Nobody wants to show you the hours and hours of becoming. They’d rather show the highlight of what they’ve become.
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.
Yes, but the main thing is that greatness is doable. Greatness is many, many individual feats, and each of them is doable.
At its core, the idea of purpose is the idea that what we do matters to people other than ourselves.
Without effort, your talent is nothing more than unmet potential. Without effort, your skill is nothing more than what you could have done but didn’t.
It isn’t suffering that leads to hopelessness. It’s suffering you think you can’t control.
Stop reading so much and go think.
I have a feeling tomorrow will be better is different from I resolve to make tomorrow better.
No whining. No complaining. No excuses.
Passion for your work is a little bit of discovery, followed by a lot of development, and then a lifetime of deepening.
As soon as possible, experts hungrily seek feedback on how they did. Necessarily, much of that feedback is negative. This means that experts are more interested in what they did wrong – so they can fix it – than what they did right. The active processing of this feedback is as essential as its immediacy.
Staying on the treadmill is one thing, and I do think it’s related to staying true to our commitments even when we’re not comfortable. But getting back on the treadmill the next day, eager to try again, is in my view even more reflective of grit. Because when you don’t come back the next day – when you permanently turn your back on a commitment – your effort plummets to zero. As a consequence, your skills stop improving, and at the same time, you stop producing anything with whatever skills you have.
In other words, we want to believe that Mark Spitz was born to swim in a way that none of us were and that none of us could. We don’t want to sit on the pool deck and watch him progress from amateur to expert. We prefer our excellence fully formed. We prefer mystery to mundanity.
There’s a vast amount of research on what happens when we believe a student is especially talented. We begin to lavish extra attention on them and hold them to higher expectations. We expect them to excel, and that expectation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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.
Passion begins with intrinsically enjoying what you do.
When I am around people,” Kat wrote, “my heart and soul radiate with the awareness that I am in the presence of greatness. Maybe greatness unfound, or greatness underdeveloped, but the potential or existence of greatness nevertheless. You never know who will go on to do good or even great things or become the next great influencer in the world – so treat everyone like they are that person.
Without effort, your skill is nothing more than what you could have done but didn’t. With.