American academic, psychologist and popular-science author Angela Duckworth is the co-founder of Character Lab, a non-profit working “to advance scientific insights that help children thrive.” Her main area of interest in her research is grit and self-control; in fact, her 2013 TED Talk, which is one of the most-watched, with 17 million views, is “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.” And with her work so closely tied to pushing through so you can succeed, our quote of the day from Duckworth is pretty appropriate, focusing on effort, talent and “unmet potential.”
Duckworth was born in 1970, and is currently the Rosa Lee and Egbert Chang Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, with research interests in Developmental Psychology, Individual Differences, Positive Psychology and Behavior Change. She went on to create the Grit Scale, which aims to measure the construct of “grit” and how much you might have, or how you measure on the scale. Her first book—which has the same name as her TED Talk—came out in 2016 and was on The New York Times bestseller list for 21 weeks.
As she said in her viral talk, grit is about “passion and perseverance for very long-term goals.” And with that notion, today’s quote by Duckworth focuses on talent and how your effort is what makes or breaks that expertise, and where people go wrong and experience “unmet potential.”
Related: Quote of the Day: Psychologist B.F. Skinner on Perseverance, Reframing and Never Giving Up
Quote of the Day by Angela Duckworth
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“Without effort, your talent is nothing more than your unmet potential.”
This quote comes from Duckworth’s 2016 book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. As we mentioned before, it’s her first book and made quite a stir when it came on the scene. Its description calls it a “must-read book for anyone striving to succeed,” and it aims to answer the question, “Why do some people succeed and others fail?”
The full quote is:
“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.”
Related: Quote of the Day: Historian Howard Zinn on Hope in Hard Times
In Duckworth’s TED Talk—which, again, shares the name of her book—she explains grit as:
“Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working really hard to make that future a reality.”
She then goes into the concept of inherent abilities, saying, “talent doesn’t make you gritty.” She posits that many talented people don’t follow through on their commitments. And therefore, “grit is usually unrelated or even inversely related to measures of talent.”
So even if you’re skillful or a "prodigy" of some sort, if you don’t put in the effort to succeed, you’re just going to be met with “unmet potential” in place of that talent. Because know-how, in itself, is not inherently impressive nor is it useful, according to Duckworth’s idea surrounding “grit.”
As she later says in her talk, a growth mindset is the best way to build grit in kids. The ability to learn isn’t fixed, and it can change with your efforts. So even if you’re not born talented or inherently a genius, you can learn to persevere and grow your abilities, and with continued effort, you can succeed. Kids with a growth mindset are more likely to persevere when they fail because “they don’t believe failure is a permanent condition,” Duckworth said in her talk, which is a point in her book.
“We have to be willing to fail, to be wrong, to start over again with lessons learned,” she stated.
So, this quote is basically saying that you typically can’t just skate through life and into an Ivy League college or into a CEO position based on just “talent” (and disregarding situations of nepotism or money, etc.). Expertise, without effort, is just potential you never lived up to. And if you don’t want to have regrets later in life, learning to persevere and stick things out even when times get tough is probably your best bet.
Related: Quote of the Day: Psychologist Erich Fromm on Lasting Love, Loyalty and Commitment
More Quotes from Angela Duckworth
“Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare.”“Our potential is one thing. What we do with it is quite another.”“... As much as talent counts, effort counts twice.”“I won’t just have a job; I’ll have a calling. I’ll challenge myself every day. When I get knocked down, I’ll get back up. I may not be the smartest person in the room, but I’ll strive to be the grittiest.”“I learned a lesson I’d never forget. The lesson was that, when you have setbacks and failures, you can’t overreact to them.”“When you keep searching for ways to change your situation for the better, you stand a chance of finding them. When you stop searching, assuming they can’t be found, you guarantee they won.”Up Next:
Related: Quote of the Day: Political Activist Angela Davis on Uplifting Others as We Succeed
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