Dr. Angela Duckworth

And you can't predict.

I remember teaching...

these three triplets, these adorable boys, and they were all very fine students.

And, you know, like so many young adults, they were like thinking about what they were wanting to do with their career.

But all it took was one summer internship to be sitting behind a desk in a terminal and to realize like, I am going to go crazy.

Why?

Because I don't like sitting down this much.

Well, you know,

probably can rule out the job that you just interned for, right?

And now that person became like a fitness instructor.

So how would he know that?

No amount of journaling, no amount of reflecting, and no amount of conversing with friends is going to substitute for one hour of actual experience.

So in science, the science of interest, the science of motivation, we call this sampling.

So before you specialize in being an author or a podcast host or a psychologist like me, you have to sample broadly.

So the paradox of specialization is that it's preceded by a breadth of sampling.

So before you become a jack of one trade, to some extent, you have to try a lot of trades, right?

And so with children...

What you see, you know, very wise and certainly very privileged parents, right, because it sometimes costs money to do this, you know, they're cycling their kids through a variety of pursuits so they can sample, so they can taste things and spit them out if they don't like them.

You know, my daughter Lucy, the one who I...

mentioned with great fondness, was not, you know, gritty when she was growing up.