare.
Grit is about holding the same top-level goal for a very long time. Furthermore, this “life philosophy,” as Pete Carroll might put it, is so interesting and important that it organizes a great deal of your waking activity. In very gritty people, most mid-level and low-level goals are, in some way or another, related to that ultimate goal. In contrast, a lack of grit can come from having less coherent goal structures.
there was no “right decision,” only a decision that was right for me.
the biggest impediment to improving wasn’t anatomy; it was how he was coached:
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 higherlevel goals that demand more tenacity. The maturation story is that we develop the capacity for long-term passion and perseverance as we get older.
What ripens passion is the conviction that your work matters.
For most people, interest without purpose is nearly impossible to sustain for a lifetime.
passion for your work is a little bit of discovery, followed by a lot of development, and then a lifetime of deepening.
interests are not discovered through introspection. Instead, interests are triggered by interactions with the outside world.
interests must be triggered again and again and again.
Nobody wants to show you the hours and hours of becoming. They’d rather show the highlight of what they’ve become.
Fortunate indeed are those who have a top-level goal so consequential to the world that it imbues everything they do, no matter how small or tedious, with significance. Consider the parable of the bricklayers: 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.
calling is not some fully formed thing that you find,” she tells advice seekers. “It’s much more dynamic. Whatever you do—whether you’re a janitor or the CEO—you can continually look at what you do and ask how it connects to other people, how it connects to the bigger picture, how it can be an expression of your deepest values.” In other words, a bricklayer who one day says, “I am laying bricks” might at some point become the bricklayer who recognizes “I am building the house of God.”
thinking about how, in small but meaningful ways, you can change your current work to enhance its connection to your core values.
adolescent rats who experienced stress they could control grew up to be more adventurous and, most astounding, appeared to be inoculated against learned helplessness in adulthood.
Carol also explains that the brain is remarkably adaptive. Like a muscle that gets stronger with use, the brain changes itself when you struggle to master a new challenge. In fact, there’s never a time in life when the brain is completely “fixed.” Instead, all our lives, our neurons retain the potential to grow new connections with one another and to strengthen the ones we already have.
as a parent and as a social scientist, I would recommend that, as soon as your child is old enough, you find something they might enjoy doing outside of class and sign them up.
“The real way to become a great swimmer is to join a great team.”
“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 go 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.”
“that there’s a hard way to get grit and an easy way. The hard way is to do it by yourself. The easy way is to use conformity—the basic human drive to fit in—because if you’re around a lot of people who are gritty, you’re going to act grittier.”
“Success is never final; failure is never fatal.36 It’s courage that counts.”
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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.
Because the process will help you achieve clarity. You’ll have a clearer sense of who you are, what you care about, and how to align your effort with your identity.
Glick noticed that high school and college dropouts had significantly higher divorce rates than the general population—
“soul mate isn’t a pre-existing condition.13 It’s an earned title. They’re made over time.”
