Dr. Angela Duckworth

What do you mean?

What do I mean?

So I will say the first stage of grit is interest.

And you don't always even know that you're interested in something until a passerby or a loved one says, hey, by the way, you spend a lot of time thinking about X, Y, or Z. So that is the first psychological asset of grit.

I don't believe that you can grow passion without the seed of interest.

And I genuinely believe that...

though we may not all be equal in IQ, though we may have different talents, that when we begin to notice where our mind lives, when we begin to notice what attracts our attention spontaneously, that is the beginning of discovering the interests that can make us something of a genius about what we do.

Dr. Duckworth, what do I do?

I have collected data on, I don't know, tens of thousands, maybe 100,000 people.

I can tell you, Mel, that when I study passion and perseverance for long-term goals, and I can give you a subscore on my questionnaire for passion, which is, you know, this consistency of interest over time, a really unabiding kind of love.

And perseverance, which is resilience, you know, I want to do the practice, I want to do the hard work.

Reliably, people score higher in perseverance than they do for passion.

I think discovering and developing interest is a lot harder than it sounds, right?

sounds like the hard part is the work.

No, no, no, no.

Figuring out the direction is for most people, including myself, like the real torturous part.

So one of the things that you should know about interest is that it is in some ways voluntary, but it is in some ways involuntary.

Like you cannot force yourself to be interested in things.

You might try.

Absolutely.