Season #2 - Episode #8 - Grit; The Power Of Passion and Perseverance By Angela Duckworth

Hello, Self Developers and welcome to The Patrick Kelly Podcast for Self-Development, where I will be reviewing  audible books on Self-Development that can change your life for the better this year, and years to come. It is said that if we keep on doing what we always did, we will keep on getting what we always got. In other words, to change our output, we first have to change our input.

Today is February 20, 2022, and This is Episode 8 of Season 2, and today we will be reviewing the audible book “Grit; The Power Of Passion and Perseverance” By Angela Duckworth. This audible book will teach you what Grit is, and how you can use Grit to change your Life.

Chapter 1: Showing Up: Some people are great when things are going well, but they fall apart when things aren’t. Why were the highly accomplished so dogged in their pursuits? For most, there was no realistic expectation of ever catching up to their ambitions. In their own eyes, they were never good enough. They were the opposite of complacent. And yet, in a very real sense, they were satisfied being unsatisfied. Each was chasing something of unparalleled interest and importance, and it was the chase —as much as the capture—that was gratifying. Even if some of the things they had to do were boring, or frustrating, or even painful, they wouldn’t dream of giving up. Their passion was enduring. In sum, no matter the domain, the highly successful had a kind of ferocious determination that played out in two ways. First, these exemplars were unusually resilient and hardworking. Second, they knew in a very, very deep way what it was they wanted. Not only did they have determination, they had direction. It was this combination of passion and perseverance that made high achievers special. In a word, they had grit.

Chapter 2: Distracted By Talent: the human individual lives usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum, and he behaves below his optimum. The “naturalness bias” is a hidden prejudice against those who’ve achieved what they have because they worked for it and had a hidden preference for those whom we think arrived at their place in life because they’re naturally talented. We may not admit to others this bias for naturals; we may not even admit it to ourselves. But the bias is evident in the choices we make. The focus on talent distracts us from something that is at least as important, and that is effort. As much as talent counts, effort counts twice.

Chapter 3: Effort Counts Twice: If we overemphasize talent, we underemphasize  everything  else. When we can’t easily see how experience and training got someone to a level of excellence that is so clearly beyond the norm, we default to labeling that person a “natural”. Great things are accomplished by those “people whose thinking is active in onedirection, who employ everything as material, who always zealously observe their own inner life and that of others, who perceive everywhere models and incentives, who never tire of combining together the means available to them. Talent and effort and skill and achievement all fit together. The Formula: Talent X Effort = Skill and Skill X Effort = Achievement. Talent is how quickly your skills improve when you invest effort. Achievement is what happens when you take your acquired skills and use them.

Chapter 4: How Gritty Are You? “Grit isn’t justworking incredibly hard. That’s only part of it.” Grit is about working on something you care about so much that you’re willing to stay loyal to it.” Grit has two components: passion and perseverance. Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare. The top-level goal is not a means to any other end. It is, instead, an end in itself. Grit is about holding the same top-level goal for a very long time. A lack of grit can come from having less coherent goal structures. High but not the highest intelligence, combined with the greatest degree of persistence, will achieve greater eminence than the highest degree of intelligence with somewhat less persistence.

Chapter 5: Grit Grows: There’s no species on the planet more adaptable than ours, we change. We rise to the occasion. In other words, we change when we needto. Necessity is the mother of adaptation. The qualities of passion and perseverance that bring about grit: Passion begins with intrinsically enjoying what you do. Next comes the capacity to practice. One form of perseverance is the daily discipline of trying to do things better than we did yesterday. So, after you’ve discovered and developed interest in a particular area, you must devote yourself to the sort of focused, full-hearted, challenge-exceeding-skill practice that leads to mastery. You must zero in on your weaknesses, and you must do so over and over again, for hours a day, week after month after year. To be gritty is to resist complacency. At various points, in big ways and small, we get knocked down. If we stay down, grit loses. If we get up, grit prevails.

Chapter 6: Interest: Whatever it is that you want to do, you’ll find in life that if you’re not passion about what it is you’re working on, you won’t be able to stick with it. People performbetter at work when what they do interests them. interests are notdiscovered through introspection. Instead, interests are triggered by interactions with the outside world. The process of interest discovery can be messy, serendipitous, and inefficient. This is because you can’t really predict with certainty what will capture your attention and what won’t. You can’t simply willyourself to like things, either. As Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon has observed, “One of the huge mistakes people make is that they try to forcean interest on themselves.” Without experimenting, you can’t figure out which interests will stick, and which won’t.

Chapter 7: Practice: Gritty people typically stick with their commitments longer than others. If you track the development of internationally renowned performers, you invariably find that their skill improves gradually over years. As they get better, their rate of improvement slows. This turns out to be true for all of us. The more you know about your field, the slighter will be your improvement from one day to the next. In order to become a Master at anything, it will require about ten thousand hours of practice over ten years before achieving elite levels of expertise. If you are not improving, then you are not engaging in deliberate practice. If you judge practice by how much it improves your skill, then deliberate practice has no rival. Flow and grit go hand in hand.Gritty people do more deliberate practiceand experience more flow.

Chapter 8: Purpose: Interest is one source of passion. Purpose—the intention to contribute to the wellbeing of others—is another. The mature passions of gritty people depend on both.Purposemeans “the intention to contribute to the well-being of others. In sharp contrast, you can see that grittier people are dramaticallymore motivated than others to seek a meaningful, other-centered life. Higher scores on purpose correlate with higherscores on the Grit Scale. For most people, purpose is a tremendously powerful source of motivation.

Chapter 9: Hope: What is hope? One kind of hope is the expectation that tomorrow will be better than today. It’s the kind of hope that has us yearning for sunnier weather, or a smoother path ahead. It comes without the burden of responsibility. The onus is on the universe to make things better. There’s an old Japanese saying: Fall seven, rise eight. Grit depends on a different kind of hope. It rests on the expectation that our own efforts can improve our future. I have a feeling tomorrow will be betteris different from I resolve to make tomorrow better. The hope that gritty people have has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with getting up again and again and again.

Closing Thoughts: On scale of 1 to 5, I would give this audible book, a 4.5, for teaching what Grit is and how you can use it to improve your life.

*To find out more about this audible book, Go To: www.audible.com and download this audible book, or go to www.angeladuckworth.com to find out more information about the Author.

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