Dr. Angela Duckworth

Mel, I think I might be more excited than you, actually.

No, I'm really thrilled.

I feel like we have a similar mission, like a little bit of wisdom, make your life a lot better.

If you take to heart what we have discovered as a science about motivation and achievement, you will have one thing, which is the possibility of glimpsing excellence in your own life to achieve what you are capable of achieving.

That's a big promise.

It is.

You know, hunt the big game.

Yeah, I really, truly believe it.

I think that when I first started as a psychologist, the question was, you know, am I only going to study this like tiny little sliver of the population who would self-identify as super ambitious?

And I discovered very quickly that everybody is ambitious.

I mean, who doesn't want to be as great as they can be?

So I study, I think everyone.

The common denominator of high achievers, no matter what they're achieving, is this special combination of passion and perseverance for really long-term goals.

And in a word, it's grit.

And how do you define grit?

It's exactly that.

It's these two parts, right?

Passion for long-term goals, like loving something and staying in love with it, not kind of wandering off and doing something else and then something else again and then something else again.

But having a kind of North Star, sort of a devotion over years.

That's the passion part.