Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (Pt. 2)

Hello and welcome to Readers, a podcast where the real-life lessons and applications of books are talked about by a 16-year-old, me, Prithviraj Chavda. Welcome back everyone. I hope everyone has been staying happy and healthy. Welcome back to Readers. This week is part 2 of Grit. The Power of Passion and Perseverance. We are once again joined by Ms. Jennifer. Thank you so much for being here.

And thanks again for having me.

Last time we discussed part 1, which was what is grit and why it matters. This week we will discuss part 2. Let's dive into it. So part 2 is called Growing Grit from the Inside Out, and it's all about the 4 internal components that can lead you to being able to grow grit internally. What beliefs and values that can empower you to become a grittier person. So she starts off with talking about a much undervalued and unappreciated concept, which is passion. She talks about how many people want their kids and their family to follow the safe, easier, not always easier, but always safer route. Financially stable, and something that you can almost guarantee will bring them success. But do they all often think about passion? Is her big question. And she talks about in this part how much passion plays a role in your life and how much it really matters. And here she shares two very interesting quotes. The first one is by Will Shortz, who is the editor of the New York Times crossword. And this quote is, "My advice for you is figure out what you enjoy doing most in life and then try to do it full-time. Life is short, follow your passion." And the second one is, "Whatever it is that you want to do, you'll find in life that if you're not passionate about what it is you're working on, you will not be able to stick with it." This quote is by none other than Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon. These are both written by very successful people And these quotes really push you to understand that no matter what you do, you have to have passion for it. And you have to have the drive to keep pushing. Because if you don't, what's your reason to keep persevering?

So it was hearing these kinds of quotes over and over in interviews with grit paragons that gives Duckworth the suspicion that passion for what you do is an important part of grit and consequently success. So this sentiment is actually echoed in the research by Hester Lacey, who is a British journalist and has been interviewing achievers, once a week since 2011. And these achievers are from all fields. And she described how the one thing that came up time after time was the quote, "I love what I do." So Duckworth kind of takes a moment here in the book to reflect on her own upbringing and how follow your passion was not really a message she heard growing up. Following overly idealistic dreams, her family felt, and particularly her father, could be a breadcrumb trail into poverty and disappointment. Luckily, scientists have studied whether pursuing your passion is advisable over practicality. And so in this first part of the chapter where Angela Duckworth delves into the advice of follow your passion, she reflects on these paragons of grit who are so obviously doing what they love. And then she kind of goes back to her childhood again and talks about her dad. So her dad tells her that her favorite subject when he was growing up was history. But his family owned a textile business in China, and so Duckworth's grandfather, her dad's dad, made his sons pursue fields that would help the family business. And at that time, what the business needed was a chemist. Unfortunately, at the end of the Communist Revolution in China, that revolution kind of brought a premature end to their family business, and her father ended up working at DuPont. So by the end of his career, he retired as the highest-ranking scientist in the company. He was very successful in that field, and even though it wasn't his passion and that he— and he loved history, his work actually became his passion, um, although it didn't start off that way. And so Duckworth kind of asks herself, and, and in her research, asked the question of whether following a practical career pursuit is actually more advisable than following your research.

So She brings up the point that often passion gets very overlooked for a safe job with financial stability. You think people like doctors, lawyers, engineers— these people have a very set path after you get there. Of course, it takes a lot of work to get there, but after you are, it is almost guaranteed that if you do well in your job, you will earn a steady good paycheck. It seems like those who are financially well off have a good life. So why would you risk that for passion? So while Angela Duckworth's dad pursued a practical career and came to love it, Duckworth disagrees with this research. She shows that there are two main reasons that make a good case for following your passion for your work. First, she says that people are more satisfied with jobs that they are personally interested in than the jobs that they have to do, which of course makes sense. If you're doing a job that you don't enjoy, or even if one— it's just one that you don't particularly love, you won't get as much satisfaction off of it. And the second one that she mentions is that people are proven, scientifically proven, to perform better at work if they enjoy what they do. They do their jobs better, they're more helpful to their co-workers, and they stay at their jobs longer. Now she shares a very interesting quote which I think was important to note because it really changed my outlook. And that was that nobody is interested in everything and everyone is interested in something. So I guess you just have to find your niche in things and you have to find what you truly love and are able to make money, financial success, and become successful off of that. And in nowadays age, it's almost easier than ever. You can make money and become successful in almost any passion. In the book, Duckworth gives the example that you cannot become successfully financial or sorry, financially successful, um, and professionally successful by playing something like video games, Minecraft, no matter how good you are. However, now that I think about it, we now have YouTubers and streamers who make lots of money doing things just like that. So now we have a society that is able to find your niche and things and make money off of doing almost anything.

So Duckworth does not think that falling in love with a career should be sudden and swift. She knows that things could seem uninteresting and superficial until you get to working on them and you start enjoying them. And I think this is one of the important points in this chapter is that she's not saying that, you know, you're going to start off passionate about everything that you do. But sometimes you do have some interest in something, and as you get more and more into that work, that interest deepens. And it gets richer and you do actually start to develop and cultivate a passion for what you're doing.

Now, she also shares the point that often those who have a passion and have been able to become successful at that passion have had to work hard to even discover the love that they had for it. It was not a love at first sight kind of deal. It's not what you will see in TV shows when you suddenly just have a moment of realization. And at that point, you just become successful right after that. And she shares a couple of stories about people like Julia Child, celebrity chef. And Julia Child, in fact, had originally wanted to become a novelist. She also shares the story about an Olympic swimming gold medalist whose name is Rowdy Gaines. She shares that he tried out for 5 different sports before he finally discovered swimming. And even then, he thought he was going to get cut from the team at the beginning. She shares that it takes trial and error, perseverance, and passion to become great at something. And she also talks about another quote that I think was very interesting, and it's that passion for your work is a little bit of discovery followed by a lot of development and then a lifetime of deepening. She says that when you start off with the first part, the little bit of discovery, Beginners need a lot of encouragement and freedom. It needs to be a self-motivated drive, not rushed by anyone else. If a beginner feels like they're being rushed or being forced into it by anyone, no matter if it's their parents, their friends, their peers, anyone, they might not discover that passion that they have for it, and it might become something that they do only because other people are telling them to.

So it's important to note for the parents out there that childhood is too early to discover your passion. You really shouldn't force your 3-year-old to become a world, you know, world champion in any particular thing, but from the time that they're 3. Science shows that people only begin to gravitate towards certain vocational interests and away from others in middle school. And childhood is really when you experiment. Without experimentation, you won't figure out what interests you. And life experience allows for interest development. So when you start to get interested in something, you may actually not notice that that's an interest that's developing at first. And it's only with time that you start to realize that it's been an interest for a few years, and you can look back and you can see where it started. But in that moment, you didn't realize that that's how it started, or that's— that that was the beginning of an interest you would have later. So really, it's, it's super important to know here that before the hard work comes play. Children and adolescents should really be allowed to explore many different fields. And it's not until later that that kind of commitment to one thing comes into play and has a lot of benefit.

And in the next chapter, she moves on to the middle years of exploring and living your passion. Here she mentions, mentions an interesting Japanese concept called kaizen. The literal translation of this concept is continuous development, right? She notes that all successful individuals demonstrate an aptitude for continuous improvement, to have the drive to do better every time. She notes that those who improve do not just focus on the quality of— or on the quantity of time. A world-class writer may only write 5 hours a day, but the quality of that time will be improved. Every time that the people who are successful do something, the time after, they try to do it better and better each time. The quality that she says can help with this is that drive to keep going and keep becoming better at everything. I want to be better tomorrow than I am today.

Duckworth dedicates an entire chapter to the discussion of passion. She has found in her research that grittier people don't just practice longer, they actually practice differently. And what she finds is that grittier people engage in more what's called deliberate practice. And they actually report— so that's kind of one part of it. And the other part of it is that they actually report enjoying or getting satisfaction out of that deliberate practice.

So to illustrate this, she talks about her own efforts as a runner, right? She says a small story about how She's been jogging for years and years, but it never gotten better. And she talks about a couple of reasons behind that was because she never had a lot of goals for her runs. She never had a coach. She didn't dedicate a lot of time or energy to finding out how she could improve her former time, and she didn't reflect on that. So here she kind of brings up that concept that you mentioned about deliberate practice. What is deliberate practice? She says that it's hours and hours of work focused on a single aspect an intense reflection upon that, as well as improvement on that aspect. For example, if I were to give one— if you shoot a basketball around randomly just in the gym every day, maybe your shot will improve to a certain extent, but this is just common practice. Deliberate practice— and this is the difference between that common practice and deliberate practice— deliberate practice would be continuously shooting the same free throw hundreds of times in a row, then watching your shot on film Later, improving form, follow-through, arc, etc. It's the point that you focus on a very specific certain aspect of your game, your craft, your art, and you focus on making that better every single time. And this involves a lot of reflection, which many people may not find fun, but it's incredibly important because only if you are able to hold up a mirror for yourself and look back on how you did will you be able to improve on what you did in the past.

So research has shown that there's this 10,000-hour rule that you may have heard of before, or the 10-year rule, which is that it takes this amount of time to become an expert in something. You can probably think, but you can probably think of people who've been doing something for 10 years and certainly don't seem like experts, and that's probably because they haven't been engaging in deliberate practice. You can be mindlessly going through the motions without really improving. Deliberate practice is effortful. It's hard. It's challenging. And it's something you choose to focus on because you know it will help you advance towards that highest-level goal. Duckworth talks about the research of a cognitive psychologist named Anders Ericsson in this chapter. This is a man who has spent his career studying how experts acquire world-class skills. Ericsson calls this intentional and effortful practice, deliberate practice. He kind of coined this term. She and Ericsson decide to study deliberate practice in a, in that group of spelling bee champions that she had, that Duckworth had previously studied. And we touched on this briefly in the last podcast, but I'll kind of, uh, give a little more background information, which was that Duckworth found that students who did best in the national spelling bee were grittier. She also found that they spent many more hours practicing than their less gritty peers. So we know that they're spending more hours practicing and that they have an edge when it comes to quantity with practice. So in this study, they set out to understand if the champions are also engaging in more deliberate practice, right? So this is the quality of the practice. And they found that these students prepare for spelling bee in some— for the spelling bee in several ways. One was reading for pleasure, playing word games like Scrabble. The second was getting quizzed by another person in our computer program. And the third was unassisted and solitary spelling bee practice, including memorizing new words from the dictionary, reviewing words in a spelling notebook, and committing memory to Latin— committing to memory Latin, Greek, and other word origins. So if you think about those three, it's only the third one that really allows for some reflection, for some mindfulness, for some being with your own thoughts and trying to respond to any feedback that you might get to try and improve. In a very deliberate way. And so it was only this third category of activity that met the criteria for deliberate practice. And what they found was that the students who— it was the students who engaged more in deliberate practice that actually advanced to further rounds in the final competition. She also found that grittier kids created— grittier kids rated that practice as more enjoyable than their less gritty counterparts. And lastly, which I thought was super interesting, she found there was absolutely no relationship between reading for fun and advancing to further levels. So while all these students enjoyed reading, this kind of, this kind of activity is not effortful and it's really not going to help them advance. So with all this being said, Duckworth kind of comes up with a set of suggestions at the end of this chapter for how you can do deliberate practice, and I think it's really important that we delve into these.

So there are 4 basic requirements of deliberate practice, and these are, these are very important. And she said the first one is a clearly defined goal, right? Have your goal in mind, have it set from the very beginning, know what you want to do, right? For the spelling bee champions, I'm sure it was to win the spelling bee, right? Then the second one is full concentration and effort, right? You keep on, um, you have that full effort, you keep trying, you keep writing the words, you keep reviewing them. Um, the third one is immediate and informative feedback. I kind of touched on this a little before, but she mentions about how you have to look back and you have to get feedback from other people in order for you to improve. And the last one is repetition with reflection and refinement. Again, every time you do it, you have to get better. You have to see improvement. Deliberate practice, she says, should also be made a habit because you won't be able to succeed through deliberate practice unless you do it regularly. People who are able to put in hours and hours of deliberate practice have to make it a routine. Now, if you need help on how to do that, I would highly recommend Atomic Habits, which was the last book we covered. But what the point that she mentions here is to make it a habit, because you can't be successful in something unless you do it regularly and consistently.

Yes, and I think it's worth spending a little extra time really digging into these how-tos of deliberate practice. I'll repeat some of these points. So let's talk about goal setting first. Um, deliberate practice involves setting specific goals, and these are usually stretch goals, areas that you feel are weaknesses, or perhaps they're tasks you have to focus on to reach those next level goals. And I'll tweak some of something Vera said, because I don't think these are high-level goals like I want to win the spelling bee. They're actually the broken-down parts that help you achieve that high-level goal. So to win the spelling bee, you might— your goal might be I want to master 20 words a day, or, you know, I want to learn the Greek origin for 5 words a week. So it's really broken-down pieces of that high-level goal. If you want to be an NBA basketball player, You need to have goals like, I want to wake up at 5:00 AM every day. And the first thing I'm going to do is review the footage of my practice yesterday, or I want to improve my layup form. That's a smaller level goal. And that even that goal, I want to improve my layup form. You could probably break down into smaller pieces because you know what the things are that you need to do to do that. Um, some of those things might actually be, you know, squats. I'm not a basketball player, so I don't know, but I can imagine that there's things that you can do that are really small pieces of what that goal is. And then once you figure these goals out, so first you have to figure them out. You can't just mindlessly go through practice. You have goals, and then you want to give these goals full concentration and effort, just like Beer said. The other piece I want to touch on is feedback. So you have to seek feedback, and then you want to use that feedback to reflect, refine, and practice more where it's needed. Personally, I think deliberate practice is mindful. It's full of introspection, and that's a big part of what makes it deliberate. Deliberate. I also think it's important to talk about the feedback piece because you may not get feedback on your work. You know, it's not— if you're not in a school environment, if you don't have a coach, if you don't have a mentor, nobody may tell you anything. But experts seek feedback. They find a way to get that feedback. If they have to ask someone for it, if they want to record themselves doing something, if they need to actively seek or find a coach or a mentor. They don't mindlessly practice without reflection. And then the habit piece. You want to make a habit and you want to practice ideally at the same time in the same place and make it a routine so that you don't even have to think about it when you start doing it. So Duckworth gives that for a personal example, which is that her routine, her habit is that she wakes up at 8:00 AM. She goes to her home office. And the first thing she does is reread yesterday's draft. And she finds that this makes it easier for her to get started on her writing for that day. So it's kind of— it's very— it's— she doesn't have to think about it. What am I going to start with today? How am I going to start my day? What's my first task? Every single day, that's the first thing she does. And it really helps her get into the habit that she wants to have of writing every day and working on her research. Lastly, Duckworth recalls that the grittiest people actually enjoy deliberate practice. That was that second piece, if you guys remember. They don't just do more of it. They actually enjoy it. And she does give a couple of examples of some very gritty people who didn't really say they enjoyed practice because it was so effortful and because it was so hard, but they at least felt this deep satisfaction with the practice. So she really suggests that you change the way you experience practice. While it should be effortful, find ways to enjoy that challenge. Reframe it if you're feeling like you don't enjoy practice at all. Relish in your mistakes because you know that you can grow from them. And this is actually something that I have taken to heart as a teacher. When one of my medical students or residents gives the wrong answer, I tell them I'm really glad they put themselves out there, first of all, and I'm actually glad that they're wrong because it gives us an opportunity to learn. So learning comes from recognizing what you don't know and remediating that knowledge gap. If you're right 100% of the time, you're not growing. Um, and I can't help my medical students and residents grow if I don't know what they don't know. So being wrong is good. It presents a challenge and people should feel comfortable being wrong. And I find that the most motivated learners are not afraid to look stupid. They really do put themselves out there.

And she mentions here, she moves on to kind of a different topic. And she says that through deliberate practice and perseverance, you can be led to experience what is called a state of flow. Flow. Now many of you might know what it is, but for those of you who don't, flow is a state that makes one feel almost as if the actions that are being done are done so effortlessly, almost spontaneously, even if the work is extremely challenging. Many athletes talk about being in the state during times of high stakes or final championship games. It's kind of what I imagine surgeons go through when they're performing a big surgery. Through research, Angela Duckworth points out that grittier people experience flow more often during times when they are working. In other words, grit and flow go hand in hand. So, so far we've kind of learned that interest is a source of passion, and we've learned that deliberate practice is a way to bring that to the next level. However, it is not the only one. In Chapter 8, Angela Duckworth describes another source for passion, And this is purpose, the intention to contribute to the well-being of others, whether it be your close friends, a certain group, or society as a whole. Many people who embody grit tend to mention others as a reason for doing their work. At its core, purpose is the idea that what we do matters to— what we do matters to— helps other people. The point that what we're doing is not only for me to either have fun doing it or to make money off of doing it, but that it matters to the world, that I'm saving lives, that I am helping people. I'm doing things that contribute to the world.

She draws on research by psychologist Benjamin Bloom in this chapter and in future chapters, and actually in past chapters too, even though we haven't specifically mentioned it. But Bloom interviewed world-class athletes, artists, mathematicians, and scientists, basically world-class experts in all different fields. And what he found was that these extraordinary people kind of progressed through 3 distinct periods of development, regardless of what they did. The first was the early years, and this is what we described when we talked about interests. This is where he found that everyone started discovering their interest, although they may not have known at the time that that's what it was. And then once they had done that, then came the middle years where they kind of honed in that this is an interest, and that's where they practiced, and that's where they, they dedicate themselves not to just a lot of quantity of practice but that deliberate practice. And then comes the later years, which is what we're talking about now. This is where they realized that they had this kind of larger purpose and meaning to their work, and You know, that's this chapter on hope that we're in right now. And I think it's important to kind of, to just highlight that this didn't always become apparent at the beginning. This kind of connection to how it helps other people was not something that they knew during the middle years when they were practicing and honing in on this skill. But the more they did it, the more they realized that there was this larger purpose.

So now you may be thinking, right, although the desire to help others is a great drive, how much of passion is truly selfless, right? I mean, if the world was truly built in a way that all of our passions were just to help people, I'm sure we might be a lot better off than we really are today. Is it really all just about helping other people? Well, she says that is a part of it, which is great. But another drive for people is, as many might know, pleasure, right? And this is not necessarily a bad thing. Um, you know, I want to have pleasure. I want, you know, when I eat a piece of chocolate, I experience pleasure and obviously I want more of it. I'm sure even the greatest people in the world, even the people who have done the most don't, uh, you know, also enjoy things in life and there's nothing wrong with that. She finds that through research, it has been found that gritty people also, as most people, care for pleasure. People want to enjoy life, and as I said, there's nothing wrong with that.

So I'll expand on Beer's last point and describe how Duckworth actually studied the connection between purpose, grit, and seeking pleasure. She recruited 16,000 American adults, and she asked them to complete the grit scale. She also asked them to complete an additional questionnaire with statements about purpose and to rate the extent to which they felt these applied to them. So these are statements like, "What I do matters to society." And then they also rated statements focused on pleasure. So for instance, "For me, the food— the— the— oh, sorry. For me, the good life is pleasure— is the pleasurable life." And what she found is that in terms of pleasure-seeking, greedy people are just like everyone else. So they're not gritty people are not monks. They're not these self-sacrificing people that don't enjoy the good life. Like Vyer said, there really isn't anything wrong with wanting to be happy, wanting to do activities that make you happy. But the difference was in that purpose. The higher their scores on purpose, the higher their scores on grit.

So now she moves on and says, that often finding your passion can lead to you finding your calling. And here she shares a parable of three bricklayers, and this is something I really, really enjoyed because I thought that it was very meaningful to me. So these three bricklayers were asked what they were doing, right? One said, I am laying bricks. The second one said, I'm building a church. The— and the third one said, I am creating the house of God. Right? The goal is to find a purpose that can enable us to have an outlook such as the one of the third brick-layer. This is the purpose that everyone wants. We do not want to be prescribing medicines, we want to be saving lives. We don't want to be typing numbers into computers, we want to be making people's lives more convenient so they can spend time doing what they love. For me, I don't want to be reading and taking notes, I want to be changing people's lives to make them more meaningful, right? It's all about finding your passion that enables us to find our calling through what we love to do. No matter what it is, we want to be able to find a higher purpose through it.

So research shows that people in equal numbers either identify themselves as 1, having a job, 2, having a career, or 3, having a calling. So it's kind of the same thing as having a job is laying bricks Building a church is that career piece, or having a calling is creating the house of God. Um, and Duckworth found in her research that those who identified as having a calling were grittier than those who identified as having a job or career. And it is these people that not only were they grittier, they actually were more satisfied with their jobs and their lives overall. In one study, adults who felt their work was a calling missed at least a third fewer days of work than those with a job or career. Research has also shown that callings have little to do with what job you do. For example, when this kind of question was posed to secretaries, the researchers had this initial hypothesis that very few secretaries would identify themselves as that being their calling. What they found was that secretaries had similar proportions to other career examples in terms of how many of them identified it as a calling, as a as a job. So it's not the work that you do. It's not the content. It's not the job that you chose. It's how you view your work and whether you believe it is your calling and whether you feel that you're connected to something far greater than yourself. And I think one of the most important takeaway points here is that a lot of people assume that they need to find their calling when actually it's not some fully formed thing that you find. You probably develop this sense by continually looking at what you do and asking yourself how it connects to other people. How it connects to the bigger picture, and how it can really be an expression of your deepest values.

So, so far, we've talked about 3 concepts, right? We've talked about interest, we've talked about practice, and we've talked about purpose. Now we'll talk about hope. Duckworth starts the 9th chapter off with an old Japanese saying, "Fall 7, rise 8." No matter how many times I fall, I will always rise up once more. Now, there is one kind of hope, and that is the hope that tomorrow will be sunnier, that my homework will be easier, that I'll have a smoother path ahead. This is not the kind of hope that is mentioned in the book. The kind that Duckworth mentions is the one that gives us hope that our own efforts can improve the future. It is the difference between I hope tomorrow is better and I will work harder to accomplish more tomorrow. People who embody grit and are able to have hope do not think of anything as failure or as disappointment, but rather as an opportunity to learn from. And a quote comes to mind, which is Thomas Edison's famous quote, "I've not failed 10,000 times. I've successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work." I love that quote.

Okay, so Duckworth discusses the research of Marty Seligman and Aaron Beck. They study a concept that they later term learned Optimism. They found that optimists are just as likely to encounter bad events as pessimists. Where they diverge is in their explanations of these events and the consequences around them. An optimist sees their failures as temporary and as things that they can overcome, whereas a pessimist might see that situation as fixed. For example, when viewing why they failed their chemistry, chemistry test, an optimist might say, I didn't study hard enough or long enough, whereas a pessimist might say, I'm dumb, or I'm not good at chemistry. The optimist has a remediable problem. They need to study harder. They need to study longer. And someone who engages in deliberate practice will go on to identify their specific weakness, and they will improve. But the pessimist feels that the problem is intrinsic to them. It's fixed, and it's not something they can change. So the one other thing that, you know, Duckworth doesn't really focus on but I think is important is I think that an optimist who has that capacity for— or sorry, let me just draw a difference. I think there are pessimists who kind of think that something's fixed to them. You know, I'm dumb, or, you know, I'm not good at chemistry, and so they won't get better because of that. And then there are these people who are kind of in between. I don't know if they would really be optimists or pessimists, but I think that there's people who externalize a lot of their failures. So, you know, I didn't pass the chemistry test because I didn't have a good chemistry teacher. I didn't pass the chemistry test because the teacher didn't give me enough time to study for my test. So I think there are a few times in life where things are extrinsic and you fail because of something that was outside of your control, but I would be very careful with that line of thinking because I think it can lead to basically just externalization for your failures when really failure is an opportunity to reflect on what you did wrong and what you could improve, and even if there are things that are outside of your control, what maybe was in your control that you could get better at. Marty found that, compared to optimists, pessimists are more likely to suffer from depression and anxiety, so It's worth maybe if you feel like you have this pessimist line of thinking to maybe try and get help to fix that. Another study that they talk about here is that Duckworth partnered with Wendy Kopp, who's the founder and CEO for Teach for America, and she partnered with Wendy Kopp and also Marty Seligman, who did this research on optimists and pessimists, and they had this hypothesis that teachers who have an optimistic way of interpreting adversity have more grit than their more pessimistic counterparts, and that grit predicts better teaching. So to put this theory to the test, they measured optimism and grit before teachers set foot in the classroom, and then a year later to see how effectively teachers— and then a year later, they, they looked at how effectively these teachers advanced the academic progress of their students. So they actually looked at the student success rates, and they also measured happiness. And what they found was that optimistic teachers were grittier. They were also happier. And their students achieve more during the school year.

And so from here, she brings up an interesting concept which was discovered by psychologist Carol Dweck, and this concept is called the growth mindset. This is the belief that we are not born with innate limits to learning something. It is the belief that if you have the hope and the certain belief that you can truly accomplish anything, and you put in the work you have the grit for it, anything you wish to accomplish can truly be done.

Dweck wanted to understand why some people were optimists or pessimists. Was it intrinsic to them, or was it— were there other factors at play? And what Dweck found was that people who see their intelligence as fixed are more likely to be that kind of pessimistic category. So if you think that you're born with a certain level of smartness and that you can only achieve what you can achieve, it's kind of predetermined by how smart you are, then you may not be able to advance as people who don't see it that way, because there are another group of people who see their intelligence as something that can be modified, that if you put in a lot of effort, you can get better. Your intelligence is not fixed, and she identified this first group as having the fixed mindset—can't get better, I have this inherent level of smartness and I can never do more than that—and then the second group is having a growth mindset, knowing that they could improve, that they could change their outcome. And so Dweck found, and I think this is important, Dweck found that praising a student's talent or success can actually foster a fixed mindset because students may feel afraid to be wrong or to look dumb. They won't challenge themselves for fear of failing, whereas praising effort can help students develop more of a growth mindset because it didn't matter whether they got it right or wrong. It mattered that they worked really hard and that they challenged themselves. It wasn't about being right. It was about working hard. So, you know, Duckworth feels that growth mindset leads to optimistic self-talk. That optimistic self-talk allows you to have perseverance over adversity. And that sense of I can persevere over adversity makes you want to seek out challenge. You're not afraid to challenge yourself, and you're not afraid to fail. So I highly recommend reading this book if you're captivated by grit, because I do think that cultivating your growth mindset helps boost your grit.

I completely agree. I think that it's really helped me understand a lot of these concepts as well. Um, and so here she still is talking about growth mindset, but she brings up a slightly different point about it. She says that a growth mindset alone might not get you everywhere, right? And even if you believe that you can do anything, sometimes it's not always done, right? And this is where she says grit comes in. A growth mindset paired with perseverance to keep going and grinding, and passion that keeps you motivated and looking ahead, can help you in ways unimaginable. Well, that brings us to the end of part 2 of grit, the power of passion and perseverance. We have talked about how to grow grit from the inside out, what internal beliefs can do for your mental state. Next time, we'll talk about growing grit from the outside in. Thank you all for joining. Thank you, Miss Jennifer. Keep on learning, keep on changing, keep on growing.